Chapter 11 shows that states in many developing countries may act as despots but lack the capacity of the Despotic Leviathan. We explain how these “Paper” Leviathans have come about and why they make so little attempt to build capacity. Our answer is that this is mostly because they are afraid of mobilizing society and thereby destabilizing their control over it. One origin of these Paper Leviathans lies in the indirect rule of colonial powers, which set up modern-looking administrative structures but at the same time empowered local elites to rule with few constraints and little participation from society.
Chapter 12 turns to the Middle East. Though state builders will often loosen the cage of norms as it limits their ability to mold society, there are circumstances under which despotic states may find it beneficial to strengthen or even to refashion the cage. We explain how this tendency has characterized Middle Eastern politics, the historical and social circumstances that have made it an attractive strategy for would-be despots, and the implications of this development path for liberty, violence, and instability.
Chapter 13 discusses how the Shackled Leviathan may get out of control when the race between state and society turns “zero-sum,” with each side trying to undercut and destroy the other for survival. We emphasize how this outcome is more likely when institutions are not up to the task of impartially resolving conflicts and lose the trust of some segments of the public. We look at the collapse of the Weimar Republic in Germany, Chilean democracy in the 1970s, and the Italian communes to illustrate these dynamics and identify the structural factors making this type of zero-sum competition more likely. Finally we link these forces to the rise of modern-day populist movements.
Chapter 14 discusses how societies move into the corridor and whether anything can be done to facilitate such a move. We emphasize several important structural factors, focusing on what makes the corridor wider and thus easier to move into. We explain the role of broad coalitions in such transitions and discuss a number of cases of successful transitions as well as some failed ones.
In Chapter 15 we turn to the challenges facing nations in the corridor. Our main argument is that as the world changes, the state must expand and take on new responsibilities, but this in turn requires society to become more capable and vigilant, lest it find itself spinning out of the corridor. New coalitions are critical for the state to gain greater capacity while keeping its shackles—a possibility illustrated by Sweden’s response to the economic and social exigencies created by the Great Depression and how this led to the emergence of social democracy. It is no different today when we are facing many new challenges, ranging from inequality, joblessness, and slow economic growth to complex security threats. We need the state to develop additional capabilities and shoulder fresh responsibilities, but only if we can find new ways of keeping it shackled, mobilizing society and protecting our liberties.
Chapter 2
THE RED QUEEN
The Six Labors of Theseus
By around 1200 BCE, the Bronze Age civilizations that had dominated the Greek world for the previous millennium had started collapsing and were making way for the so-called Greek Dark Ages. Bronze Age Greek societies were run by chiefs or kings living in centralized palaces and bureaucratic administrations that used a writing system called Linear B, collected taxes, and regulated economic activity. All this disappeared during the Dark Ages. The chaos of this new era is the subject of the legends of Theseus, the mythical ruler of Athens. One of the best accounts of his exploits was written by the Greek scholar Plutarch, who spent much of his life as one of the two priests of the Oracle of Delphi.
Theseus, the illegitimate son of the king of Athens, Aegeus, was raised in Troezen in the northeastern Peloponnese. To claim his rightful throne, Theseus had to travel back to Athens by land or sea. He chose land, but Plutarch notes:
It was difficult to make the journey to Athens by land, since no part of it was clear nor yet without peril from robbers or miscreants.
During the trip Theseus had to battle a series of bandits. The first he encountered, Periphetes, stalked the road to Athens, robbing and killing people with a bronze club. Plutarch recounts how Theseus wrestled with Periphetes and used Periphetes’s own club against him. Theseus then managed to avoid other sticky ends, including being tied between two pine trees and gnawed by an enormous wild pig, the Crommyonian Sow; thrown off a cliff into the sea; and wrestled to death. He finally bested Procrustes, the Stretcher, who notoriously cut off people’s limbs to make them fit onto his bed. Theseus’s quest to claim his kingship in Athens vividly illustrates the lawlessness of Greece at the time, without any state institutions to keep order. As Plutarch has it:
Thus Theseus … went on his way chastising the wicked, who were visited with the same violence from him, which they were visiting on others, and suffered justice after the manner of their own injustice.
Theseus’s strategy was therefore very much “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.” Athens was living Mahatma Gandhi’s “an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.”
Athenian kings didn’t last long, however. By the end of the Dark Ages the city was ruled by a group of Archons, or chief magistrates, who represented its rich families. These elites competed endlessly for power, a process which sometimes led to coups such as the one by Cylon in 632 BCE. Elites recognized that they needed to develop more orderly ways of dealing with conflicts in the city. But it was to be a slow, treacherous road, with unexpected twists and turns.
The first attempt was a decade after Cylon, in 621 BCE, when a legislator named Draco was charged with producing the first written Athenian laws. The fact it took so long to write them down had a lot to do with the disappearance of the Linear B script of Bronze Age Greeks during the Dark Ages. Writing had to be reinvented with a completely different script borrowed from the Phoenicians. Draco’s constitution, as the Greek philosopher Aristotle called it in his Athenian Constitutions, consisted of a series of written laws, only one of which survives. We do know that the punishment for breaking these laws was typically death (hence the modern expression “draconian”). The one surviving fragment of Draco’s laws, which pertains to homicide, reveals that these laws corresponded to something rather different from what we mean today by “constitution,” largely because they were dealing with a society trapped in endemic lawlessness, blood feuds, and violence. The fragment states:
And if anyone kills anybody not from forethought, he shall be exiled.
There shall be reconciliation, if there are a father or brother or sons, to be granted by all, or the objector shall prevail. If these do not exist, then as far as cousinhood and cousin, if they are all willing to grant reconciliation, or the objector shall prevail… .
There shall be a proclamation against the killer in the agora by those as far as cousinhood and cousin; there shall join in the prosecution cousins and cousins’ sons and brothers-in-law and fathers-in-law and phratry members.
This fragment is concerned with involuntary homicide. Someone who commits such an act should go to exile and await justice. If the extended kin of the person murdered unanimously decide to grant reconciliation, it ends there, but if they don’t, the extended family “shall join in the prosecution” of the killer. The term “phratry” refers to extended kin groups. As we’ll see, however, the influence of the phratry would soon diminish.