Violence and Social Orders is the latest in a series of recent books offering rational choice, institution-based accounts of how the advanced industrial democracies of the West have achieved political stability, large measures of personal freedom, and sustained economic growth, while most other countries in the world have not. Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson's Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006) is probably the most notable of these efforts, but several others have sought to analyze the Great Transition from what Douglass C. North, John Joseph Wallis and Barry R. Weingast call “natural states” to modern, “open-access” societies.

I was not surprised, then, that when I began reading Violence and Social Orders, I felt like I had read this book before. It eventually occurred to me, however, that it is not the current crop of books on the Great Transition that echo through the pages of Violence and Social Orders. Its roots actually trace back more directly to an older book, and that is the provocative and highly influential Political Order in Changing Societies, by Samuel P. Huntington (new edition with foreword by Francis Fukuyama. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1968, 2006). North, Wallis, and Weingast never refer to Huntington, but it is his book upon which they build. They cover much of the same ground as Huntington, engaging in a sweeping discussion of several societies at various points in history, ranging from the Roman, Carolingian, and Aztec Empires to Tudor England, revolutionary France, and colonial America. In no way, however, is Violence and Social Orders a mere rehash of previous work. The line of argument that North, Wallis, and Weingast pursue is innovative and insightful, and ultimately much more compelling than either Huntington's or the other, more recent “big think” books alluded to above.

What is actually entailed in the Great Transition to modernity has long been appreciated. Huntington and social theorists going back to Durkheim identify the requisite social transformation as the replacement of personal (typically patron-client) relationships based upon the ascriptive community attachments of family, kin, and tribe, with more stable and longer-lived organizational arrangements based upon impersonal, standardized, universalistic norms. Like North, Wallis, and Weingast, Huntington recognizes that politics in natural states is a limited access, inside game for a small number of elites, while open-access societies are characterized by, well, open access: “The institutions of the traditional polity need only structure the participation of a small segment of society. The institutions of a modern polity must organize the participation of the mass of the population…. The distinctive institution of the modern polity, consequently, is the political party” (Huntington 2006, p. 89). North, Wallis, and Weingast have a somewhat different emphasis, i.e., the rich, stable democracies of the West have bigger, denser, and more decentralized networks of subnational government and nongovernment organizations. Open access means well-entrenched individual property rights, broad participation in the market economy, and political competition in the form of free elections. Both agree that modern, open-access societies are more adaptable to changing circumstances, more open to innovation, more resilient to exogenous, growth-crippling shocks, and are thus characterized by much higher levels of material wealth, freedom, and security. All this we have heard before.

Violence and Social Orders, however, provides several insights that significantly advance our understanding of how modern, open-access societies have emerged. First, the authors recognize that one cannot take a static view of traditional, natural states. These states must instead encourage (or at least allow for) the emergence of institutions that, while compatible with the interests of those elites privileged by the status quo of the natural state, create three “doorstep conditions” that make the transition to open access societies possible. These are 1) Rule of law for elites, 2) Perpetually lived organizations, both public and private, and 3) Consolidated political control of the military (p. 26). Secondly, getting to these doorstep conditions is far more than a matter of pursuing the right policies. The Great Transition does not occur simply because enlightened rulers have decided it must be so, as the failure of “revolutions from above,” such as those sought by Catherine the Great or Emperor Joseph II, clearly demonstrate. Indeed, those societies that originally succeeded in making the Great Transition did so without anyone fully understanding what was going on: “Elite groups in eighteenth-century Europe could not have intended to produce a transition to open access because no one knew an open-access society was a viable alternative, much less how to construct it” (p. 188). North, Wallis, and Weingast argue instead that the institutional evolution necessary to get to the doorstep of the Great Transition is instead the product of “thousands of incremental changes” (p. 167) that are ad hoc, practical responses to a variety of different problems encountered over time.

One such innovation that they discuss at length is the Navy Bill-a short-term revenue anticipation note-issued by the British Navy in the early eighteenth century. Designed to allow the Victualling Board to supply the fleet with food and materiel in a more convenient and reliable fashion, this innovation encouraged and reinforced a wide range of other significant institutional developments, including the emergence of secondary financial markets where said bills were traded and discounted, and the letting out of contracts through competitive bidding. The authors also do a superb job tracing the evolution of property rights and land law in England, as well as changes in the governing structures of the medieval Roman Catholic Church that influenced and interacted with the European monarchies. In these and other analyses, North, Wallis, and Weingast stress that political and economic institutions, if they are to survive and adapt, must be consistent with people's beliefs about them. For this and other related reasons, the same formal institutions work very differently in limited versus open-access societies: “Elections produce different results in a society with open political competition than in a society with limited political competition. The institution of elections does not inherently produce democracy” (p. 15). One need only contemplate the elections held recently in Iran or Russia to appreciate this point.

By far the most important contribution made by this book, as the title presages, is its analysis of violence and its suppression. Violence is the omnipresent club behind the door. A central problem of all societies is the control of violence. There have been myriad studies of bargaining and distribution, and they have yielded elegant analytical results. Such studies assume, however, that people figuring out how to divide a dollar do not hit each other over the head or threaten to do so. One of the early signs that market reforms might not take in Russia following the wave of privatization that occurred in the early 1990s is that, rather than compete on price and quality, business rivals chose car bombs and hired hit men to get an edge on the competition.

But as mafia dons and rulers of nations have long known, violence is bad for business, and suppressing violence makes them better off. This is true in natural states, in modern open-access societies, and those that are somewhere in between. According to North, Wallis, and Weingast, natural states, which in one form or another have existed since the dawn of civilization, therefore survive and sometimes prosper because of their success in limiting violence. They limit violence by limiting access to political and economic power to privileged elites, who thus have a strong vested interest in maintaining the flow of rents they receive from the status quo. Access to violence is accordingly limited to the elites in the dominant coalition, but dispersed amongst them. Open-access societies, in contrast, operate in exactly the opposite fashion. By definition, citizens in general are free to participate in the market economy and to engage in political participation. Access to violence, in contrast, is strictly limited. For all practical purposes, this can only occur if the government has achieved consolidated control over the institutional mechanisms of state-sanctioned violence-the military, the police, and the courts-and that these institutions do not intervene and cannot be exploited in the ongoing competition for economic and political power (p. 153).

Therein lies the rub: consolidated political control of the military, which is one of the hallmarks and also one of the chief guarantors of the open-access society, must initially be brought forth in the natural, limited access state. As indicated above, it is one of the three doorstep conditions identified above, and also the key one: “Achieving consolidated control of the military appears to be the most difficult doorstep condition for a natural state to achieve” (p. 169). As the authors concede in the midst of a protracted and not entirely successful struggle to explain just how it is that political control of the military might come about, it is inherently paradoxical, and, “of all the concepts in the book … the hardest to understand” (p. 172).

While there is thus still much more work to be done in understanding how to get from here to there, the authors' insights regarding the control of violence in natural, limited access societies versus modern, open-access societies are nonetheless major contributions. Among other things, the analysis in Violence and Social Orders allows us to makes sense of two major questions that Huntington addresses in Political Order in Changing Societies. The first concerns the nature of authoritarianism. As Huntington sees it, the Great Transition is tricky to navigate. Rapid increases in mass political participation, i.e., in opening up access, may outpace the ability of existing institutions to maintain order. The resultant violence and instability undermines the conditions necessary for economic growth and political development. In such cases, authoritarian regimes are likely to seize power and restore order, one way or another. Huntington is not sure what to make of this, as the consequences of praetorian intervention vary dramatically. Much appears to depend upon the course chosen by nondemocratic rulers, and is thus difficult to predict. Run by generals, the Communist Party, or a strong man, authoritarian regimes are clearly capable of halting the Great Transition in its tracks. In other cases, however, they serve to make the country safe for open access, democratic government; pointing to cases in which “political parties which have come out of the womb of the army” (p. 239), Huntington cites Ataturk as a prime example. In a subsequent book, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993) Huntington produces a list of five reasons as to why so many formerly authoritarian regimes have been replaced by democratic government. But these reasons are actually just coincident historical trends, and do not tell us why other authoritarian regimes have not given way to democracy.

The second phenomenon concerns the extent of violence that occurs in making the transition from limited to open-access societies. Why have some movements toward modernization and open access faltered as they fall prey to outbreaks of violence and disorder? Conversely, why have so many transitions entailed little or no violence? Huntington's explanations appeal to the nature and constellation of social forces that are present at a particular time. In many cases, it is urban workers who support violence in the quest for open access, but such movements are rarely effectual without the support of the peasantry (p. 277). The peasantry, however, is sometimes willing to engage in and support widespread revolutionary violence, while in other situations it remains stubbornly docile (p. 293). Furthermore, which way the peasants go depends less upon their objective circumstances than upon their feelings of relative deprivation and political consciousness: “The peasant's dissatisfaction stems from his realization that his material hardships and sufferings are much worse than those of other groups in society and they are not inevitable” (p. 298).

In both cases, Huntington has identified a crucially important phenomenon, but, as a social theorist, his explanations for them are ad hoc, unsystematic, and unpersuasive (what is wrong with Huntington is what is wrong with social theory). In contrast, North, Wallis, and Weingast's analysis of violence and its suppression provides a simple, straightforward path to understanding both authoritarianism and transitional violence. True enough; the reversion to authoritarianism is by definition a step backward in the transition to an open-access economy. But it is also the case, as noted earlier, that it is within limited access states controlled by privileged elites that the three “doorstep conditions” that make the transition to open-access societies possible must be attained.

This is particularly important in the case of the key doorstep condition-consolidated political control of the military. North, Wallis, and Weingast's analysis thus also explains why the Great Transition is sometimes accompanied by great violence, but often it is not. The key here is that the natural state's mode of controlling violence (essentially a power-sharing arrangement among privileged elites) not collapse before the open-access societies' mode (consolidated political control of the military) is in place. The communist regimes installed in Eastern Europe by the Soviets after World War II were ugly, brutal, and reprehensible, but it also the case that they were generally characterized by consolidated political control of the military. When these regimes fell, most of these countries were soon at least on the way to becoming open-access, market-oriented democracies with virtually no violence, despite wrenching economic and political dislocations. In Yugoslavia, in contrast, a large portion of the military, the Territorial Defense Forces, had been organized into ethnically homogenous units within each republic, province, and commune-a very old-school, natural state arrangement. In light of North, Wallis, and Weingast's analysis, results were predictable.