A Shackled Leviathan That Keeps Roaming and Growing.

• Author: Lemieux, Pierre

The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty

By Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson

576 pp.; Penguin Press, 2019

The Narrow Corridor, by economists Daron Acemoglu of MIT and James Robinson of the University of Chicago, was released in 2019 and since then it has been used to support calls for increasing "state capacity." The book was not reviewed in these pages when it first appeared, and it should be discussed here.

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, a 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...