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March 15 - May 27, 2014
China was the first world civilization to create a modern state. But it created a modern state that was not restrained by a rule of law or by institutions of accountability to limit the power of the sovereign. The only accountability in the Chinese system was moral. A strong state without rule of law or accountability amounts to dictatorship, and the more modern and institutionalized that state is, the more effective its dictatorship will be.
social classes emerged known as varnas: Brahmins, who were priests; Kshatriyas, warriors; Vaishyas, merchants; and Sudras, everyone else not in the first three varnas (at that time, mostly peasants). From the standpoint of politics, this was an extremely important development because it separated secular and religious authority.
There is a likely cause-and-effect relationship here: the lack of a widespread literary culture, particularly among the Indian rulers and administrators, constituted a major obstacle to the development of a powerful centralized state.
Indian political development starts with the migration of the Indo-Aryan tribes out of an area in southern Russia between the Black and Caspian seas. Some of the tribes turned west and became the progenitors of Greeks, Romans, Germans, and other European groups. Another group went south into Persia, and a third turned east into eastern Afghanistan,
It was around this time that the cow began to change in status, from the Indo-Aryans’ chief source of protein (as with the Nuer) to a totemic animal that was an object of veneration.6
In other words, southern Indian tribes, like many Arab ones, tend to keep marriages (and hence inheritances) within a very narrow circle of kin.
Thus law, in the Indian tradition, did not spring from political authority as it did in China; it came from a source independent of and superior to the political ruler.
It was Marx who said that religion was the “opiate of the masses,” a fairy tale that was cooked up by elites to justify their domination of the rest of society.
in India it was not the elites holding coercive and economic power but the elites holding ritual power who ended up on top. Even if one believed material causes were primary, one would still need to answer the question of why the Kshatriyas and the Vaishyas—the warriors and the merchants—agreed to subordinate themselves to the Brahmins, giving them not just land and economic resources but also control over intimate aspects of their personal lives.
Religion and politics must therefore be seen as drivers of behavior and change in their own right, not as by-products of grand economic forces.
Modern labor market theory demands that individuals should be free, in Adam Smith’s phrase, to “better their condition” through investments in education and skills, and by contracting for their services to whomever they want.
The Brahmin hierarchy was not organized into an institution with a central, formal source of authority like the Catholic church. It resembled rather a vast social network, where individual Brahmins communicated and cooperated with one another without being able to exercise institutional authority as such.
the organization of small, tightly knit corporate entities that extended all the way from top to bottom of the society, based on the jati. These units were self-governing and did not require the state to organize them. Indeed, they resisted the state’s efforts to penetrate and control them, leading to the situation that the political scientist Joel Migdal characterizes as a weak state and a strong society.
British administrators in the early nineteenth century described the Indian village as a “little republic” that could survive the ruin of empires.
Unlike Jews, Christians, and Muslims, who were all “people of the book” from the start of their religious traditions, the Brahmins strongly resisted the introduction of writing and technologies related to it. Chinese travelers to India in the fifth and seventh centuries A.D. looking for sources of Buddhist tradition were hard-pressed to find any written documents.
Compared to the Chinese, the Brahmins’ monopoly on learning and their resistance to the adoption of writing had an incalculable impact on the development of a modern state.
whereas China developed a strong state that kept society weak in a self-perpetuating manner, India had a strong society that prevented a strong state from emerging in the first place.
Due to India’s nonliterary culture at the time, Ashoka’s accomplishments were never chronicled in a history like the Chinese Book of History or Spring and Autumn Annals. He was not recognized as a great king by later generations of Indians until 1915,
They introduced Western notions of universal human equality, which induced Indians to rethink the philosophical premises of the caste system and unleashed demands for social equality. A liberal and nationalist Indian elite was then able to turn British ideas against their authors in the twentieth-century struggle for independence.
By the nineteenth century, when the Ottoman Empire was in full decline, the Janissaries appeared to many observers to be a weird and obsolete institution that was blocking the ability of the Turkish empire to modernize. They deposed Sultan Selim III in 1807 and elevated Mahmud II to the throne the following year. Mahmud II consolidated his position over the following years, and in 1826 he had the entire corps of Janissaries, some four thousand strong, killed by setting fire to their barracks.
things did not end well for the Janissaries #Ottoman #Turkey
Tribal societies are egalitarian, consensus based, and fractious; they have great difficulty holding territory over prolonged periods and are subject to internal disagreement and rupture.
The implication is that any successful order needs to suppress the power of kinship through some mechanism that makes the guardians value their ties to the state over their love for their families.
Just as the Muslims themselves eliminated Christianity and Zoroastrianism as major religions in the Middle East, so too might Islam have been relegated to the status of a minor sect had the Christian Crusaders succeeded in dominating the region, or had the Mongols swept all the way to North Africa.
The moral ties that had bound the Mamluks to earlier sultans were replaced by a purely economic calculus.
There is no question that some states are highly predatory, and that all states are predatory to some degree. An important question in understanding political development, however, is whether all states seek to maximize rents from predation, or whether they are driven by other considerations to extract rents at a level well below the theoretical maximum.
the predatory state
maximum rent extraction was not an inevitable characteristic of premodern states ruling over agrarian societies. In the Persian theory of the Middle Eastern state that was adopted by the Arabs, one of the monarch’s functions was in fact to protect the peasantry from the rapacious behavior of landlords and other elites who wanted to maximize their rents, in the interests of justice and political stability. The state was thus less a stationary bandit than a guardian of an incipient public interest.
Machiavelli captures the essence of the Ottoman state: it was far more centralized and impersonally managed than France in the early sixteenth century, and in that way more modern.
The Ottoman state thus created a one-generation aristocracy, preventing the emergence of a powerful landed aristocracy with its own resource base and inherited privileges.9
There is evidence to suggest that the Ottomans in their prime did not seek to extract taxes at the maximum rate but rather saw their role as preserving a certain basic level of taxation, while protecting the peasantry from exactions by other elites who were more likely to behave like organized criminals.
freedom isn't free #ottomans #throwbackthursday
the need for restraint was built into the Ottoman theory of the state itself, which was inherited from earlier Middle Eastern regimes. The Persian ruler Chosroes I (531–579) was quoted as saying, “With justice and moderation the people will produce more, tax revenues will increase, and the state will grow rich and powerful. Justice is the foundation of a powerful state.”
The fact that virtually all of the employees of the state had the formal status of slave indicates that the sultan had total discretionary control over the bureaucracy.
the Janissaries’ moral ties to the sultan eroded as they became preoccupied with their own well-being and that of their families, and began to act like just another self-seeking interest group.
The Ottomans were by far the most successful regime ever to emerge in the Muslim world.
led the Chinese to invent the Mandarin examination system for entry into the bureaucracy. Today, the functional equivalent of the Chinese system remains in place in the requirements for entry into modern European and Asian bureaucracies, as well as in more general qualification tests like the Scholastic Aptitude Tests in the United States or the baccalauréate in France.
the actual change in social mores and family rules was enforced not by political authorities but by the church on a social and cultural level.
Of all the components of contemporary states, effective legal institutions are perhaps the most difficult to construct.
It is not clear, moreover, that even the best-specified modern property rights would be sufficient in themselves to raise productivity substantially, or to create the modern capitalist economic world out of a Malthusian society.
a rule of law that protects citizens against arbitrary actions of the state itself is often initially applied only to a minority of privileged subjects. The law, in other words, protects the interests of the elites who are close to the state or who control the state, and in that sense law resembles what Socrates in Plato’s Republic labels the “justice of a band of robbers.”
People lucky enough to live in countries with a strong rule of law usually don’t understand how it arose in the first place, and they mistake the outward forms of the rule of law for its substance.
One characteristic of wergeld penalties was their inequality. The compensation paid for different injuries varied depending on the social status of the harmed individual. Thus the murder of a freeman would be compensated at many times the rate of a servant or a slave.
Among the Anglo-Saxon tribes, these were the moots. The moots heard testimony from the accuser and the accused, and deliberated on the appropriate form of compensation. They did not, however, have modern powers of subpoena to force witnesses to testify. Nor could their decisions be enforced except by mutual agreement of the parties.
priests and bishops in this period were allowed to marry and have children. They practiced a form of priestly concubinage known as nicolaism.
The conversion of Germanic pagans to Christianity, like the conversion of infidels to Islam in Arab or Turkish tribal society, poses an interesting challenge for Hayek’s theory of spontaneous order. A glance through Hayek’s index shows not a single reference to religion, and yet religion is clearly a critical source of legal rules in Jewish, Christian, Hindu, and Muslim societies.
The Common Law did not emerge as some kind of spontaneous evolution of customary law. It was intimately associated with the rise of the early English state and dependent on state power for its eventual dominance.
There was in the beginning competition among the various types of courts for judicial business, but over time the king’s courts came to predominate. These were preferable to local courts for a number of reasons.
Plaintiffs preferred to have their cases taken to the royal courts, and over time the seigneurial courts lost their jurisdiction over land tenure disputes to them.30 This market-driven preference suggests that the royal courts must have been perceived as being fairer and less biased in favor of the local lords, and better able to enforce their decisions.
The vast majority of people in any peaceful society obey the law not so much because they are making a rational calculation about costs and benefits, and fear punishment. They obey because they believe that the law is fundamentally fair, and they are morally habituated to follow it. They are much less inclined to obey the law if they believe that it is unjust.
This is a point that Hayek and his libertarian followers fail to see: the Common Law may be the work of dispersed judges, but it would not have come into being in the first place, or been enforced, without a strong centralized state.
a lot has been made of the fact that church and state are separated in the West but fused in Muslim countries like Saudi Arabia. This distinction does not withstand scrutiny. The Western separation of church and state has not been a constant since the advent of Christianity but rather something much more episodic.
In the eleventh century, the bishops Gérard de Cambrai and Aldabéron de Laon formulated a doctrine that society should be organized into three hierarchical orders: the aristocracy, the ecclesiastics, and the commons—those who fought, those who prayed, and those who worked to support those who fought and prayed.
