Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither is democracy. MIT professor Daron Acemoglu and University of Chicago professor James A. Robinson lead us down what they call “the narrow corridor,” a pathway and crucible through which a civilization or culture must pass if liberty is to be realized. Framing this narrow corridor is an excessively strong society on one side and an excessively strong state on the other. Too strong a society, and there’s anarchy; too strong a state, and there’s dictatorship. Liberty either unprotected or unprotected. Drawing from history and geopolitics, Acemoglu and Robinson show us why liberty is so tough to develop and hang on to. 

In the Epic of Gilgamesh, Gilgamesh is the king of the Sumerian city Uruk. He is shrewd and powerful, and no one dares challenge his abuses. The people cry out to Anu, the main god of the Sumerian pantheon, and ask him to rescue them. Anu hears the people’s cries and asks Aruru, (essentially Mother Earth), to create a double of Gilgamesh—someone who is his equal in power, cunning, and arrogance. Aruru makes Enkidu, and plants him in Uruk to challenge Gilgamesh. This strategy is an ancient version of checks and balances.

But then there’s a problem: After an initial meeting and brawl, Gilgamesh and his lookalike Enkidu become friends and brothers instead of rivals as the gods had anticipated. Together, the pair becomes an indomitable force that continues to oppress the people of Sumer. They slay whatever monster the gods send to humble them. Instead of checking each other’s power, Gilgamesh and Enkidu become even more of a menace than Gilgamesh was on his own.

Liberty needs law and order to thrive, but it must be the people who guide the state—not the other way around. When the state controls the people, you get situations like Syria leading up to 2011, where Assad brutally repressed protests until his government was scattered, instead of seeing protest as a healthy part of political life.

The basic quid pro quo for freedom is a strong state and a strong society. The two together create an environment where people can move freely about their lives without threat of violence, dominance, or intimidation. That’s a bare minimum for freedom to exist. For that to happen, the state must protect its people and uphold law so people can pursue their lives freely. But society must also be robust and capable of restraining a state’s power and make sure the state uses its power for citizens' freedom, not to control them. These two posts of state and society form a narrow corridor between which freedom is possible. But there are many ways in which one can become too strong and the other too weak to keep the corridor open and democracy alive.

As the dangerous alliance between two powerful tyrants in the Epic of Gilgamesh shows us, the most effective checks and balances aren’t between co-ruling king-brothers or between branches of government. They can collude and conspire and render founding documents irrelevant in their workarounds. People can still be pressured, squeezed between the violence and pandemonium of unprotected anarchy on one side and the fear of governmental oppression on the other.

Between pandemonium and despotism is a narrow corridor. Entering the narrow corridor is not realized in a single epic moment. Movement along the corridor is an uneasy fluctuation between one pole and the other. Ideally, however, the state and society do not compete, but cooperate. This is a win for everyone.

A vital distinction here is that freedom isn’t a doorway or threshold because it isn’t accomplished in an instant. It takes time. It’s more of a long hallway.    

Liberty is a corridor because a society must walk through the process of eliminating violence by establishing and enforcing rule of law. The elites have to learn that they’re not above the law while diverse groups of people must play nice and cooperate. The corridor is narrow because liberty is a complex and precarious task. Pitfalls await any society that attempts to become free. These pitfalls include questions of how government navigates an increasingly global, complex world without becoming controlling, or how state and society view things as both-and, rather than a zero-sum tussle.

These cards feature offers like $200 bonus, up to 3% cash back or 0% interest for 15 months. PLUS no annual fee. A long-time credit card writer says these are some of the best deals he's seen in his years of writing for top financial websites.

Learn more.

In his famous book The End of History, published in 1989, political theorist Francis Fukuyama announced that the world was slowly but surely conforming to the United States and democracy had won out over communism. A few years later, Robert Kaplan published a book warning us of "the coming anarchy" that will envelop the globe. More recently historian Yuval Noah Harari wrote an essay telling us that technology helps dictatorships more than it does democracies, that more tech means more parts of our lives are under the control of our overlords. Freedom. Anarchy. Technocratic control. These are radically different predictions, but which will it be?

If you go to China, you might think technocratic dictatorships will win out. Their surveillance setup is intricate, extensive, and invasive. They have control over the media, the internet, and the citizenry. Any resistance to the government is systematically quashed.

If you go to Africa or the Middle East, however, you might be more sympathetic with the anarchy thesis. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, for example, the Congolese joke about the infamous Article 15 that’s found in all six of the Constitutions, they say. Article 15 simply says, Debrouillez vous, or “fend for yourself.” What’s humorous is that Article 15 does not actually exist on paper, but it’s in full effect in everyday life. The majority of citizens feel their government fails to afford them any concrete provisions or protections. Murder is common. Pockets of the country are controlled by insurgent groups. In 2010, the DCR was the rape capital of the world. Article 15 is a sardonic commentary on an unstable, anarchic country that is democratic in name only.

There are, however, countries that stay within the narrow corridor between anarchy and despotism, where state and society are robust enough for liberty to emerge. So the answer to the question of whether anarchy, despotism, or freedom is the way of the future is: “All of them.” The world is far too big, dynamic, and complex to place any one frame over the entire globe.

Leviathan is a mythical sea creature referenced in the Old Testament book of Job. It’s enormous, powerful, and fills us with fear. Thomas Hobbes used this creature to describe the club-wielding government, to which people give their power and rights in order to protect themselves from “warre” or anarchy. Left to their own devices, he argued, people engaged in “a war of all against all.” People would rather fear a Leviathan than fear anyone and everyone. He was correct that elimination of warre (the conditions of dominance) is an essential task for people. Where Hobbes went wrong was that there were plenty of stateless societies free of violence—even if they weren’t exceptionally free.

Might does not make right as Hobbes thought. It doesn’t bring freedom either. Life can be just as nasty, brutish, and short with a Leviathan as without one. The Third Reich was a ferocious, bureaucratic Leviathan—and it stripped many of its citizens of their rights, freedoms, and lives instead of protecting them. During China’s Great Famine, which began in the 1950s, life was nasty, brutish, and cut short for 45 million people—not because the Leviathan was missing, but because the Leviathan was very much present. Under Mao, anyone caught calling the “Great Harvest” a famine was submitted to the “struggle”—a veiled way of saying beaten to death.

To clarify, the Despotic Leviathan isn’t despotic simply because it starves and tortures its citizens or sends them off to death camps. More basically, it’s despotic because it represses the voice of the people about how the power they’ve given the Leviathan should be wielded.

The very real possibility of a Despotic Leviathan creates a big problem for Hobbes’ theory. People give their power to the government to be protected from each other, but that assumes the state will justly mete out punishment to those who try to harm other citizens. It is not an easy task to keep the Leviathan strong enough to protect citizens, but shackled enough that it won’t turn on the people and oppress them.

Societies without a Leviathan weave together rituals and customs to form a “cage of norms.” A cage of norms keeps people safe as long as they operate within the norms. These customs and traditions become so deeply ingrained and rigidly observed that stepping outside them has severe consequences. This reduces chaos, but it also reduces freedom.

Moreover, the traditions inevitably tilt in favor of elites. This shows up with men in positions of power, and women on the bottom rungs for the most part. With rare exceptions, caged norms societies perpetuate significant power imbalances between men and women—especially in the Middle East and Asia.

Take the Pashtuns in Afghanistan as an example: A woman can’t leave the house without a male chaperone—a father, a brother, or a husband. And when a Pashtun woman is in public, she must wear a burka. Failing to follow these codes incites severe punishment. In Pashtun society, people will go to extreme lengths to exact revenge if their honor is called into question.

India is another place that relies heavily on a cage of norms. Even though it’s technically a democracy, liberty isn’t exactly thriving. A constitution, parliament, and voting system are a thin veneer that overlays an ancient system of caste. Caste is a far more potent force, one that influences behavior and society. It cripples India’s ability to unify and mobilize because it fragments society into hundreds of smaller groups.

History shows us that creating a Shackled Leviathan is a colossal task. Shackling the Leviathan means allowing the state to become powerful enough to effect good in the lives of people without becoming despotic and controlling, but also not so weak that people are left defenseless against anyone who is stronger. It means creating a society that is robust and cohesive enough to challenge the Leviathan if it starts becoming too powerful. Entering and remaining in the narrow corridor long enough to shackle the Leviathan takes time.

It’s a stressful political dance over the long-haul: When society is stronger than the state, the dance moves toward the Absent Leviathan, governed more by a cage of norms than rule of law. When the state is strong and society is weak, the political dance moves toward a Despotic Leviathan. But liberty can emerge and be preserved if the Leviathan can be kept between the two extremes long enough for state and society to become strong together.

What was it that led to Europe establishing so many successful states? In many cases throughout history, society or state grows strong at the expense of the other, but there are plenty of European success stories, where state and society grew robust together. Explanations abound for the factors that brought Europe into the narrow corridor of freedom and democracy. Some cite religious reasons, like the Judeo-Christian background. Others point to climate and geography. Some have even surmised that there was just something inherently special about European culture.

The real factors, however, are twofold: a Germanic tribal structure that was highly democratic and ancient Roman legal and bureaucratic norms. We can look at these dual forces as blades. On their own, they cut toward one of the two extremes: an Absent Leviathan (Germanic tribes) or Despotic Leviathan (ancient Rome). But 1500 years ago, as Rome was falling, the blades came together and formed a kind of civilizational scissors or shears, which cut through the political backdrop everyone had taken for granted.

Europe entered the corridor when the Germanic tribes (or “barbarians,” as the Romans called them) sacked Rome. As a result, the spirit of hierarchy and organization and law in the Roman Empire and the Church bled into local democratic customs. “Bled” is an appropriate word: Europe’s entry into the corridor of liberty was racked with violence and turmoil. Europe endured centuries of bloodshed as it careened uneasily between tyranny and anarchy. Some European polities stayed in the corridor between the two extremes and managed to shackle the Leviathan as society and state grew up together.

A strong case can be made that the United States is a gleaming success story: a people deeply committed to freedom, suspicious of government overreach, a Constitution that shackled the Leviathan from the time of its founding, the ardent belief of its citizens that they have a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—a right that the state is obliged to protect. 

You could make the case that the United States has a Shackled Leviathan and remains within the narrow corridor of liberty, but the country’s success has been mixed. Many glowing renditions of US history forget the dark side of the US struggle to keep the Leviathan shackled: powerful enough to protect citizens while also restrained enough that it can’t abuse power.

There are several major factors that block the country from measuring up to its claims of exceptionalism. One factor that dampens a cheery reading of US history is that a well-thought-out Constitution is not enough to ensure liberty. The United States could not have entered the narrow corridor of liberty without early colonists who were vigilant, bold, and iconoclastic. They were skeptical rabble rousers who kept the government on its toes. Society, in other words, was robust—robust enough to restrain the Leviathan of the state. 

But did they render the state too impotent to protect its citizens adequately? Another issue is in the Constitution itself. It intentionally created a weak state. The federal form of government, which grants states’ rights, in effect made allowances for localized despotisms like slavery and Jim Crow. This means that throughout the United States’ history, certain segments of the population have been routinely denied liberty. If we describe liberty as the ability to act in the absence of dominance (through violence, intimidation, or threats), then the United States does not measure up as liberty’s darling.

Violence in the United States is five times higher than in Western Europe. Ineffective law enforcement leaves inner cities vulnerable to violence and neglect. Among residents of US inner cities, PTSD rates are far higher than among veterans—an average of 46 percent—versus just 10–20 percent. When it’s no safer walking around the streets of your neighborhood than it was for a soldier in Afghanistan, you wonder how much liberty you have.

Another consequence of severely restricted federal power is the State’s inability to provide basic needs of citizens without public-private partnerships. Most other wealthy, democratic nations are able to do so, but the United States instead facilitates contracts with private entities to provide basic services and infrastructure. Blending private and public interests might stimulate the economy, but it can also stimulate collusion and corruption.

Edward Snowden exposed the National Security Agency’s colossal breaches of constitutional rights including data gathering and large scale surveillance. In doing so, he also revealed how heavily the US government needed to rely on private entities to provide security. Tech giants like Facebook, Yahoo!, Google, and Microsoft and phone behemoths like AT&T and Verizon were either forced or willingly gave the government massive amounts of data from private citizens. In either case, it’s a huge problem.

These insights are just an introduction. If you're ready to dive deeper, pick up a copy of The Narrow Corridor here. And since we get a commission on every sale, your purchase will help keep this newsletter free.