{"id":16854,"date":"2019-09-25T07:41:14","date_gmt":"2019-09-25T07:41:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/?p=16854"},"modified":"2020-06-09T12:41:09","modified_gmt":"2020-06-09T12:41:09","slug":"the-permanent-struggle-for-liberty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/the-permanent-struggle-for-liberty\/","title":{"rendered":"The permanent struggle for liberty"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Daron Acemoglu\u2019s new book examines the battle between state and society, which occasionally produces liberal-democratic freedom.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Where do democratic states with substantial personal liberty come from? Over the years, many grand theories have emphasized one specific factor or another, including culture, climate, geography, technology, or socioeconomic circumstances such as the development of a robust middle class.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Daron Acemoglu<\/a>\u00a0has a different view: Political liberty comes from social struggle. We have no universal template for liberty \u2014 no conditions that necessarily give rise to it, and no unfolding historical progression that inevitably leads to it. Liberty is not engineered and handed down by elites, and there is no guarantee liberty will remain intact, even when it is enshrined in law.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cTrue democracy and liberty don\u2019t originate from checks and balances or from clever institutional design,\u201d says Acemoglu, an economist and Institute Professor at MIT. \u201cThey originate [and are sustained] in the much more messy process of society mobilizing, people defending their own liberties, and actively setting constraints on how rules and behaviors are imposed on them.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now Acemoglu and his longtime collaborator James A. Robinson, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, have a new book out propounding this thesis. \u201cThe Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty<\/a>,\u201d published this week by Penguin Random House, examines how some states emerged as beacons of liberty.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The crux of the matter, to Acemoglu and Robinson, is that liberal-democratic states exist in between the alternatives of lawlessness and authoritarianism. The state is needed to protect people from domination at the hands of others in society, but the state can also become an instrument of violence and repression. When social groups contest state power and harness it to help ordinary citizens, liberty expands.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe conflict between state and society, where the state is represented by elite institutions and leaders, creates a narrow corridor in which liberty flourishes,\u201d Acemoglu says. \u201cYou need this conflict to be balanced. An imbalance is detrimental to liberty. If society is too weak, that leads to despotism. But on the other side, if society is too strong, that results in weak states that are unable to protect their citizens.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

From the \u201cGilgamesh problem\u201d to the \u201cnarrow corridor\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Following the English political theorist John Locke, Acemoglu and Robinson define liberty by writing that it \u201cmust start with people being free from violence, intimidation, and other demeaning acts. People must be able to make free choices about their lives and have the means to carry them out without the menace of unreasonable punishment or draconian social sanctions.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This has been a nearly eternal concern, the authors note: Gilgamesh, per the ancient epic, was a king who \u201cexceeded all bounds\u201d in society. The need to curb absolute power is something the authors call the \u201cGilgamesh problem,\u201d one of several coinages in the book. Another is the \u201ccage of norms,\u201d the condition where society, in absence of a state, organizes itself to avoid extensive violence \u2014 but only through restrictive social arrangements.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

States, by becoming the guarantors of liberty, can break the repressive cage of norms. But social groups must curb state power before it too stifles freedom. When state capacity and society develop in tandem, the authors call this the \u201cRed Queen effect,\u201d alluding to a race in Lewis Carroll\u2019s \u201cThrough the Looking Glass.\u201d This \u201crace,\u201d if balanced enough, occurs in the \u201cnarrow corridor\u201d where liberty-supporting states can exist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Acemoglu and Robinson examine ancient cases of political reform from Athens to the Zapotec state, and they locate liberty\u2019s largest direct wellspring in the early Middle Ages. Germanic tribes had quasidemocratic assemblies; meanwhile some leftover administrative structures of the Roman empire still existed alongside those of the Christian church. When the Frankish king Clovis created a \u201cfusion of Roman state structure with the norms and political institutions of the Franks\u201d in 511, the authors write, some parts of Europe were \u201cat the entryway to the corridor\u201d toward liberty.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To be sure, there was a \u201cgradual, painful historical process\u201d to be played out; it was another 700 years before King John of England signed the Magna Carta in 1215, a watershed for the distribution of lawful power beyond the throne.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Still, state structures being grafted onto a mechanism for representing society, through assemblies, meant both state and society could expand their power. As Acemoglu and Robinson put it, this \u201cfortuitous balance\u201d effectively \u201cput Europe into the corridor, setting in motion the Red Queen effect in a relentless process of state\u2010society competition.\u201d Eventually, European democracies evolved.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cLiberty is fragile\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

That Europe took the lead in creating liberty-granting states was not inevitable, Acemoglu and Robinson emphasize. Almost 3,000 years ago, they note, ancient China was organized into city-states, and one influential political advisor of the time wrote that \u201cthe people are masters of the deities.\u201d But by the fourth century B.C.E., spurred on by the politician and theorist Shang Yang, Chinese rulers built a much more powerful state, which became the Qin empire. Despite many potential moments of reform, detailed in \u201cThe Narrow Corridor,\u201d China\u2019s state has largely remained much more powerful than its social interests.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Moreover, Acemoglu suggests, the longer a despotic state exists, \u201cthe more self-reinforcing it becomes.\u201d He adds: \u201cThe more it takes root, the more it sets up a hierarchy which is hard to change, and the more it weakens society. \u2026 That\u2019s why I think dreams of China smoothly converting to a democratic system have been misplaced \u2014 [it\u2019s had] 2,500 years of state despotism.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The account of the U.S. in \u201cThe Narrow Corridor\u201d also takes a long view, albeit over a much shorter period. The U.S. Constitution and the architecture of government developed in the late 18th century, Acemoglu and Robinson write, was a \u201cFaustian bargain\u201d created by Federalists to limit both absolute power and popular power. This structure, they believe, especially its emphasis on states\u2019 rights, \u201cmeant that the federal state remained impaired in some important dimensions. For one, it obviously didn\u2019t protect slaves and later its African American citizens from violence, discrimination, poverty, and dominance.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Acemoglu and Robinson also believe that focusing too much on \u201cthe brilliant design of the Constitution\u201d is problematic because it \u201cignores the critical role that society\u2019s mobilization and the Red Queen [effect] played at every turn. The Constitution and the Bill of Rights \u2026 were the result of the tussle between elites and the people.\u201d The expansion of U.S. rights and liberties has emerged intermittently\u00a0 \u2014 following the Civil War, the civil rights movement, and the women\u2019s rights movement, among other things. But these liberties can also recede if political counter-movements become effective enough.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThat is the sense in which liberty is fragile,\u201d Acemoglu says. \u201cIf you thought liberty depended on clever designs, you\u2019d have thought we would find the perfect design that protects liberty all the time. But if you think it depends on this messy process, then it\u2019s a much more contingent and troubled existence.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Facing the \u201curgent challenges for us today\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe Narrow Corridor\u201d examines many additional cases of state-building in history, from India and Africa to Scandinavia. It also builds on a body of work Acemoglu and Robinson have produced examining the relationships between society, state institutions, and growth. That includes the books \u201cEconomic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy\u201d (2006) and \u201cWhy Nations Fail\u201d (2012). The two scholars have also co-authored 36 published papers on these topics (some with additional co-authors).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Acemoglu has also published widely on labor economics, the impact of technology on work and growth, and macroeconomic dynamics. He was named as one of MIT\u2019s 12 Institute Professors this summer and has been on the faculty of the Department of Economics since 1993.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As the authors view it, their account of liberty stands in contrast to many other models. The close of the Cold War helped generate the idea of a geopolitical \u201cend of history,\u201d in which states would converge on a liberal-democratic model. That notion did not closely forecast subsequent developments. Neither did postwar theories of modernization that posited a standardized path to democratic prosperity for the developing world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThere are multiple destinations countries can be headed to,\u201d Acemoglu says. \u201cThere is nothing ephemeral about a despotic state or a weak state, and there is no ineluctable process that\u2019s going to take every country smoothly toward some sort of liberty at all.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Moreover, Acemoglu says, \u201cOur argument is not a culturally deterministic one.\u201d He adds: \u201cThere are views that are very economistic. \u2026 Ours is a view that emphasizes the role of agency by individuals and society, and maintains that different social organizations lead to different outcomes. It\u2019s also not geography-based. I think there are a lot of differences from [other] theories.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Today\u2019s politics have also generated abundant discussion about the future of governance and democracy. In this vein, Acemoglu says, \u201cThe Narrow Corridor\u201d is an engagement with the past meant to illuminate the present.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe need to think about history,\u201d Acemoglu says. \u201cWe are writing this book because we think it\u2019s relevant to the urgent challenges for us today. Creating the right sort of political balance, and mobilizing society while not disempowering laws and institutions, are completely first-order challenges we face today. I hope our perspective will shed some light on those issues.\u201d<\/p>\n
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