The authors write — twice! — that “this book is about liberty.” They argue that between “despotic Leviathan” and anarchy there is a narrow corridor of liberty in which individuals flourish and prosper. Their analysis is both positive, describing societies’ evolution into, and out of, the narrow corridor, and normative, arguing for the benefits of liberty. At first sight, this looks like essential reading for the intelligentsia, which does not hear the word “liberty” often. However, as we shall see, there are a number of problems with the book’s arguments.
The model / As economists do, Acemoglu and Robinson develop their thesis with a simplified model of the world, represented graphically in the book. The basic idea is that social affairs (including economic and political affairs) are governed in varying degrees by the power of the state and the power of society. Each of these two variables is shown on an axis of a Cartesian plane. Acemoglu and Robinson define “society” as anything that is not the state nor government elites. Society is made of ordinary individuals. In developed countries, it corresponds more or less to what is called “civil society.”
The more power the state enjoys, ceteris paribus, the more it is a “despotic Leviathan.” The more power is exercised by society, ceteris paribus, the more likely it is that we instead get one of two situations: either the Hobbesian “war of all against all” or else, to prevent constant violence and coordinate individual actions, stifling norms of the kind we observe in primitive societies.
The Chinese government has exemplified the despotic Leviathan for more than two millennia; needless to say, it has not been and is still not alone in this. Closer to the second axis (society’s power) we meet what Acemoglu and Robinson call the absent Leviathan. This can be found in many primitive stateless societies, about which the authors present much ethnological information. Some modern societies — Lebanon, for example — also have an absent Leviathan. According to Acemoglu and Robinson, somewhere between these two types of social organization — between the despotic Leviathan and the absent Leviathan — runs the narrow corridor where liberty dwells.
One might think that the expression “despotic Leviathan” is pleonastic, but that is not the case in Acemoglu and Robinson’s model and terminology. For them, “the Leviathan” is not a pejorative term: it describes a central state that, à la Thomas Hobbes, is powerful enough to prevent continuous violence or to break “the cage of norms.” In The Narrow Corridor (as in common wisdom), anarchy can only lead to either Hobbesian war or stifling primitive society.
Continuous violence, stifling norms, and despotism are all inimical to economic growth and prosperity. Growth needs innovation and “innovation needs creativity and creativity needs liberty.” The authors developed these ideas in their previous book, Why Nations Fail (Profile Books, 2012).
The Narrow Corridor argues that liberty requires both “state capacity” (power of the state) and popular mobilization (power of society) to keep Leviathan shackled. The shackled Leviathan opens a narrow corridor between despotism and the cage of norms or continuous violence. This corridor is where liberty prevails: in America, most of Western Europe, and other countries that follow their political and economic systems. The authors explain:
It isn’t just the shackles that are important. So is the ability of the Leviathan to have the power to enforce laws, resolve conflicts, provide public services, and support the economic institutions that create economic opportunities and incentives. Thus equally essential is the capacity of the state so long as it is matched with society’s ability to control it.
Different societies occupy different spots in the corridor. As new problems appear that require collective action, both state capacity and democratic social power will grow. Societies will move up in the corridor. Acemoglu and Robinson describe as “the Red Queen effect” this race between, on the one hand, a state offering more and more public goods, social services, solutions to externalities, control of monopolies, public health care, and so on and so forth; and, on the other hand, society’s democratic control over Leviathan. As the Red Queen explained in Lewis Carol’s Through the Looking-Glass, everybody has to run just to stay where they are. Similarly, if a society is to stay in the corridor, Leviathan’s power must grow to respond to increasing popular demands and social power must grow to keep Leviathan shackled.
This way, liberty increases — or at least it does not decrease — as societies move along the corridor, or from outside the corridor to within it. “True liberty” needs a shackled Leviathan. Or so argue the authors of The Narrow Corridor.
Cage of norms / Before looking at the problems in The Narrow Corridor, we should acknowledge that what Acemoglu and Robinson call the cage of norms in the absence of Leviathan probably constitutes one the most serious arguments against anarchy. To avoid continuous violence in a stateless society, the argument goes, the relations between its members have to be coordinated by very strict social norms. (See “The Valium of the People,” Spring 2016.) By localizing power in a limited state (the shackled Leviathan), it can be better controlled and liberty can develop. However, this argument — even if true — does not give carte blanche to Leviathan’s capacity.
One problem is that the state often strengthens rather than dismantles the cage of norms. As shown by Acemoglu and Robinson themselves, Saudi Arabia and other Middle Eastern states have historically enforced Islamic religious rules, the Sharia, because it was in their interest to do so. If most individuals (“society”) believe in some anti-individualist superstitions, the state is likely to enforce them, to lend them its own force of arms. At the minimum, it will not directly intervene against these social norms, especially at the local level where the violence often happens.
Acemoglu and Robinson tell horrible stories about India’s surviving caste system and its frequently violent discrimination, as well as about other countries outside the corridor. It’s not certain that a more powerful state would better challenge injustices. The Islamic State certainly did not. The Taliban offer another telling example.
This criticism of the supposedly beneficial race between the state and society is even stronger if, by “the state,” we mean the whole structure of organized coercion by political authorities, including at the local level. If “society” wants to ban somebody who has violated some norm, there must be some power physically capable of throwing the culprit out of the village or bullying him into leaving, preventing his return, and stopping other individuals from dealing with him.
It is typically when prevailing norms threaten the state’s power that it will try to uproot them. This is in large part the history of the French Revolution, especially its more violent period starting in 1793. As many observers noted, from Alexis de Tocqueville to Bertrand de Jouvenel, the revolutionaries wished to uproot any trace of the ancien régime, from political institutions to religious and educational institutions, and even the family. As a result, the isolated individual found himself under the total control of the new republican Leviathan, with long-lasting consequences. It would be interesting if Acemoglu and Robinson tried to apply their model to the French Revolution.
With the Enlightenment, modern societies have developed what Nobel economics laureate Friedrich Hayek called an “abstract order” that is the opposite of the cage of norms. (See “Against Tribal Instincts,” Spring 2018.) In these conditions, it is less certain that the only alternative is between a shackled Leviathan and a dangerous or stifling anarchy. A stateless society based on a Humean sort of spontaneous conventions, which corresponds to what both Adam Smith and Anthony de Jasay were thinking of, could conceivably find a place in another narrow corridor. At least, the question must be raised.
It is not impossible that a new cage of repressive woke norms has been developing over the past decades. But note that this new cage has been mightily supported by the state through its subsidization of universities and encouragement of woke causes with billions of dollars. This further argues against a total rejection of anarchy.
Acemoglu and Robinson claim that Western countries were able to develop state capacity (along with more democracy and liberty after the Red Queen did its magic) because they benefited from the heritage of the Roman Empire’s state institutions. This is far from sure. In his book Escape from Rome, Stanford University’s Walter Scheidel persuasively argues the contrary: liberty and prosperity grew in the West thanks to the anarchy brought about by the fall of the Western Roman Empire. (See “Let’s Travel That Road Again,” Spring 2020.)
The few ancient societies that prospered and offered some degree of individual liberty, such as classical Athens or the commercial communes of Italy around the 10th century, had elaborate institutions, including democratic ones, to prevent the rise of a despot. Yet, it is notable that only a few centuries sufficed for despotic Leviathans to engulf them. Can a Red Queen rat race between the state and society really prevent this fate from hitting modern societies? Is this time different?
Murky society, murky politics / Using “society” as a variable in a political model increases the risk of viewing it as an acting or thinking entity. Perhaps such organicist or collectivist rhetoric has a veneer of plausibility in the case of societies imprisoned in a tight cage of norms, but it is certainly dangerous when applied to modern and diversified societies. In the latter, the range of common individual preferences or values is very small and the number of genuine “public goods” (which are, by definition, unanimously desired) is very limited. Most government interventions in the name of “society” actually hurt some individuals in order to help others, a reality that should never be ignored. Speaking of “society’s needs” or “society’s desire” makes little sense.
The authors seem to argue, like populists, that a democratic system can shackle Leviathan because that is in the interest of “society.” Do they fully realize that democratic processes can lead anywhere in policy space, as Kenneth Arrow and William Riker among others have shown? (See “Populist Choices Are Meaningless,” Spring 2021.) The more politics gets pumped up by the Red Queen race, the more incoherent, chaotic, or dictatorial the results will be.
All these problems of society and government can be usefully analyzed with James Buchanan’s concept of a liberal social contract. It is puzzling that nowhere is the Nobel economics prizewinner cited or even mentioned in The Narrow Corridor. The book suffers from a Buchanan deficit.
Reductio ad absurdum / We have seen that Acemoglu and Robinson’s model suggests that an unending Red Queen race can or will lead to continuously growing state power and social power. But that is strictly impossible because we would eventually reach a situation where the (no longer) shackled Leviathan would have acquired total power over society, with the latter being totally powerful in resisting the former. This argument provides a sort of reductio ad absurdum of the Red Queen effect. Every growth in state power is necessarily accompanied by mandates, bans, and constraints imposed on individuals and therefore on society.
Recall Harvard philosopher Robert Nozick’s allegory in Anarchy, State and Utopia: a master lets his 100 slaves make democratically all decisions about themselves, so that each one controls 1% of the life of every slave, including 1% of his own life. Each individual would be very close to totally powerless, just like the individual in an all-powerful society dominated by an all-powerful democratic Leviathan.
We must thus address the question of where the parallel growth of Leviathan and society should stop before liberty is irremediably compromised. Are we past that point? How do you want to stop Leviathan once it is clearly running ahead? Will “society” be able to tell Leviathan, “Stop a moment; I have to catch my breath”? Acemoglu and Robinson’s model seems incapable of answering those questions.
This incapacity is all the more troubling as the logic of Acemoglu and Robinson still underestimates what we can call the “de Jasay effect”: the more state capacity strengthens, the more valuable and necessary are the privileges granted by Leviathan, the more it is burdened by incompatible demands from different corners of society, and the more power it gains — and the vicious circle continues. Acemoglu and Robinson do detect the problem in what they call a “zero-sum Red Queen effect,” where society loses what the state gains: it happened in Allende’s Chile, in Chavez’s Venezuela, in the Weimar Republic, and in other countries. But they don’t seem to appreciate all the instability in the Red Queen’s rat race.
“Liberty is always a work in progress,” Acemoglu and Robinson write, which is certainly true. But the state is very far from helping as much as they claim. And what is liberty anyway?
What is liberty? / One confusion, suggested by Montesquieu, is between the power of the people (“society”) and the liberty of the people as individuals. I would argue that this confusion oozes from the race between society and Leviathan as described in The Narrow Corridor. A related confusion, pointed out by Benjamin Constant, is between individual or modern liberty, and collective or ancient liberty. In an 1819 lecture in Paris, Constant explained that for the Ancients, liberty was the collective liberty of citizens to rule over minorities, while modern liberty is individual liberty, which allows each individual to literally govern himself to the greatest extent possible. The Red Queen doesn’t see that clearly.
Contrary to what Acemoglu and Robinson claim, the “essence of despotism” is not “the inability of society to organize and influence policy making outside the hierarchy of the state.” Elected assemblies can be despotic. Despotism is the inability of individuals to satisfy their own peaceful preferences without violence or threats of violence from the government; despotism is the absence of individual liberty.
Closely related is the distinction between negative and positive liberty. As confirmed in the last chapter of The Narrow Corridor, Acemoglu and Robinson affirm the ideal of positive liberty — that is, the capacity of some individuals to do things and have stuff, even if it requires reducing the capacity of other individuals to pursue their own happiness. Contrary to this conception, negative liberty resides in the protection against the interference (or at least arbitrary interference) of political authorities in individual choices. Negative liberty is, by and large, to live and let live.
At least implicitly, then, Acemoglu and Robinson conceive liberty as the collective power of the people to allow a majority of individuals to exercise some positive freedoms. I suspect they would reply that these positive freedoms include the right to be free of violence and “dominance,” and that they are also concerned about individual liberty. But they have offered no key to reconcile these different concepts of liberty. The stance they take in favor of the Progressive era and of Franklin D. Roosevelt and his New Deal, as well as their belief that the American Leviathan should grow larger, shows, I fear, where their heart is.
The concluding chapter of The Narrow Corridor criticizes Hayek’s book The Road to Serfdom for not understanding that Leviathan can be both shackled and powerful. Acemoglu and Robinson argue (although in different terms) that Hayek’s fear of totalitarianism was misplaced because a totalitarian government, in the sense that its sphere embraces the totality of human activities, need not be dangerous. Look at the Danes who accept government surveillance because their shackled Leviathan can do no wrong! A more general criticism of Acemoglu and Robinson is that they neglect the soft tyranny “regulated, mild and peaceful” that Tocqueville forecasted for democratic regimes.
Politics without romance / The authors of The Narrow Corridor express their admiration for what used to be called “the Swedish model.” Is that justified? Just a couple of indications: Sweden is the country where “social partners” (trade unions and big business) decide the conditions of employment over the head of individuals. The authors of The Narrow Corridor suggest that it might be better for the state to alter market prices than to redistribute income through taxes and subsidies. How is that to work? Like rent controls? According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Sweden has the most restrictive rent controls among its member states. A consequence is that the average waiting time for legally renting an apartment in Stockholm is eight to 10 years. It is difficult to square this approach with sound economics and even sound redistribution.
One sometimes gets the impression that countries like Sweden resemble the village in Patrick McGoohan’s TV series The Prisoner: life is controlled and easy, everybody is smiling, and the only thing missing is individual liberty. Says Dan Klein, a George Mason University economist who spends much time in Sweden, “If you define ‘liberty’ to mean whatever it is that Sweden has today, then what Sweden has today is the ideal of liberty.”
The Narrow Corridor presents a biased view of many types of federal regulation. Why aren’t the authors more concerned about the next minority that the American Leviathan will discriminate against, redline, or spy on? There are powers that should not be available to either the federal Leviathan or to the Big Brother individual states (“Leviathan with a Human Face,” Spring 2016). Especially at the current level of state capacity, any increase is difficult to justify.
Another weakness of the book is that it features little reflection, if any, on how political processes actually work in real-world democratic systems, accentuating what I’ve called its “Buchanan deficit.” Passing the book’s interesting ideas through the filter of public choice economics — “politics without romance,” as Buchanan said — would improve it.
My negative criticisms don’t imply that the book is not instructive. I have neglected many aspects of the analysis I agree with to concentrate on what can hopefully be improved. The authors ask many important questions about how individual liberty and autonomy can best be protected, even if their own conception of liberty is murky.
An improved and more useful study of the narrow corridor would, in my opinion, switch the normative positions of anarchy and the state. Instead of looking at how the state can protect “society” against anarchy, it would ask how the state can protect feasible anarchy — that is, whatever level of anarchy is possible. The normative primacy should go to anarchy, not to Leviathan.
