In a 2019 interview with Yascha Mounk
I don’t think the evidence is consistent with the idea that slavery was good for economic development in the United States. If you look at the U.S. South, it was a lot poorer. It had very little manufacturing industry. It was less urbanized. It was much less publicly provisioned, fewer canals, fewer roads. So the South was much less developed. The slave economy was less innovative. If you look at patenting data, the South was much less innovative than the North or the West. So, I think the evidence is consistent with the idea that the slave economy actually held back the United States, not advanced it.
The South also had the benefit of actually being embedded in this bigger society with relatively functional institutions. In other parts of the world, like the Caribbean or Brazil, the slave economy had a much more profound effect on institutions. So I don’t think the evidence is consistent at all with the notion that the slave economy was an important positive in American capitalism. What the data suggests is that slavery was very profitable for plantation owners. Exploiting other people turns out to always be profitable for some people. But it had huge negative consequences for the economy. That’s what the evidence suggests.
We’re interested in economics, but we’ve always been trying to explain variation in institutions, because we think that’s so critical. Here we’re also interested in trying to broaden the discussion of what it is that makes for a good society. In a world where the Chinese are putting millions of face recognition cameras on every street corner, it seems that some notion of liberty is very critical for thinking about human welfare. What is it that people are complaining about in Hong Kong? Why is it that people are fleeing Syria? It’s not really about living standards. It’s about some basic notion of liberty and the consequences for welfare that has. If you think about Syria, there’s a very Hobbesian set of issues there, basic order and security.
As you see in the first chapter of the book, we start with a pretty Hobbesian sort of discussion, which is, in this very anarchic world, you do need a state. You can’t have liberty without a state mediating disputes and providing basic public goods. But that’s obviously not enough either. So we try to tap into this very old philosophical debate started by Hobbes about what it is that can promote order in societies.
I think there’s two arguments in the book for why we need a state.
- One is a sort of very traditional argument, which is that in stateless societies, there is a lot of Hobbesian war and disorder. Locke said: “Well, actually, it’s a little bit more orderly than Hobbes said, but there’s some inconveniences in the state of nature.” And in my experience in the world, just reading history and ethnography, there’s a lot of inconveniences in the state of nature. It’s very difficult to create a stateless society which has high levels of liberty, and that’s because of this threat of violence.
- But it’s also because the response to the absence of the state is often what we call in the book the “cage of norms.” Society structures itself in order to reduce the possibility of violence and conflict. And those restrictions, that cage of norms, also puts enormous constraints on liberty. Societies aren’t necessarily violent, but they’re not necessarily characterized by much liberty, either, because of how they head violence off.
What’s crucial is the balance of power between state and society. You need a state to provide order and public goods, but the state has to be “shackled.” It has to be under the control of society. That’s very much in the spirit, say, of Locke’s Second Treatise of Government, in which he says, essentially, “Look, Hobbes didn’t get this right, because you’ve got to worry about the governance of the state.” But Locke didn’t provide a positive theory of under what circumstances do you get a state that is governed in a way that promotes liberty. And so, what we try to do is provide a positive theory of that, and it’s these elements of the balance between state and society.
- The state can dominate society. That would be the Chinese case.
- But society can also dominate the state. That is the case in Lebanon, in large parts of Pakistan, in the Philippines and (historically) in sub-Saharan Africa.
- Or a balance can emerge. The balance emerge in the “narrow corridor” from which the book takes its title. That’s to do with historical contingency. How do you think about these Western European or Northern European dynamics? How come they got into the narrow corridor? That’s largely historical contingency: the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, where the Frankish tribes, especially the Merovingians, Clovis, fuse these very participatory traditions and political institutions with elements of Western Roman state institutions, administrative institutions, legal institutions, the church, etc. So you get this kind of blend of state and civic participation, which turns out to be very hard to achieve.
We don’t know enough about why Clovis Germanic traditions with Roman law. He was a sort of political entrepreneur. We understand the ideas better in the Chinese case than we do in the European case. Clovis himself didn’t write about this, or if he did, it hasn’t survived. But there are some incredible facts which are consistent with this idea. Look at, for example, the incidents of parliamentary institutions in Europe—it coincides almost perfectly with the spread of these Germanic tribes. There’s a remarkable correlation in Western Europe between the origin of these representative institutions and the spread of these Germanic tribes at the collapse of the Western Roman Empire.
One thing that’s very interesting is that if you contrast early legal codes in Western Europe (like the Salic law, which Clovis promulgated) they dramatically differ from Chinese legal codes, like the Qin or Han legal codes.
- The Salic law is a sort of bottom up codification of social norms. It was actually written not by Clovis, but by assemblies where people were chosen to pull these norms together and write them down. The Franks weren’t literate, but they put it in writing with the help of Roman lawyers. So it’s a sort of bottom up codification of social norms.
- If you look at the Chinese legal codes, it’s a kind of top-down engineering project to micromanage society. So that, to us, is incredibly significant in terms of just the gelling of this particular type of society in Western Europe.
What we point out in the book, actually, is that you could say in China the pivotal moment is the first dynasty. Before that there’s lots of evidence of participation and assemblies. There’s a famous kind of aphorism in the Xunzi, which is a third century BC philosophical tract: “The king is a boat. The people are the water. The water can hold up the boat, or it can sink the boat.” So that’s a statement about participation. But what you see with the Qin Empire is a sort of intellectual project of how to organize society. And that’s what they try to implement. And that sets off a dramatic divergence in China.
In some sense, the creation of this very centralized, despotic state in China would be very threatening to people’s liberty. In fact, the Qin Dynasty didn’t last very long, because there was a mass uprising against this micro management.
If you take Africa—there’s a lot of fabulously illustrated ethnographic examples of this—it’s the kind of antagonism to hierarchy, and the concern that hierarchy will be used despotically, that makes people very anxious about it and leads them to try to stop it. To go back to Locke, “Should people be so worried about polecats and foxes that they risk being devoured by lions?”
African societies are so small-scale. There are 68 different ethnic groups on the Jos Plateau in central Nigeria, and it’s about the size of metropolitan Chicago. Why did these small-scale societies never accumulate into something bigger? I don’t think it’s because Africans don’t get that there are advantages to this. They just don’t know how to control it. So that’s the basic argument in the book: what leads you to the other side of this corridor is this inability to create hierarchy and control it. But that doesn’t create liberty either, as we were discussing earlier.