I’m back from quarantine with another book review. Daron Acemoglu & Jame Robinson’s best-known book, “Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty” was a highly influential and persuasive defence of democracy, that I certainly found useful and informative in doing the research for my first book (“Politics for the New Dark Age: Staying Positive Amidst Disorder.”) Now they’re back with a follow-up, “The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies and the Fate of Liberty”, a 500-page behemoth that aims to perform the same service for liberalism. I regret to inform everyone, however, that “The Narrow Corridor” does not reach the same heights of the original, and in fact is a genuine slog to get through. Despite my genuine admiration for Acemoglu & Robinson’s academic work, I can’t recommend this book, and this blog will tell you why.
Acemoglu & Robinson’s central thesis is that the long-run success of states depends on the balance of power between the ‘state’ and ‘society’. If states are too strong, you end up with a Despotic Leviathan that is good for short-term growth but is brittle and unstable. If society is too strong, Leviathan is Absent and societies suffer under a pre-modern war of all against all. The ideal place to be, according to Acemoglu & Robinson, is the ‘narrow corridor’ where state and society are balanced, producing a ‘Shackled Leviathan’ that is able to grow state capacity and individual liberty simultaneously. The trick is to navigate into and stay in the narrow corridor (which one clever twitter user has already dubbed the ‘birth canal of liberalism’) against the centripetal forces pulling this delicate balance apart.
To their credit, Acemoglu & Robinson support their thin thesis with an extensive, and one might say exhaustive, set of case studies. And this is where the problems start. Although the authors’ selection of studies is broad and includes many non-Western cultures, the vast bulk of the book is little better than a potted history of civilisation, a tendency that gets worse in the second half where the authors cover so many unrelated topics (e.g. racial politics in the US, #metoo, the origins of Al Qaeda and the War on Terror, globalization, automation and the rise of the Nazis) that it covers none of them well. It falls into the trap of so much mediocre writing of mistaking description for analysis. So while their history of the world might be of interest to a first-year political science or economics student, it does not stand up as a serious work of scholarship.
Liberalism for dummies
From the reviews I’ve seen online, “The Narrow Corridor” is popular with neoliberals, even though the text itself ostensibly defends some version of a social democratic welfare state. The reason, I suspect, is its simplistic definition of what liberalism is and how it operate, and its almost Fukuyama-esque assumption that there is only a single stable evolutionary pathway that societies can take in the long-run. Acemoglu & Robinson are stuck in the tired dichotomy of Hobbes and Locke. In other words, the State is a despotic Leviathan that is necessary to provide order and prevent a war of all against all. The only way to constrain the state’s despotic tendencies is through individual rights, and some soft notion of ‘civil society’ that is never fully explained or developed.
Acemoglu & Robinson valorise the idea of Liberty, but their definition of it is deeply constrained. Throughout ‘The Narrow Corridor’, liberty is to be understood solely as ‘negative freedom’: restraints on what the state can and cannot do with regard to individuals and their property. The authors are curiously uninterested in the development of the individual, or the pursuit of happiness, in a way that might lead to demands for positive liberty. Instead, rights are a constraint on the despotic tendencies of the State, and individuals benefit from the growth in state capacity (so long as it does not become overmighty). One can easily see how such a worldview (“capitalism lifts people out of poverty”) may be sympathetic to neoliberalism’s core claim to rule.
But this is more than just an ideological objection. In “The Narrow Corridor” it is not individuals but the State which is the primary ontological entity. But what is the state, and where does it come from? Acemoglu & Robinson have a unfortunate and deliberate tendency to label everyone living outside a modern, Weberian nation-state as ‘stateless’, without any consideration of how governance emerges slowly and organically from within pre-existing structures. A State has police and bureaucrats, we are told: there is either the modern state form, fully formed and rational-legal in its orientation, or there is despotism. No other form of governance is worth consideration. As a result, Acemoglu & Robinson ignore the many forms of social organisation in history that were not states, and claims a great many things to be states which were not. Italian city-states which were legally part of the Holy Roman Empire and Muhammad’s early Islamic ummah are States; but the Islamic Caliphates and post-colonial governments in Africa and Latin America are not.
A dash of chauvinism
Acemoglu & Robinson rightly critique narrow works of history that focus solely on structural factors to explain the rise of civilization (looking at you, Jared Diamond), and prefer history that is messy and path-dependent. They claim this resurrects the role of ‘agency’ in history. But this is not the agency of individuals - there is no methodological individualism in “The Narrow Corridor”. The people who matter, the people with agency, are ‘state-builders’: law-givers, prophets and conquerers who stand astride world history as heroes. Despite their central thesis being one of constant tension between state and society, Acemoglu & Robinson specify almost no dynamic mechanisms in their theory: no classes, no divergence of interests, no means of production. States evolve over time, allegedly, yet in their cosmology they also emerge fully-formed from the hands of Great Men. After that, all that matters is that coalitions and inclusiveness are good and polarisation and social conflict are bad. Neoliberals in suits with technocratic cabinets are the ideal way to govern a state, forever.
Like all liberals, therefore, Acemoglu & Robinson propose a universalistic and trans-historical ideal of what constitutes a good state. The challenge they, and all liberals face, is to explain why this apparently successful social equilibrium is so difficult to achieve. It’s unclear what actually determines the balance of power between state and society: is it ideology, religion, economics, geography, or culture? At one point or another, all of these factors are thrown into the mix, but it’s hard to escape the impression that the authors have fallen into the trap of relying heavily on ‘cultural’ explanations for the success and failure of states.
In “The Narrow Corridor”, the archetypes of a successful Shackled Leviathan are ancient Athens, Italian city-states and the United States. What constrains the growth of state power, we are told, is the formation of society on the basis of free, smallholding peasant farmers. It’s an argument, I suppose. But while in some societies landowners are the fountainhead of liberty, in other societies are different times landowners are the chief centres of reaction and despotism. ‘Labour coercion’, we are told, undermines the growth of liberty, yet both ancient Athens and the United States were slave-holding societies. Privatisation is good until it isn’t. The lack of consistency is an inevitable result of the sheer number of stories being told and the lack of a coherent framework linking them together.
The other twinge of cultural chauvinism in “The Narrow Corridor” is that Acemoglu & Robinson really, really don’t like pre-modern forms of social organisation. In this book, any form of social governance which is not a Weberian rational-legal nation-state is by definition part of the ‘cage of norms’ which holds societies back, explains their failure to build states and undermines their economy. Peoples aren’t allowed to develop their own forms of self-governance based on kin networks, reciprocity, religion and custom - all that must be swept aside in the name of progress, most likely by some conquerer or law-giver with the public’s best interests at heart. Non-liberal cultures, we are told, oppress people and keep them impoverished. Better for everyone if social interactions are anonymised and conducted solely on the basis of self-interest.
In the final analysis, Acemoglu & Robinson’s account of the rise of Shackled Leviathans in the West is so simplistic it could come out of a Ben Shapiro book. Only in the West, we are told, did societies inherit the twin boons of Roman law and the ‘Germanic’ proto-democratic practice of tribal assemblies. It’s as if two millennia of war, feudalism, imperialism, colonialism and the Cold War never happened. Western political and economic institutions had a complex evolutionary history, and yet modern liberal States have the same cultural toolkit as the fifth century Franks (in much the same way, it must be said, that the Chinese Communist Party is ascribed the same cultural toolkit as the Qin Empire, 2500 years earlier). The glaring and obvious errors in many if their takes on European history makes the reader suspect that they’re picking and choosing their lessons from other parts of the world as well.
Bad Economists
Acemoglu & Robinson struggle the hardest, as most liberals do, when it comes to explaining the rise of China. They often come across as admiring and envious of the economic usefulness of the Despotic Leviathan and its capacity to organise short-term economic growth - although they are typically silent on the reasons for this (land redistribution, the suppression of labour and the concentration of capital might be among them). But they argue, weakly, that this is unsustainable and that China, under the rule of the Communist Party, can never pose a long-term challenge to the cultural West. Moreover, their unwillingness to theorise about civil society and social movements mean they have no prescriptions for the Chinese people to get out of this perceived trap.
Innovation, we are told, requires creativity and creativity requires liberty. That’s a hell of a claim, but it constitutes the sum total of their argument for the inferiority of despotism. At various points, we are told that government regulation of any kind is no different from despotism, and that free markets are the only road out of poverty. No form of social organisation that is not universal liberalism can deliver sustainable improvements in quality of life. But this is, empirically not true. Any even in the liberal West, States had a long history of despotic growth behind them before they became philosophically modern.
Conclusion
“The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies and the Fate of Liberty” is a book by liberals for liberals. It won’t convince anyone else of its central claims, and the longer the book goes on the more unfocused and self-defeating it becomes. Acemoglu & Robinson wanted to write a book about everything and ended up writing a book about nothing. No matter how extensively sourced or research, the authors offers no guidance to the future or wisdom about the past that one could not pick up from reading newspaper columns. A pity.