Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History

A natural state, or limited access order, is a social arrangement in which political manipulation of the economy creates rents for powerful individuals and groups. These rents—monopoly rights, land grants, exclusive trading privileges—give elites a stake in maintaining peace, because violence would destroy their privileged positions. North, Wallis, and Weingast argue this is how most societies throughout history have controlled violence. The concept is central because it explains why economic development is so difficult: the very mechanisms that preserve order also constrain competition and growth [citation:1][citation:2].

The 1990 book emphasized path dependence and the persistence of inefficient institutions through increasing returns and organizational lock-in. Violence and Social Orders shifts the explanatory weight to violence itself. Instead of asking why inefficient institutions persist, the authors ask how any social order sustains peace at all. The answer centers on rent-creation as a political technology for restraining violence. This reframes the problem from one of institutional efficiency to one of political survival and elite coordination, drawing on a broader historical canvas from hunter-gatherer societies to modern democracies [citation:1][citation:11].

The authors identify three doorstep conditions that precede the transition: the rule of law for elites, perpetually lived organizations in the public and private spheres, and consolidated political control of the military. These conditions do not guarantee transition, but they make it possible. They allow elites to rely on impersonal rules rather than personal privileges, and they enable organizations to outlive their founders. The transition itself is a gradual process of opening access, not a single revolutionary moment. Most countries that achieved open access passed through these conditions over centuries [citation:2][citation:5].

The book argues that standard reforms—removing trade barriers, privatizing state enterprises, strengthening elections—assume the institutional foundations of open access orders already exist. But in natural states, those very privileges and rents are what hold the political coalition together. Dismantling them without first building alternative mechanisms for controlling violence can unleash disorder. The authors warn that reformers who treat the 'superficial exterior' of natural states as removable obstacles may unwittingly destroy the arrangements that keep the peace. This is why economic development is so difficult and why successful transitions are rare [citation:1][citation:10].

North, Wallis, and Weingast treat violence as the foundational problem of social order, but unlike Hobbes, they do not assume a single sovereign solves it. Unlike Weber, they do not treat the state's monopoly on legitimate violence as a given. Instead, they show how the distribution of violence potential shapes the entire institutional architecture. In natural states, the threat of violence by powerful elites is checked by giving them rents. In open access orders, competition and impersonal rules replace rent-creation as the mechanism of restraint. Violence is not eliminated but transformed into a managed, contained feature of political life [citation:1][citation:13].

Reception has been broadly positive but not uncritical. Reviewers praised the book's ambition and its synthesis of economic and political history, with James Robinson calling it a compelling explanation of why poor countries are poor [citation:10]. However, some critics noted that the framework's categories are broad and that the mechanisms of transition remain underspecified. Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson's Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy is often cited as a rival approach that emphasizes inequality and redistribution rather than violence coordination as the central political problem [citation:6]. The book has nonetheless become a standard reference in institutional economics and development studies.