Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History

third common pattern that differs across social orders concerns organizations. In open access societies, access to organizations becomes defined as an impersonal

right that all citizens possess.

Organizations are, in part, tools: tools that

individuals use to increase their productivity,

A healthy

capitalist economy is one in which there will be sufficient social capital in the underlying society to permit businesses, corporations, networks, and the like to be self-organizing…The same propensity for spontaneous sociability that is key to building durable businesses

The state most often provides third-party enforcement. Open access to organizations is a major and underappreciated distinction

between natural states and open access orders.

1 formal-sector business organization for

every 13 people.

The open access pattern is characterized by: 1. Political and economic development. 2. Economies that experience much less negative economic growth. 3. Rich and vibrant civil societies with lots of organizations. 4. Bigger, more decentralized governments. 5. Widespread impersonal social relationships, including rule of law, secure property rights, fairness, and equality – all aspects of treating everyone the same. The limited access pattern is characterized by: 1. Slow-growing economies vulnerable to shocks. 2. Polities without generalized consent of the governed. 3. Relatively small numbers of organizations. 4. Smaller and more centralized governments. 5. A predominance of social relationships organized along personal lines, including privileges, social hierarchies, laws that are enforced unequally, insecure property rights, and a pervasive sense that not all individuals were created or are equal.

Some form of social institution must arise to control violence if societies are to develop larger groups. Whereas it is possible to imagine a larger society of peaceful individuals, such a society will not persist if the only way to control violence is through personal knowledge and repeated personal interaction.

Because individuals always have the option of competing with one another for resources or status through violence, a necessary corollary to limiting the use of violence within a social group is placing limits on competition.

All three social orders are competitive, but they limit competition in different ways.

clarify. Institutions are the “rules of the game” (North, 1990, pp. 3–4), the patterns of interaction that govern and constrain the relationships of individuals.

The most common way of thinking about institutions is that they are constraints on the behavior of individuals as individuals;

In contrast to institutions, organizations consist of specific groups of individuals pursuing a mix of common and individual goals through partially coordinated behavior.

An adherent organization is characterized by self-enforcing, incentive-compatible agreements among its members.

Cooperation by an adherent organization’s members must be, at every point in time, incentive-compatible for all members.

Contractual organizations, in contrast, utilize both third-party enforcement of contracts and incentive-compatible agreements among members (as Williamson, 1985, argues for the firm).

Modern open access societies often limit violence through institutions. Institutions frame rules that deter violence directly by changing the payoffs to violent behavior, most obviously by stipulating punishments for the use of violence.

In order for a formal rule – an institution – to constrain violence, particularly violence among individuals with no personal knowledge of one another, some organization must exist within which a set of officials enforce the rules in an impersonal manner.

As Weber’s famous maxim goes (1947, p. 156), the state is that organization with a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence.

Controlling violence depends on the structure and maintenance of relationships among powerful individuals.

Mobilizing rents, in turn, requires specialists in other activities.

In the earliest societies of recorded human history, priests and politicians provided the redistributive network capable of mobilizing output and redistributing it between elites and non-elites.