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

"Daron Acemoglu is an economist of Turkish origin who is a professor at MIT. James Robinson is a political scientist and also a very distinguished academic. They’ve written a slew of books, several together. They write real political economy and have been splendidly influential. I think they’re wonderful economists. The reason I chose The Narrow Corridor is that it is the closest to the argument in my most recent book, and it influenced it a great deal, while having, as you indicated, an even broader canvas. So the argument they have is that to manage a complex civilization, you want a society in which civil society is influential and powerful, so it’s not just an autocracy. But if the civil society is too strong and the state too weak, it collapses into different forms of anarchy, so you don’t want that either. They start off with the views of Hobbes , the great English political theorist of the early 17th century, who propounded the view that in order to have a functioning state, you need what he called a Leviathan , which is an overpowering state that can prevent catastrophic disorder like the one he experienced. In his view, the English Civil War showed that you need a strong state to prevent terrible catastrophes in which vast numbers of people die. It deeply influenced his view of the world. “We should have paid much more attention to what was happening to the losers” But Acemoglu and Robinson point out that it’s not very nice living under an absolute state. It’s rather repressive and most of us wouldn’t want to live in contemporary Russia or China. We want something else. We want a society in which civil society—normal associations of people acting together, talking freely and so on, have a real role. We can think of that as democracy. But if nobody obeys the state, we then start having to look out for ourselves, the state disappears, and we’re back into anarchy. They argue there is a narrow corridor between the two, where there’s just enough state to give order, but there’s enough civil society to give democracy and freedom. Civilization is basically about having that balance. They discuss at length the difficulties of this and how rare it is. They discuss the Leviathans on one side, but they also discuss societies—and a lot of their examples come from developing countries, Latin American ones particularly—where the Leviathan is too weak. It’s what they call ‘a paper Leviathan.’ It interferes with everything in a chaotic way but doesn’t provide order. The Leviathan is weak, the society is an anarchy, and nothing productive gets done. The really crucial point they make is that the sort of society we think we live in in a country like ours—which is stable, ordered and reasonably prosperous and, at the same time, gives genuine freedoms to people and associations—is incredibly fragile. It can never be taken for granted. Its imperfections must be dealt with to preserve its legitimacy, which is a theme of my book. But we also have to remember how dangerous change is because we can tip ourselves over into either the Leviathan or anarchy. So I like this book. I like the image of a narrow corridor as a way of thinking about how difficult the task of maintaining what many people in the contemporary world would think of as a civilized order is. I reviewed books by them before and what’s interesting about their previous works is that they started off with a basic optimism about the Western system. They were in the Francis Fukuyama camp, if you like. They thought that the world was tending towards liberal democracy . They focused very much on institutions (as opposed to the environment) and argued that if you got the right institutions, it would just follow. In this book, they realize it’s more complicated than that. It’s about the people and their values, how they relate to one another, their sense of history, of who they are, and the institutions are as much a reflection of that as a cause—or at least that’s my interpretation. That’s very much how I see it. But they were very optimistic about the world as a whole. After the fall of the Soviet Union, and the spread of democracy across much of the developing world, many of us were. 30 years ago, we thought we were moving into a liberal democratic world. It turns out that wasn’t the case, not at all. This book reflects, I think, their reckoning with a very painful reality. It’s important because it’s a reckoning with reality we all need to go through, which is, of course, why I wrote my book. Yes, very much so. I’ve been an adult person for 55 years now, so it’s almost inevitable that you realize that you got quite a few things wrong—particularly that you were too naive about. If I think about Britain and America, for example, I took for granted the basic stability of political and social institutions and relations to a naive degree. There were assumptions about what economists would call ‘degrees of freedom’ in the system, in changing policy and institutions, which turned out to be much more dangerous for the underpinnings of democracy than most of us realized. And this is my reckoning with that. I very much regret that I didn’t realize this 30 years ago, but I didn’t. That’s a very important question. I think I would say that particularly over the last 40 years or so, in economic policy and institutional development, we should have paid much more attention to what was happening to the losers. Yes, we had winners, but what about all the losers? And I would also focus much more on how the winners are behaving and the sort of society they’re creating. It would have been very difficult, because the forces acting on the other side were objectively very powerful—as I discussed at the beginning—but with that general mantra, we might have done a better job of managing the transformations that have befallen us. Many of them were going to be very difficult to manage in any case but, at the very least, we could have been more aware that what might be at stake is not just policy mistakes, but fundamental damage to the trust of people in their political lives and their society’s political system. I should have been more aware of the things that could follow once people lose that trust. That’s really quite important."

"This is perhaps the most ambitious account of the origins of contemporary democracies since Francis Fukuyama’s The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution . It makes the convincing argument that political liberty depends on a precarious balance between a strong state and a strong society. So rather than thinking, as we often tend to, of state power and civil power as being in conflict with each other, they show that a flourishing society really needs both. There’s a ‘narrow corridor’ in which the state is strong enough to protect the individual from oppressive groups, to maintain order, and to put in place the conditions for economic development, but at the same time, society is strong enough to make sure that the state doesn’t become oppressive and stifling. And for anybody who wants to understand why democracy flourishes in some parts of the world and historically struggled in others, this is a deeply-informed yet extremely readable explanation. There’s a debate in which I think both poles are simplistic. One pole is the idea that every nation in the world is simply waiting for democracy to come to its shore and if some outside power instituted a democratic constitution, political liberty would immediately flourish. That idea has driven a lot of foreign policy mistakes in the United States and elsewhere over the last several decades and it is wrong. On the other end, there is now a cynical idea, which sometimes dresses itself up as being idealistic, which says that other countries prefer dictatorships or prefer theocracy, that democracy and liberty are not universal values. The picture that emerges from the work of Acemoglu and Robinson is that democratic institutions have tremendous benefits and that many people around the world really do desire them. But the conditions for democracy are difficult to create and they are not easily imposed from the outside."