Carles Boix

This is an unusually ambitious work in historical theory, especially considering how short it is. The author tries to provide a parsimonious account of the relationships between the origin of the states, social hierarchies, economic growth, political institutions and warfare, more or less in one go. His main idea is that all societies initially contain peaceful producers who produce economic goods and potential looters who find it more advantageous to appropriate goods by force than to participate in production. Equality and growth are incompatible with each other, and the only way to sustain growth is to create political institutions capable of enforcing an unequal equilibrium. This institution usually takes the form of a monarchy set up by looters, but in small states it can exceptionally be a republic of producers.

This quasi-historical sketch of producers and looters is a bit too unrealistic to really be interesting. In my opinion it is actually a bit unnecessary, because the latter chapters of the book in fact provide an interesting discussion of inequality which would have stood its ground well even without the sketchy general framework. The author draws on a broad range of historical, anthropological and archaeological evidence as he discusses the basic dilemma of inequality: when somebody innovates and produces more efficiently than others, the resulting advantage can either be blocked or accepted by the other members of society. Economic growth is stifled if the advantage is blocked, but accepting growth leads to economic inequality.

So despite my misgivings about the overly formalized quasi-historical theorizing in the first chapters, this actually turned out to be a fairly enlightening book. I would personally have preferred a bit more emphasis on descriptive anthropological review and less on mathematical correlation factors, but the time I spent on this book was still worthwhile.… (mehr)