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Social orders

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Abstract

This review discusses the stability of social orders in light of the recent work Violence and Social Orders by Douglass North, John Wallis and Barry Weingast (hereafter NWW). The purpose of this book was to understand the two great transitions that have occurred in human society. The first, the agricultural revolution, resulted in a transition from hunter–gather society to what NWW call limited access society. This first transition occurred at various times and places, but generally about 10,000 years before the present. The second revolution, the social/industrial/technological revolution, from limited access to what NWW call open access, occurred initially in a few societies, particularly Britain and the United States, within a fairly brief period between 1600 and 1860. Currently, all the West European economies, as well the Western offshoots (the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand) and Japan have crossed the economic threshold of $20,000/capita. However, inequality across the set of all political economies is extreme, and likely to increase. The paper attempts to complement the institutional analysis of NWW, deploying some theoretical ideas from social choice theory, game theory, and economics (particularly the role of factors of production, land, capital and labor). Emphasis is placed on the variation of risk preference between autocrats and other factor groups. The discussion also alludes to the notion of structural stability of dynamical social systems, and the possibility of chaos. It is argued that all the limited access societies face a Malthusian constraint, generated by the pressure of population on land. In such societies, particularly in Africa in the present day, this quandary over land is likely to lead to the exercise of power by risk preferring autocrats who will restrain any move to open access democracy.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center in Political Economy, Washington University in Saint Louis, Brookings Drive, Saint Louis, MO, 63130, USA

    Norman Schofield

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  1. Norman Schofield
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Correspondence to Norman Schofield.

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This paper is based on work supported by NSF grant 0715929, and was completed while Schofield was the Glenn Campbell and Rita Ricardo-Campbell National Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford, 2009. The author was fortunate to be able to talk about the topics in this paper with Howard Margolis shortly before he passed away. The author also appreciates the comments made at a seminar presentation at the Center for the Study of Democracy, UC Irvine.

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Schofield, N. Social orders. Soc Choice Welf 34, 503–536 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00355-009-0407-3

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