Barry Weingast

Quotes From

“Adam Smith’s Theory of Violence and the Political Economics of Development” (2017)

• Property rights in land, the most valuable asset in medieval times, were designed to promote security and other military goals, not economic efficiency.#

Violence and Social Orders (2009)

• Effective political competition requires credible guarantees that losers will not be expropriated and that losing political organizations continue to enjoy access to future competition#
• Beliefs that impersonal identities can be sustained lie at the heart of beliefs in equality. Equality depends on impersonal identity; for citizens to be equal before the law, for example, the law must treat citizens impersonally.#
• It is not that natural states are incapable of progress; it is that they are as likely to move back toward personal arrangements and more limited access as they are toward impersonal arrangements.#
• The birth of the nation-state did not occur with the apotheosis of the ruler, but by subsuming the personal identity of all rulers in a durable and perpetual corporate organization of the state.#
• Charters created rents even when charters did not confer monopolies because the ability to access the corporate form in itself was a substantial advantage to any economic organization.#
• A modern political party contains a legislative arm coordinating the behavior of legislators, and an elective arm identifying party voters and getting out the vote.#
• [Adam Smith’s] low opinion of corporations in general reflected less on the economic and organizational aspects of joint-stock businesses than on the natural state’s political effects of chartering – the corrosive effects of corporate privileges given to towns, guilds, and monopolies. Although much of the debate about Smith’s view of corporations has focused on his view about their efficiency, Smith saw corporations in a traditional Whig manner: grants of economic privilege used to secure political advantage. As late as 1776, the founder of modern economics viewed corporations largely in natural-state terms – as tools for the political manipulation of the economy.#
• When elites institutionalize their own impersonal intra-elite relationships, they lower the costs of expanding the size of the coalition covered by these institutions.#
• The personal nature of sovereign debt in a natural state meant that all early modern European sovereigns were credit rationed, and the Stuart kings could not raise much money to finance their governments. After the Revolution of 1688, sovereign debt became the impersonal liability of parliament.#
• Solving the problem of constraining its leaders required that the church define itself as a perpetually lived organization.#
• The Romans developed rule of law for organizations, but they never solved the problem of perpetual life.#
• As long as landownership serves both a political and an economic purpose, it will serve its economic purpose less well than if ownership responds more closely to economic incentives.#
• The natural state cannot support creative destruction because the creation of new economic organizations directly threatens existing economic organizations and their patterns of rents.#
• All exchange in limited access order is dominated by personal knowledge.#
• Widening the set of commonly held beliefs among elites broadens the range of credible commitments that the dominant coalition can sustain.#
• Societies capable of supporting complicated private organizations have complicated and sophisticated public organizations. Societies incapable of governing themselves are also incapable of supporting strong private organizations.#
• The social identity of non-elites [in a natural state] is closely tied to the identity of the patronage network in which they are located.#
• All personal relationships are, in some way, unique while large classes of impersonal relationships are the same. . . . As long as social personas are unique across individuals, impersonal relationships are impossible. Impersonality arises as social personas become standardized.#
• The cessation of violence (peace) is not achieved when violence specialists put down their arms, but rather peace occurs when the violent devise arrangements (explicit or implicit) that reduce the level of violence.#
• The difficulty with a single actor approach to the state is that it assumes away the fundamental problem of how the state achieves a monopoly on violence.#
• Systematic rent-creation through limited access in a natural state is not simply a method of lining the pockets of the dominant coalition; it is the essential means of controlling violence.#

“The Political Foundations of Democracy and the Rule of Law” (1997)

• When a [mass] consensus over [political] values exists, elites face different incentives than when none exists.#
• Maintaining limits on the state requires that citizens oppose a violation even if they potentially benefit from it. . . . [C]itizens in stable democracies not only must value democracy but also must be willing to take costly action to defend democratic institutions against potential violations.#