On Violence and Social Orders, the Machinery of Record, and the Witnessing and Registration of Public Truth.

A few months ago, my some-time co-author, John Thrasher (Chapman), recommended I read Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History (Cambridge, 2009) by Douglass C. North, John Joseph Wallis, and Barry R. Weingast (hereafter: NWW). During the last few years, I have gotten to know Weingast (Stanford) a bit because of his thoroughgoing interest in Adam Smith scholarship. And so it was, perhaps, overdetermined that I would pick up Violence and Social Orders.

Violence and Social Orders offers what we may call a ‘stadial approach to’ political order of which it identifies three kinds: (i) foraging or hunter–gatherer societies; (ii) limited access order or natural states, and (iii) open access societies. The book is uninterested in the first, and focuses on the latter two, which it claims have dominated political life of the last “five to ten millennia.” (p. 13)

Violence and Social Orders is primarily interested in characterizing natural states and analyzing how and when they transition to open access societies. In fact, the book offers a further three-fold distinction of kinds of natural states: “fragile, basic, and mature.” (p. 41) These three are identified as follows:

Fragile natural states are unable to support any organization but the state itself. Basic natural states can support organizations, but only within the framework of the state. Mature natural states are able to support a wide range of elite organizations outside the immediate control of the state. The ability to support organizations – to structure human interaction – is an important determinate of the economic and political development within the natural state. (p. 21; emphasis in original)

These labels sound somewhat teleological, but the authors are explicit that they do not imply that there is tendency to move from one to the other or to move from natural states to open access societies: “no teleology pushes societies to move along the progression from simpler to more complex natural states.” (p. 49; “No teleology pushes states through the progression from fragile to basic to mature natural states.” (p. 73); “no teleology or inevitable forces move societies toward more mature institutions;” (p. 101) “no teleological movement pushes societies to become more complex, more stable, or more developed.” (p. 255)) If anything, while open access societies are economically and militarily quite dominant globally the book successfully manages to convey the idea that these are rare social achievements that are by no means inevitable or permanent. Violence and Social Orders is largely immune to post-cold-war triumphalism.

As an aside, some other time I connect the analysis in Violence and Social Orders to a puzzle raised (in order to contest this winnowing) by David Graeber and David Wengrow about why large-scale social organizations seem to have settled on a relatively narrow range of possibilities (recall here).

Crucially, “natural states limit the ability of individuals to form organizations.” That is, “personal relationships, who one is and who one knows, form the basis for social organization and constitute the arena for individual interaction, particularly personal relationships among powerful individuals.” (p. 2) An important implication of this feature of natural states is that they do not conform to Max Weber’s expectation that a state has a monopoly on violence (p. 110ff). For in a natural state, the capacity of (significant) violence is dispersed in the ruling coalition of elite(s) (see, e.g., p. 20, 70), and this capacity is connected to the power of particular individuals (and families/clans).

By contrast, open access societies allow a wide variety of people to form organizations, and this capacity tends to be ground in impersonal rights. In fact, “in open access societies, access to organizations becomes defined as an impersonal right that all citizens possess.” (p. 6) Of course, in practice, this is itself an achievement of open access orders—they don’t start out this way. Violence and Social Orders explains that before we get there in natural states it is members of the elite who acquire impersonal rights (for themselves and progeny) and particular kind of institutions, ‘corporations’ that were originally chartered by the state that are, in principle, eternal in character. These are organizations that are expected to live on beyond the life of their members. (p. 166) Somewhat oddly, NWW ignore the role of universities as early examples of corporate eternal entities, but about that some other time more.

Part of the interest of the book is that it explains how the framework(s) of standard (development) economics and political science that is oriented toward open access states is inappropriate for analyzing natural states, especially when it comes to offering development advice. (There is, thus, a historicist sensibility that runs through the book.) It also suggests that what makes open access societies so distinctive is that they are capable of limiting periods of negative growth.

So much for set up.

One important and to me welcome feature of Violence and Social Orders is that it recognizes that open access societies are relatively recent phenomena that were, in many ways, unintended and unknown prior to the nineteenth century. It, thus, resists the tendency to read seventeenth and eighteenth century political theory into future developments: during the eighteenth century, “no one knew an open access society was a viable alternative, much less how to construct it.” (p. 188; see also p. 245)

But this correct insight also leads to a tendency to mistakenly historicize theorizing by eighteenth century thinkers. I quote an important passage:

Those ideas formed the core of a crystallizing political theory in the eighteenth century called the republican tradition or civic humanism by some (with roots stretching back to Greece and Republican Rome). The backward-looking idea that intra-elite competition posed the greatest threat to social order described a natural state, not an open access order. The specific idea that political manipulation of economic privileges posed the greatest threat to a republic was the central hypothesis of Whig or Commonwealth thinking in the eighteenth century in Britain, France, and the United States. (p. 190, emphasis in original)

At a high level of generality this claim is right. But one key element of the fruitfulness of the revival of Machiavellian republicanism is that Machiavelli diagnosed what we may call (recall) ‘creative turbulence’ (a form of permanent, albeit partially contained, class conflict that generated a spirit of adaptation to new circumstances) in the rise of republican Rome and on his recommendation, some such turbulence was embraced by Bolingbroke, Hume, and Montesquieu (amongst others). And this became a corner-stone of liberal thinking in later ages.

So, while I agree with NWW that the “British Whigs, French Republicans, and the American Founding generation” did not create or even intellectually constitute the “modern world,” (p. 244) Violence and Social Orders overplays its hand. And the reason for this is that it is unwilling to treat ‘open access societies’ as themselves ‘liberal’ in character—a word almost entirely absent in the vocabulary of NWW. (There are a few telling isolated exceptions on p. 241 and p. 7.)

This strikes me as a missed opportunity. Distinctly liberal ideas — which I associate with Smith, Bentham, Constant, Kant, and Humboldt — shaped the rise of open access societies and then became keys to their self-interpretation of leading agents in it. (Not the least illustrated by the new use of ‘society’.) In particular, the liberal art of government connects state interest and the development of capacity in maintaining (to use a term I picked up (here) from Nick Cowen), the machinery of record with the conditions of open access. This interest originates in the natural state’s elites’ role in what with a nod to Tom Pink (recall) — I have been calling witnessing truth. (See also this post on Adam Smith here.)

Let me make this concrete. According to Violence and Social Orders a key step in the transition from a mature natural state to an open access state is the development of a “procedure by which joint-stock companies could be formed by administrative procedure without the consent of the government.” (p. 218) In natural states, which tightly control access to incorporation, a corporation is a means to secure economic privilege by well-connected insiders. This capital fact, is central to Adam Smith’s critique of mercantilism in Books IV and V of (1776) Wealth of Nations. For Smith, corporations are vehicles of elite privilege to maintain itself. And this helps explain his persistent anti-corporate rhetoric.

In Britain (the first mover) the legislation that created corporate open access was first passed in 1844: “an act Registering, Incorporation, and Regulation of Joint-Stock Companies and an accompanying act for Facilitating the Winding Up of the Affairs of Joint-Stock Companies.” (p. 218) This act “opened the gates to incorporation…Britain went from seven hundred to ten thousand business corporations in twenty years, open access indeed.” (p. 219) As NWW note, the act itself did not “confer limited liability” on joint-stock corporations, a provision added only in 1856 (p. 218)

The act created a registry and a process of registration that allowed for fairly automatic incorporation, including becoming a separate legal personality. (p. 218) And so upon registration a company could (amongst other rights) sue and be sued. (p. 218) This presupposes not just an impartial enforcement of the law, as NWW emphasize, but also an interest in developing the capacity to maintain an impartial state bureaucracy (something mentioned but not emphasized (see p. 112)).

In an accompanying note NWW trace an interest in registration to the way the 1786 renewal Navigations Act established a register of ships. (p. 218 note 37.) But the public discussion of the risks and benefits of maintaining registries is much older. So, early in Wealth of Nations, Smith observes

A regulation which obliges all those of the same trade in a particular town to enter their names and places of abode in a publick register, facilitates such assemblies. It connects individuals who might never otherwise be known to one another, and gives every man of the trade a direction where to find every other man of it. (WN 1.10.c.28, p. 145)

Here Smith diagnoses how in the natural state the requirement of public registration is a means of elite coalition management and, thereby, facilitation of the cartelization of the economy. But it doesn’t follow that Smith is always against public registration.

In fact, Adam Smith had extolled it in a passage in Book V of Wealth of Nations. The passage occurs after Smith’s treatment of how stamp duties and taxes on registration are organized collected. But it builds on the idea that having “different register offices which it would be proper to establish in the different districts” (in order to generate proper land taxes). (WN 5.2.e.17, 832) I quote:

The registration of mortgages, and in general of all rights upon immoveable property, as it gives great security both to creditors and purchasers, is extremely advantageous to the publick. That of the greater part of deeds of other kinds is frequently inconvenient and even dangerous to individuals, without any advantage to the publick. All registers which, it is acknowledged, ought to be kept secret, ought certainly never to exist. The credit of individuals ought certainly never to depend upon so very slender a security as the probity and religion of the inferior officers of revenue. But where the fees of registration have been made a source of revenue to the sovereign, register offices have commonly been multiplied without end, both for the deeds which ought to be registered, and for those which ought not. In France there are several different sorts of secret registers. This abuse, though not perhaps a necessary, it must be acknowledged, is a very natural effect of such taxes. (WN 5.2.h.17, 863)

Smith is quite clear that general registration of social facts generates all kinds of social dangers. But at the same time, the natural reading of this passage and the earlier one is that under some conditions the state’s maintenance of a public registry is not just a means to make the population legible in order to raise taxes, but it can be “extremely advantageous to the public” by facilitating commerce and impersonal enforcement of rights. Keep that in mind.

As NWW note, a young William Gladstone headed the committee that drafted the 1844 bills. (p. 218) Gladstone is, alongside Cobden and Bright, the political face of nineteenth century liberalism. And, in fact, as others have remarked liberal ideas that can be traced to Adam Smith shaped the deliberation of the committee, both in limiting initially which industries to open up to incorporation and how to organize corporations (see Watson 2015; Chaplin 2016).

Unfortunately, I don’t have access to a copy of the First Report of the Select Committee on Joint Stock Companies B.P.P. VII, 1844. So, right now this is a bit speculative. But Watson also notes that “Robert Lowe, the driving force behind the legislation, believed incorporation should be made more freely available as he considered the benefits of investing in companies should be made available to the middle classes.” Lowe was also a great enthusiast of Adam Smith (including a once famous lecture to commemorate the centenary of Wealth of Nations in 1876.)

My point is that liberal political economy and liberal political philosophy that between (say) 1776-1840 taught the liberal art of government (as Smith and Bentham did) understood itself as a frontal critique of what Violence and Social Orders calls the natural state. And that this liberal critique helped shape the development and formation of the underlying machinery of open access orders once what NWW call the ‘doorstep conditions’ are achieved in natural states (rule of law for elites, perpetually lived organizations in private and public spheres, consolidated control of the military). And one of the mechanisms by which open access is organized according to the liberal art of government, is the generation of a machinery of record, that is, state organized registries (including, as NWW note non-trivially, registration of voters).