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Key insights from
The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies,
and the Fate of Liberty
By
Daron Acemoglu, James A. Robinson
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What you’ll learn
Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither is democracy. MIT
professor Daron Acemoglu and University of Chicago professor James A.
Robinson lead us down what they call “the narrow corridor,” a pathway and
crucible through which a civilization or culture must pass if liberty is to
be realized. Framing this narrow corridor is an excessively strong society
on one side and an excessively strong state on the other. Too strong a
society, and there’s anarchy; too strong a state, and there’s dictatorship.
Liberty either unprotected or unprotected. Drawing from history and
geopolitics, Acemoglu and Robinson show us why liberty is so tough to
develop and hang on to.
Read on for key insights from The Narrow Corridor.
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1. Checks and
balances are not a guarantee against tyranny.
In the Epic of Gilgamesh, Gilgamesh is the king of
the Sumerian city Uruk. He is shrewd and powerful, and no one dares
challenge his abuses. The people cry out to Anu, the main god of the
Sumerian pantheon, and ask him to rescue them. Anu hears the people’s cries
and asks Aruru, (essentially Mother Earth), to create a double of
Gilgamesh—someone who is his equal in power, cunning, and arrogance. Aruru
makes Enkidu, and plants him in Uruk to challenge Gilgamesh. This strategy
is an ancient version of checks and balances.
But then there’s a problem: After an initial meeting and
brawl, Gilgamesh and his lookalike Enkidu become friends and brothers
instead of rivals as the gods had anticipated. Together, the pair becomes
an indomitable force that continues to oppress the people of Sumer. They
slay whatever monster the gods send to humble them. Instead of checking
each other’s power, Gilgamesh and Enkidu become even more of a menace than
Gilgamesh was on his own.
Liberty needs law and order to thrive, but it must be the
people who guide the state—not the other way around. When the state
controls the people, you get situations like Syria leading up to 2011,
where Assad brutally repressed protests until his government was scattered,
instead of seeing protest as a healthy part of political life.
The basic quid pro quo for freedom is a strong
state and a strong society. The two together create an environment
where people can move freely about their lives without threat of violence,
dominance, or intimidation. That’s a bare minimum for freedom to exist. For
that to happen, the state must protect its people and uphold law so people
can pursue their lives freely. But society must also be robust and capable
of restraining a state’s power and make sure the state uses its power for
citizens' freedom, not to control them. These two posts of state and
society form a narrow corridor between which freedom is possible. But there
are many ways in which one can become too strong and the other too weak to
keep the corridor open and democracy alive.
As the dangerous alliance between two powerful tyrants in
the Epic of Gilgamesh shows us, the most effective checks and
balances aren’t between co-ruling king-brothers or between branches of
government. They can collude and conspire and render founding documents irrelevant
in their workarounds. People can still be pressured, squeezed between the
violence and pandemonium of unprotected anarchy on one side and the fear of
governmental oppression on the other.
Between pandemonium and despotism is a narrow corridor. Entering
the narrow corridor is not realized in a single epic moment. Movement along
the corridor is an uneasy fluctuation between one pole and the other.
Ideally, however, the state and society do not compete, but cooperate. This
is a win for everyone.
A vital distinction here is that freedom isn’t a doorway or
threshold because it isn’t accomplished in an instant. It takes time. It’s
more of a long hallway.
Liberty is a corridor because a society must walk through
the process of eliminating violence by establishing and enforcing rule of
law. The elites have to learn that they’re not above the law while diverse
groups of people must play nice and cooperate. The corridor is narrow
because liberty is a complex and precarious task. Pitfalls await any
society that attempts to become free. These pitfalls include questions of
how government navigates an increasingly global, complex world without
becoming controlling, or how state and society view things as both-and,
rather than a zero-sum tussle.
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2. The world is
not on the verge of being consumed by anarchy, liberty, or technological
dictatorship—all three are at play in different places.
In his famous book The End of History, published in 1989,
political theorist Francis Fukuyama announced that the world was slowly but
surely conforming to the United States and democracy had won out over
communism. A few years later, Robert Kaplan published a book warning us of
"the coming anarchy" that will envelop the globe. More recently
historian Yuval Noah Harari wrote an essay telling us that technology helps
dictatorships more than it does democracies, that more tech means more
parts of our lives are under the control of our overlords. Freedom.
Anarchy. Technocratic control. These are radically different predictions,
but which will it be?
If you go to China, you might think technocratic
dictatorships will win out. Their surveillance setup is intricate,
extensive, and invasive. They have control over the media, the internet,
and the citizenry. Any resistance to the government is systematically
quashed.
If you go to Africa or the Middle East, however, you might
be more sympathetic with the anarchy thesis. In the Democratic Republic of
Congo, for example, the Congolese joke about the infamous Article 15 that’s
found in all six of the Constitutions, they say. Article 15 simply says, Debrouillez
vous, or “fend for yourself.” What’s humorous is that Article 15 does
not actually exist on paper, but it’s in full effect in everyday life. The
majority of citizens feel their government fails to afford them any
concrete provisions or protections. Murder is common. Pockets of the
country are controlled by insurgent groups. In 2010, the DCR was the rape
capital of the world. Article 15 is a sardonic commentary on an unstable, anarchic
country that is democratic in name only.
There are, however, countries that stay within the narrow
corridor between anarchy and despotism, where state and society are robust
enough for liberty to emerge. So the answer to the question of whether anarchy,
despotism, or freedom is the way of the future is: “All of them.” The world
is far too big, dynamic, and complex to place any one frame over the entire
globe.
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3. The Leviathan
(the state) is just as likely to make people’s lives nasty, brutish, and
short as it is to protect their lives from becoming so.
Leviathan is a mythical sea creature referenced in the Old
Testament book of Job. It’s enormous, powerful, and fills us with fear.
Thomas Hobbes used this creature to describe the club-wielding government,
to which people give their power and rights in order to protect themselves
from “warre” or anarchy. Left to their own devices, he argued, people
engaged in “a war of all against all.” People would rather fear a Leviathan
than fear anyone and everyone. He was correct that elimination of warre
(the conditions of dominance) is an essential task for people. Where Hobbes
went wrong was that there were plenty of stateless societies free of
violence—even if they weren’t exceptionally free.
Might does not make right as Hobbes thought. It doesn’t
bring freedom either. Life can be just as nasty, brutish, and short with a
Leviathan as without one. The Third Reich was a ferocious, bureaucratic
Leviathan—and it stripped many of its citizens of their rights, freedoms,
and lives instead of protecting them. During China’s Great Famine, which
began in the 1950s, life was nasty, brutish, and cut short for 45 million
people—not because the Leviathan was missing, but because the Leviathan was
very much present. Under Mao, anyone caught calling the “Great Harvest” a
famine was submitted to the “struggle”—a veiled way of saying beaten to
death.
To clarify, the Despotic Leviathan isn’t despotic simply
because it starves and tortures its citizens or sends them off to death camps.
More basically, it’s despotic because it represses the voice of the people
about how the power they’ve given the Leviathan should be wielded.
The very real possibility of a Despotic Leviathan creates a
big problem for Hobbes’ theory. People give their power to the government
to be protected from each other, but that assumes the state will justly
mete out punishment to those who try to harm other citizens. It is not an
easy task to keep the Leviathan strong enough to protect citizens, but
shackled enough that it won’t turn on the people and oppress them.
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4. In the absence
of a Leviathan, people rely on strict customs and rituals to maintain order
and contain violence.
Societies without a Leviathan weave together rituals and
customs to form a “cage of norms.” A cage of norms keeps people safe as
long as they operate within the norms. These customs and traditions become
so deeply ingrained and rigidly observed that stepping outside them has
severe consequences. This reduces chaos, but it also reduces freedom.
Moreover, the traditions inevitably tilt in favor of elites.
This shows up with men in positions of power, and women on the bottom rungs
for the most part. With rare exceptions, caged norms societies perpetuate
significant power imbalances between men and women—especially in the Middle
East and Asia.
Take the Pashtuns in Afghanistan as an example: A woman
can’t leave the house without a male chaperone—a father, a brother, or a
husband. And when a Pashtun woman is in public, she must wear a burka.
Failing to follow these codes incites severe punishment. In Pashtun
society, people will go to extreme lengths to exact revenge if their honor
is called into question.
India is another place that relies heavily on a cage of
norms. Even though it’s technically a democracy, liberty isn’t exactly
thriving. A constitution, parliament, and voting system are a thin veneer
that overlays an ancient system of caste. Caste is a far more potent force,
one that influences behavior and society. It cripples India’s ability to
unify and mobilize because it fragments society into hundreds of smaller
groups.
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5. It is difficult
to shackle the Leviathan, but that’s what needs to happen for liberty to
emerge.
History shows us that creating a Shackled Leviathan is a
colossal task. Shackling the Leviathan means allowing the state to become
powerful enough to effect good in the lives of people without becoming
despotic and controlling, but also not so weak that people are left
defenseless against anyone who is stronger. It means creating a society
that is robust and cohesive enough to challenge the Leviathan if it starts
becoming too powerful. Entering and remaining in the narrow corridor long
enough to shackle the Leviathan takes time.
It’s a stressful political dance over the long-haul: When
society is stronger than the state, the dance moves toward the Absent
Leviathan, governed more by a cage of norms than rule of law. When the
state is strong and society is weak, the political dance moves toward a
Despotic Leviathan. But liberty can emerge and be preserved if the
Leviathan can be kept between the two extremes long enough for state and
society to become strong together.
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6. Europe has been
a seedbed of many successful democracies thanks to two ancient
influences—but not the ones that most people guess.
What was it that led to Europe establishing so many
successful states? In many cases throughout history, society or state grows
strong at the expense of the other, but there are plenty of European
success stories, where state and society grew robust together. Explanations
abound for the factors that brought Europe into the narrow corridor of
freedom and democracy. Some cite religious reasons, like the
Judeo-Christian background. Others point to climate and geography. Some
have even surmised that there was just something inherently special about
European culture.
The real factors, however, are twofold: a Germanic tribal
structure that was highly democratic and ancient Roman legal and
bureaucratic norms. We can look at these dual forces as blades. On their
own, they cut toward one of the two extremes: an Absent Leviathan (Germanic
tribes) or Despotic Leviathan (ancient Rome). But 1500 years ago, as Rome
was falling, the blades came together and formed a kind of civilizational
scissors or shears, which cut through the political backdrop everyone had
taken for granted.
Europe entered the corridor when the Germanic tribes (or
“barbarians,” as the Romans called them) sacked Rome. As a result, the
spirit of hierarchy and organization and law in the Roman Empire and the
Church bled into local democratic customs. “Bled” is an appropriate word:
Europe’s entry into the corridor of liberty was racked with violence and
turmoil. Europe endured centuries of bloodshed as it careened uneasily
between tyranny and anarchy. Some European polities stayed in the corridor
between the two extremes and managed to shackle the Leviathan as society
and state grew up together.
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7. The United
States made a deal with the devil to create a Shackled Leviathan.
A strong case can be made that the United States is a
gleaming success story: a people deeply committed to freedom, suspicious of
government overreach, a Constitution that shackled the Leviathan from the
time of its founding, the ardent belief of its citizens that they have a
right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—a right that the state
is obliged to protect.
You could make the case that the United States has a
Shackled Leviathan and remains within the narrow corridor of liberty, but
the country’s success has been mixed. Many glowing renditions of US history
forget the dark side of the US struggle to keep the Leviathan shackled:
powerful enough to protect citizens while also restrained enough that it
can’t abuse power.
There are several major factors that block the country from
measuring up to its claims of exceptionalism. One factor that dampens a
cheery reading of US history is that a well-thought-out Constitution is not
enough to ensure liberty. The United States could not have entered the
narrow corridor of liberty without early colonists who were vigilant, bold,
and iconoclastic. They were skeptical rabble rousers who kept the
government on its toes. Society, in other words, was robust—robust enough
to restrain the Leviathan of the state.
But did they render the state too impotent to protect its
citizens adequately? Another issue is in the Constitution itself. It
intentionally created a weak state. The federal form of government, which
grants states’ rights, in effect made allowances for localized despotisms
like slavery and Jim Crow. This means that throughout the United States’
history, certain segments of the population have been routinely denied
liberty. If we describe liberty as the ability to act in the absence of
dominance (through violence, intimidation, or threats), then the United
States does not measure up as liberty’s darling.
Violence in the United States is five times higher than in
Western Europe. Ineffective law enforcement leaves inner cities vulnerable
to violence and neglect. Among residents of US inner cities, PTSD rates are
far higher than among veterans—an average of 46 percent—versus just 10–20
percent. When it’s no safer walking around the streets of your neighborhood
than it was for a soldier in Afghanistan, you wonder how much liberty you
have.
Another consequence of severely restricted federal power is
the State’s inability to provide basic needs of citizens without
public-private partnerships. Most other wealthy, democratic nations are
able to do so, but the United States instead facilitates contracts with
private entities to provide basic services and infrastructure. Blending
private and public interests might stimulate the economy, but it can also
stimulate collusion and corruption.
Edward Snowden exposed the National Security Agency’s
colossal breaches of constitutional rights including data gathering and
large scale surveillance. In doing so, he also revealed how heavily the US
government needed to rely on private entities to provide security. Tech
giants like Facebook, Yahoo!, Google, and Microsoft and phone behemoths
like AT&T and Verizon were either forced or willingly gave the
government massive amounts of data from private citizens. In either case,
it’s a huge problem.
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Endnotes
These insights are
just an introduction. If you're ready to dive deeper, pick up a copy of The
Narrow Corridor here. And since we get a commission on
every sale, your purchase will help keep this newsletter free.
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