In this essay, I write,
Ultimately, it is the cultural beliefs of citizens that determines whether a limited-access order or an open-access order can remain stable. For a limited-access order, the necessity is for citizens to give enough legitimacy to the monarch to enable the monarch to rule without having to give way to an open-access order. For an open-access order the necessity is for citizens to withhold legitimacy from the government when it tries to expand too much.
Since I first composed that essay, I have come to think that open-access orders have two sources of stability. One is the fact that nearly everyone feels that they have a stake in the system. The other source is the set of norms and beliefs that had to develop to make an open-access order possible in the first place. Those layers of beliefs provide a strong counter-weight to disorderly political activism.
“The flaw in limited-access orders is that the elites face constant pressure to broaden access to the political process. The king finds that he needs the support of more groups in the population, and to obtain their support he must concede rights and political opportunities to a broader and broader segment of the population. This is the process by which a limited-access order evolves gradually into an open-access order.”
What I would like to add as a supplement to Kling’s outline (“The Elusive Goal of Political Stability” is that North et al. emphasise time and again that the successful transition to an open-access society is exceedingly rare, having been achieved by no more than perhaps 25 countries throughout world history.
I would tentatively submit for further consideration that open access societies have been remarkably resilient since their emergence. It appears that countries in which civil society has taken root at an early stage, tend to remain open access societies in the long run. Efforts at subverting the open access order fundamentally, as during the Third Reich or in Communist East Germany, have not been able to override “mean reversion” toward open access structures.
This is highly intriguing as it points to a remarkable feature of free societies – their ability to maintain robust conditions of freedom without the support of politically powerful champions of liberty. Just consider the utter political insignificance of libertarians.
In other words, open access societies seem to have evolved to incorporate cultural, political, and economic structures that make it too costly, too painful to deviate from too far. Libertarians need to look more carefully into what I call “the spontaneous order of politics and the state,” which is arbitrarily ignored by Hayek and in all other libertarian approaches (to the role of politics in open access societies) that I am aware of.
Incidentally, I find it hard to associate the USA, of all places, with a lament concerning “the elusive goal of political stability.”
In order to understand freedom, it may well be that we need to open our eyes more widely to the ways in which politics and the state manage to work quite effectively in our open access societies.
For more, see http://redstateeclectic.typepad.com/redstate_commentary/2015/04/competing-for-liberty.html
A fine essay, Arnold. However, I wonder if there is any reason to think that the potential stability of any of these regimes will change in the future. Example: as the Western world secularizes, the legitimacy of any monarchy must decline, as claims to rule be divine right are increasingly scoffed at. Likewise, the failures of socialism and communism undermines the legitimacy of limited-access orders where the elite are bound together by a common ideology. Does a surveillance state and, say, drone technology make a limited access order more durable than in previous eras? Does the lack of a frontier in the modern era make different regimes more stable? I guess what I’m getting at is that I am concerned the 21st century might give us a lot of the wrong kind of stability.
Hopefully, you will keep returning to this particular aspect of our own social order (as does Munger).
So far, as one who has studied North, et al., and some of Kenneth Arrow, with references back to Oakeshott; it is a bit difficult to grasp what is intended by citing the “political” as a form of stability (within?) the social order; or, is it the stability of the social order itself that is under consideration.
I think Oakeshott concluded “There is no such thing as collective choice.” And Arrow seems to have a confirming opinion (impossibility).
Munger sort of toys around with it, but does not seem to want assert outright that Democracy is a **process,** not a condition. Which makes one wonder if these observations are not really about the “stability” of that process.
There are also the issues of the constraints that are developed on relationships and on formations of associations, as well as on group actions via associations; which constraints we observe in the expansion of the Administrative State with its intermediations and intrusions into transactions and human interactions.
So, with open access come the opposing forces of those constraints; not necessarily from elites, but from within the social structure; particularly as interests consolidate.