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The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty
'A must-read. Acemoglu and Robinson are intellectual heavyweights of the first rank . . . erudite and fascinating' Paul Collier, Guardian, on Why Nations Fail
By the authors of the international bestseller Why Nations Fail, based on decades of research, this powerful new big-picture framework explains how some countries develop towards and provide liberty while others fall to despotism, anarchy or asphyxiating norms- and explains how liberty can thrive despite new threats.
Liberty is hardly the 'natural' order of things; usually states have been either too weak to protect individuals or too strong for people to protect themselves from despotism. There is also a happy Western myth that where liberty exists, it's a steady state, arrived at by 'enlightenment'. But liberty emerges only when a delicate and incessant balance is struck between state and society - between elites and citizens. This struggle becomes self-reinforcing, inducing both state and society to develop a richer array of capacities, thus affecting the peacefulness of societies, the success of economies and how people experience their daily lives.
Explaining this new framework through compelling stories from around the world, in history and from today - and through a single diagram on which the development of any state can be plotted - this masterpiece helps us understand the past and present, and analyse the future.
'An intellectually rich book that develops an important thesis with verve' Martin Wolf, Financial Times, on Why Nations Fail
560 pages, Kindle Edition
First published September 24, 2019
About the author
Daron Acemoğlu
65 books1,527 followersDaron Acemoglu is the Elizabeth and James Killian Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 2005 he won the prestigious John Bates Clark medal, awarded to the best economist under 40.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 373 reviews
January 26, 2020
The Narrow Corridor is the sequel to one of the best books ever.
Last time around, authors Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson explained “Why Nations Fail.” In short, they said three things:
1. There are two types of politics: inclusive and extractive
2. There are two types of economic institutions: inclusive and extractive
3. In order not to fail, your nation needs to have both, inclusive politics and inclusive economic institutions.
The book caused a stir, because when it came out in 2012 China was riding high. Their magnum opus basically said this could not last, because Chinese politics are far from inclusive.
On the other hand, it’s one thing to establish what the “boundary conditions” are that must be met for a nation not to fail and it is quite another to describe the steps to success. Their previous work does offer some insight regarding that process, but the thrust of the argument made is about the preconditions.
This time, the authors attempt to set that straight. The Narrow Corridor is the course a nation must steer if it is actually to succeed!
The conspiracy theorist in me says they’ve had this book ready to go, awaiting the moment when it’s clear that Chinese exceptionalism has run its course.
In case you’re worried this is all about one country, rest assured that they’re are at it again: the Narrow Corridor invites you on a wild tour from ancient Uruk and Giglamesh to modern Syria and Assad, via
• Solon’s Athens,
• modern Lebanon,
• the Tiv of rural Nigeria,
• prophet Muhammad’s Egira,
• chief Shaka’s Zululand,
• Kamehameha’s Hawaii,
• Shevardnadze’s Georgia,
• the city-states of medieval Italy,
• a very long study of English history including the Magna Carta,
• the Byzantine Empire,
• the Holy Roman Empire,
• Prussia,
• a full chapter on the history of authoritarianism in China,
• another on the caste system of India,
• the origins of the Swiss confederation,
• the clan wars of Albania and Montenegro,
• the success of Solidarnosc in Poland versus the failure of democracy to flourish in post-1989 Russia,
• the emergence of democracy in Costa Rica versus the “repression of the Finca” in Guatemala,
• the long shadow cast on American history by compromises made by both the founding fathers and FDR,
• the gnocchi of Argentina,
• the Tuxedo-clad orangutan that is the Colombian government,
• the suppression of Liberian tribes by freed American slaves,
• the rise of the House of Saud and the seeds of 9/11,
• the dissolution of the Weimar Republic and the ascension to power of you-know-who,
• Salvador Allende as the (very temporary) beneficiary of the secret ballot,
• the popular demand for aristocratic leadership in thirteenth century Italy and its modern echos in the twenty-first century Americas,
• the Rainbow Coalition that brought the end of Apartheid,
• the brief Turkish flirtation with pluralistic democracy at the turn of the millennium,
• the brutal rule of Congo by king Leopold of Belgium,
• 1930’s Sweden,
• post-war Britain,
• post-war Japan (some shocking stuff, there, too!)
The point of this tour is to illustrate via numerous examples the authors’ latest construct, the “Narrow Corridor” that lies between the power of the state Leviathan and the power of society.
There are two fundamental conclusions:
1. the power of society and the power of the state need to be in balance
2. provided they are in balance, great things happen as they grow together. In particular, the state can offer more and more to its citizens, provided society also keeps growing stronger, so it can contain the growing power of the state.
This nirvana the authors dub “the Shackled Leviathan.”
The situation whereby the state dominates is called the “Despotic Leviathan.” That’s the kind of thing that’s going on in China today, with the author giving a decent account of how fun things are for the hundreds of thousands of people who are sent for “re-education through labor” every year. The opposite is the “Absent Leviathan.” That’s what you could observe in Lagos, Nigeria a short 20 years ago or, if you don’t have access to a time machine, in Lebanon today. Other pathologies are the “Cage of Norms,” (best observed in India, where society collectively enforces the caste system and the state be damned,) the “Paper Leviathan” (whereby a state has people manning all positions in government, but does not offer any services whatsoever to its citizens) and the “Broken Red Queen” (a reference to an allegory the authors annoyingly repeat all the time that I refuse to go into: the Red Queen is a character from Alice in Wonderland and the blight of this book; I’m not an idiot and I had to keep going back to page 41 to find out how the godforsaken Red Queen is relevant.)
Economists love their 45 degree lines, I suppose, so the corridor is illustrated a bit like you stretched a condom down the diagonal of a chart that says “power of the state” on the Y axis and “power of society” on the X axis. Yeah, sorry, buy the book, have a look and tell me otherwise.
To get into the corridor, you need to bring together “the two blades of the scissors,” namely inclusive bottom-up political traditions and state institutions. The authors’ favorite examples are modern England (where the pre-existing Franks had little peacetime hierarchy, but the conquering Romans introduced state institutions, planting the seed for successive parallel evolution of both state and society, eventually leading to the parallel structure of Parliament and the monarchy, via 1066, the Black Plague and the Magna Carta) and my hometown of Athens, where Solon succeeded in making the transition from Dracon’s laws (which amounted to little more than a codification of the societal norms of a tribal society) to the first Shackled Leviathan in history, by introducing very liberal measures (1. making it illegal to pawn one’s freedom for money on one hand and 2. allowing some representation of all free Athenians in public life) all while codifying the dominance of the aristocracy in political structures.
The authors go to great lengths to emphasize that neither is this process automatic, nor pre-ordained, nor does it occur in one go. They don’t use the word “dialectic,” but you can see where they read this first…
I make fun of their little box with the 45 degree line down the middle, but it’s actually a good shorthand if you want to demonstrate that to understand how events can push a nation toward “the corridor” you need to understand where it stood before.
So if the nation starts “left” of the corridor, with the state more powerful than society, and the Black Plague hits, making labor scarce and moving power away from the state and toward the people, it matters how strong the state was to begin with. In England, where there was a legacy of bottom-up institutions, it was enough to move the proceedings into “the Narrow Corridor,” but in Eastern Europe it wasn’t, so for them eventually it was a non-event. (The same analysis is applied to post-1989 events, though the authors ought to additionally acknowledge a strong nationalist element to the divergence in outcomes between Russia and the rest of Eastern Europe)
Similarly, a state could be in the corridor, but war could happen, which is always an endeavor best pursued with the state firmly in charge, rather than via “inclusive institutions” and if that state, like 18th century Prussia, for example, was already borderline autarchic, then it could find itself outside the corridor again.
The converse is how the authors see the birth of the Swiss state, which was to the “right” of the Narrow Corridor, with a bunch of cantons living independently of one another, but banding together to fight an external threat. This moved them into the corridor, where they have happily lived ever since.
Another pathology is the one the authors perceive to be afflicting the United States of America. In the case of the US, which was born when elites decided they no longer wanted to pay tax to the British king, a balance was struck between the Federal state, which sought to unify the country, and the individual States, where local business very much preferred to carry on pursuing extractive economic policies, often enforced via violent means. The authors view through this lens both the original interpretation of the Constitution as tolerating slavery and FDR’s tolerance of redlining, a compromise which they believe casts a long shadow all the way to the lack of workers’ rights in today’s South relative, say, to Detroit, and to the license the police force took in the recent Ferguson incident.
In summary, tolerance of economically extractive institutions goes hand-in-hand with the necessary state violence to enforce them, which in turn translates into higher overall levels of violence, and that is the key to understanding gun ownership, higher incarceration rates etc.
Not only that, the authors go on to say, but when issues arise that must be dealt with at the Federal level, the institutions are not in place whereby society (twice removed) can have an influence. As a result, the institutions in question evolve in isolation and with low accountability and that’s a bad thing, because they never earn the full trust of the people. To understand the Waco, Texas incident you must understand that the FBI never bothered to consider society’s expectations on how it treated Martin Luther King; to understand why we’re not batting an eyelid as we’re abandoning the Middle East to its fate you must take into account that nobody even imagined the state would be monitoring our every communication, as Edward Snowden revealed it has been. Compare and contrast with Denmark, where the question was put to its people on whether it should accumulate all their data and the people had enough confidence to resoundingly respond with a “yes.”
It’s certainly an interesting angle!
But the authors eventually get too cocky for my taste. Riding on a high horse, they go on to equate the election of Donald Trump to populist movements in medieval Italy and the election of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. They argue that the people got so fed up with elites looking after themselves after the financial crisis, that they elected to office a populist demagogue whose only positive attribute was that he did not belong to the elite.
Not quite! Perhaps because, in contrast to Chavez and Maduro and their ilk, the 44th president was a decent man, the authors basically fail to identify that it was Barack Obama who won that rebound, a charismatic black community organizer who campaigned on Change. It is only after it transpired that he was a mild conservative, wasting two full terms proving he could be a “no drama” President for all Americans (no mean feat, God knows, and perhaps good enough a legacy, but not our point here) that, in desperation, the American people voted in a candidate who really looked like he might actually bring the temple down.
And the sad thing is that PERFECT parallels exist to Trump, in countries where I’d love to have seen the authors apply their tools. Silvio Berlusconi springs to mind first, but populist businessmen in power can currently also be found across all of Eastern Europe.
Anyway, you sleepwalk through the Narrow Corridor, but at some point you eventually ask yourself the inevitable question:
THE NARROW CORRIDOR TO WHERE EXACTLY?
The answer is underwhelming, but it brings us back to China and to the heart of this book. Quoting from page 234:
“Chinese growth is not likely to peter out in the next few years. But as with other episodes of despotic growth, its existential challenge lies in unleashing large-scale experimentation and innovation. Like all previous instances of despotic growth, it is unlikely to succeed in this.”
So the objective whose pursuit the authors study for 496 pages is growth.
Success, here, is one and the same as GDP growth.
Agh.
Still, this was a very thought-provoking read.
Last time around, authors Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson explained “Why Nations Fail.” In short, they said three things:
1. There are two types of politics: inclusive and extractive
2. There are two types of economic institutions: inclusive and extractive
3. In order not to fail, your nation needs to have both, inclusive politics and inclusive economic institutions.
The book caused a stir, because when it came out in 2012 China was riding high. Their magnum opus basically said this could not last, because Chinese politics are far from inclusive.
On the other hand, it’s one thing to establish what the “boundary conditions” are that must be met for a nation not to fail and it is quite another to describe the steps to success. Their previous work does offer some insight regarding that process, but the thrust of the argument made is about the preconditions.
This time, the authors attempt to set that straight. The Narrow Corridor is the course a nation must steer if it is actually to succeed!
The conspiracy theorist in me says they’ve had this book ready to go, awaiting the moment when it’s clear that Chinese exceptionalism has run its course.
In case you’re worried this is all about one country, rest assured that they’re are at it again: the Narrow Corridor invites you on a wild tour from ancient Uruk and Giglamesh to modern Syria and Assad, via
• Solon’s Athens,
• modern Lebanon,
• the Tiv of rural Nigeria,
• prophet Muhammad’s Egira,
• chief Shaka’s Zululand,
• Kamehameha’s Hawaii,
• Shevardnadze’s Georgia,
• the city-states of medieval Italy,
• a very long study of English history including the Magna Carta,
• the Byzantine Empire,
• the Holy Roman Empire,
• Prussia,
• a full chapter on the history of authoritarianism in China,
• another on the caste system of India,
• the origins of the Swiss confederation,
• the clan wars of Albania and Montenegro,
• the success of Solidarnosc in Poland versus the failure of democracy to flourish in post-1989 Russia,
• the emergence of democracy in Costa Rica versus the “repression of the Finca” in Guatemala,
• the long shadow cast on American history by compromises made by both the founding fathers and FDR,
• the gnocchi of Argentina,
• the Tuxedo-clad orangutan that is the Colombian government,
• the suppression of Liberian tribes by freed American slaves,
• the rise of the House of Saud and the seeds of 9/11,
• the dissolution of the Weimar Republic and the ascension to power of you-know-who,
• Salvador Allende as the (very temporary) beneficiary of the secret ballot,
• the popular demand for aristocratic leadership in thirteenth century Italy and its modern echos in the twenty-first century Americas,
• the Rainbow Coalition that brought the end of Apartheid,
• the brief Turkish flirtation with pluralistic democracy at the turn of the millennium,
• the brutal rule of Congo by king Leopold of Belgium,
• 1930’s Sweden,
• post-war Britain,
• post-war Japan (some shocking stuff, there, too!)
The point of this tour is to illustrate via numerous examples the authors’ latest construct, the “Narrow Corridor” that lies between the power of the state Leviathan and the power of society.
There are two fundamental conclusions:
1. the power of society and the power of the state need to be in balance
2. provided they are in balance, great things happen as they grow together. In particular, the state can offer more and more to its citizens, provided society also keeps growing stronger, so it can contain the growing power of the state.
This nirvana the authors dub “the Shackled Leviathan.”
The situation whereby the state dominates is called the “Despotic Leviathan.” That’s the kind of thing that’s going on in China today, with the author giving a decent account of how fun things are for the hundreds of thousands of people who are sent for “re-education through labor” every year. The opposite is the “Absent Leviathan.” That’s what you could observe in Lagos, Nigeria a short 20 years ago or, if you don’t have access to a time machine, in Lebanon today. Other pathologies are the “Cage of Norms,” (best observed in India, where society collectively enforces the caste system and the state be damned,) the “Paper Leviathan” (whereby a state has people manning all positions in government, but does not offer any services whatsoever to its citizens) and the “Broken Red Queen” (a reference to an allegory the authors annoyingly repeat all the time that I refuse to go into: the Red Queen is a character from Alice in Wonderland and the blight of this book; I’m not an idiot and I had to keep going back to page 41 to find out how the godforsaken Red Queen is relevant.)
Economists love their 45 degree lines, I suppose, so the corridor is illustrated a bit like you stretched a condom down the diagonal of a chart that says “power of the state” on the Y axis and “power of society” on the X axis. Yeah, sorry, buy the book, have a look and tell me otherwise.
To get into the corridor, you need to bring together “the two blades of the scissors,” namely inclusive bottom-up political traditions and state institutions. The authors’ favorite examples are modern England (where the pre-existing Franks had little peacetime hierarchy, but the conquering Romans introduced state institutions, planting the seed for successive parallel evolution of both state and society, eventually leading to the parallel structure of Parliament and the monarchy, via 1066, the Black Plague and the Magna Carta) and my hometown of Athens, where Solon succeeded in making the transition from Dracon’s laws (which amounted to little more than a codification of the societal norms of a tribal society) to the first Shackled Leviathan in history, by introducing very liberal measures (1. making it illegal to pawn one’s freedom for money on one hand and 2. allowing some representation of all free Athenians in public life) all while codifying the dominance of the aristocracy in political structures.
The authors go to great lengths to emphasize that neither is this process automatic, nor pre-ordained, nor does it occur in one go. They don’t use the word “dialectic,” but you can see where they read this first…
I make fun of their little box with the 45 degree line down the middle, but it’s actually a good shorthand if you want to demonstrate that to understand how events can push a nation toward “the corridor” you need to understand where it stood before.
So if the nation starts “left” of the corridor, with the state more powerful than society, and the Black Plague hits, making labor scarce and moving power away from the state and toward the people, it matters how strong the state was to begin with. In England, where there was a legacy of bottom-up institutions, it was enough to move the proceedings into “the Narrow Corridor,” but in Eastern Europe it wasn’t, so for them eventually it was a non-event. (The same analysis is applied to post-1989 events, though the authors ought to additionally acknowledge a strong nationalist element to the divergence in outcomes between Russia and the rest of Eastern Europe)
Similarly, a state could be in the corridor, but war could happen, which is always an endeavor best pursued with the state firmly in charge, rather than via “inclusive institutions” and if that state, like 18th century Prussia, for example, was already borderline autarchic, then it could find itself outside the corridor again.
The converse is how the authors see the birth of the Swiss state, which was to the “right” of the Narrow Corridor, with a bunch of cantons living independently of one another, but banding together to fight an external threat. This moved them into the corridor, where they have happily lived ever since.
Another pathology is the one the authors perceive to be afflicting the United States of America. In the case of the US, which was born when elites decided they no longer wanted to pay tax to the British king, a balance was struck between the Federal state, which sought to unify the country, and the individual States, where local business very much preferred to carry on pursuing extractive economic policies, often enforced via violent means. The authors view through this lens both the original interpretation of the Constitution as tolerating slavery and FDR’s tolerance of redlining, a compromise which they believe casts a long shadow all the way to the lack of workers’ rights in today’s South relative, say, to Detroit, and to the license the police force took in the recent Ferguson incident.
In summary, tolerance of economically extractive institutions goes hand-in-hand with the necessary state violence to enforce them, which in turn translates into higher overall levels of violence, and that is the key to understanding gun ownership, higher incarceration rates etc.
Not only that, the authors go on to say, but when issues arise that must be dealt with at the Federal level, the institutions are not in place whereby society (twice removed) can have an influence. As a result, the institutions in question evolve in isolation and with low accountability and that’s a bad thing, because they never earn the full trust of the people. To understand the Waco, Texas incident you must understand that the FBI never bothered to consider society’s expectations on how it treated Martin Luther King; to understand why we’re not batting an eyelid as we’re abandoning the Middle East to its fate you must take into account that nobody even imagined the state would be monitoring our every communication, as Edward Snowden revealed it has been. Compare and contrast with Denmark, where the question was put to its people on whether it should accumulate all their data and the people had enough confidence to resoundingly respond with a “yes.”
It’s certainly an interesting angle!
But the authors eventually get too cocky for my taste. Riding on a high horse, they go on to equate the election of Donald Trump to populist movements in medieval Italy and the election of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. They argue that the people got so fed up with elites looking after themselves after the financial crisis, that they elected to office a populist demagogue whose only positive attribute was that he did not belong to the elite.
Not quite! Perhaps because, in contrast to Chavez and Maduro and their ilk, the 44th president was a decent man, the authors basically fail to identify that it was Barack Obama who won that rebound, a charismatic black community organizer who campaigned on Change. It is only after it transpired that he was a mild conservative, wasting two full terms proving he could be a “no drama” President for all Americans (no mean feat, God knows, and perhaps good enough a legacy, but not our point here) that, in desperation, the American people voted in a candidate who really looked like he might actually bring the temple down.
And the sad thing is that PERFECT parallels exist to Trump, in countries where I’d love to have seen the authors apply their tools. Silvio Berlusconi springs to mind first, but populist businessmen in power can currently also be found across all of Eastern Europe.
Anyway, you sleepwalk through the Narrow Corridor, but at some point you eventually ask yourself the inevitable question:
THE NARROW CORRIDOR TO WHERE EXACTLY?
The answer is underwhelming, but it brings us back to China and to the heart of this book. Quoting from page 234:
“Chinese growth is not likely to peter out in the next few years. But as with other episodes of despotic growth, its existential challenge lies in unleashing large-scale experimentation and innovation. Like all previous instances of despotic growth, it is unlikely to succeed in this.”
So the objective whose pursuit the authors study for 496 pages is growth.
Success, here, is one and the same as GDP growth.
Agh.
Still, this was a very thought-provoking read.
Want to read
February 3, 2023قدرت بیقدرتان" در برابر "استبداد"، "راه باریک آزادی" است"
فرهاد میثمی
فرهاد میثمی
September 26, 2019
The word "institution" is contained 404 times in this book. On roughly 550 pages. The quick general advice would be this: if you look for a good economic/historic account on why the world evolved the way it did, and why some countries are rich and others not, do not read this book. Go look somewhere else and read people that actually spent their whole careers thinking and researching thoroughly about these questions. It is a very one-sided and partisan approach, "sharply rejecting" other narratives and theories on why some countries are richer today than others.
Keep the following in mind before and while reading the book: This reminds us of their old agenda that they are trying to push again now, 7 years after "Why Nations Fail". This last book of theirs had the same agenda and got heavily critisised by numerous scholars that were actual experts on the countries and periods that single chapters were devoted to. And in general they got, and are still getting, flak from several sides for attributing all observed variation in prosperity monocausally to institutions.
The larger debate amongst scholars (mostly economists) in the early 2000's had the causes of modern and sustained economic growth at its heart and essentially boiled down to three big strands: "culture", "geography", "institutions". The new interest in growth theory, reinvigorated by Paul Romer's contributions in the late 1980's, followed by a decade of "cross-country growth regressions" gave this debate a very sizeable audience and gained a lot of traction.
Almost anyone involved agreed in hindsight that this debate was a stupid debate in the first place that we shouldn't have had, as it is obvious that no monocausal explanations exist and it is always a combination of many factors and circumstances. Not so Acemoglu and Robinson, they seemingly still insist that it's all about institutions. They are extremely intelligent and well-read scholars with a very accessible writing style. They do not provide explanations based on economic fundamentals and thus do not put forward theories that are actually testable.
As in Why Nations Fail, they "did not abandon their own framework but enhanced it [...]" ((c) pseudoerasmus), this time with other (cherrypicked) narratives that have been put forward by scholars. Coming to the same conclusions every single time: it was the institutional framework, some magical balance of power between state and society that you have to get right, otherwise you are doomed.
According to AR (Chapter 6), the reason the industrial revolution happened in Britain in the 18th century is because in the 5th century there was a magical amalgamation of Germanic tribal institutions and Roman institutions that were the basis for the Frankish empire. In the 5th century Europe entered the narrow path, this was the necessary - probably even sufficient - condition. I am not exaggerating when I say that a lot of (Economic) Historians are going to have a hard time believing this narrative. If we engange in this line of argument though, the question is where the Germanic and Roman institutions came from in the first place? AR reject "sharply" anything that has to do with geography/climate or some sort of cultura thing. So probably in the next AR book we learn about another institutional explosion a few hundred years before the 5th century that lead Europe on the pre-path to the narrow path...?
The bibliographic essay at the end of the book is very insightful, albeit cherrypicking sources that confirm the Acemoglu, Robinson narrative.
Keep the following in mind before and while reading the book: This reminds us of their old agenda that they are trying to push again now, 7 years after "Why Nations Fail". This last book of theirs had the same agenda and got heavily critisised by numerous scholars that were actual experts on the countries and periods that single chapters were devoted to. And in general they got, and are still getting, flak from several sides for attributing all observed variation in prosperity monocausally to institutions.
The larger debate amongst scholars (mostly economists) in the early 2000's had the causes of modern and sustained economic growth at its heart and essentially boiled down to three big strands: "culture", "geography", "institutions". The new interest in growth theory, reinvigorated by Paul Romer's contributions in the late 1980's, followed by a decade of "cross-country growth regressions" gave this debate a very sizeable audience and gained a lot of traction.
Almost anyone involved agreed in hindsight that this debate was a stupid debate in the first place that we shouldn't have had, as it is obvious that no monocausal explanations exist and it is always a combination of many factors and circumstances. Not so Acemoglu and Robinson, they seemingly still insist that it's all about institutions. They are extremely intelligent and well-read scholars with a very accessible writing style. They do not provide explanations based on economic fundamentals and thus do not put forward theories that are actually testable.
As in Why Nations Fail, they "did not abandon their own framework but enhanced it [...]" ((c) pseudoerasmus), this time with other (cherrypicked) narratives that have been put forward by scholars. Coming to the same conclusions every single time: it was the institutional framework, some magical balance of power between state and society that you have to get right, otherwise you are doomed.
According to AR (Chapter 6), the reason the industrial revolution happened in Britain in the 18th century is because in the 5th century there was a magical amalgamation of Germanic tribal institutions and Roman institutions that were the basis for the Frankish empire. In the 5th century Europe entered the narrow path, this was the necessary - probably even sufficient - condition. I am not exaggerating when I say that a lot of (Economic) Historians are going to have a hard time believing this narrative. If we engange in this line of argument though, the question is where the Germanic and Roman institutions came from in the first place? AR reject "sharply" anything that has to do with geography/climate or some sort of cultura thing. So probably in the next AR book we learn about another institutional explosion a few hundred years before the 5th century that lead Europe on the pre-path to the narrow path...?
The bibliographic essay at the end of the book is very insightful, albeit cherrypicking sources that confirm the Acemoglu, Robinson narrative.
April 21, 2023
خب بالاخره تمومش کردم😂راستش کتاب ملت ها چگونه شکست میخورند رو خیلی بیشتر دوست داشتم، مثال ها بهتر و قابل لمس تر بودند و خیلی دقیق تر هم توضیح داده شده بود ولی دلیل بر این نمیشه که این کتاب رو دوست نداشتم.
کتاب در کل درباره بالانس بین حکومت و مردم بود، کل کتاب داشت اینو توضیح میداد اگه توازن قدرت بین حکومت و جامعه برقرار باشه همه چی خوب پیش میره و آزادی های سیاسی و اقتصادی… هست، ولی اگر این توازن نباشه اینطوری نیست.
کتاب در کل درباره بالانس بین حکومت و مردم بود، کل کتاب داشت اینو توضیح میداد اگه توازن قدرت بین حکومت و جامعه برقرار باشه همه چی خوب پیش میره و آزادی های سیاسی و اقتصادی… هست، ولی اگر این توازن نباشه اینطوری نیست.
March 3, 2020
The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty, by Daron Acemoğlu and James A. Robinson, is an interesting book that examines state building and state capacity in terms of the relationship between society and the state. This relationship creates something the authors call the "narrow corridor" - an ideal situation where powerful state institutions and powerful societal institutions combine to ensure that liberty, efficiency and affluence are all considered and built. This is done through what the authors call the "Red Queen effect" - where the state builds capacity while society builds checks and balances to ensure a powerful state cannot be hijacked by the elite. The authors examine this theory by analyzing different societies throughout history and creating general categories for each. The most desirable is the Shackled Leviathan (based off of Hobbes Leviathan). This is a state that has efficient, powerful and effective administrative, political and bureaucratic capacities while ensuring freedoms, liberties and opportunities for its citizens and ensuring their welfare and security - the ideal state. These Shackled Leviathans are within the narrow corridor of an ideal state. Examples in this book include the United States, Denmark, Sweden and so on, as well as an examination of Athenian democracy and the Italian Communes of the 11th-13th centuries. These states have all at times ensured that the interests of society are well managed and funded by the state, to ensure the maximum amount of citizen participation, while maintaining a stable state and society.
The second form of state is called the Despotic Leviathan. This is a state that builds massive amounts of administrative and bureaucratic power while repressing its civil society to ensure political control by an elite, individual or party. This form of state can be highly efficient at creating economic growth and reducing poverty, as in the examples of China, South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan. However, this economic growth does not ensure that the human rights of its citizens are respected. China might have high economic growth rates, but does not allow its citizens the right to express themselves openly, engage in culture without restriction, or read and write opinions outside the party norms. Despotic Leviathans also suffer from issues of continuity. Sometimes a "benevolent dictator" might emerge, like Deng Xiaoping, Park Chung Hee, Augustus Caesar, and so on. These despots may rapidly and with great skill improve the lot of their nations, while also restricting citizens degree of political or social maneuverability. By the same stroke, however, states like North Korea, or Iraq under Saddam Hussein or Egypt under al-Sisi exist. These are states where administrative control over citizens rights is often total or very intrusive, constraining the ability of society to develop. This lack of development in the social field ensures the states dominance over society, and reduces the capacity for change, invention or innovation, while also ensuring state resources are spent not on welfare or social mobility, but on oppressive measures and societal control. This ensures that states such as North Korea will stagnate into an abusive regime where life is miserable, violent or oppressive.
Another form of Leviathan is the opposite to the above - an Absent Leviathan. These are states where society has total control over politics, and the state struggles to develop capacities to improve or create environments for creativity, innovation, growth, safety, or so on. Examples in this book include India and its caste system (nominally illegal but still very much active in modern India), various tribal/nomadic groups, like the Tiv of West Africa, or the modern Democratic Republic of the Congo. These are states where the state cannot develop institutions to ensure security, prosperity, or mobility because the norms of society - called the "cage of norms" by the authors, is so restrictive. This cage of norms creates situations like India's caste system, where marriages are not allowed or frowned upon between different castes (with numerous cases of assault or murder of those trying to escape this give). These norms restrict a government's ability to ensure social mobility, as these social norms often conflict with the state's ability to govern. A murder of two members of different castes may occur in India, but the local police and government often does not step in to enforce the law, as these actors may agree or be complicit in the event. Another example, the DRC, shows a state where the government has no control at all, and taxes, police services, hospitals and so on are not funded, and the state is basically completely removed from most citizens lives. In these cases, the norms of particular peoples, groups or localities are what ensures societal cohesion, but these norms often restrict people's lives as well, and much like the Despotic Leviathan, may lead to violent, miserable and brutal lives (serfdom, castes, enforced norms, etc.).
The authors note that these situations vary and there are many areas of grey. Some despotic states, like Singapore, have a strong rule of law and very favourable living and working conditions for citizens, while being harsh on cultural expression and society in general. Some absent states, like pre-colonization tribal societies in Africa, had norms of culture that ensured people were happy, healthy and safe. Some Shackled Leviathans, like Weimar Germany, or the Athenian state, Roman Republic, or modern Turkey, Poland or even the United States, may be moving outside of the corridor for various reasons. This could be state capture by the elite or business or financial institutions (in the US, for example) where deregulation of the state ensures that the elite can exploit weak institutions for their own gain. In other nations, despotism may be accepted or even desired by society. Social unrest in Weimar Germany, for example, paved the way for electoral gains by the Nazi Party. Most Italian Communes willingly gave away voting rights to despots - for example in Ferrera, Milan, Florence and so on, or to Oligopolies like in Venice. The corridor is not set in stone, and states can move from Shackled to unshackled, or efficient to Absent.
A discussion on a further type of state ensues. The authors call it a Paper Leviathan. Examples include most modern states in Latin America (Argentina, Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador) and Africa (Nigeria, Angola, Cote D'iVoire, Liberia etc.). These are states with the trappings of a state with strong institutions - welfare systems, police, bureaucracies, political parties etc., but have been captured or subsumed by the elite for exploitation. Argentina was at one time the darling of South American politics, but its "gnocchi" state - filled with political appointees and relatives of the elite - is inefficient, exploitative, and ensures no services for the citizens of the state. Similarly, in Colombia, a highly centralized and efficient state at times has existed, but not far outside of Bogota and other large cities. Much of the state is cut off from the rest, and alternative political organizations, such as the FARC and other guerilla or cartel groups, have set up alternative systems of taxation, education and security that exists outside the state. These systems of government are also brutal, both in the exploitative nature of the elite, and in the absence of any support from the state, thus combining the despotism of a Despotic Leviathan and its centralized administration with lack of state support, welfare and so on of an Absent Leviathan.
The authors end the book with a discussion on the progression and regression of liberty in the modern world, and the movement of states within the narrow corridor. The authors' thesis relates to how best to ensure a state can reach and remain in the corridor. This is through a combination of both increasing the power and strength of the state, and increasing the power and strength of civil society. States need resources like money and staff to ensure programs like welfare, security and maintaining an efficient marketplace - all hallmarks of a modern state. On the flip side, to ensure liberty from oppression, society requires power, agency and a voice in affairs. The authors advocate for the Red Queen effect - the expansion of both state and societal capacity. The best example they have given is that of modern Sweden (and other Scandinavian countries). These are nations that have built an effective and strong central administration, a competitive and profitable business environment, and a society with freedom, greater social equity, and social mobility. There are of course criticisms of these models (Utopia is an idea, not a practicality, after all), but these models show that cooperation, debate and consensus building between various parties - labour, the state, and business, for example - create systems that are efficient, affordable, and a joy to be a part of. The authors are cautious of any one party gaining too much power over the other. The issue in the US, for example, is tied to the power of business and finance over American political and societal institutions. How to fight this, you may ask? The authors have some innovative ideas. Progressive taxation and market regulation based on consensus with business - ie. the codetermination model in Germany. Although these exact systems will not work in other countries, it is certainly true that one group dominating another is not a way to build an equitable society.
I ended up quite enjoying this book. My updates of this book were often critical as I read through it, but at the end of the book, the authors eloquence in explaining their thesis made it an appealing and enjoyable piece of political theory. This book is an excellent example of a book that is engaging, stimulating and refreshing. Although I may not fully agree with many aspects of their historical analysis, and certainly not the Amerocentric nature of their analysis, this lack of agreement did not translate into a lack of engagement. This is a wonderful and interesting work of political theory, and the ideas contained within are stimulating and thought provoking. The sourcing and works cited are vast and varied across the political and historical spectrum. I would highly recommend this book to anyone looking for an engaging and timely read on political theory that blows past the stilted and biased analysis of the Trump era. This book is pure theory, and an absolute joy for it.
February 22, 2024
کتاب راه باریک آزادی اثر دیگری از نویسندگان کتاب برجسته چرا ملتها شکست میخورند، دارون عجم اوغلو و جیمز رابینسون است. این کتاب تلاش دیگری از این دو نویسنده برای بررسی این مسئله است که چرا حرکتهای آزادی خوهانه و انقلابها در بعضی (تقریبا بسیاری) به جای آزادی به هرجومرج و آشوب بیشتر منجر میشوند.
December 31, 2020
Mă veți auzi vorbind despre această carte mult timp de aici încolo. Așa cum, în urmă cu vreo cinci-șase ani, nu exista întâlnire prin țară cu telespectatorii în care să nu pomenesc despre ”De ce eșuează națiunile”, o carte din care am avut multe de învățat de asemenea, cum ar fi ideea că supărarea noastră că nu avem încă un stat ca lumea este total nefondată, dat fiind faptul că trecerea la un Stat Încătușat de la un Stat Despotic (despre care voi vorbi mai jos) este un proces care durează cel puțin cât a durat dominația Statului Despotic. Deci, chiar și azi, la 30 de ani de la Revoluție, suntem încă pe traseu. Și nu pare că luăm cele mai bune măsuri, în condițiile în care, iată, pandemia aceasta ne-a surprins în sănătate și-n educație cu un Stat mai degrabă absent.
Și, pentru că am menționat toate aceste trei forme de organizare a statului, Despotic, Absent și Încătușat, am ajuns la ideea cărții acestor băieți foarte șmecheri. Teza lor, expusă în cartea care a ieșit de curând la Publica (are aproape 600 de pagini, dar trebuie să alocați timpul necesar pentru a o citi, eu scriu aceste rânduri după ce am parcurs abia jumătate din carte, dar nu văd cum aș putea fi dezamăgit în vreun fel la final) este asta: libertatea nu este ceea ce ni se spune inclusiv la școală, o construcție puternică și foarte stabilă, ci o stare care se obține dintr-un echilibru între stat și societate, la care se ajunge destul de greu și care este foarte, foarte instabil. Iar autorii spun că acest echilibru aduce un culoar, un coridor, care este foarte îngust și pe care societățile înaintează câștigând tocmai din acest război permanent între stat și societate.
Și-mi place la nebunie teza asta pentru că este ceea ce spun și eu de foarte mult timp, răspunzându-le astfel celor care sunt mai degrabă fanii Statului Despotic și cred că puterea trebuie criticată doar când la putere se află partidul pe care nu-l plac ei. Ei bine, tocmai asta e principala piedică în aflarea libertății. Cum bine punctează autorii, tocmai capacitatea de a contesta este definiția libertății. Asta pentru că statul trebuie să evolueze continuu, pentru a răspunde cerințelor cetățenilor. Ei bine, tocmai asta nu se întâmplă la noi. De-aia nu suntem pe acest coridor îngust, chiar dacă pe hârtie avem un stat încătușat, așa cum ar trebui să fie. Doar că ce e pe hârtie nu se aplică, iar legea e pentru unii mumă, iar pentru alții ciumă, ceea ce face ca statul nostru să fie un amestec de Stat Despotic și Stat Absent. Și citind cartea asta îți poți da seama cât de greșit percepem lucrurile și cât de departe suntem de coridorul îngust.
Pentru a ajunge pe coridor e nevoie de implicarea tuturor. De fapt, libertatea depinde aproape întotdeauna de mobilizarea societății și de abilitatea sa de a ajunge la un echilibru de putere cu statul și cu elitele sale. Noi de asta suntem foarte departe, pentru că nu știm ce să cerem, când să cerem și cum să cerem. Participarea la vot o dată la patru ani nu înseamnă nimic. Ba, e chiar periculoasă, dacă ea dă toată puterea în mâna unui singur partid.
Și, pentru că am menționat toate aceste trei forme de organizare a statului, Despotic, Absent și Încătușat, am ajuns la ideea cărții acestor băieți foarte șmecheri. Teza lor, expusă în cartea care a ieșit de curând la Publica (are aproape 600 de pagini, dar trebuie să alocați timpul necesar pentru a o citi, eu scriu aceste rânduri după ce am parcurs abia jumătate din carte, dar nu văd cum aș putea fi dezamăgit în vreun fel la final) este asta: libertatea nu este ceea ce ni se spune inclusiv la școală, o construcție puternică și foarte stabilă, ci o stare care se obține dintr-un echilibru între stat și societate, la care se ajunge destul de greu și care este foarte, foarte instabil. Iar autorii spun că acest echilibru aduce un culoar, un coridor, care este foarte îngust și pe care societățile înaintează câștigând tocmai din acest război permanent între stat și societate.
Și-mi place la nebunie teza asta pentru că este ceea ce spun și eu de foarte mult timp, răspunzându-le astfel celor care sunt mai degrabă fanii Statului Despotic și cred că puterea trebuie criticată doar când la putere se află partidul pe care nu-l plac ei. Ei bine, tocmai asta e principala piedică în aflarea libertății. Cum bine punctează autorii, tocmai capacitatea de a contesta este definiția libertății. Asta pentru că statul trebuie să evolueze continuu, pentru a răspunde cerințelor cetățenilor. Ei bine, tocmai asta nu se întâmplă la noi. De-aia nu suntem pe acest coridor îngust, chiar dacă pe hârtie avem un stat încătușat, așa cum ar trebui să fie. Doar că ce e pe hârtie nu se aplică, iar legea e pentru unii mumă, iar pentru alții ciumă, ceea ce face ca statul nostru să fie un amestec de Stat Despotic și Stat Absent. Și citind cartea asta îți poți da seama cât de greșit percepem lucrurile și cât de departe suntem de coridorul îngust.
Pentru a ajunge pe coridor e nevoie de implicarea tuturor. De fapt, libertatea depinde aproape întotdeauna de mobilizarea societății și de abilitatea sa de a ajunge la un echilibru de putere cu statul și cu elitele sale. Noi de asta suntem foarte departe, pentru că nu știm ce să cerem, când să cerem și cum să cerem. Participarea la vot o dată la patru ani nu înseamnă nimic. Ba, e chiar periculoasă, dacă ea dă toată puterea în mâna unui singur partid.
July 27, 2023
کتاب کمک بزرگی به من تو درک شرایط سیاسی و اجتماعی امروز ایران، وضعیت حکومت های کاغذی، شرایط اقتصادی انواع حکومت ها و ... کرد.
حتما بخونید ولی خوندن این کتاب اصلا راحت و سریع نیست و نیاز زیادی به فکر کردن و وقت گذاشتن داره.
حتما بخونید ولی خوندن این کتاب اصلا راحت و سریع نیست و نیاز زیادی به فکر کردن و وقت گذاشتن داره.
November 27, 2019
As a development economist myself, I have followed the work of the authors closely in the past decade and I am strongly convinced by the essence of their earlier book, Why Nations Fail. That book distinguished between extractive and inclusive political and economic institutions and explained how these shaped their subsequent economic development.
They maintain that it is not geography, not good policies, nor culture (though they do soften their stance on that last one) that drives the development of nations, rather their economic and political institutions, which in turn are greatly shaped by societal power structures. They continue to argue that history matters and that institutions are persistent, where events over a millennia ago can have strong lasting effects on today's institutions.
In their earlier book, Why Nations Fail, they differentiated between extractive and inclusive institutions both in the political realm (such as suffrage) and economic ones (such as property rights). They showed how extractive institutions, which represent the interest of a few, are often legacies of colonial systems designed for natural resource exploitation (including gold, sugar cane, etc.), and how strong their effects were on subsequent development. They also show how difficult it is for an extractive state to move to become an inclusive one, given that the controlling elite has little interest in such change. But major shocks (such as industrial revolution or the black death) can change the underlying power balance in society. They also postulated in their book over 10 years ago that repressive regimes, such as China are poised to collapse soon as undemocratic societies are unable to innovate and grow. On the other hand, once societies democratize (like India), they should keep on growing and innovating.
In this new book, "The Narrow Corridor", they present a more complex framework where there are not two but rather three types of states: a despotic state (“Despotic Leviathan”), anarchy/weak state (“Absent Leviathan”) or the sweat spot, an accountable and effective state ("Shackled Leviathan"), see Figure 1. In this new framework, which state you are in critically depends on the balance of power between state and society. If you have too much societal power (often based on norms and kinship) then you'll have a very weak and ineffective state, if you have too much state power, you'll get despotism. Only if the two are in balance, will you find yourself in the Narrow Corridor. As opposed to ideas proposed by modernization theory, (and pronouncements like End of History) they argue that there is nothing automatic in reaching an accountable and effective state through development. Countries like China can continue to become increasingly authoritarian, while others can be trapped forever in anarchy. If you miraculously get the balance right, and get into the Narrow Corridor, you can unleash a development where both state and society's power grows (they call this the Red Queen effect). The book does not aim to classify countries, but Lebanon is the exemplary weak state today, while China, Russia are the despotic ones. Some countries have barely any state power (“paper leviathan”), while some societies are “trapped in the cage of norms”, in such cases there is no chance of striking a balance until both state and society evolve.
Again, as in their earlier book, large technological or other shocks can lead to institutional change but will depending on starting conditions. The collapse of the Soviet Union led to various outcomes: Russia momentarily democratized but slid back (too far from corridor), Poland successfully democratized (into corridor) and Tajikistan became feudal and anarchic (overshooting the corridor).
----
All in all, this book is clearly an important contribution, one that will be much discussed and debated in our field. I think that this new framework goes a long way in explaining some clear outliers to the earlier book's theory, including many 'successful' and stable autocracies, especially China as well as the developmental failure of many democracies which in their laws had many of the inclusive political/economic institutional features in place.
In my own reading, this new book also offers some valuable policy lessons for international development, even if not articulated in a very explicit way. It suggests that a balance needs to be struck between efforts at improving government effectiveness vs increasing societal accountability. One needs to analyze the starting position when considering where support is more needed. The book also suggests that there are ways to widen the corridor, especially by increasing rewards from societal cooperation (win-win). Though difficult to implement in practice, this might be an important consideration in reforming the developmental architecture.
Then on then negatives:
One of my major issue with the framework, is that completely overlooks the multiplicity of actors especially within the state. It treats the government as monolithic, despite the fact that all despotic governments have fractions within. Same can be said about society, where class, gender and ethnicity division are often entrenched, but political coalitions can change. Therefore, I think, the important clash is not always between state and society, but sometime within state or within society.
The other issue I take with the book, especially given that it was written by two prolific academics who've written many seminal empirical papers, is that they fail to provide any indication as to how to quantify their two key variables: state and societal power. State power is (based on the book) partly associated with classic state effectiveness measures, such as ability to tax or carry out basic social services. But they also suggest it goes beyond that, and argue that building up a surveillance state is some advanced form of state power. Unclear how to measure that part. Even less clear is how would one would go about to start measuring societal power.
Then there are a bunch of other terms that also constitute important tenants of their framework, and for which we get many historical illustrations, but I still felt they are rather under-defined. What exactly is the ‘cage of norms’ and how do societies brake free from it? How do you know that the ‘red queen effect’ is in motion/can you be in the corridor without progressing? A bit more definition and intuition would have gone a long way.
Finally, the book is difficult to read. Although "only" 600 page, it feels like much more. It goes through heaps of quite detailed historical accounts across time and place, all centered on making a single point about the validity of their framework. Where I had more knowledge of events described, I felt the narrative was rather one sided (though never felt it was wrong). And although they are eloquently and interestingly written, I often felt that I just don't feel like reading another 50 pages on a distant and ancient tribe's customs or a narrow political conflict between landowners and traders just so I can catch the the short bits of intuition about the framework.
All in all, I am glad I read the book and will keep getting back to it, but the big punchline I was hoping for just wasn't there for me.
They maintain that it is not geography, not good policies, nor culture (though they do soften their stance on that last one) that drives the development of nations, rather their economic and political institutions, which in turn are greatly shaped by societal power structures. They continue to argue that history matters and that institutions are persistent, where events over a millennia ago can have strong lasting effects on today's institutions.
In their earlier book, Why Nations Fail, they differentiated between extractive and inclusive institutions both in the political realm (such as suffrage) and economic ones (such as property rights). They showed how extractive institutions, which represent the interest of a few, are often legacies of colonial systems designed for natural resource exploitation (including gold, sugar cane, etc.), and how strong their effects were on subsequent development. They also show how difficult it is for an extractive state to move to become an inclusive one, given that the controlling elite has little interest in such change. But major shocks (such as industrial revolution or the black death) can change the underlying power balance in society. They also postulated in their book over 10 years ago that repressive regimes, such as China are poised to collapse soon as undemocratic societies are unable to innovate and grow. On the other hand, once societies democratize (like India), they should keep on growing and innovating.
In this new book, "The Narrow Corridor", they present a more complex framework where there are not two but rather three types of states: a despotic state (“Despotic Leviathan”), anarchy/weak state (“Absent Leviathan”) or the sweat spot, an accountable and effective state ("Shackled Leviathan"), see Figure 1. In this new framework, which state you are in critically depends on the balance of power between state and society. If you have too much societal power (often based on norms and kinship) then you'll have a very weak and ineffective state, if you have too much state power, you'll get despotism. Only if the two are in balance, will you find yourself in the Narrow Corridor. As opposed to ideas proposed by modernization theory, (and pronouncements like End of History) they argue that there is nothing automatic in reaching an accountable and effective state through development. Countries like China can continue to become increasingly authoritarian, while others can be trapped forever in anarchy. If you miraculously get the balance right, and get into the Narrow Corridor, you can unleash a development where both state and society's power grows (they call this the Red Queen effect). The book does not aim to classify countries, but Lebanon is the exemplary weak state today, while China, Russia are the despotic ones. Some countries have barely any state power (“paper leviathan”), while some societies are “trapped in the cage of norms”, in such cases there is no chance of striking a balance until both state and society evolve.
Again, as in their earlier book, large technological or other shocks can lead to institutional change but will depending on starting conditions. The collapse of the Soviet Union led to various outcomes: Russia momentarily democratized but slid back (too far from corridor), Poland successfully democratized (into corridor) and Tajikistan became feudal and anarchic (overshooting the corridor).
----
All in all, this book is clearly an important contribution, one that will be much discussed and debated in our field. I think that this new framework goes a long way in explaining some clear outliers to the earlier book's theory, including many 'successful' and stable autocracies, especially China as well as the developmental failure of many democracies which in their laws had many of the inclusive political/economic institutional features in place.
In my own reading, this new book also offers some valuable policy lessons for international development, even if not articulated in a very explicit way. It suggests that a balance needs to be struck between efforts at improving government effectiveness vs increasing societal accountability. One needs to analyze the starting position when considering where support is more needed. The book also suggests that there are ways to widen the corridor, especially by increasing rewards from societal cooperation (win-win). Though difficult to implement in practice, this might be an important consideration in reforming the developmental architecture.
Then on then negatives:
One of my major issue with the framework, is that completely overlooks the multiplicity of actors especially within the state. It treats the government as monolithic, despite the fact that all despotic governments have fractions within. Same can be said about society, where class, gender and ethnicity division are often entrenched, but political coalitions can change. Therefore, I think, the important clash is not always between state and society, but sometime within state or within society.
The other issue I take with the book, especially given that it was written by two prolific academics who've written many seminal empirical papers, is that they fail to provide any indication as to how to quantify their two key variables: state and societal power. State power is (based on the book) partly associated with classic state effectiveness measures, such as ability to tax or carry out basic social services. But they also suggest it goes beyond that, and argue that building up a surveillance state is some advanced form of state power. Unclear how to measure that part. Even less clear is how would one would go about to start measuring societal power.
Then there are a bunch of other terms that also constitute important tenants of their framework, and for which we get many historical illustrations, but I still felt they are rather under-defined. What exactly is the ‘cage of norms’ and how do societies brake free from it? How do you know that the ‘red queen effect’ is in motion/can you be in the corridor without progressing? A bit more definition and intuition would have gone a long way.
Finally, the book is difficult to read. Although "only" 600 page, it feels like much more. It goes through heaps of quite detailed historical accounts across time and place, all centered on making a single point about the validity of their framework. Where I had more knowledge of events described, I felt the narrative was rather one sided (though never felt it was wrong). And although they are eloquently and interestingly written, I often felt that I just don't feel like reading another 50 pages on a distant and ancient tribe's customs or a narrow political conflict between landowners and traders just so I can catch the the short bits of intuition about the framework.
All in all, I am glad I read the book and will keep getting back to it, but the big punchline I was hoping for just wasn't there for me.
January 5, 2020
A few years ago, Acemoglu's and Robinson "Why nation fails" became an international bestseller, and I remember I hugely enjoyed reading the book. If you haven't heard of it before, the central thesis in the book was that the key factor determining long term economic growth is not a country's geography, religion, or a level of education, but the quality of its institutions.
The book has also drawn some criticisms, the most important of which is: how do you define "quality of institutions"? The problem is that, when you try to give an operational meaning to this term, you often end up with a circular reasoning: "economies grow when countries have institutions that promote economic growth". Another problem is that the book didn't really give a convincing answer to the question: "what determines the emergence of good institutions in the first place"? Acemoglu and Robinson provided numerous historical examples, but in most cases the conclusion is that the emergence of good institutions is path dependent and depends on details. Which may be well be the most that is to say on the topic, but is hardly satisfying.
With "The narrow corridor", Acemoglu and Robinson go one step further and try to provide an overarching theory of what determines freedom. Their basic premises are sound enough (a) without central state or strong social norms, human communities end up in a Hobbesian "war of everybody against everybody", and liberty in this context is impossible (b) a strong state can put an end to this, but without countervailing power from "society", there is a very strong risk that the state can become despotic itself (c) societies without strong central state can still function if there are strong social norms constraining behavior. However, social norms can also inhibit human freedom.
Acemoglu's and Robinson's thesis is then that there is a "narrow corridor" where state and society keep each other in balance, and where "genuine freedom" is possible.
Fair enough, but here the thesis really gets into trouble when you try to apply it. The book is chokeful of (actually very interesting) historical examples from a wide diversity of context, and the authors use those examples to illustrate their theory. The problem is: what does it mean that the corridor becomes "broader" or "narrower" if you don't have a clear way to measure how broad or narrow the corridor is, or how "strong" the state or social norms are?
The result is that this book is deeply frustrating. You end up with the feeling that Acemoglu and Robinson use concepts that are so flexible that they can be made to fit whatever historical example they come up with - which is really the antithesis of science if you adhere to a Popperian view.
Which is a bit of a pity, given that the historical examples are often quite interesting and even revealing. It had for instance never occurred to me that the American "bill of rights" was designed to curtail the power of the federal government, but not those of the states - which really implied that, in practice, the federal government could do very little against oppressive practices in (mostly southern states) until the Supreme Court changed its interpretation of certain clauses.
Another point that really struck me were the differences in Acemoglu's and Robinson, 's discussion of the caste system and colonialism in India compared to the treatment in another recent book, Piketty's "Capital et idéologie".
Piketty spends a lot of time discussing how the Raj have reinforced existing caste divisions for their own purposes. In Acemoglu and Robinson, this is mentioned in just one paragraph - but A and R emphasize that the British have just continued a practice that already started under the Mughal empire. On the other hand, A & R spend a whole chapter discussing the perverse incentives of the caste system, the economic waste it creates and how it is a barrier to economic growth while Piketty focuses almost exclusively on the distributional effects of the caste system. The interesting finding is here that neither account implies that the other is factually incorrect. But it really shows how you end with a completely different account depending on what you want to discuss.
This is exactly why it's so important to read books written by authors with complete different worldviews. Unless you are a specialist, you never know what the author doesn't discuss in his account, and that might be just as relevant as what he does tell.
The book has also drawn some criticisms, the most important of which is: how do you define "quality of institutions"? The problem is that, when you try to give an operational meaning to this term, you often end up with a circular reasoning: "economies grow when countries have institutions that promote economic growth". Another problem is that the book didn't really give a convincing answer to the question: "what determines the emergence of good institutions in the first place"? Acemoglu and Robinson provided numerous historical examples, but in most cases the conclusion is that the emergence of good institutions is path dependent and depends on details. Which may be well be the most that is to say on the topic, but is hardly satisfying.
With "The narrow corridor", Acemoglu and Robinson go one step further and try to provide an overarching theory of what determines freedom. Their basic premises are sound enough (a) without central state or strong social norms, human communities end up in a Hobbesian "war of everybody against everybody", and liberty in this context is impossible (b) a strong state can put an end to this, but without countervailing power from "society", there is a very strong risk that the state can become despotic itself (c) societies without strong central state can still function if there are strong social norms constraining behavior. However, social norms can also inhibit human freedom.
Acemoglu's and Robinson's thesis is then that there is a "narrow corridor" where state and society keep each other in balance, and where "genuine freedom" is possible.
Fair enough, but here the thesis really gets into trouble when you try to apply it. The book is chokeful of (actually very interesting) historical examples from a wide diversity of context, and the authors use those examples to illustrate their theory. The problem is: what does it mean that the corridor becomes "broader" or "narrower" if you don't have a clear way to measure how broad or narrow the corridor is, or how "strong" the state or social norms are?
The result is that this book is deeply frustrating. You end up with the feeling that Acemoglu and Robinson use concepts that are so flexible that they can be made to fit whatever historical example they come up with - which is really the antithesis of science if you adhere to a Popperian view.
Which is a bit of a pity, given that the historical examples are often quite interesting and even revealing. It had for instance never occurred to me that the American "bill of rights" was designed to curtail the power of the federal government, but not those of the states - which really implied that, in practice, the federal government could do very little against oppressive practices in (mostly southern states) until the Supreme Court changed its interpretation of certain clauses.
Another point that really struck me were the differences in Acemoglu's and Robinson, 's discussion of the caste system and colonialism in India compared to the treatment in another recent book, Piketty's "Capital et idéologie".
Piketty spends a lot of time discussing how the Raj have reinforced existing caste divisions for their own purposes. In Acemoglu and Robinson, this is mentioned in just one paragraph - but A and R emphasize that the British have just continued a practice that already started under the Mughal empire. On the other hand, A & R spend a whole chapter discussing the perverse incentives of the caste system, the economic waste it creates and how it is a barrier to economic growth while Piketty focuses almost exclusively on the distributional effects of the caste system. The interesting finding is here that neither account implies that the other is factually incorrect. But it really shows how you end with a completely different account depending on what you want to discuss.
This is exactly why it's so important to read books written by authors with complete different worldviews. Unless you are a specialist, you never know what the author doesn't discuss in his account, and that might be just as relevant as what he does tell.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
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April 28, 2022کتابی فوق العاده ! مشابه کتاب قبلی نویسنده هاش یعنی «چرا ملتها شکست می خورند؟» این کتاب هم نظریه ای رو مطرح میکنه و با آوردن مثالهای تاریخی اونو تبیین میکنه. کتاب اول دیدگاه هابز رو به چالش میکشه و میگه لویاتان یا حکومت در عین حال که پایان دهنده وضعیت «جنگ همه علیه همه » هست اما یک روی مستبد داره . از طرف دیگه بسته به قدرت جامعه و هنجارهای جامعه ممکنه چنین لویاتانی شکل نگیره و یا تحت مهار جامعه قرار بگیره .به این ترتیب ما چهار نوع جامعه داریم با ۱-لویاتان مستبد(در کنار جامعه ضعیف) ۲-لویاتان غایب (در کنار جامعه با هنجارهای غالب بر حکومت سازی چیزی که اسمشو میزاره قفس هنجارها) ۳- لویاتان مقید که هم جامعه و هم حکومت باظرفیت و قویه( چیزی که اسمشو میزاره اثر ملکه سرخ ) ۴-لویاتان کاغذی که هم جامعه هم حکومت ضعیفه . کتاب درواقع نموداری رو با محور عرضی قدرت جامعه و محور طولی قدرت حکومت رسم میکنه و دالانی در خط وسط این دو محور که از هر دو ط��ف به یک فاصله است رسم میکنه و اسمشو میزاره « دالان باریک آزادی» و چگونگی حرکت کشورها در تاریخشون به داخل و خارج این دالان و عوامل ساختاری جوامع که حتی روی عرض این دالان موثر هستند رو بررسی میکنه
مثلا اینکه ریشه های تشکیل لویاتان مستبد چینی چه بود (فصل ۷) یا لویاتان غایب لبنان یا بسیاری از کشورهای آفریقایی (فصل ۲) چگونگی شکل گیری لویاتان مقید اروپایی (فصل ۶) و چگونگی شکل نگرفتن لویاتان مقید در هند (فصل۸) تشدید قفس هنجارها توسط لویاتان برای شکل گیری و بقای خودش (عربستان و عراق در فصل ۱۲) لویاتان خاص آمریکایی و چگونگی شکل گیری آن و مشکلاتش (فصل ۱۰) و چگونگی خارج شدن لویان آلمانی از دالان ��ر زمان نازیها ( فصل ۱۳)
«لویاتان مقید در اروپا حاصل دو لبه قیچی است یکی نهادهای حکومتی اقتباس شده از امپراطوری روم و هنجارها و نهادهای مشارکتی به ارث رسیده از قبایل ژرمن . هیچ یک از این دو به تنهایی برای خلق لویاتان مقید کافی نبود وقتی به مانند بیزانس فقط تیغه اول حاضر بود لویاتان مستبد معمولی بوجود امد و وقتی به مانند ایسلند تنها تیغه بعدی وجود داشت توسعه سیاسی اندکی رقم میخورد و حکومت سازی انجام نمیگیرد »
«هند یک معماست کشوری بسیار فقیر با شکستهای فراگیر حکومت و عدم کارکرد درست سیاسی ، همزمان مهد بزرگترین دموکراسی جهان با یک رقابت سیاسی شدید. ریشه های دموکراسی هند در عمق تاریخ این کشور به لحاظ مشارکت سیاسی مثل اروپا ریشه دارد ولی اثر ملکه سرخ در هند قفس هنجارها را نتوانست از بین ببرد. آن هم به خاطر ماهیت میراث نظام کاستی . جامعه که بس پاره و در جنگ با خویش است از نظارت بر نهادهای حکومتی بازماند و به طرزی چشمگیر نتوانست حکومت را به منظور ایجاد ظرفیت بیشتر تحت فشار قرار دهد »
فصل ۹ میگوید شیطان در جزییات است یعنی وارد شدن به دالان به میزان فاصله از آن مربوط است «به همین دلیل گذار روسیه به دالان شکست خورد چون بیش از اندازه از ان دور بود.ولی اگر افول در قدرت و حکومت نخبگان حزب کمونیست برای دور شدن روسیه از مدار لویاتان استبدادی کافی نبود برای تغییر مسیر حکومتی چون تاجیکستان بعنوان جمهوری سابق شوروی در مرز افغانستان و چین که سیطره متزلزل تری بر جامعه داشت زیاد هم بود به این معنا که فرایند گذار به علت حکومت ضعیف و جامعه ای بدون ابزارهای نهادی برای مشارکت در سیاست منجر شد با فروپاشی شوروی بین طوایف جنگ قدرت صورت بگیرد و حکومت نابود شود ولی از طرفی دیگر افول قدرت شوروی برای گشودن دری به سوی دالان پیش روی لهستان کافی بود »
«بر خلاف تاکید رایج در بخش اعظم علوم اجتماعی عوامل ساختاری گرایشی قوی به نفع ظهور نوعی از الگوی اقتصادی سیاسی یا اجتماعی به وجود نمی آورند بلکه آنها به تاثیرات مشروط می انجامند بدان معنا که پیامدهایشان اکیدا بستگی به توازن قدرت از قبل موجود میان حکومت و جامعه دارد»
فصل ۱۱ لویاتان کاغذی را معرفی میکند : آزمون مرغابی «اینکه اگر چیزی شبیه حکومت باشد مثل حکومت شنا کند بانگی شبیه به حکومت داشته باشد پس انکاه حکومت است؟ نه ! لویاتان کاغذی یک لویاتان واقعی نیست یعنی اگرچه هنوز بسیار استبدادی است اما ظرفیت لویاتان مستبد برای انجام کارها را ندارد و هیچ تلاشی هم برای خلق آزادی و کاستن از شدت هنجارها نمیکند بلکه قفس هنجارها را تنگ تر میکند» و اتفاقا قفس هنجارها (شبکه بستگی های متقابل و پیوندهای قومی) بقای لویاتان کاغذی را دوام می بخشد مانع از توان جامعه برای عمل جمعی میشود و همزمان رشد ظرفیت حکومت را سرکوب میکند این لویاتان در بخش های زیادی از جهان از جمله امریکای لاتین و افریقا و خاورمیانه وجود دارد و همه انها محصول استعمار اروپا هستند چراکه نحوه اداره مستعمرات توسط قدرتهای استعماری اروپایی و دخل و تصرف آنان در نهادهای بسیاری از مستعمراتشان شرایط را برای ظهور لویاتان کاغذی فراهم میکند علت:۱- تاسیس نهادها توسط اروپاییها بدون اقداماتی برای مهار انها (چون منفعتی در آن نداشتند)۲- ترویج حاکمیت غیر مستقیم توسط روسای محلی ( با کمترین هزینه) و عدم شکل گیری دیوان سالاری و دستگاه قضایی شایسته سالار ۳-ماهیت دلبخواهی کشورهای پسااستعماری ۴-به رسمیت شناخته شدن این لویاتانهای کاغذی در جوامع بین المللی ...
در فصل ۱۳ ملکه سرخ افسارگسیخته یا با حاصل جمع صفر را در آلمان وایمار که جامعه را از دالان بیرون برد معرفی میکند.یعنی حالتی که فضای اندکی برای سازش بین فرادستان و جامعه بسیج شده وجود دارد و در این جامعه قطبی هر طرف سعی به از بین بردن طرف دیگر دارد و نبردی بر سر موجودیت جای مسابقه بین حکومت و جامعه را میگیرد علت؟ چون ظرفیت نهادهای جامعه برای حل این منازعات پایین است در یک معنا نهادها نمیتوانستند با همان سرعت حکومت و جامعه بدوند و این امر ملکه سرخ را هرچه بیشتر در معرض مهار گسیختن میگذاشت در مقابل ملکه سرخ با حاصلجمع مثبت که هردو طرف برای رقابتشان باظرفیت تر و قوی تر میشوند.
«کشورهایی که لویاتانمستبد دارند می توانندبا تقویت جامعه خود یا تقویت شیوه های جدید نظارت و تضعیف قدرت حکومتهایشان از همه راحتتر وارد دالان شوند در افریقای جنوبی وضعیت اینگونه بود.جامعه ای که کار را از لویاتان غایب آغاز میکند وضعیت پیش رویش این نیست . در اینجا تقویت بیشتر جامعه و تضعیف حکومت اثر عکس دارد بلکه افزایشی در قدرت حکومت یک شیوه ممکن برای ورود به دالان است .سرانجام کشورهای با لویاتان کاغذی با ظرفیت بسیار کمتر حکومت و بدون هیچ شیوه نهادینه از اعمال قدرت توسط جامعه ماموریتی حتی سختتر دارند . یعنی باید همزمان ظرفیت حکومت و جامعه را افزایش داد »
البته همه اینها بستگی به شکل دالان هم دارد . مثلا میزان قدرت داشتن فرادستان زمین دار (در مقابل صنعتی)که دالان را باریک تر و کار را سخت تر میکند یا وجود نهادهای مشارکتی و دموکراتیک که بر پهنای دالان می افزاید و همچنین اینکه تداوم لویاتان مقید منوط به اعتماد جامعه به نهادهاست تا از طریق آن به حل منازعات بین خودشان بپردازند تا ملکه سرخ به سمت حاصل جمع صفر گرایش نیابد.
معلومه که در تمام مدت مطالعه کتاب به تاریخ ایران و نوع جامعه ایرانی فکر میکردم اینکه از کدوم نوعه و چه چالشهایی پیش روشه! از طرفی در تاریخ استبدادی ایران نمای یک لویاتان مستبد رو میدیدم و از طرفی دیگه در بی ظرفیتی حکومت الان نوعی لویاتان کاغذی ! چیزی که میتونم امیدوارانه بگم افزایش ظرفیت و قدرت جامعه است چیزی که نمیدونم ظرفیت نهادهای جامعه و اعتماد جامعه به این نهادهاست که مثال خوبش انتخابات اخیره که دوگروه متفاوت با هدفی یکسان ایجاد کرد که یکیش چاره رو در رای دادن میدونس و دیگری در رای ندادن ... آیا در آینده شاهد افسارگسیختن ملکه سرخیم یا یک لویاتان مقید؟
مثلا اینکه ریشه های تشکیل لویاتان مستبد چینی چه بود (فصل ۷) یا لویاتان غایب لبنان یا بسیاری از کشورهای آفریقایی (فصل ۲) چگونگی شکل گیری لویاتان مقید اروپایی (فصل ۶) و چگونگی شکل نگرفتن لویاتان مقید در هند (فصل۸) تشدید قفس هنجارها توسط لویاتان برای شکل گیری و بقای خودش (عربستان و عراق در فصل ۱۲) لویاتان خاص آمریکایی و چگونگی شکل گیری آن و مشکلاتش (فصل ۱۰) و چگونگی خارج شدن لویان آلمانی از دالان ��ر زمان نازیها ( فصل ۱۳)
«لویاتان مقید در اروپا حاصل دو لبه قیچی است یکی نهادهای حکومتی اقتباس شده از امپراطوری روم و هنجارها و نهادهای مشارکتی به ارث رسیده از قبایل ژرمن . هیچ یک از این دو به تنهایی برای خلق لویاتان مقید کافی نبود وقتی به مانند بیزانس فقط تیغه اول حاضر بود لویاتان مستبد معمولی بوجود امد و وقتی به مانند ایسلند تنها تیغه بعدی وجود داشت توسعه سیاسی اندکی رقم میخورد و حکومت سازی انجام نمیگیرد »
«هند یک معماست کشوری بسیار فقیر با شکستهای فراگیر حکومت و عدم کارکرد درست سیاسی ، همزمان مهد بزرگترین دموکراسی جهان با یک رقابت سیاسی شدید. ریشه های دموکراسی هند در عمق تاریخ این کشور به لحاظ مشارکت سیاسی مثل اروپا ریشه دارد ولی اثر ملکه سرخ در هند قفس هنجارها را نتوانست از بین ببرد. آن هم به خاطر ماهیت میراث نظام کاستی . جامعه که بس پاره و در جنگ با خویش است از نظارت بر نهادهای حکومتی بازماند و به طرزی چشمگیر نتوانست حکومت را به منظور ایجاد ظرفیت بیشتر تحت فشار قرار دهد »
فصل ۹ میگوید شیطان در جزییات است یعنی وارد شدن به دالان به میزان فاصله از آن مربوط است «به همین دلیل گذار روسیه به دالان شکست خورد چون بیش از اندازه از ان دور بود.ولی اگر افول در قدرت و حکومت نخبگان حزب کمونیست برای دور شدن روسیه از مدار لویاتان استبدادی کافی نبود برای تغییر مسیر حکومتی چون تاجیکستان بعنوان جمهوری سابق شوروی در مرز افغانستان و چین که سیطره متزلزل تری بر جامعه داشت زیاد هم بود به این معنا که فرایند گذار به علت حکومت ضعیف و جامعه ای بدون ابزارهای نهادی برای مشارکت در سیاست منجر شد با فروپاشی شوروی بین طوایف جنگ قدرت صورت بگیرد و حکومت نابود شود ولی از طرفی دیگر افول قدرت شوروی برای گشودن دری به سوی دالان پیش روی لهستان کافی بود »
«بر خلاف تاکید رایج در بخش اعظم علوم اجتماعی عوامل ساختاری گرایشی قوی به نفع ظهور نوعی از الگوی اقتصادی سیاسی یا اجتماعی به وجود نمی آورند بلکه آنها به تاثیرات مشروط می انجامند بدان معنا که پیامدهایشان اکیدا بستگی به توازن قدرت از قبل موجود میان حکومت و جامعه دارد»
فصل ۱۱ لویاتان کاغذی را معرفی میکند : آزمون مرغابی «اینکه اگر چیزی شبیه حکومت باشد مثل حکومت شنا کند بانگی شبیه به حکومت داشته باشد پس انکاه حکومت است؟ نه ! لویاتان کاغذی یک لویاتان واقعی نیست یعنی اگرچه هنوز بسیار استبدادی است اما ظرفیت لویاتان مستبد برای انجام کارها را ندارد و هیچ تلاشی هم برای خلق آزادی و کاستن از شدت هنجارها نمیکند بلکه قفس هنجارها را تنگ تر میکند» و اتفاقا قفس هنجارها (شبکه بستگی های متقابل و پیوندهای قومی) بقای لویاتان کاغذی را دوام می بخشد مانع از توان جامعه برای عمل جمعی میشود و همزمان رشد ظرفیت حکومت را سرکوب میکند این لویاتان در بخش های زیادی از جهان از جمله امریکای لاتین و افریقا و خاورمیانه وجود دارد و همه انها محصول استعمار اروپا هستند چراکه نحوه اداره مستعمرات توسط قدرتهای استعماری اروپایی و دخل و تصرف آنان در نهادهای بسیاری از مستعمراتشان شرایط را برای ظهور لویاتان کاغذی فراهم میکند علت:۱- تاسیس نهادها توسط اروپاییها بدون اقداماتی برای مهار انها (چون منفعتی در آن نداشتند)۲- ترویج حاکمیت غیر مستقیم توسط روسای محلی ( با کمترین هزینه) و عدم شکل گیری دیوان سالاری و دستگاه قضایی شایسته سالار ۳-ماهیت دلبخواهی کشورهای پسااستعماری ۴-به رسمیت شناخته شدن این لویاتانهای کاغذی در جوامع بین المللی ...
در فصل ۱۳ ملکه سرخ افسارگسیخته یا با حاصل جمع صفر را در آلمان وایمار که جامعه را از دالان بیرون برد معرفی میکند.یعنی حالتی که فضای اندکی برای سازش بین فرادستان و جامعه بسیج شده وجود دارد و در این جامعه قطبی هر طرف سعی به از بین بردن طرف دیگر دارد و نبردی بر سر موجودیت جای مسابقه بین حکومت و جامعه را میگیرد علت؟ چون ظرفیت نهادهای جامعه برای حل این منازعات پایین است در یک معنا نهادها نمیتوانستند با همان سرعت حکومت و جامعه بدوند و این امر ملکه سرخ را هرچه بیشتر در معرض مهار گسیختن میگذاشت در مقابل ملکه سرخ با حاصلجمع مثبت که هردو طرف برای رقابتشان باظرفیت تر و قوی تر میشوند.
«کشورهایی که لویاتانمستبد دارند می توانندبا تقویت جامعه خود یا تقویت شیوه های جدید نظارت و تضعیف قدرت حکومتهایشان از همه راحتتر وارد دالان شوند در افریقای جنوبی وضعیت اینگونه بود.جامعه ای که کار را از لویاتان غایب آغاز میکند وضعیت پیش رویش این نیست . در اینجا تقویت بیشتر جامعه و تضعیف حکومت اثر عکس دارد بلکه افزایشی در قدرت حکومت یک شیوه ممکن برای ورود به دالان است .سرانجام کشورهای با لویاتان کاغذی با ظرفیت بسیار کمتر حکومت و بدون هیچ شیوه نهادینه از اعمال قدرت توسط جامعه ماموریتی حتی سختتر دارند . یعنی باید همزمان ظرفیت حکومت و جامعه را افزایش داد »
البته همه اینها بستگی به شکل دالان هم دارد . مثلا میزان قدرت داشتن فرادستان زمین دار (در مقابل صنعتی)که دالان را باریک تر و کار را سخت تر میکند یا وجود نهادهای مشارکتی و دموکراتیک که بر پهنای دالان می افزاید و همچنین اینکه تداوم لویاتان مقید منوط به اعتماد جامعه به نهادهاست تا از طریق آن به حل منازعات بین خودشان بپردازند تا ملکه سرخ به سمت حاصل جمع صفر گرایش نیابد.
معلومه که در تمام مدت مطالعه کتاب به تاریخ ایران و نوع جامعه ایرانی فکر میکردم اینکه از کدوم نوعه و چه چالشهایی پیش روشه! از طرفی در تاریخ استبدادی ایران نمای یک لویاتان مستبد رو میدیدم و از طرفی دیگه در بی ظرفیتی حکومت الان نوعی لویاتان کاغذی ! چیزی که میتونم امیدوارانه بگم افزایش ظرفیت و قدرت جامعه است چیزی که نمیدونم ظرفیت نهادهای جامعه و اعتماد جامعه به این نهادهاست که مثال خوبش انتخابات اخیره که دوگروه متفاوت با هدفی یکسان ایجاد کرد که یکیش چاره رو در رای دادن میدونس و دیگری در رای ندادن ... آیا در آینده شاهد افسارگسیختن ملکه سرخیم یا یک لویاتان مقید؟
November 7, 2019
I went back and forth about whether I should read this and then I decided to just read it. As I was reading, I went back and forth about whether I should keep reading, but I just finished by default. I am still just neutral or mixed about it. It’s way too broad and unscientific to be a useful formula.
I agree generally that there’s a “narrow corridor” or a sweet spot for state power and I agree that states can enter and leave this sweet spot (yes, America is not immune to downfall either). The stories were interesting but I’m not sure they all prove the point. How can Nazi germany leaving the corridor be compared to Argentina leaving? There are way too many variables to try to fit into a clean formula
I agree generally that there’s a “narrow corridor” or a sweet spot for state power and I agree that states can enter and leave this sweet spot (yes, America is not immune to downfall either). The stories were interesting but I’m not sure they all prove the point. How can Nazi germany leaving the corridor be compared to Argentina leaving? There are way too many variables to try to fit into a clean formula
July 31, 2023
In the latter stages of grade school I became aware that different countries had different forms of government (democracy - good; communism - bad; monarchy - nostalgic). I also became aware that some had advanced reasons for this variation in government type. These reasons seemed to fall into two basic categories: climate (temperate climates foster democracy, tropical and polar climates do not); and race (light-skinned people can govern themselves; everybody else, not so much). Over the years such explanations have fallen out of favor and I don't think even Donald Trump would give either type much credence. (Although the former president seems to think the "strength" of the leader is more important than the type of government.)
In this book Professors Acemoglu and Robinson have advanced their own ideas about why different types of government have developed and, like good economists, have focused their explanation around a graph with x and y axes and have entered data at various spots on the graph to illustrate what they are talking about. Although the subject of the book is political science and economics, much of the book is a discussion of the history of governments, from Solon's Athens to Mandela's South Africa, used as examples to demonstrate their ideas. This may be presumptuous for two non-historians who in the first chapter confuse Benjamin Harrison with his grandfather, William Henry, but I found these discussions intriguing and very helpful in understanding their thesis.
I don't want to spoil the ending, but to suffice it to say that 21st century Americans need to do a better job of maintaining the institutions of democracy and empathizing with their fellow citizens or we may find ourselves leaving the narrow corridor of which the authors speak.
In this book Professors Acemoglu and Robinson have advanced their own ideas about why different types of government have developed and, like good economists, have focused their explanation around a graph with x and y axes and have entered data at various spots on the graph to illustrate what they are talking about. Although the subject of the book is political science and economics, much of the book is a discussion of the history of governments, from Solon's Athens to Mandela's South Africa, used as examples to demonstrate their ideas. This may be presumptuous for two non-historians who in the first chapter confuse Benjamin Harrison with his grandfather, William Henry, but I found these discussions intriguing and very helpful in understanding their thesis.
I don't want to spoil the ending, but to suffice it to say that 21st century Americans need to do a better job of maintaining the institutions of democracy and empathizing with their fellow citizens or we may find ourselves leaving the narrow corridor of which the authors speak.
September 26, 2022
Aceasta ar putea fi o carte de istorie practică.
"Pentru ca omenirea să progreseze, statul trebuie să-și extindă capacitatea pentru a răspunde noilor provocări și a lupta împotriva tuturor formelor de dominanție, dar acest lucru nu se va întâmpla dacă societatea nu-l cere și nu se mobilează pentru a apăra drepturile tuturor. Acest proces nu este ușor sau automat, dar el poate să se întâmple și chiar se întâmplă."
Aceasta este o carte despre libertate. Și despre stat. Iar coridorul este simbolul spațiului îngust prin care societatea se strecoară spre libertate. Pentru că oamenii vor să fie liberi. Să-și manifeste fără constrângeri întregul potențial, „fără să ceară permisiunea oricărui alt om și fără să depindă de voința acestuia”.
Ideea e că atitudinea asta poate conduce la haos. Când haosul se instaurează fără nicio constrângere superioară, se produce o stratificare în care cei mai puternici încep să domine pe cei mai slabi. Atunci libertatea se poate defini ca „absență a dominației”. Haosul constă și-n zbaterea intestină a diverselor puteri pentru a căpăta și mai multă putere asupra celorlați stare descrisă de Hobbes ca fiind naturală.
Omul prins în toată furtuna asta anarhică ajunge și „trăiește într-o permanentă teamă, și pericol de moarte violentă”, într-o solitudine fatală în cele din urmă. Statul, sau Leviatanul, este suprastructura menită să-l protejeze de intemperiile anarhismului natural. Dar apariția statului nu implică neapărat garantarea libertăți, ci ar putea impune limitarea ei; cum nici absența lui nu garantează acelalși libertate.
Coridorul devine însă calea de mijloc a societății către libertate între cele două extreme, Leviatanul Despotic și cel Absent; coridorul este frecventabil în acea îngustime produsă de lupta între Leviatanul Încătușat și societatea care-l stăpânește, pentru că tendința lui este să se elibereze și să domine autoritar, iar tendința ei este să se elibereze în anarhie. Între cele două tendințe opuse echilibrul îngust se regăsește în imaginea acestui coridor, o cale de compromis care ajută atât statul să nu devină un monolit dominator, cât și societatea să nu devină atât de liberă încât să se întoarcă împotriva ei înseși.
Un Leviatan încătușat nu este un dat al unei arhitecturi constituționale inteligente, ci este rezultatul mobilizării societății prin atitudini ferme la adresa dinamicii statului, încât ea să se protejeze de elita politică ambițioasă care ar manevra statul împotriva societății. Această luptă, între societate și stat este numită de autori „Efectul Reginei Roșii”.
Lupta permite dezvoltarea simultană a societății și statului în spațiul îngust al Coridorului, dar fără ca mobilizarea societății să distrugă complet elite de la conducere și nici ca statul să încerce să slăbească societatea ori s-o reprime; cei mai de seamă conducători au reușit să instituționalizeze puterea societății simultan cu expansiunea statului. Statul astfel construit vine în sprijinul societății oferindu-i condiții de viață mai bune cetățenilor și medierea diverselor conflictelor întrucât dinamica efectului Reginei Roșii produce o creștere a conflictelor în societate, iar aceste conflicte sunt constructive când sunt direcționate spre sporirea capacității, nu spre o mai mare instabilitate.
Totodată, efectul Reginei Roșii sporește capacitatea societății de a controla statul, iar aceasta este o necesitate mai ales în situații de criză socială și economică când statul trebuie să-și extindă competențele. Un stat trebuie să răspundă permanent noilor provocări, să descopere multe pârghii de a face față noului mai ales că lumea este un mediu eminamente dinamic. De aici apare peremant riscul de a se întoarce împotriva societății. Deci societatea trebuie să fie de asemenea într-o perpetuă vigilență.
Cartea prezintă în detaliu diferitele tipuri de geneză ale statelor, acolo unde statele s-au născut; unde oamenii n-au permis apariția unei puteri centralizatoare, avem prezentată dinamica acestor grupuri și motivațiile din spatele acestei alegeri. Ca orice geneză, avem în spate un bogat material istoric legat de forma de conducere și de tranzițiile formelor de conducere sub influența, cu precădere, a naturii umane sedusă de putere.
Analiza asupra puterii conducătorilor și a celor conduși, ne îndrumă să fim conștienți la desfășurarea activităților politice, sociale și economice din prezent. De aceea cartea este o altă lentilă prin care să cercetăm realitatea lumii care ne înconjoară. Ea este un impuls care să ne arate cât de importanți suntem noi ca indivizi angajați într-o societate și ne responsabilizează să fim deosebit de activi și vigilenți în viața cetății pentru a nu cădea pradă despotismului unui sistem a cărui menire e să ne sprijine. Căci sistemul puterii, inevitabil, are în natura lui augmentarea permanentă și progresivă a prerogativelor sale dincolo de necesitate, dar spre propriile privilegii ale celor care-l reprezintă. Pentru a pune limite existenței sale expansive, fiecare din noi trebuie să simtă pericolul și să se mobilizeze pentru a-i limita intențiile.
De aceea, cartea stabilește niște limite de alarmare pentru oameni și niște căi de răspuns de jos în sus pe baza unor experiențe istorice prezentate de autori cu date concrete. Lucrarea este esențială, în cele din urmă, pentru a înțelege cum funcționează puterea și în ce direcții poate conduce viața oamenilor mai ales că fiecare e responsabil de sine însuși, dar și de societate în care trăiește. Trebuie să citești cartea ca să înțelegi în ce lume te învârți și unde să te uiți încât să nu cazi pradă forțelor aparent de neînțeles ale puterii.
"Pentru ca omenirea să progreseze, statul trebuie să-și extindă capacitatea pentru a răspunde noilor provocări și a lupta împotriva tuturor formelor de dominanție, dar acest lucru nu se va întâmpla dacă societatea nu-l cere și nu se mobilează pentru a apăra drepturile tuturor. Acest proces nu este ușor sau automat, dar el poate să se întâmple și chiar se întâmplă."
Aceasta este o carte despre libertate. Și despre stat. Iar coridorul este simbolul spațiului îngust prin care societatea se strecoară spre libertate. Pentru că oamenii vor să fie liberi. Să-și manifeste fără constrângeri întregul potențial, „fără să ceară permisiunea oricărui alt om și fără să depindă de voința acestuia”.
Ideea e că atitudinea asta poate conduce la haos. Când haosul se instaurează fără nicio constrângere superioară, se produce o stratificare în care cei mai puternici încep să domine pe cei mai slabi. Atunci libertatea se poate defini ca „absență a dominației”. Haosul constă și-n zbaterea intestină a diverselor puteri pentru a căpăta și mai multă putere asupra celorlați stare descrisă de Hobbes ca fiind naturală.
Omul prins în toată furtuna asta anarhică ajunge și „trăiește într-o permanentă teamă, și pericol de moarte violentă”, într-o solitudine fatală în cele din urmă. Statul, sau Leviatanul, este suprastructura menită să-l protejeze de intemperiile anarhismului natural. Dar apariția statului nu implică neapărat garantarea libertăți, ci ar putea impune limitarea ei; cum nici absența lui nu garantează acelalși libertate.
Coridorul devine însă calea de mijloc a societății către libertate între cele două extreme, Leviatanul Despotic și cel Absent; coridorul este frecventabil în acea îngustime produsă de lupta între Leviatanul Încătușat și societatea care-l stăpânește, pentru că tendința lui este să se elibereze și să domine autoritar, iar tendința ei este să se elibereze în anarhie. Între cele două tendințe opuse echilibrul îngust se regăsește în imaginea acestui coridor, o cale de compromis care ajută atât statul să nu devină un monolit dominator, cât și societatea să nu devină atât de liberă încât să se întoarcă împotriva ei înseși.
Un Leviatan încătușat nu este un dat al unei arhitecturi constituționale inteligente, ci este rezultatul mobilizării societății prin atitudini ferme la adresa dinamicii statului, încât ea să se protejeze de elita politică ambițioasă care ar manevra statul împotriva societății. Această luptă, între societate și stat este numită de autori „Efectul Reginei Roșii”.
Lupta permite dezvoltarea simultană a societății și statului în spațiul îngust al Coridorului, dar fără ca mobilizarea societății să distrugă complet elite de la conducere și nici ca statul să încerce să slăbească societatea ori s-o reprime; cei mai de seamă conducători au reușit să instituționalizeze puterea societății simultan cu expansiunea statului. Statul astfel construit vine în sprijinul societății oferindu-i condiții de viață mai bune cetățenilor și medierea diverselor conflictelor întrucât dinamica efectului Reginei Roșii produce o creștere a conflictelor în societate, iar aceste conflicte sunt constructive când sunt direcționate spre sporirea capacității, nu spre o mai mare instabilitate.
Totodată, efectul Reginei Roșii sporește capacitatea societății de a controla statul, iar aceasta este o necesitate mai ales în situații de criză socială și economică când statul trebuie să-și extindă competențele. Un stat trebuie să răspundă permanent noilor provocări, să descopere multe pârghii de a face față noului mai ales că lumea este un mediu eminamente dinamic. De aici apare peremant riscul de a se întoarce împotriva societății. Deci societatea trebuie să fie de asemenea într-o perpetuă vigilență.
Cartea prezintă în detaliu diferitele tipuri de geneză ale statelor, acolo unde statele s-au născut; unde oamenii n-au permis apariția unei puteri centralizatoare, avem prezentată dinamica acestor grupuri și motivațiile din spatele acestei alegeri. Ca orice geneză, avem în spate un bogat material istoric legat de forma de conducere și de tranzițiile formelor de conducere sub influența, cu precădere, a naturii umane sedusă de putere.
Analiza asupra puterii conducătorilor și a celor conduși, ne îndrumă să fim conștienți la desfășurarea activităților politice, sociale și economice din prezent. De aceea cartea este o altă lentilă prin care să cercetăm realitatea lumii care ne înconjoară. Ea este un impuls care să ne arate cât de importanți suntem noi ca indivizi angajați într-o societate și ne responsabilizează să fim deosebit de activi și vigilenți în viața cetății pentru a nu cădea pradă despotismului unui sistem a cărui menire e să ne sprijine. Căci sistemul puterii, inevitabil, are în natura lui augmentarea permanentă și progresivă a prerogativelor sale dincolo de necesitate, dar spre propriile privilegii ale celor care-l reprezintă. Pentru a pune limite existenței sale expansive, fiecare din noi trebuie să simtă pericolul și să se mobilizeze pentru a-i limita intențiile.
De aceea, cartea stabilește niște limite de alarmare pentru oameni și niște căi de răspuns de jos în sus pe baza unor experiențe istorice prezentate de autori cu date concrete. Lucrarea este esențială, în cele din urmă, pentru a înțelege cum funcționează puterea și în ce direcții poate conduce viața oamenilor mai ales că fiecare e responsabil de sine însuși, dar și de societate în care trăiește. Trebuie să citești cartea ca să înțelegi în ce lume te învârți și unde să te uiți încât să nu cazi pradă forțelor aparent de neînțeles ale puterii.
November 29, 2021
评 The Narrow Corridor
本书是两位作者 Daron Acemoğlu, James A. Robinson 继2012年大作“Why nations fail”后，进一步延伸讨论政府、社会与自由的关系。
前作主要从宏观经济和发展理论的角度，来考察全球国家之间为何有的繁荣稳定，有的战乱贫穷。在新作中，两位作者再次携手，超越经济学的视角，从政府治理和社会互动的关系上，讨论历史和现实中的全球各国为什么会发展出不同的政府类型。前作还可以大致视为宏观经济学或增长理论（这是两位作者的研究方向）专门作品，而本作已经是一部政治理论和政府治理的作品。经过7年时间的潜心研究和积累，让两位作者可以从更为广阔的视角，更长的时间跨度，来研究更为根本的大哉问：在当今全球民族主义国家主义膨胀到类似于1930年代那种状态，各种“进步”和“保守”团体之间的立场对立日趋剧烈，社会割裂已成现实的状况之下，自由和善政的政府是否还有可能？
在本作中，两位作者考察的焦点就是政府与社会互动，进而详细分析由于政府和社会力量之间的此长彼消，造成了世界各国中各异的政府形态。其理论原点，是十七世纪英国著名政治哲学家托马斯·霍布斯的经典作品《利维坦》。这本书基本上可以视为现代政治学的发端之作，霍布斯用《圣经·启示录》里强大的海怪“利维坦”作比喻，把国家机构视为利维坦，同时说明，缺乏利维坦的国家，是一个人人对抗人人，人与人之间无休止争斗的社会。政府是维持社会秩序，调解个人冲突的机制。这个理论标志了现代社会与古代社会的区别：政府不再是私人的统治机器，而是为全社会提供公共服务和保障的机构。从《利维坦》开始，现代读者熟知的政府形态就诞生了。
从这一经典理论出发，Daron Acemoğlu, James A. Robinson 创建了自己理论框架：根据国家形态不同，利维坦也是不同的，总共有四种形态：缺位的利维坦，压榨的利维坦，受限的利维坦，和一种亚型态：纸面的利维坦。然后指出，能够提供良好社会治理并同时保障个人自由的社会，其政府形态必然是受限的利维坦。缺位的利维坦是无政府状态，由于政府缺位，强大的社会习俗和宗族、部落势力控制了个人，没有政府来提供公共服务和保障，个人的状态就是霍布斯经典叙述里那种悲惨境地，谈不上什么自由。压榨的利维坦是另一个极端，政府过于强大，完全压制住个人和社会，全面干涉个人自由，常见于极权社会。纸面的利维坦是介于缺位和压榨利维坦之间的一种形态，即虽然有完善而强大的政府构建，但几乎不作为，民众在被压榨的同时，却也完全得不到公共服务和保障，其典型代表是阿根廷。这是在“Why Nations Fail”之后，两位作者再次毫不客气地批评了阿根廷，估计这个政府也真的是过于奇葩了。
在此分类基础之上，关键问题就来了：一个国家如何成为受限的利维坦？政府权力为民众提供公共服务和保障的同时，也受到限制而不至于侵害个人自由？两位作者提出达成这一目标的途径：红皇后效应。这里的红皇后出自路易斯·卡罗尔的经典童话作品《爱丽丝漫游奇境记》，红皇后在作品里对爱丽丝说了一句名言：“我必须努力奔跑，才能停在原地”。借此强力的隐喻表达，作者提出，一个国家存在两种互相制约的力量：政府（state）与社会（society）。政府代表权力精英的意志，社会则由普罗大众的构成。两者之间健康、建设性的合作、竞争、和相互制约，会让国家进入受限利维坦的“通道”，即本书标题里那条“Narrow Corridor”。其中任何一方过于孱弱而另一方过于强大，都会落入缺位的利维坦、压榨的利维坦和纸面的利维坦这三种形态。
至此，两位作者完成了本书主体理论框架构建，接下来的章节里，就针对全球主要国家从历史到现实运用这个框架进行分析。这部分很能体现作者的研究功力，世界亚非欧美洲几个主要国家的历史沿革和政治现实，作者都分别进行了论述，以此检验前述的理论构建成果。殊为难得的是，两位作者显然是不懂中文的，仍然根据可用的英文资料，对中国历史以来的政治变迁进行了大体上的讨论，虽然有若干明显错误，但仍然瑕不掩瑜，勤学深思的态度令人敬佩。
这部分针对各个国家和政体的讨论，还有另外一个好处，就是让读者迅速对各国的现实政治有了一些大致的了解，可以比较完整地理解当今各种时事新闻标题背后的由来和背景，算是很好的一个基础世界政治史学习，比如 BLM，MeToo等运动，在书中均有深入的讨论。
最后，书中的若干细节也足以令人回味，比如作者明确指出，保障个人自由与民主选举并无必然关系，例如13世纪的意大利城邦，政府已经可以较好地保障自由，提供善治，但他们并没有选举制度，而是靠强大的社会团体与精英政治的妥协、合作与制约。另一个类似案例是古希腊雅典城邦。其次，作者明显对当下的社会矛盾剧烈，政治观点极化比较担忧，用了很多案例来表明不懂得妥协与合作的机制，只能导致政府与社会的零和游戏，最后双方都失败。双方力量的制约、竞争与合作，是国家进入自由走廊，迈向受限利维坦的必要条件。这一点，就从根本上完全否定了马列共产主义的斗争哲学，那种所谓各个阶级间你死我活的斗争，是无法形成一个受限的利维坦。即使普罗大众消灭了一切阶级敌人，最后仍然会滑向压榨的利维坦。南美，前苏联和俄国的今天现实，已经说明了这一点。
更进一步，两位作者还提醒读者，利维坦在今天并不局限于国家。大的金融机构，比如华尔街，和大型科技公司如谷歌，已经足够强大以至于成为利维坦，如何限制他们？这是当代社会给大家提出的挑战。但两位作者仍然乐观，表示政府和社会的良性互动，以及红皇后效应，还是可以继续保障个人的权利和自由。
总体来说，这是一本非常易读的政治学作品，提出的理论分析框架也足够形象、清晰，对各国的政治历史现状叙述也堪称博学，可以用来分析、品评当下的现实。比如作者把先知默罕默德创建伊斯兰的举动，视为阿拉伯民族的国家意识觉醒和建国（state building）举动，这个角度非常有见地。这算回答“读这本书有什么用”这类问题，虽然并不必要。
本书是两位作者 Daron Acemoğlu, James A. Robinson 继2012年大作“Why nations fail”后，进一步延伸讨论政府、社会与自由的关系。
前作主要从宏观经济和发展理论的角度，来考察全球国家之间为何有的繁荣稳定，有的战乱贫穷。在新作中，两位作者再次携手，超越经济学的视角，从政府治理和社会互动的关系上，讨论历史和现实中的全球各国为什么会发展出不同的政府类型。前作还可以大致视为宏观经济学或增长理论（这是两位作者的研究方向）专门作品，而本作已经是一部政治理论和政府治理的作品。经过7年时间的潜心研究和积累，让两位作者可以从更为广阔的视角，更长的时间跨度，来研究更为根本的大哉问：在当今全球民族主义国家主义膨胀到类似于1930年代那种状态，各种“进步”和“保守”团体之间的立场对立日趋剧烈，社会割裂已成现实的状况之下，自由和善政的政府是否还有可能？
在本作中，两位作者考察的焦点就是政府与社会互动，进而详细分析由于政府和社会力量之间的此长彼消，造成了世界各国中各异的政府形态。其理论原点，是十七世纪英国著名政治哲学家托马斯·霍布斯的经典作品《利维坦》。这本书基本上可以视为现代政治学的发端之作，霍布斯用《圣经·启示录》里强大的海怪“利维坦”作比喻，把国家机构视为利维坦，同时说明，缺乏利维坦的国家，是一个人人对抗人人，人与人之间无休止争斗的社会。政府是维持社会秩序，调解个人冲突的机制。这个理论标志了现代社会与古代社会的区别：政府不再是私人的统治机器，而是为全社会提供公共服务和保障的机构。从《利维坦》开始，现代读者熟知的政府形态就诞生了。
从这一经典理论出发，Daron Acemoğlu, James A. Robinson 创建了自己理论框架：根据国家形态不同，利维坦也是不同的，总共有四种形态：缺位的利维坦，压榨的利维坦，受限的利维坦，和一种亚型态：纸面的利维坦。然后指出，能够提供良好社会治理并同时保障个人自由的社会，其政府形态必然是受限的利维坦。缺位的利维坦是无政府状态，由于政府缺位，强大的社会习俗和宗族、部落势力控制了个人，没有政府来提供公共服务和保障，个人的状态就是霍布斯经典叙述里那种悲惨境地，谈不上什么自由。压榨的利维坦是另一个极端，政府过于强大，完全压制住个人和社会，全面干涉个人自由，常见于极权社会。纸面的利维坦是介于缺位和压榨利维坦之间的一种形态，即虽然有完善而强大的政府构建，但几乎不作为，民众在被压榨的同时，却也完全得不到公共服务和保障，其典型代表是阿根廷。这是在“Why Nations Fail”之后，两位作者再次毫不客气地批评了阿根廷，估计这个政府也真的是过于奇葩了。
在此分类基础之上，关键问题就来了：一个国家如何成为受限的利维坦？政府权力为民众提供公共服务和保障的同时，也受到限制而不至于侵害个人自由？两位作者提出达成这一目标的途径：红皇后效应。这里的红皇后出自路易斯·卡罗尔的经典童话作品《爱丽丝漫游奇境记》，红皇后在作品里对爱丽丝说了一句名言：“我必须努力奔跑，才能停在原地”。借此强力的隐喻表达，作者提出，一个国家存在两种互相制约的力量：政府（state）与社会（society）。政府代表权力精英的意志，社会则由普罗大众的构成。两者之间健康、建设性的合作、竞争、和相互制约，会让国家进入受限利维坦的“通道”，即本书标题里那条“Narrow Corridor”。其中任何一方过于孱弱而另一方过于强大，都会落入缺位的利维坦、压榨的利维坦和纸面的利维坦这三种形态。
至此，两位作者完成了本书主体理论框架构建，接下来的章节里，就针对全球主要国家从历史到现实运用这个框架进行分析。这部分很能体现作者的研究功力，世界亚非欧美洲几个主要国家的历史沿革和政治现实，作者都分别进行了论述，以此检验前述的理论构建成果。殊为难得的是，两位作者显然是不懂中文的，仍然根据可用的英文资料，对中国历史以来的政治变迁进行了大体上的讨论，虽然有若干明显错误，但仍然瑕不掩瑜，勤学深思的态度令人敬佩。
这部分针对各个国家和政体的讨论，还有另外一个好处，就是让读者迅速对各国的现实政治有了一些大致的了解，可以比较完整地理解当今各种时事新闻标题背后的由来和背景，算是很好的一个基础世界政治史学习，比如 BLM，MeToo等运动，在书中均有深入的讨论。
最后，书中的若干细节也足以令人回味，比如作者明确指出，保障个人自由与民主选举并无必然关系，例如13世纪的意大利城邦，政府已经可以较好地保障自由，提供善治，但他们并没有选举制度，而是靠强大的社会团体与精英政治的妥协、合作与制约。另一个类似案例是古希腊雅典城邦。其次，作者明显对当下的社会矛盾剧烈，政治观点极化比较担忧，用了很多案例来表明不懂得妥协与合作的机制，只能导致政府与社会的零和游戏，最后双方都失败。双方力量的制约、竞争与合作，是国家进入自由走廊，迈向受限利维坦的必要条件。这一点，就从根本上完全否定了马列共产主义的斗争哲学，那种所谓各个阶级间你死我活的斗争，是无法形成一个受限的利维坦。即使普罗大众消灭了一切阶级敌人，最后仍然会滑向压榨的利维坦。南美，前苏联和俄国的今天现实，已经说明了这一点。
更进一步，两位作者还提醒读者，利维坦在今天并不局限于国家。大的金融机构，比如华尔街，和大型科技公司如谷歌，已经足够强大以至于成为利维坦，如何限制他们？这是当代社会给大家提出的挑战。但两位作者仍然乐观，表示政府和社会的良性互动，以及红皇后效应，还是可以继续保障个人的权利和自由。
总体来说，这是一本非常易读的政治学作品，提出的理论分析框架也足够形象、清晰，对各国的政治历史现状叙述也堪称博学，可以用来分析、品评当下的现实。比如作者把先知默罕默德创建伊斯兰的举动，视为阿拉伯民族的国家意识觉醒和建国（state building）举动，这个角度非常有见地。这算回答“读这本书有什么用”这类问题，虽然并不必要。
March 19, 2020
Not as foundational as Why Nations Fail, but it builds from that. The focus is no longer on how institutions affect developmental outcomes in general but it hones in on liberty, how it thrives, and the process by which states develop along the spectrum of despotic, extortionist regimes on one end and states that are absent, or practically absent. They argue that liberty flourishes when the state and society are both strong, where the state has enough muscle to enforce laws and control violence while giving enough space for people to restraint the state via non-institutional means. It’s a delicate balance, and most of the book explores this dynamic. Acemoglu and Robinson draws from a wealth of historical examples across many different contexts, as is their trademark. Skimmed some of the chapters and read mostly the chapters pertaining directly to their argument. The usual criticisms to A and R apply, like their tendency to speak of institutions as a black box for everything, sometimes bordering on too much abstraction.
January 11, 2021
I seldom shelve a book before finishing it, but Acemoglu and Robinson broke me. How can anyone fit in so much anecdotal stuff to prop up a wonky thesis and still have to invent so many external explanations to justify why so many societies don't follow it. At its best, it seemed to retrace some steps Engels followed in Origin of the Family, the State and Private Property, except "class" is absent and you get a vague conflict between "society" and "the state", with "elites" floating in between somewhere. At its worst, it's an American style safari tour through myriad civilizations at different points in time, stringing together decontextualized episodes to make a simplistic argument.
No, I didn't like the book. Perhaps the second half would redeem the first, but asking a reader to chew through 250 pages of exposition before delivering on anything would still be too much.
No, I didn't like the book. Perhaps the second half would redeem the first, but asking a reader to chew through 250 pages of exposition before delivering on anything would still be too much.
December 1, 2019
This is a very big book with a distinct thesis—to my knowledge, an original one—and it’s downright encyclopedic in providing supporting examples. I’ve not read the authors’ previous book, How Nations Fail, so I’m not sure how much of this thesis continues earlier work. Though Acemoglu and Robinson are economists, The Narrow Corridor is only tangentially about economics; rather, the subjects here are political history, political theory, a little sociology and anthropology, and the various ways that states have developed across centuries and cultures. To explain their theory, Acemoglu and Robinson have invented a colorful nomenclature for the political dynamics they describe. These terms are initially a little annoying, but they're useful.
Their premise is that political liberty is essential for economic growth and prosperity, and that liberty is uncommon in human history, that it is not inevitable, not the natural tendency of the arc of history. Rather, liberty has developed under specific cultural circumstances, within a narrow corridor in which the state’s power and society’s power are in some form of balance and are advancing simultaneously. Most polities today, like most societies in human history, are not in the corridor. Moreover, under the right circumstances, some nations, such as South Africa, can move into the corridor, and, conversely—with Weimar Germany the striking example—can move out of it.
Because they’re economists, the authors chart their theory on a simple line graph, with state power on the y or vertical axis and society's power on the horizontal or x axis. Liberty can only develop within a narrow band close to a 45° angle. Polities that develop along a more vertical trajectory, in which state power is high and society’s independent power is low, are despotic. But cultures with powerful social norms that inhibit the evolution of a strong state—that is, with angles well under 45°—also repress liberty, because people therein are dominated by others and by traditional norms, what the authors call the “cage of norms.” In modern India, for example, caste discrimination is illegal but pervasive because the government is weak relative to centuries of custom.
The authors take their basic concept from Hobbes, that a strong state, a Leviathan, is needed to liberate people from domination by others—that is, from warre (following Hobbes’ 17th-century spelling), the condition of every man against every other. Free people, in other words, rely on the protection of a strong government, which should have a monopoly on the use of violence or force. But Hobbes thought that any Leviathan was better than none, whereas Acemoglu and Robinson insist that liberty can only thrive in a “shackled Leviathan,” in which the state’s power is monitored, constrained, and channeled by “social mobilization.” “The vital challenge,” they write, “is to make sure that the state can increase its capacity to meet society’s needs but still remain shackled.”
Though today we take relative liberty for granted in most of Europe and the English-speaking world, as well as in a few other countries scattered across the globe, elsewhere and throughout history there have been few shackled Leviathans. History, ancient and current, has seen many “absent Leviathans”—polities, like Albania, with scant state capacity, in which the people are trapped in the “cage of norms,” or beset by warre, or otherwise under the domination of elites. Nations like China are “despotic Leviathans,” in which society is weak relative to an all-controlling state. And there are “paper Leviathans,” prevalent across South America and Africa: corrupt states with all the trappings of real governments but little capacity to actually govern the nation or protect the people—as a matter of fact, little interest in doing anything except enriching the elites in charge.
Under a shackled Leviathan the state and society run a constant competitive race with each other, each growing its capacity; the authors call this arms race “the Red Queen effect,” with reference to Alice in Wonderland. The result of this balance of power is liberty, with the strong state freeing people from domination by others and from the cage of norms and strong society keeping state power in check.
A weakness in this book is the fuzziness of the concept of social mobilization. What exactly is society’s power, as distinct from the state’s power? The authors provide examples, but not, to my recollection, any definition, so they must assume that it’s self-evident. It’s probably close to the more familiar “civil society”: community groups, small businesses, trade and labor unions, professional and trade associations, NGOs, churches, indigenous groups, charities and foundations, the free press—all reflecting the power of people combining outside government to further their interests. Nevertheless, Acemoglu’s and Robinson’s thesis would be stronger if this important component were clearer.
Within this framework, The Narrow Corridor examines the political histories of ancient Athens, Albania, the Italian city-states of the Middle Ages, the United States, China, India, England, Prussia, Switzerland, Argentina, Colombia, Japan, Sweden, Costa Rica and Guatemala, the Islamic ummah and empire, and several native societies in Africa, among others. This is wide-ranging history, anthropology, and political science (and you have to admire the authors’ fearlessness in trespassing on so many academic disciplines not their own).
Particularly interesting is the way they contrast Poland and Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Though both countries attempted reforms to create democracies and market economies, Poland essentially succeeded in entering the narrow corridor and Russia failed. According to the authors, the key difference seems to have been Solidarity, the huge and popular trade union in Poland, which Acemoglu and Robinson consider an example of social mobilization competing with state power. Nothing comparably bottom-up existed in Russia, which devolved to Soviet-style despotism. Or consider Soviet Tajikistan, which for most of the 20th century had been governed informally by traditional clan leaders, who conveniently styled themselves Communist Party members and served their own interests while pretending to be clients of Moscow; so even under Soviet rule Tajikistan never developed a strong central government. When the Soviet Union collapsed, what little state capacity there was in Tajikistan disintegrated and the clans continued their feuding, resulting in civil war, a hallmark of the absent Leviathan.
As one would expect, Acemoglu and Robinson end with some cautionary words for the United States. They break no new ground here by noting the parallels between Weimar Germany and America under Trump. The former was a functioning, modern, prosperous, democratic state until it was jolted by the Depression, when the German people voted to install the Nazis and ditch democracy. In hindsight, the Weimar Republic’s key weakness was the polarization of the people into resentful and opposed groups, their willingness to see categories of fellow citizens as internal enemies—a condition ripe for exploitation by a demagogue and a despot. The authors refer to this condition as the “zero-sum Red Queen,” in which the elements of society compete not with the state, but vehemently, in winner-take-all battles, with each other. The healthy, positive-sum Red Queen effect is about society’s many organized facets driving the growth of civilization, taking to politics only (1) to achieve what only the state can achieve, and (2) to maintain limits on state power. Under the zero-sum Red Queen, on the other hand, competing groups in society strive to capture and even augment state power for themselves. It’s hard not to see American politics today as a zero-sum competition. It’s hard not to see the possibility that the US will slip outside the narrow corridor of liberty.
Given the originality of their thesis, Acemoglu and Robinson offer correct but unoriginal diagnoses and recommendations vis-à-vis our current political predicament. They note that American culture is perhaps too distrustful of state power, and that, in the domestic sphere at least, the federal government is too weak. Americans see the inability of Congress to legislate to address society’s real needs as evidence that government per se is irrelevant and corrupt, that the people’s votes and voices don’t count, and that democracy is a sham. But liberty cannot thrive, and the nation cannot stay in the narrow corridor, if people abandon all trust in institutions and the democratic process. Citizens become cynical when they see political corruption hiding in plain sight, with massive amounts of money being poured into campaigns and lobbying to serve the interests of elites, widening our growing inequality and encouraging rather than discouraging industrial power and concentration.
Our widening inequality is the key warning sign that we may be straying from the narrow corridor, and it has many causes. It’s perpetuated by our highly undemocratic education system, the decline of labor unions to balance the well-organized power of business interests, and our failure to regulate the financial industry and cyber giants such as Facebook, Google, and Amazon. Beyond reforms in those areas, Acemoglu and Robinson insist that the American state “must begin designing and operating a more generous and comprehensive social safety net, which will protect individuals who are not benefitting from the major economic changes.” Such a safety net, they conclude, does not necessarily stifle “opportunities and incentives for business dynamism and innovation,” nor should it put us automatically (in Friedrich Hayek’s term) on the road to serfdom. The authors greatly admire the achievement of Sweden, both during and since World War II, in developing a considerable safety net, maintaining a strong industrial capitalist economy, and growing a robust democracy. Though it’s hard to imagine Swedish-like reforms in the context of today’s American politics, we may have few other choices if we are to remain within the narrow corridor.
Their premise is that political liberty is essential for economic growth and prosperity, and that liberty is uncommon in human history, that it is not inevitable, not the natural tendency of the arc of history. Rather, liberty has developed under specific cultural circumstances, within a narrow corridor in which the state’s power and society’s power are in some form of balance and are advancing simultaneously. Most polities today, like most societies in human history, are not in the corridor. Moreover, under the right circumstances, some nations, such as South Africa, can move into the corridor, and, conversely—with Weimar Germany the striking example—can move out of it.
Because they’re economists, the authors chart their theory on a simple line graph, with state power on the y or vertical axis and society's power on the horizontal or x axis. Liberty can only develop within a narrow band close to a 45° angle. Polities that develop along a more vertical trajectory, in which state power is high and society’s independent power is low, are despotic. But cultures with powerful social norms that inhibit the evolution of a strong state—that is, with angles well under 45°—also repress liberty, because people therein are dominated by others and by traditional norms, what the authors call the “cage of norms.” In modern India, for example, caste discrimination is illegal but pervasive because the government is weak relative to centuries of custom.
The authors take their basic concept from Hobbes, that a strong state, a Leviathan, is needed to liberate people from domination by others—that is, from warre (following Hobbes’ 17th-century spelling), the condition of every man against every other. Free people, in other words, rely on the protection of a strong government, which should have a monopoly on the use of violence or force. But Hobbes thought that any Leviathan was better than none, whereas Acemoglu and Robinson insist that liberty can only thrive in a “shackled Leviathan,” in which the state’s power is monitored, constrained, and channeled by “social mobilization.” “The vital challenge,” they write, “is to make sure that the state can increase its capacity to meet society’s needs but still remain shackled.”
Though today we take relative liberty for granted in most of Europe and the English-speaking world, as well as in a few other countries scattered across the globe, elsewhere and throughout history there have been few shackled Leviathans. History, ancient and current, has seen many “absent Leviathans”—polities, like Albania, with scant state capacity, in which the people are trapped in the “cage of norms,” or beset by warre, or otherwise under the domination of elites. Nations like China are “despotic Leviathans,” in which society is weak relative to an all-controlling state. And there are “paper Leviathans,” prevalent across South America and Africa: corrupt states with all the trappings of real governments but little capacity to actually govern the nation or protect the people—as a matter of fact, little interest in doing anything except enriching the elites in charge.
Under a shackled Leviathan the state and society run a constant competitive race with each other, each growing its capacity; the authors call this arms race “the Red Queen effect,” with reference to Alice in Wonderland. The result of this balance of power is liberty, with the strong state freeing people from domination by others and from the cage of norms and strong society keeping state power in check.
A weakness in this book is the fuzziness of the concept of social mobilization. What exactly is society’s power, as distinct from the state’s power? The authors provide examples, but not, to my recollection, any definition, so they must assume that it’s self-evident. It’s probably close to the more familiar “civil society”: community groups, small businesses, trade and labor unions, professional and trade associations, NGOs, churches, indigenous groups, charities and foundations, the free press—all reflecting the power of people combining outside government to further their interests. Nevertheless, Acemoglu’s and Robinson’s thesis would be stronger if this important component were clearer.
Within this framework, The Narrow Corridor examines the political histories of ancient Athens, Albania, the Italian city-states of the Middle Ages, the United States, China, India, England, Prussia, Switzerland, Argentina, Colombia, Japan, Sweden, Costa Rica and Guatemala, the Islamic ummah and empire, and several native societies in Africa, among others. This is wide-ranging history, anthropology, and political science (and you have to admire the authors’ fearlessness in trespassing on so many academic disciplines not their own).
Particularly interesting is the way they contrast Poland and Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Though both countries attempted reforms to create democracies and market economies, Poland essentially succeeded in entering the narrow corridor and Russia failed. According to the authors, the key difference seems to have been Solidarity, the huge and popular trade union in Poland, which Acemoglu and Robinson consider an example of social mobilization competing with state power. Nothing comparably bottom-up existed in Russia, which devolved to Soviet-style despotism. Or consider Soviet Tajikistan, which for most of the 20th century had been governed informally by traditional clan leaders, who conveniently styled themselves Communist Party members and served their own interests while pretending to be clients of Moscow; so even under Soviet rule Tajikistan never developed a strong central government. When the Soviet Union collapsed, what little state capacity there was in Tajikistan disintegrated and the clans continued their feuding, resulting in civil war, a hallmark of the absent Leviathan.
As one would expect, Acemoglu and Robinson end with some cautionary words for the United States. They break no new ground here by noting the parallels between Weimar Germany and America under Trump. The former was a functioning, modern, prosperous, democratic state until it was jolted by the Depression, when the German people voted to install the Nazis and ditch democracy. In hindsight, the Weimar Republic’s key weakness was the polarization of the people into resentful and opposed groups, their willingness to see categories of fellow citizens as internal enemies—a condition ripe for exploitation by a demagogue and a despot. The authors refer to this condition as the “zero-sum Red Queen,” in which the elements of society compete not with the state, but vehemently, in winner-take-all battles, with each other. The healthy, positive-sum Red Queen effect is about society’s many organized facets driving the growth of civilization, taking to politics only (1) to achieve what only the state can achieve, and (2) to maintain limits on state power. Under the zero-sum Red Queen, on the other hand, competing groups in society strive to capture and even augment state power for themselves. It’s hard not to see American politics today as a zero-sum competition. It’s hard not to see the possibility that the US will slip outside the narrow corridor of liberty.
Given the originality of their thesis, Acemoglu and Robinson offer correct but unoriginal diagnoses and recommendations vis-à-vis our current political predicament. They note that American culture is perhaps too distrustful of state power, and that, in the domestic sphere at least, the federal government is too weak. Americans see the inability of Congress to legislate to address society’s real needs as evidence that government per se is irrelevant and corrupt, that the people’s votes and voices don’t count, and that democracy is a sham. But liberty cannot thrive, and the nation cannot stay in the narrow corridor, if people abandon all trust in institutions and the democratic process. Citizens become cynical when they see political corruption hiding in plain sight, with massive amounts of money being poured into campaigns and lobbying to serve the interests of elites, widening our growing inequality and encouraging rather than discouraging industrial power and concentration.
Our widening inequality is the key warning sign that we may be straying from the narrow corridor, and it has many causes. It’s perpetuated by our highly undemocratic education system, the decline of labor unions to balance the well-organized power of business interests, and our failure to regulate the financial industry and cyber giants such as Facebook, Google, and Amazon. Beyond reforms in those areas, Acemoglu and Robinson insist that the American state “must begin designing and operating a more generous and comprehensive social safety net, which will protect individuals who are not benefitting from the major economic changes.” Such a safety net, they conclude, does not necessarily stifle “opportunities and incentives for business dynamism and innovation,” nor should it put us automatically (in Friedrich Hayek’s term) on the road to serfdom. The authors greatly admire the achievement of Sweden, both during and since World War II, in developing a considerable safety net, maintaining a strong industrial capitalist economy, and growing a robust democracy. Though it’s hard to imagine Swedish-like reforms in the context of today’s American politics, we may have few other choices if we are to remain within the narrow corridor.
December 15, 2023
چگونه کشورها به آزادی میرسند؟ قیود رسیدن به آزادی چیست؟ آیا سرنوشت یکسان و محتومی برای کشورها در مسیر رسیدن به آزادی وجود دارد؟ نقش نیروها در رسیدن به آزادی چگونه است؟ آیا کشورها پس از رسیدن به آزادی کارشان تمام است؟
راه باریک آزادی، داستان پر فراز و نشیب کشورها در طول تاریخ برای رسیدن به آزادی است. آزادی یعنی نفی سلطه و بندگی. جایی که حقوق طبیعی انسان محترم شمرده میشود، رابطهی بین حکومت و جامعه در راستای اهداف مثبت گام برمیدارد و تکثر و قانون اساسی وجود دارد.
راه رسیدن به آزادی، به توازن رسیدن قدرت بین حکومت و جامعه، برای افزایش ظرفیت حکومت و در عین حال افزایش نظارت جامعه برای لگام زدن به میل از بین نروندهی گستردهشدن حکومت است.
عجم اوغلو و رابینسون، در این کتاب که ۲۰۱۸ به چاپ رسیده، مانند کتاب قبلی خودشان در ۲۰۱۳ ( چرا ملتها شکست میخورند)، نظریهای را مطرح میکنند و در دل تاریخ به دنبال اثبات مدعای خود میگردند.
نظریه این است: کسب آزادی یک فرایند همیشگیست و از به توازن رسیدن حکومت و جامعه به دست میآید. افزایش ظرفیت هر دو در عین افزایش نظارت جامعه بر حکومت و افزایش قدرت حکومت، آزادی را خلق میکند و کشورها را در مسیر دالان آزادی قرار میدهد.
راه باریک آزادی، داستان پر فراز و نشیب کشورها در طول تاریخ برای رسیدن به آزادی است. آزادی یعنی نفی سلطه و بندگی. جایی که حقوق طبیعی انسان محترم شمرده میشود، رابطهی بین حکومت و جامعه در راستای اهداف مثبت گام برمیدارد و تکثر و قانون اساسی وجود دارد.
راه رسیدن به آزادی، به توازن رسیدن قدرت بین حکومت و جامعه، برای افزایش ظرفیت حکومت و در عین حال افزایش نظارت جامعه برای لگام زدن به میل از بین نروندهی گستردهشدن حکومت است.
عجم اوغلو و رابینسون، در این کتاب که ۲۰۱۸ به چاپ رسیده، مانند کتاب قبلی خودشان در ۲۰۱۳ ( چرا ملتها شکست میخورند)، نظریهای را مطرح میکنند و در دل تاریخ به دنبال اثبات مدعای خود میگردند.
نظریه این است: کسب آزادی یک فرایند همیشگیست و از به توازن رسیدن حکومت و جامعه به دست میآید. افزایش ظرفیت هر دو در عین افزایش نظارت جامعه بر حکومت و افزایش قدرت حکومت، آزادی را خلق میکند و کشورها را در مسیر دالان آزادی قرار میدهد.
December 5, 2020
دومين اثر مشترکی كه از اين دو نويسنده خوندم، با سبک و سیاقی بسیار نزدیک به اثر نامدار پیشین؛
دغدغه ي نويسنده ها - كه بر نامِ اين نسخه ترجمه ي فارسي هم آمده- بررسي امكان "شكوفايي آزادي" در جوامع مختلف است. آزادي از قيد هر رابطه ي نابرابر بين ملت و دولت (هر صورت بندي اي از سلطه) كه شالوده ي زندگي رضايت بخشه. آزادي در بيان و در عقيده. آزادي از ترس، فقر و ساير نكبت هاي اجتماعی.
تئوري اصلي نويسنده ها اينه كه متناسب با ميزان قدرت جامعه و حاكميت، اشكال مختلفي از روابط دولت-ملت شكل مي گيره. كتاب وجود commonwealth رو -با اقتدا به هابز- به "لوياتان" تعبير كرده و بر اساس نسبت بين ميزان قدرت جامعه و حاكميت، اين رابطه رو در ٤ كلاس طبقه بندي مي كنه: لوياتان مستبد، لوياتان غايب، لوياتان مقيد و لوياتان كاغذي.
اگرچه ساده سازي در مسائل اجتماعي به نظرم نوعي تقليل گراييه؛ ولی اگر بخوايم به طور خلاصه تئوري عجم اوغلو و رابينسون رو بيان كنيم:
لوياتان مستبد (حاكميت قدرتمند و جامعه ي ضعيف)؛
لوياتان غايب (حاكميت ضعيف و جامعه قدرتمند)؛
لوياتان كاغذي (حاكميت و جامعه ي ضعيف)
و در نهايت لوياتان مقيد (قدرت متوازن حاكميت و جامعه) كه در دالان باريكي ميان ترس و سركوبِ لوياتان مستبد و آنارشي و خشونتِ لوياتان غايب شكل مي گيره.
در جوامع با لوياتان مقيد، مردم با ابزارهاي نهادي و غيرنهادي اي كه دارند مي تونند بر لوياتان لگام بزنند و مانع انحصار و فربه شدن افسارگسيخته ي حاكميت بشن، لذا به لوياتان اجازه ي افزايش ظرفيت رو ميدن و بهش اعتماد ميكنند؛ در مقابل حاكميت ظرفيت توسعه و بهروزي اقتصادي جامعه رو بالا ميبره، به حل اختلافات و مهار خشونت مي پردازه و با وضع قانون، "قفس هنجارها"ي جامعه رو براي رسيدن به آزادي و رشد بيشتر براي همه مي شكنه. در همچین جامعه ای، جامعه و لوياتان مدام در حال دويدن و توانمند شدن هستند تا این توازن به هم نخوره و نگذارند قدرتِ يكي بر ديگري سبقت بگيره.
كتاب در خلال ٦٠٦ صفحه ي خواندني به تحليل ويژگي هاي جوامع، فرهنگ و تاريخشون، نهادهاشون و لوياتان حاكم بر آن ها مي پردازه. به ارتباط تنگاتنگ سیاست و اقتصاد می پردازه. از شواردنادزه و نظام مشوقِ فسادش مي گه كه ابزاري بوده براي هميشه مقصر بودن و هميشه ميسر بودنِ سركوب جامعه؛ از سامانه اعتبارسنجي چيني ها و Big brother is watching you مي گه؛ از لوياتان متناقض نما و فاوستي ايالات متحده مي گه؛ و از لوياتان كاغذي مي گه كه البته خوندنش با غم همراهه: لوياتاني كه سركوبگره بدون اينكه قدرتمند باشه. اقتدار و ظرفيت پوشالي داره ولي در نواحي دوردست كشورش تقريبا به صورت كامل غايبه؛ جامعه اش بس پاره شده و دغدغه جامعه به موضوعات دم دستي تقليل داده شده..
عجم اوغلو و رابينسون در صفحاتي از كتاب با ذكر چندين نمونه نشون مي دن تفاوت هاي تاريخيِ جوامع، ميل به تداوم دارند؛ از جوهره ي استبداد و بازتوليدش در جامعه مي نويسند؛ از لوياتان به جايِ خدا نشسته مي نويسند كه در برابرش اساساً هيچ نقدي حق بيان شدن نداره، چون لوياتان نماينده ي تام الاختيار خداست و ذات حق نقد ناپذيره؛ و از اثر مخرب قطبي شدن جوامع مي نويسند.
به نظر نااميد كننده مي رسه اما خوشبختانه ن��يسندگان نيم نگاهي هم به "عامليت اجتماعي" دارند و قائل به وجود "دريچه هايي" براي ورود به دالان هستند. در آخرين فصل از "جامعه مدنيِ سازمان يافته حول حقوق" صحبت مي كنند و در جمع بندي مي نويسند: «تا زماني كه جامعه بتواند مجموعه اي وسيع از حقوقِ معقول را هر چه همگاني تر سازد، حال و روزش از طريق "تشكل يافتن" و "هم قامت شدن" با قدرتِ در حال گسترش حكومت بهتر خواهد بود.»
كتاب عليرغم مبتلا بودن به اطناب، غني و خوندنيه. البته كه متاسفانه مشابه اثر قبلي به نظر مي رسه عجم اوغلو و رابينسون براي اثبات تئوري خودشون گرفتار oversimplification هستند و الگوها و جوامع رو با عينك منقّش و مصوّر به تئوريِ خودشون مي بينند و تفسير مي كنند. علي اي حال خوندنش رو بسيار توصيه مي كنم
دغدغه ي نويسنده ها - كه بر نامِ اين نسخه ترجمه ي فارسي هم آمده- بررسي امكان "شكوفايي آزادي" در جوامع مختلف است. آزادي از قيد هر رابطه ي نابرابر بين ملت و دولت (هر صورت بندي اي از سلطه) كه شالوده ي زندگي رضايت بخشه. آزادي در بيان و در عقيده. آزادي از ترس، فقر و ساير نكبت هاي اجتماعی.
تئوري اصلي نويسنده ها اينه كه متناسب با ميزان قدرت جامعه و حاكميت، اشكال مختلفي از روابط دولت-ملت شكل مي گيره. كتاب وجود commonwealth رو -با اقتدا به هابز- به "لوياتان" تعبير كرده و بر اساس نسبت بين ميزان قدرت جامعه و حاكميت، اين رابطه رو در ٤ كلاس طبقه بندي مي كنه: لوياتان مستبد، لوياتان غايب، لوياتان مقيد و لوياتان كاغذي.
اگرچه ساده سازي در مسائل اجتماعي به نظرم نوعي تقليل گراييه؛ ولی اگر بخوايم به طور خلاصه تئوري عجم اوغلو و رابينسون رو بيان كنيم:
لوياتان مستبد (حاكميت قدرتمند و جامعه ي ضعيف)؛
لوياتان غايب (حاكميت ضعيف و جامعه قدرتمند)؛
لوياتان كاغذي (حاكميت و جامعه ي ضعيف)
و در نهايت لوياتان مقيد (قدرت متوازن حاكميت و جامعه) كه در دالان باريكي ميان ترس و سركوبِ لوياتان مستبد و آنارشي و خشونتِ لوياتان غايب شكل مي گيره.
در جوامع با لوياتان مقيد، مردم با ابزارهاي نهادي و غيرنهادي اي كه دارند مي تونند بر لوياتان لگام بزنند و مانع انحصار و فربه شدن افسارگسيخته ي حاكميت بشن، لذا به لوياتان اجازه ي افزايش ظرفيت رو ميدن و بهش اعتماد ميكنند؛ در مقابل حاكميت ظرفيت توسعه و بهروزي اقتصادي جامعه رو بالا ميبره، به حل اختلافات و مهار خشونت مي پردازه و با وضع قانون، "قفس هنجارها"ي جامعه رو براي رسيدن به آزادي و رشد بيشتر براي همه مي شكنه. در همچین جامعه ای، جامعه و لوياتان مدام در حال دويدن و توانمند شدن هستند تا این توازن به هم نخوره و نگذارند قدرتِ يكي بر ديگري سبقت بگيره.
كتاب در خلال ٦٠٦ صفحه ي خواندني به تحليل ويژگي هاي جوامع، فرهنگ و تاريخشون، نهادهاشون و لوياتان حاكم بر آن ها مي پردازه. به ارتباط تنگاتنگ سیاست و اقتصاد می پردازه. از شواردنادزه و نظام مشوقِ فسادش مي گه كه ابزاري بوده براي هميشه مقصر بودن و هميشه ميسر بودنِ سركوب جامعه؛ از سامانه اعتبارسنجي چيني ها و Big brother is watching you مي گه؛ از لوياتان متناقض نما و فاوستي ايالات متحده مي گه؛ و از لوياتان كاغذي مي گه كه البته خوندنش با غم همراهه: لوياتاني كه سركوبگره بدون اينكه قدرتمند باشه. اقتدار و ظرفيت پوشالي داره ولي در نواحي دوردست كشورش تقريبا به صورت كامل غايبه؛ جامعه اش بس پاره شده و دغدغه جامعه به موضوعات دم دستي تقليل داده شده..
عجم اوغلو و رابينسون در صفحاتي از كتاب با ذكر چندين نمونه نشون مي دن تفاوت هاي تاريخيِ جوامع، ميل به تداوم دارند؛ از جوهره ي استبداد و بازتوليدش در جامعه مي نويسند؛ از لوياتان به جايِ خدا نشسته مي نويسند كه در برابرش اساساً هيچ نقدي حق بيان شدن نداره، چون لوياتان نماينده ي تام الاختيار خداست و ذات حق نقد ناپذيره؛ و از اثر مخرب قطبي شدن جوامع مي نويسند.
به نظر نااميد كننده مي رسه اما خوشبختانه ن��يسندگان نيم نگاهي هم به "عامليت اجتماعي" دارند و قائل به وجود "دريچه هايي" براي ورود به دالان هستند. در آخرين فصل از "جامعه مدنيِ سازمان يافته حول حقوق" صحبت مي كنند و در جمع بندي مي نويسند: «تا زماني كه جامعه بتواند مجموعه اي وسيع از حقوقِ معقول را هر چه همگاني تر سازد، حال و روزش از طريق "تشكل يافتن" و "هم قامت شدن" با قدرتِ در حال گسترش حكومت بهتر خواهد بود.»
كتاب عليرغم مبتلا بودن به اطناب، غني و خوندنيه. البته كه متاسفانه مشابه اثر قبلي به نظر مي رسه عجم اوغلو و رابينسون براي اثبات تئوري خودشون گرفتار oversimplification هستند و الگوها و جوامع رو با عينك منقّش و مصوّر به تئوريِ خودشون مي بينند و تفسير مي كنند. علي اي حال خوندنش رو بسيار توصيه مي كنم
November 29, 2022
Is this the bible of State Capacity Libertarianism?
I quite liked Acemoglu and Robinson's earlier book, Why Nations Fail, and use it in my classes regularly. This book makes for a nice update, complimenting the institutional focus of their earlier work with an emphasis on the importance of social forces.
Here's the short version of the story, as I understand it. The authors take human liberty, understood in a republican sense as the absence of domination, to be the main standard against which different societies are to be judged. By that standard, they argue, anarchy (the "Absent Leviathan," as they call it) does poorly. True, there's no *state* to dominate people. But state domination isn't the only kind of domination we have to worry about, and without some mechanism for defining and enforcing rights, freedom is in peril.
Of course, tyranny (the "Despotic Leviathan") is no good for liberty either, for obvious reasons. So, what we want is something in the middle. Enough state capacity to protect human liberty, but not so much to pose a threat to it. We want a "Shackled Leviathan," which means not only having institutions that limit the power of the state, but also enough social organization to monitor and enforce those institutional constraints.
All of this sounds like a plausible articulation of a broadly liberal view. Some libertarians, like Deirdre McCloskey, find the view to be overly statist. And A+R to sing paeans to Roosevelt's New Deal and the Swedish welfare state toward the end of the book. But I think we can and should differentiate between the broad framework they set out, and the way they apply that framework to judge particular policies and regimes. I have more confidence in the former than the latter, especially when the policies and regimes under considerations are still relatively close in temporal terms, and our view of them still heavily colored by political ideology and imperfect information.
Overall, I'd say it's a very worthwhile book. It's *long*, and probably longer than it needs to be. But you'll learn a lot of interesting facts about history, culture, and politics along the way.
I quite liked Acemoglu and Robinson's earlier book, Why Nations Fail, and use it in my classes regularly. This book makes for a nice update, complimenting the institutional focus of their earlier work with an emphasis on the importance of social forces.
Here's the short version of the story, as I understand it. The authors take human liberty, understood in a republican sense as the absence of domination, to be the main standard against which different societies are to be judged. By that standard, they argue, anarchy (the "Absent Leviathan," as they call it) does poorly. True, there's no *state* to dominate people. But state domination isn't the only kind of domination we have to worry about, and without some mechanism for defining and enforcing rights, freedom is in peril.
Of course, tyranny (the "Despotic Leviathan") is no good for liberty either, for obvious reasons. So, what we want is something in the middle. Enough state capacity to protect human liberty, but not so much to pose a threat to it. We want a "Shackled Leviathan," which means not only having institutions that limit the power of the state, but also enough social organization to monitor and enforce those institutional constraints.
All of this sounds like a plausible articulation of a broadly liberal view. Some libertarians, like Deirdre McCloskey, find the view to be overly statist. And A+R to sing paeans to Roosevelt's New Deal and the Swedish welfare state toward the end of the book. But I think we can and should differentiate between the broad framework they set out, and the way they apply that framework to judge particular policies and regimes. I have more confidence in the former than the latter, especially when the policies and regimes under considerations are still relatively close in temporal terms, and our view of them still heavily colored by political ideology and imperfect information.
Overall, I'd say it's a very worthwhile book. It's *long*, and probably longer than it needs to be. But you'll learn a lot of interesting facts about history, culture, and politics along the way.
November 12, 2022
ما نیاز به حکومتی داریم که ظرفیت اجرای قانون، مهار خشونت، حل و فصل مرافعات و ارائه خدمات عمومی را داشته باشد و در عین حال توسط جامعه ای جسور، مطالبهگر و کاملا سازمانیافته لجام زده شود.
آزادی از دل فرایندی پرآشوب پدیدار می شود. فرایندی که نمیتوان آن را به آسانی طراحی کرد. آزادی را نمی توان مهندسی کرد یا سرنوشتش را با سامانه ای زیرکانه از نظارت ها و موازنه ها تضمین نمود. به برانگیختگی، هوشیاری و جسارت جامعه نیاز داریم تا آزادی درست عمل کند. لازم است همه در حال دویدن باشند.
نوآوری منوط به خلاقیت و خلاقیت محتاج آزادی است- اشخاصی که بدون ترس کار کنند، دست به آزمایش بزنند و مسیر حرکت شان را با ایده های خود بگشایند، ولو دیگران این کار را نپسندند. تحت حاکمیت استبداد، تداوم رشد سخت است. وقتی گروهی بر بقیه جامعه مسلط میشود فرصت در اختیار همگان قرار نمی گیرد و در یک جامعه محروم از آزادی، مدارای چندانی برای طی مسیر های متفاوت و انجام آزمایش های مختلف وجود ندارد.
پیشرفت بشر به گسترش ظرفیت حکومت برای پاسخگویی به چالش های جدید و مبارزه با تمامی سیطره ها، چه کهنه و چه نو، وابسته است. اما چنین اتفاقی نخواهد افتاد مگر آنکه جامعه تقاضایش کند و در دفاع از حقوق همگان بسیج شود. بدیهی است که چنین کاری آسان نیست چه رسد به آنکه خود به خود محقق شود، اما این رویداد میتواند رخ دهد و رخ می دهد.
شاخصه معرف استبداد توانایی اش در محروم کردن جامعه از ابزارهای مشارکت در تصمیم گیری سیاسی است.
آزادی از دل فرایندی پرآشوب پدیدار می شود. فرایندی که نمیتوان آن را به آسانی طراحی کرد. آزادی را نمی توان مهندسی کرد یا سرنوشتش را با سامانه ای زیرکانه از نظارت ها و موازنه ها تضمین نمود. به برانگیختگی، هوشیاری و جسارت جامعه نیاز داریم تا آزادی درست عمل کند. لازم است همه در حال دویدن باشند.
نوآوری منوط به خلاقیت و خلاقیت محتاج آزادی است- اشخاصی که بدون ترس کار کنند، دست به آزمایش بزنند و مسیر حرکت شان را با ایده های خود بگشایند، ولو دیگران این کار را نپسندند. تحت حاکمیت استبداد، تداوم رشد سخت است. وقتی گروهی بر بقیه جامعه مسلط میشود فرصت در اختیار همگان قرار نمی گیرد و در یک جامعه محروم از آزادی، مدارای چندانی برای طی مسیر های متفاوت و انجام آزمایش های مختلف وجود ندارد.
پیشرفت بشر به گسترش ظرفیت حکومت برای پاسخگویی به چالش های جدید و مبارزه با تمامی سیطره ها، چه کهنه و چه نو، وابسته است. اما چنین اتفاقی نخواهد افتاد مگر آنکه جامعه تقاضایش کند و در دفاع از حقوق همگان بسیج شود. بدیهی است که چنین کاری آسان نیست چه رسد به آنکه خود به خود محقق شود، اما این رویداد میتواند رخ دهد و رخ می دهد.
شاخصه معرف استبداد توانایی اش در محروم کردن جامعه از ابزارهای مشارکت در تصمیم گیری سیاسی است.
November 6, 2019
This is a more demanding read than the authors’ classic, Why Nations Fail. Be prepared to put it down from time to time, mildly disheartened by the lengthy digressions into the history of little known societies employed by the authors to support their arguments, only to realise later (helped by some side reading on Greek, Arabic, African, etc. history.........) how helpful understanding the background is. Hard works this!!!
My take away? The central image of the book, a country exerting itself (their “Red Queen” effect) to stay in the “Narrow Corridor” between the stateless and potentially chaotic “Absent Leviathan” and the liberty destroying, “Despotic” Leviathan” (Hobbesian), reminds us in the perilous Trump era how fragile is liberal democracy, with its foundations of personal liberty and justice.
My take away? The central image of the book, a country exerting itself (their “Red Queen” effect) to stay in the “Narrow Corridor” between the stateless and potentially chaotic “Absent Leviathan” and the liberty destroying, “Despotic” Leviathan” (Hobbesian), reminds us in the perilous Trump era how fragile is liberal democracy, with its foundations of personal liberty and justice.
March 25, 2020
Kitap, Why Nations Fail’in geliştirilememiş bir versiyonu gibi.
June 5, 2022
Interesting and thought provoking. But written in an obtuse and nearly inscrutable way.
5* for the ideas
3* for the writing
5* for the ideas
3* for the writing
May 16, 2023
"The vital challenge is to make sure the State can increase the capacity to meet society's needs but still remain shackled. [...] It's not just about State capacity, but about who controls and monitors that capacity, and how it will be used. [...] Human progress depends on the expansion of the State's capacity to meet new challenges and combat all dominances, old and new. "
In "The Narrow Corridor," the authors outline the Goldilock zone between a too powerful State and, essentially, everyone for themselves. It's the space where democracy and justice lives, balanced on the intersecting lines of State strength and Society strength, and it is incredibly fragile. The book itself, wherein the authors postulate a grand-unifying-political theory, is heavy enough to cave in your chest - metaphorically and physically.
The book is very well-written, even if it is as dry as ancient Egyptian bones, and covers just about every corner of the earth in some way. Unfortunately, the authors annoyingly chose to package their theory in allegory, succeeding only in making the theory more difficult to process (although, now that I think about it, that may have been the point, the concepts in this book are not difficult to understand, after all), but that's overcomeable and not that big a deal.
Honestly, as far as grand-unifying-theories goes, this one is a good one. Sure, it takes some shoehorning and stretching to fit everything in there, but not as much as one would think. It's definitely a thought-provoking book.
Recommended, just remember to partake in some caffeine while reading.
In "The Narrow Corridor," the authors outline the Goldilock zone between a too powerful State and, essentially, everyone for themselves. It's the space where democracy and justice lives, balanced on the intersecting lines of State strength and Society strength, and it is incredibly fragile. The book itself, wherein the authors postulate a grand-unifying-political theory, is heavy enough to cave in your chest - metaphorically and physically.
The book is very well-written, even if it is as dry as ancient Egyptian bones, and covers just about every corner of the earth in some way. Unfortunately, the authors annoyingly chose to package their theory in allegory, succeeding only in making the theory more difficult to process (although, now that I think about it, that may have been the point, the concepts in this book are not difficult to understand, after all), but that's overcomeable and not that big a deal.
Honestly, as far as grand-unifying-theories goes, this one is a good one. Sure, it takes some shoehorning and stretching to fit everything in there, but not as much as one would think. It's definitely a thought-provoking book.
Recommended, just remember to partake in some caffeine while reading.
August 4, 2020
Daron Acemoğlu ve James Robinson, özgür ve yüksek refaha sahip bir toplumun oluşabilmesi için devlet/otorite ile halk arasındaki ilişkiyi her birinin rollerini farklı özel durumları da dikkate alarak inanılmaz detaylı bir şekilde incelemiş. Kitap savını küçük bir kabileden Orta Çağ feodal oluşumlarına, modern ABD'den diğer pek çok ulus devletini örnekleyerek sınamış. Öyle ki ne zaman "iyi ama şöyle bir durum da var" gibi karşı bir düşünceniz olsa bir sonraki bölümde detaylı bir cevap geliyor. Bu anlamda oldukça doyurucu, ikna edici ve öğretici bir araştırma.
November 15, 2020
Bu kitabı üç ayrı düzlemde değerlendirmek mümkün, bunun için en basit düzeyden başlamayı tercih ederim. DAr Koridor, Acemoğlu ve Robinson ikilisinin birlikte yazdığı bir üçlemenin son kitabı: Diktatörlük ve Demokrasinin Ekonomik Kökenleri, Ulusların Düşüşü ve Dar Koridor. Bu üç kitabı yazılış sıralamasına göre değerlendirirsek ilk kitaptan başlayarak teorik tartışmaların giderek azaldığını ve soyutlama düzeylerinin giderek sığlaştığını, basitleştiğini söylemek mümkün. BUna karşılık kitapların tarihsel referansları ve örneklemi de zamansal ve mekansal olarak artan bir şeşitliliğe sahip. Ama bu çerçevede ilk kitap akademik çevreler, ikinci kitap öğrenciler ve yeni kuşak ve son kitap da akademik olmayan, daha genel bir okur kitlesi için yazılmış gibi duruyor.
İKinci bir düzlemde bu kitabın kurumsal iktisat, kalkınma çalışmaları, refah ekonomisi ve politik ekonomi ekseninde zengin tartışmalara imkan verecek bir kesişim noktasında durduğunu söyleyebiliriz. Peki, kitap literatüre katkı sunmak, gelecek çalışmalara ilham kaynağı olmak veya bir teorik açılım sağlamak için sahip olduğu fırsatları iyi değerlendiriyor mu? Ne yazık ki buna Acemoğlu ve Robinson'un Düşüşü demesem de ciddi bir grafik düşüşü olduğunu söyleyebilirim. Kİtapta bolca tarihi örnek var, ama bu örnekler gelişigüzel bir anlatım içinde karşılaştırılıyor. Formel bir yöntemsel yol, araştırma tekniği ya da veri sunumu yok, mevcut toplu veriye yönelik referanslar bile oldukça sınırlı. Anlatılan tarihsel örnekleri sırf yazarlar öyle istedi diye ve o noktada gerekli gördükleri için kabul etmek zorunda mıyız? Neden Güney Kore'nin atılımı, Latin Amerika'nın örgütsel sıkıntıları, İsveç refah devleti ya da Afrika'nın geri kalmışlığı gibi klişeleşmiş örnekler yeniden ve yeniden önümüze sürülüyor? TArihin bu kadar araçsal kullanımı tarihsel olaylar arasındaki ilişkiyi, bağlamı, süreklilik ve kırılmaları yok sayıyor. Bütün bir dünya tarihi üzerinden cımbızlanan örnekler basit bir hipotezin doğrulanması için delil olarak sunuluyor. İtiraz ediyorum sayın yazarlar!
Son olarak, bu kitabı yazıldığı bağlam içinde değerlendirmek gerekirse bir disiplin olarak iktisadın giderek fazlasıyla soyut ve teknik bir alana dönüşmesi, teorik yaklaşımların sıklıkla tümdengelim hattını izleyerek teoriden yola çıkması ve ampirik olana yönelik indirgemecilik disiplinin kendi iç çelişkisi oldu. Buna karşılık, tıpkı popüler bilim, popüler tarih anlayışında olduğu gibi popüler iktisat da bu kısıtları aşmaya ve gidişatı tersine çevirmeye yönelik çabalar içeriyor. Bu çabaların bir kısmı, gerçekten insanı ve insani değerleri, dinamikleri merkezine alan alternatif arayışlar, ama bir kısmı da kaş yapayım derken göz çıkaran, bunun gibi, evreni tanımadan evrensel olmaya çalışan, asla sahip olması mümkün olmayan bir bilginin peşinde koşanlar. Tam da bu noktada hatırlamak gerekirse: Küçük güzeldir!
İKinci bir düzlemde bu kitabın kurumsal iktisat, kalkınma çalışmaları, refah ekonomisi ve politik ekonomi ekseninde zengin tartışmalara imkan verecek bir kesişim noktasında durduğunu söyleyebiliriz. Peki, kitap literatüre katkı sunmak, gelecek çalışmalara ilham kaynağı olmak veya bir teorik açılım sağlamak için sahip olduğu fırsatları iyi değerlendiriyor mu? Ne yazık ki buna Acemoğlu ve Robinson'un Düşüşü demesem de ciddi bir grafik düşüşü olduğunu söyleyebilirim. Kİtapta bolca tarihi örnek var, ama bu örnekler gelişigüzel bir anlatım içinde karşılaştırılıyor. Formel bir yöntemsel yol, araştırma tekniği ya da veri sunumu yok, mevcut toplu veriye yönelik referanslar bile oldukça sınırlı. Anlatılan tarihsel örnekleri sırf yazarlar öyle istedi diye ve o noktada gerekli gördükleri için kabul etmek zorunda mıyız? Neden Güney Kore'nin atılımı, Latin Amerika'nın örgütsel sıkıntıları, İsveç refah devleti ya da Afrika'nın geri kalmışlığı gibi klişeleşmiş örnekler yeniden ve yeniden önümüze sürülüyor? TArihin bu kadar araçsal kullanımı tarihsel olaylar arasındaki ilişkiyi, bağlamı, süreklilik ve kırılmaları yok sayıyor. Bütün bir dünya tarihi üzerinden cımbızlanan örnekler basit bir hipotezin doğrulanması için delil olarak sunuluyor. İtiraz ediyorum sayın yazarlar!
Son olarak, bu kitabı yazıldığı bağlam içinde değerlendirmek gerekirse bir disiplin olarak iktisadın giderek fazlasıyla soyut ve teknik bir alana dönüşmesi, teorik yaklaşımların sıklıkla tümdengelim hattını izleyerek teoriden yola çıkması ve ampirik olana yönelik indirgemecilik disiplinin kendi iç çelişkisi oldu. Buna karşılık, tıpkı popüler bilim, popüler tarih anlayışında olduğu gibi popüler iktisat da bu kısıtları aşmaya ve gidişatı tersine çevirmeye yönelik çabalar içeriyor. Bu çabaların bir kısmı, gerçekten insanı ve insani değerleri, dinamikleri merkezine alan alternatif arayışlar, ama bir kısmı da kaş yapayım derken göz çıkaran, bunun gibi, evreni tanımadan evrensel olmaya çalışan, asla sahip olması mümkün olmayan bir bilginin peşinde koşanlar. Tam da bu noktada hatırlamak gerekirse: Küçük güzeldir!
April 10, 2020
Martin Niemöller:
“First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out
because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out
because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out
because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me
and there was no one left to speak for me.”
It was the lack of universal recognition of very basic rights that was at the root of the inability of German society to rise up to the Nazis, who could deal with and eliminate each group separately, without mobilizing a broad coalition within German society to stand up to them.
Ultimately society’s power is about society’s organization and mobilization. Human progress depends on the expansion of the state’s capacity to meet new challenges and combat all dominances, old and new, but that won’t happen unless society demands it and mobilizes to defend everybody’s rights.
Review:
This is an astounding book, both in its scope and wisdom. It covers every major civilisation in the world over 3,000 years of human history across geographies, from the Ancient Greeks to modern-day Sweden, from early Islam under Muhammad to Iraq under Saddam. And for the most part, I think it does a tremendous job and there is so much to learn from. The crux of their thesis is that development/ progress and liberty need a strong state and a strong society. A strong state is required because conflict and uncertainty mean individuals do not have secure property rights on the fruits of their investments and this discourages economic activity. We need a state that has the capacity to enforce laws, control violence, resolve conflicts, and provide public services but which is still tamed and controlled by an assertive, well-organised society. Liberty almost always depends on society’s mobilisation and ability to hold its own against the state and its elites. It takes society’s mobilization, vigilance, and assertiveness to make it work.
The sceptic in me knows that the world is more complex than simplification to an interplay between society and state. Yet, the book is a very relevant reading in today’s environment. It makes a parallel between the current surge in populism across the world with that in the 1930s (similar to Ray Dalio). There are lessons to be learnt and mistakes to be avoided. Given that it is inevitable that we are going to have an expanding state because of the pandemic, it would be really important to increase society's own capacity and checks over the state.
A really fun read if you like history, politics and economics.
“First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out
because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out
because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out
because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me
and there was no one left to speak for me.”
It was the lack of universal recognition of very basic rights that was at the root of the inability of German society to rise up to the Nazis, who could deal with and eliminate each group separately, without mobilizing a broad coalition within German society to stand up to them.
Ultimately society’s power is about society’s organization and mobilization. Human progress depends on the expansion of the state’s capacity to meet new challenges and combat all dominances, old and new, but that won’t happen unless society demands it and mobilizes to defend everybody’s rights.
Review:
This is an astounding book, both in its scope and wisdom. It covers every major civilisation in the world over 3,000 years of human history across geographies, from the Ancient Greeks to modern-day Sweden, from early Islam under Muhammad to Iraq under Saddam. And for the most part, I think it does a tremendous job and there is so much to learn from. The crux of their thesis is that development/ progress and liberty need a strong state and a strong society. A strong state is required because conflict and uncertainty mean individuals do not have secure property rights on the fruits of their investments and this discourages economic activity. We need a state that has the capacity to enforce laws, control violence, resolve conflicts, and provide public services but which is still tamed and controlled by an assertive, well-organised society. Liberty almost always depends on society’s mobilisation and ability to hold its own against the state and its elites. It takes society’s mobilization, vigilance, and assertiveness to make it work.
The sceptic in me knows that the world is more complex than simplification to an interplay between society and state. Yet, the book is a very relevant reading in today’s environment. It makes a parallel between the current surge in populism across the world with that in the 1930s (similar to Ray Dalio). There are lessons to be learnt and mistakes to be avoided. Given that it is inevitable that we are going to have an expanding state because of the pandemic, it would be really important to increase society's own capacity and checks over the state.
A really fun read if you like history, politics and economics.
January 18, 2020
Really enjoyed this. After having listened to Acemoglu's appearence on Conversations with Tyler and being deeply impressed by the breadth of their discussion, I immidiately got the book.
Acemoglu's and Robinsons basic theory goes as follows: Look at the strenth of society. Think about freedom of press, democracy and political participation, labor rights, and all that. Then look at the strength of the state. Think about collecting taxes, building infrastructure, providing health care, monopoly on violence, and all the things that a modern Western state does. Now, to get on the "successful nation track", you simply need both state and society to be roughly equally powerful to keep each other in check and support each others growth. Lay back and watch them both leveling up till infinity. Or until they get off track due to mixtures of external shocks, bad policies, a calcifying elite and random events like drawing the German Arschkarte as your leader.
Next to the elegant theory (that, of course, is much more nuanced), the book is also a tour de force on looking at the historical developments of societies from ancient Athens, over medieval Northern-Italian citystates, to China today, and dozens more. I wish I had a model of the world where I can begin to make sense of political developments in more than my home country, and I think this book is another great source that helps me get there.
I wish people outside of my social bubble would know of this book and its theory of the "Shackled Leviathan". It's hopeful, motivating and a productive outlook on society. It's not too difficult to understand and might be a good mental framework that helps them deal with rightwing demagogues or ideologue revolutionaries.
Looking at two favourable critiques, Joseph Sternberg from WSJ complains about some historical inaccuracies and the lack of a measurable definition of "being in the narrow corridor" [1]. The latter also worried me, as the theory is qualitative and, though it feels like it fits the world we live in, it could be another just-so story without predictive value. Martin Wolf's FT review (I don't know those two people, by the way) is very positive about the book, for what it's worth [2].
[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-narr...
[2] https://www.ft.com/content/d8eaaaba-d...
Acemoglu's and Robinsons basic theory goes as follows: Look at the strenth of society. Think about freedom of press, democracy and political participation, labor rights, and all that. Then look at the strength of the state. Think about collecting taxes, building infrastructure, providing health care, monopoly on violence, and all the things that a modern Western state does. Now, to get on the "successful nation track", you simply need both state and society to be roughly equally powerful to keep each other in check and support each others growth. Lay back and watch them both leveling up till infinity. Or until they get off track due to mixtures of external shocks, bad policies, a calcifying elite and random events like drawing the German Arschkarte as your leader.
Next to the elegant theory (that, of course, is much more nuanced), the book is also a tour de force on looking at the historical developments of societies from ancient Athens, over medieval Northern-Italian citystates, to China today, and dozens more. I wish I had a model of the world where I can begin to make sense of political developments in more than my home country, and I think this book is another great source that helps me get there.
I wish people outside of my social bubble would know of this book and its theory of the "Shackled Leviathan". It's hopeful, motivating and a productive outlook on society. It's not too difficult to understand and might be a good mental framework that helps them deal with rightwing demagogues or ideologue revolutionaries.
Looking at two favourable critiques, Joseph Sternberg from WSJ complains about some historical inaccuracies and the lack of a measurable definition of "being in the narrow corridor" [1]. The latter also worried me, as the theory is qualitative and, though it feels like it fits the world we live in, it could be another just-so story without predictive value. Martin Wolf's FT review (I don't know those two people, by the way) is very positive about the book, for what it's worth [2].
[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-narr...
[2] https://www.ft.com/content/d8eaaaba-d...
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