Leviathan, Redux: Government Is Frightful Unless Shackled

This year's economics Nobel prize winners have much to say about November 5.

Reviewed by Lybi Ma

Two weeks ago, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced its decision to award the 2024 Nobel Prize in Economics Sciences to Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson of MIT and James Robinson of the University of Chicago for their research illuminating the causes of the differences in prosperity between nations. I’ve critiqued aspects of the early work for which they were awarded that prize, but am a huge fan of Acemoglu and Robinson’s 2019 book The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies and the Fate of Liberty, which I discussed in For High Quality of Life, Accountable Government a Necessity soon after its publication. The relevance of their work to the U.S. election less than a week from today could scarcely be greater.

Acemoglu and Robinson focus on the question of political democracy and the role of the government as a partner in fostering economic well-being. They adopt the image of government as a terrifying and potentially domineering power, portrayed as the Leviathan of Biblical myth in Thomas Hobbes’ political philosophy tract of the same title (1651). Fear of an unshackled Leviathan bestriding a society’s territory and wielding its control over armed police and soldiers according to its own interests and whims is entirely understandable, they agree. They argue, however, that societies need governments to provide important goods and services that cannot be made profitable for the private sector to supply, except as a government partner or contractor. These goods and services include police, legal, and prison systems to protect human life and property, armies and navies to protect their region against foreign conquest, and infrastructures like roads, bridges, and ports.

In modern times, effective government has become even more important in raising the quality of life through oversight of food, water, and pharmaceutical safety, efforts to contain pollution, provision or subsidization of education and health care, insurance against unemployment, extreme poverty, and insufficient savings in old age, and responses to large economic shocks such as those of the 2008 financial crisis and the closure of workplaces during the COVID-19 pandemic. In a modern economy, a decent standard of living for all but the richest sliver of society thus depends crucially on having a capable government that is genuinely focused on the well-being of ordinary citizens.

Since citizens cede to their government immense powers, not least of them being powers of policing, prisons, and control of military forces, government power can be a terrifying Leviathan, like the government in North Korea, Russia, and China—and even, unfortunately, like police brutality in some instances in our own country—unless successfully made the servant of the people by an effective civil society. Competitive electoral democracy, guard rails against the persecution of political losers by winners, and strong checks on corruption and personal enrichment by those in power can turn the hideous Leviathan of an authoritarian government into the partner of free citizens and competitive enterprises that are crucial to the high quality of life experienced by most in countries like Denmark, Norway, Canada, Germany, Australia, and New Zealand today. In their words, can make it a “shackled Leviathan” which is the servant of, not the authority over, a society’s people.

With Acemoglu and Robinson’s insistence on the positive roles of government and the centrality of democratic political institutions for making government a promoter of the good society, they place themselves on the liberal if not the progressive side of debates about the role of government in the making of the good society today. Given the importance that pocketbook issues will play for so many voters in the current election, it seems important to know that a substantial majority of professional economists, including most Nobel prize winners, join Acemoglu and Robinson in fearing what might follow the election of the team favoring higher tariffs, repeal of the Affordable Care Act, and a more powerful and unified executive branch. U.S. voters might choose the Republican ticket because of their perceptions about who is responsible for the inflation of 2021 and ’22, which was attributable to overshooting in efforts to preserve spending power during the COVID-19 recession. Those stimulus efforts began under Donald Trump and continued with bi-partisan support under Biden. For voters to opt for a new round of tax cuts for top earners, tariffs that would raise the prices of consumer goods, and abandonment of clean energy initiatives, due to this serious but now abating inflationary episode, would be a tragic setback.

Fear of untamed power was rational when Hobbs wrote Leviathan in the seventeenth century and remains rational today. Acemoglu and Robinson’s Narrow Corridor tells the story of how England began to trod the path that eventually led to the world’s first democratic polity, the United States, some 335 years ago. The pivotal event was the overthrow of England’s James II in 1688 and the resulting weakening of the power of the monarchy relative to Parliament. The thirteen American colonies’ successful rebellion against another British monarch nine decades later, their adoption of a novel form of representative government without monarchy a decade after that, and the generations of struggle that then gradually expanded the franchise to those without great wealth, to citizens of any race, and to women, have marked the emergence of a new system of government, one that succeeded in abolishing slavery in the nineteenth century and presided over unparalleled economic growth and the defeat of Fascism and its Communist counterpart in the twentieth.

The idea of inverting the pyramid of power to put the people on top and make the government their servant, of government “of the people, by the people, and for the people,” is in danger of becoming a footnote in the long history of unshackled Leviathans, if Americans fail to take the long view and understand why, exactly, the Leviathan had been so loathed before the birth of democracy.