North D.C. et al. Violence and Social Orders

A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge: Camdridge University Press, 2009.All societies must deal with the possibility of violence, and they do so in different ways. This book integrates the problem of violence into a larger social science and historical framework, showing how economic and political behavior are closely linked.Most societies, which we call natural states, limit violence by political manipulation of the economy to create privileged interests. These privileges limit the use of violence by powerful individuals, but doing so hinders both economic and political development. In contrast, modern societies create open access to economic and political organizations, fostering political and economic competition.The book provides a framework for understanding the two types of social orders, why open access societies are both politically and economically more developed, and how some twentyfive countries have made the transition between the two types.
Douglass C. North is co-recipient of the 1993 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science. He is the Spencer T. Olin Professor in Arts and Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, where he served as director of the Center for Political Economy from 1984 to 1990, and is the Bartlett Burnap Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a former member of the Board of Directors of the National Bureau of Economic Research for twenty years, Professor North received the John R. Commons Award in 1992. The author of ten books, including Institutions, Institutional Change, and Economic Performance (Cambridge University Press,1990) andUnderstanding the Process of Economic Change (2005), Professor North has research interests in property rights, economic organization in history, and the formation of political and economic institutions and their consequences through time. He is a frequent consultant for theWorld Bank and numerous countries on issues of economic growth.
John Joseph Wallis is professor of economics at the University of Maryland and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He received his Ph.D. from the University ofWashington in 1981 and went on to spend a two-year postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Chicago. During the 2006–7 academic year, he was a Visiting Scholar at the Hoover Institution and a Visiting Professor of Political Science at Stanford. Professor Wallis is an economic historian who specializes in the public finance of American governments and more generally on the relation between the institutional development of governments and the development of economies. His large-scale research on American state and local government finance, and on American state constitutions, has been supported by the National Science Foundation.
Barry R.Weingast is theWard C.Krebs Family Professor in the Department of Political Science and a Senior Fellow at theHoover Institution at StanfordUniversity.He is also a Senior Fellow (by courtesy) of the Stanford Center for International Development. Weingast received his Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology in 1977. Prior to teaching at Stanford, Professor Weingast spent ten years at Washington University in St. Louis in the Department of Economics and the School of Business. The recipient of the Riker Prize, the Heinz Eulau Prize, and the James Barr Memorial Prize, among others, he has also worked extensively with development agencies such as the World Bank and the U.S. Agency for International Development. ProfessorWeingast coauthored Analytical Narratives (1998) and coedited TheOxford Handbook of Political Economy (2006). His research focuses on the political foundations of markets, economic reform, and regulation, including problems of political economy of development, federalism and decentralization, and legal institutions.