- •Contents
- •Preface
- •Acknowledgments
- •1.1 Introduction
- •1.3 The Logic of the Natural State
- •1.4 The Logic of the Open Access Order
- •1.5 The Logic of the Transition from Natural States to Open Access Orders
- •1.6 A Note on Beliefs
- •1.7 The Plan
- •2.1 Introduction
- •2.2 Commonalities: Characteristics of Limited Access Orders
- •2.2.2 Size, Boundaries, Trade, and Specialization
- •2.3 Differences: A Typology of Natural States
- •2.4 Privileges, Rights, and Elite Dynamics
- •2.5 Origins: The Problem Scale and Violence
- •2.6 Natural State Dynamics: Fragile to Basic Natural States
- •2.7 Moving to Mature Natural States: Disorder, Organization, and the Medieval Church
- •2.9 Natural States
- •APPENDIX: SKELETAL EVIDENCE AND EMPIRICAL RESULTS
- •3.1 Introduction
- •3.2 Chronology
- •3.3 The Courts, Legal Concepts, and the Law of Property
- •3.4 Bastard Feudalism
- •3.5 Bastard Feudalism and the Impersonalization of Property
- •3.6 The Typology of Natural States
- •APPENDIX
- •A Glossary of Technical Terms involving Land Use
- •Estimating Landownership Concentration in Medieval England
- •4.1 Introduction
- •4.2 Commonalities: Characteristics of an Open Access Order
- •4.3 Institutions, Beliefs, and Incentives Supporting Open Access
- •4.4 Incorporation: The Extension of Citizenship
- •4.5 Control of Violence in Open Access Orders
- •4.6 Growth of Government
- •4.7 Forces of Short-Run Stability
- •4.7.1 Elections, Party Competition, and the Civil Society
- •4.7.2 Market Competition
- •4.7.3 Implications
- •4.8.1 Sources of Change in Open Access Orders
- •4.11 Democracy and Redistribution
- •5.1 Introduction
- •5.2 Personality and Impersonality: The Doorstep Conditions
- •5.3 Doorstep Condition #1: Rule of Law for Elites
- •5.4 Doorstep Condition #2: Perpetually Lived Organizations in the Public and Private Spheres
- •5.4.1 Moving toward the Doorstep in Europe and the United States: Impersonality in Public and Private Organizations
- •5.5 Doorstep Condition #3: Consolidated Control of the Military
- •5.6 The British Navy and the British State
- •5.7 Time, Order, and Institutional Forms
- •6.1 Institutionalizing Open Access
- •6.2 Fear of Faction
- •6.3 Events
- •6.4 Parties and Corporations
- •6.5 The Transition to Open Access in Britain
- •6.6 The Transition to Open Access in France
- •6.7 The Transition to Open Access in the United States
- •6.8 Institutionalizing Open Access: Why the West?
- •6.8.2 The Transition Proper
- •7.1 The Framing Problems
- •7.2 The Conceptual Framework
- •7.3 A New Approach to the Social Sciences: Violence, Institutions, Organizations, and Beliefs
- •7.4 A New Approach to the Social Sciences: Development and Democracy
- •7.5 Toward a Theory of the State
- •7.6 Violence and Social Orders: The Way Ahead
- •References
- •Index
1.7 The Plan |
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actual experience. Because experience is limited, all beliefs are necessarily incomplete.
Greif (2006) develops a powerful way of thinking about how beliefs form in specific institutional settings. He defines an institution as a set of institutional elements: rules, norms, beliefs, and organizations. He makes wonderful use of the idea of institutional elements in his concept of an equilibrium, showing how “institutions generate behavior.” Greif limits admissible beliefs about how the world works to those that are consistent with the actual behavior induced by the institution. The confirmation of beliefs closes Greif’s equilibrium system. Behavior – actions taken by individuals or organizations – generated by the incentives created by institutions must lead to beliefs that are consistent with the behavior. For Greif, institutions, behavior, and beliefs form the three legs of a self-enforcing equilibrium. Beliefs flow from actions, and because beliefs are, in part, about the consequences of actions, they are at the service of intentionality.
We differ from Greif in two respects. The first is a matter of language. Where Greif folds organizations into institutional elements and, for most of his book, discusses institutions without explicitly identifying organizations, we distinguish organizations and institutions and focus as much on one as the other. The second difference is substantive: we treat beliefs in a larger and more general, but less rigorous, way as resulting from larger cultural, educational, and religious organizations and not in the limited sense of beliefs immediately supported by modeling one particular subset of interactions in the society.
1.7 The Plan
The book follows the framework laid out in this chapter. Chapters 2 and 3 delve into the logic of the natural state and consider detailed examples of how institutions and organizations develop in the natural state. Chapter 4 focuses on the logic of open access orders. Chapters 5 and 6 consider the two parts of the transition. Chapter 7 concludes the conceptual framework, including a series of implications for the future of social science.
TWO
The Natural State
2.1 Introduction
A natural state manages the problem of violence by forming a dominant coalition that limits access to valuable resources – land, labor, and capital – or access to and control of valuable activities – such as trade, worship, and education – to elite groups. The creation of rents through limiting access provides the glue that holds the coalition together, enabling elite groups to make credible commitments to one another to support the regime, perform their functions, and refrain from violence. Only elite groups are able to use the third-party enforcement of the coalition to structure contractual organizations. Limiting access to organizational forms is the key to the natural state because limiting access not only creates rents through exclusive privileges but it also directly enhances the value of the privileges by making elites more productive through their organizations.
Every state must deal with the problem of violence, and if we begin thinking about the state by positing a single actor with a monopoly on violence, we assume away the fundamental problem. All states are organizations, involving multiple individuals who cooperate to pursue a common goal even as they retain their individual interests. In natural states, powerful elites are directly connected to the organizations they head. The resources elite organizations bring to the dominant coalition strengthen relationships within the coalition. Increasing specialization and division of labor, including specialization in violence, come with increasing size of societies. Because the application of violence requires organization, violence specialists typically head or are embedded in organizations.1 The organization of the dominant
1It may be more accurate to say that members of the dominant coalition are leaders of organizations made up of many specialists, including specialists in violence, whether the leaders themselves actually are violent.
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2.1 Introduction |
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coalition then is a matter of organizing organizations, and the state is an organization of organizations.
Throughout recorded history, the cessation of violence (peace) is not achieved when violence specialists put down their arms, but rather peace occurs when the violent devise arrangements (explicit or implicit) that reduce the level of violence. Even when one actor within the dominant coalition is designated king or is in fact more powerful than the others, that actor is never more powerful as an individual than the coalition of his peers. The king or ruler only becomes powerful if he or she heads a powerful coalition. Remaining king depends on maintaining a dominant coalition that can best all rivals. Rulers are just one of many relevant actors in the dominant coalition. Focusing on the dynamic relationships of the players in the dominant coalition allows us to explicate and understand the logic of the social order and the conditions underlying all social organizations in a natural state.
The natural state is natural because, for most of the last ten thousand years, it has been virtually the only form of society larger than a few hundred people that has been capable of securing physical order and managing violence. Natural states encompass a wide variety of societies, however, and we have no wish to imply that they are all the same. Mesopotamia in the third millennium b.c.e., Britain under the Tudors, and modern Russia under Putin were all natural states, but very different societies. The limited access order is not a specific set of political, economic, or religious institutions; it is a fundamental way of organizing society.
We begin by laying out the features that all natural states share and then the dimensions in which natural states differ. The latter task produces a typology useful for thinking about the variety of natural states through time and also the conditions under which a natural state is capable of moving into a transition to an open access order. Just as we distinguish the three social orders by how they structure and support organizations, we also distinguish types of natural states by how they structure and support organizations, including the state itself. Then we turn to a series of historical examples that illustrate how different natural states are structured and develop. We also ask how the first societies managed to create larger, sustainable social units. Anthropologists have long debated the origin of “pristine states” in history; we do as well. We next study the problem of creating a more complicated natural state. As extended illustrations, we use the rise of the Aztec Empire in fifteenth-century Mesoamerica and the restoration of order under the Carolingians in eighthand ninth-century Europe. Then we look at the development of ideas about the corporate structure of the state and