A review of an important book:
Douglass North, John Joseph Wallis, Barry R. Weingast:
Violence and Social Orders - A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History
(Cambridge University Press, 2009)
elites, domination and change
Ricardo Abramovay
Economic Value , 28/08 / 2009
The great advantage of open access societies is adaptive efficiency, which combines power and participation.
is the way they face the problem of violence that societies shape the interaction human and define the forms of their political and economic organization. Over the past ten thousand years, mankind has known mainly two ways to stop the violence. The longest lasting of the order is limited or natural state, typical of much of Mesopotamia to Britain under the Tudors or the Aztec empire. Indeed, it is in societies with limited access to live, even today, 85% of humanity in 175 countries. The central feature of these natural states is that stability comes from a coalition of forces whose members have privileges (in some cases, even rights) special. Military power is dispersed among several groups who renounce their use by establishing agreements to gain in economic activities. But those deals are closed and strictly personal. It is only in the last 150 years that a few companies formed states of open access, in which the processes of social domination are depersonalized and competition in terms of politics and economics paves the way for innovations that result in dramatic improvements in living standards. Ensuing two central questions: which allowed the order formed by natural states emerge societies marked by open access and why this transition was limited to a restricted number of such countries?
At 88 years old and holder of the Nobel Prize Economics 1993, - a reference book that will certainly be in the social sciences of the XXI century.
His starting point is that violence can only be controlled by the elites' interest in forms of economic exploitation that bring them more income than that provided by the use of weapons. It is only in societies open access there is a real monopoly on violence by the state. In the restricted access, violence is scattered and the challenge is to find ways to allow dominant groups to explore opportunities to gain that lead them to forgo their use. The primary means to do so is the restriction of the possibility of forming organizations to a small number of individuals. Hence the deep dependence and promiscuity among private and public organizations, characteristic of societies in closed access.
Until the early nineteenth century, create businesses or form a political organization, for example, was a privilege, the grant came from the state. It was since then, and initially only in three countries (Britain, France and United States), that the elites have undergone universal laws. At the same time, generalization is the ability to create independent organizations and the state is consolidated political control over military power. The monopoly of violence is a consequence and not a precondition for the formation of modern democracies.
The central question the book is: if the elites stabilize their power based on special privileges in customized forms of domination and restrictions on building organizations, how can the states of closed access to the premises to produce a social order supported in an impersonal and opening opportunities for increasingly large segments? The answer is that in societies of closed access, to ensure the prerogatives of the elite organizations whose expansion is needed just requiring the definition not only privileges but also rights of those elites. At the same time, it creates conditions that may broaden the opportunities for gain for larger segments of their own ruling elites, based on competitive processes, which requires a new institutional arrangement, in which depersonalized forms of domination are to be paramount. Democracy and development are neither renunciation of the dominant groups to their interests or they make concessions to the pressures of the masses. Are new forms of domination, where elites are employing organizations and methods of control and impersonal in which exponentially expands the possibility of forming organizations not only to elites, but the whole population.
The book aspires to nothing less than propose a new research agenda for the social sciences, the center of which are the ways in different societies deal with violence. Three important conclusions stand out. Firstly, the development is not just about adding "more capital or a transplant to correct society institutions such as democracy, property rights, markets or laws." Without giving rise to conditions that will, within the groups ruling, interest in opening opportunities for organizations to encourage the prescription of formal democracy (elections, markets, laws, etc..) can backfire. Development involves understanding the culture and history of countries and not formulas. The second conclusion is that open access societies are characterized by strong states, with a prominent intervention in economic life and, above all, the ability to offer bases in impersonal, public goods that contribute to reduce inequality and widen access to opportunities to generate income. Finally, and most importantly, natural states have proved extremely resilient, with its thousands of years, and we can not guarantee that societies open access will continue. But its great advantage is that they have greater adaptive efficiency than any other form of social organization known previously. This is not an uncritical defense of the market economy but a powerful historical analysis of the reasons why the elites extend the legal and organizational bases of their rule to, around, open extraordinarily rich possibilities of participation and social change .
Abramovay Ricardo, is a professor in the Department of Economics, FEA / USP, the coordinator of its Center for Environmental Economics (Nesa), a researcher from CNPq and FAPESP. www.econ.fea.usp.br / Abramovay
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