Throughout their careers Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson have tackled big questions. What are the origins of dictatorship and democracy? Why do nations fail? Why are some countries prosperous while others remain mired in poverty? With their latest book, The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty, Acemoglu and Robinson continue along their ambitious path, seeking to understand nothing less than “how and why human societies have achieved or failed to achieve” liberty (p. xi).
Liberty, for Acemoglu and Robinson, is “the absence of dominance”: individuals must be “free to choose their actions,” as well as have “the ability to exercise that freedom.” (Although they do not put it this way, Acemoglu and Robinson favor a “positive” rather than a “negative” conception of liberty.) This type of liberty is rare in human history, emerging only in very particular contexts or, as they put it, when countries find themselves within a narrow corridor.
In contrast to libertarians and other advocates of a minimal state, Acemoglu and Robinson argue that a necessary condition for liberty is a strong state capable of maintaining order and providing a wide range of public goods. But although a strong state is necessary for liberty, it is not sufficient. Indeed, Acemoglu and Robinson argue that a strong state can be antithetical to liberty, because a state strong enough to maintain order and provide a wide range of public goods is also strong enough to dominate society.
So, if neither an Absent nor a Despotic Leviathan will do, what will? Acemoglu and Robinson argue what is required is a Shackled Leviathan: a “state [with] the capacity to enforce laws, control violence, resolve conflicts and provide public services” but one that is “tamed and controlled by an assertive, well-organized society” (p. 24). Liberty, in short, requires a strong state balanced by a strong society.
This is a wise and important point and parallels arguments by other scholars of state development and state-society relations like Michael Mann, Peter Evans, Joel Migdal, and Andreas Wimmer. There are, however, some vagaries associated with Acemoglu and Robinson’s description of the context within which liberty flourishes.
First, Acemoglu and Robinson define a strong society as one able to “contend, constrain, and check” the state (p. 146). But this definition is tautological: it assesses the independent variable (society’s strength) by the dependent variable (its ability to shackle the state). Without an independent measure of society’s strength, it is hard to evaluate statements like the following—“if the state and elites become too powerful, we end up with the Despotic Leviathan. If they fall behind, we get the Absent Leviathan” (p. 40)—because we have no way of assessing whether states or societies are becoming “stronger” or “weaker” separate from the outcome being described: an “out of balance” relationship between them. Two measures of society’s strength that would fit Acemoglu and Robinson’s analysis are the density and nature (reinforcing or cross-cutting) of its civil society organizations, because these critically shape whether citizens can cooperate, overcome collective action problems, engage in political action, and so on.
This raises a second important point that Acemoglu and Robinson discuss but perhaps do not fully grapple with. They stress the “strength” or “weakness” (however measured) of states and societies as crucial, but the nature of states and societies is equally important. Divided and polarized societies, for example, may be “strong” in the sense of being highly mobilized, organized, and participatory, but such societies are less capable of (or interested in?) checking despotic states than unified ones. Similarly, states can be strong in the sense of being able to maintain order, provide public goods, and so on, but their power can be exercised or institutionalized in dramatically different ways. The Prussian and late nineteenth/early twentieth-century German states, for example, were “strong” but were constructed in a way that cemented the power of antiliberal, antidemocratic elites, making it harder for a society capable of shackling them to develop and thus for liberty to flourish.
A third issue concerns democracy. Interestingly, democracy is not directly emphasized in Acemoglu and Robinson’s description of what makes a society able to shackle the state. But is not democracy a necessary, but surely not sufficient condition, for a society to be able to mobilize, organize, protest, and so on? Relatedly, without institutionalized mechanisms to check executives, maintain the rule of law, ensure that citizens are able to get rid of leaders who are unresponsive to them, and so on, how can the state be deterred from dominating society? The Narrow Corridor’s relative lack of emphasis on democracy may be related to a distinction between the conditions necessary for the emergence and maintenance of liberty, with democracy being more important for the latter than the former.
This brings me to another question I had about The Narrow Corridor. Acemoglu and Robinson’s first contribution is to make the case that a balance between a strong state and society creates the narrow corridor within which liberty flourishes. But they say that they are not just describing the context within which liberty flourishes but also providing a theory. Typically, theories provide answers to “why” questions; in this case, why some countries, at some times, fall into and out of the narrow corridor. The Narrow Corridor provides innumerable fascinating discussions of various societies’ political paths from ancient times to the present, but I was unable to pull out of these discussions a clear, systematic argument about which variables determine why or when the “right” state–society balance appears.
Acemoglu and Robinson reject many of the most prominent existing theories about the development of states, societies, and the relationship between them. They treat war as a dependent rather than an independent variable, affected by the balance between state and society rather than affecting that balance. They argue, for example, that warfare in early modern Europe pushed Prussia, but not Switzerland, toward despotism, because Swiss society was able to counterbalance an increasingly powerful state. They view technological change similarly. Examining the contemporary period, for example, Acemoglu and Robinson argue that whether new technologies will increase the despotic powers of the state depends on the strength of society: in Denmark, where society is strong, the state’s despotic powers are less like to increase as a result of technological change than in China, where society is weak. Acemoglu and Robinson also reject modernization theory. They do not believe, for example, that economic development alone will change Chinese society enough to shift the country off its long-standing despotic path.
In their own discussions of countries’ political paths, Acemoglu and Robinson sometimes stress structural factors and historical legacies as the key variables pushing countries down different political paths. For example, they argue that the answer to the question of why Europe experienced an “unprecedented rise of liberty…lies in a unique series of historical events 1,500 years ago that created a fortuitous balance between the powers of central authority and those of common men.… It is this balance that put Europe into the corridor” (p. 153). Particularly important was the takeover of Europe at the end of the fifth century by “democratically organized tribal societies centered on assemblies and norms of consensual decision making” and “state institutions” inherited from the Roman Empire and the Christian Church (pp. 153, 199). There is no explanation, however, for why the advantageous legacies of these historical events persisted over time, whereas other historical legacies less conducive to the rise of liberty, such as religious intolerance, obscurantism, and a caste-like system of estates, did not.
Yet, despite the attention paid to structural factors and historical legacies, The Narrow Corridor also clearly confronts the limits to such variables or explanations. Some countries, for example, despite auspicious background conditions, fall out of the narrow corridor. Europe is in this camp, because the continent fell in and out of the narrow corridor many times between 500 AD and the modern era, even though its ancient legacies prepared the scene for the rise of the Shackled Leviathan, thus making clear that “history is not destiny” (p. 302). Other countries, meanwhile, lacking auspicious background conditions, nevertheless sometimes manage to shift into the narrow corridor, something Acemoglu and Robinson often attribute to the actions of political leaders who have an “edge” (by which I think they mean extraordinary political skills or charisma), a “will to power,” and an ability to form coalitions to support their political projects.
Given the historical and global range of the cases examined in The Narrow Corridor, it is not surprising that history turns out to be “messy.” Indeed, it is hard to imagine that a single or perhaps even one type of variable could explain something as complex as the emergence or maintenance of liberty. But given political science’s current mania for “causal identification,” I think it is worth being clear about what we can and should expect from different types of analyses.
Perhaps theory building—in the sense of offering an independent variable that can be clearly connected to a particular dependent variable—is not possible when tackling big questions like the emergence or maintenance of liberty. Perhaps that type of simple, straightforward analysis is only suitable for very limited situations—one where the analyst can manipulate variables, be satisfied with somewhat thin and superficial understandings of causality, or is willing to identify only the last link in complex causal chains, as experiments do, for example. But unless we, as a field, are willing to abandon the big questions, a different understanding of our goals is necessary.
In my 2019 book, Democracy and Dictatorship in Europe, for example, I do not identify a particular independent variable or set of variables or claim to have a theory that explains political development across time and space. What the book offers instead is an analysis of European political history from the ancien régime to the present day that identifies patterns of or generalizations about how political development occurred. I wonder if that is, in fact, what Acemoglu and Robinson aimed to provide in The Narrow Corridor, rather than a “theory” in the more traditional sense.
If, however, Acemoglu and Robinson do indeed want to offer a theory of why some countries end up within the narrow corridor, and not a description of that corridor—an endeavor, I want to stress, that I believe is important, difficult, and undervalued by our discipline—or some generalizations about how that corridor has historically emerged or been maintained, then some questions naturally present themselves. What are the most important variables pushing countries into or out of the narrow corridor? Do wise, determined, politically savvy leaders always have the possibility of shifting their country’s political path or are particular preconditions for such dramatic shifts necessary? If so, what are they? Are the conditions favoring the emergence of liberty the same as conditions enabling its maintenance? If not, how do they differ?
