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

Weingast and was first published in 2009. Douglas C. North is a Spencer T. Olin Professor in Arts and Science at Washington University at St. Louis. He was a corecipient of the 1993 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. He is a neo-institutional economist who has had a profound impact on the field and has rejuvenated this particular subject area in economics. His work deals with issues of property rights, economic organization in history, and formation of political and economic institutions. John Joseph Wallis is a professor of economics at University of Maryland. His areas of interest are economic history, public finance, institutional development and economics of transaction costs. He has written extensively on the subject of institutions and their impact on economic and political development. Barry R Weingast is the Ward C. Krebs Family Professor in the Department of Political Science at Stanford University. His research focuses on the political foundations of markets, economic reform, and regulation, including problems of political economy of development, federalism, decentralization, and legal institutions. The central thesis of Violence and Social Orders is that every social order has particular institutional constraints, organizational structure, and belief systems that determine how it copes with the possibility of violence. The proposition is explicated in the historical context where the transition from one type of social order (natural access or © International Review of Public Administration 2012, Vol. 17, No. 1 201