The Rise and Decline of Nations in Historical Perspective

Abstract

When an historian is called upon to scrutinize the work of an economist (or vice versa), the results are often of questionable value. The intellectual structure of the two disciplines seems to differ in ways that encourage mutual misunderstanding. The historian starts with a knowledge of his necessarily limited terrain: the historical data of some time and place. Here he is at home; he seeks to understand his environment with theory and abstraction (if he is wise), but these are not really his chief interests. The economist starts with a hypothesis which he seeks to test with appropriate data. If, as with Mancur Olson, he combines the rare talents of fruitful theorizing with bold application, the economist will make forays into a wide range of 'factual environments' always shielded by a protective layer of abstractions. By now it should be clear that confrontation between the economist and the historian resembles something like warfare between a conventional army and a band of guerillas: there are no agreed rules of the game nor are there shared criteria for success. But metaphors of war aside, if the chances for fruitful exchange in the academy are better concerning The Rise and Decline of Nations, it is in large part because Olson is no ordinary economist. His book, vastly ambitious as it is, nonetheless takes the historian's perspective seriously. Denying himself the shield of abstraction, Olson holds to high standards in seeking historical verification for his theoretical claims. Before I begin discussing Olson's interesting and important work, a note of disclaimer is perhaps in order. The self-limitations that every serious historian must impose upon himself also prevent me from commenting on the subject of the rise and decline of nations per se; the subject is simply too vast to be adequately handled in this brief space. I will also pass over any consideration of differential rates of national economic growth; this phenomenon also involves too many variables for a brief discussion. Instead, I will restrict my comments to the more limited problem of understanding the conditions governing the creation and persistence of distributional coalitions. When do they arise? Under what conditions do they flourish? How much economic damage do they cause? Mancur Olson treats all of these relatively manageable questions, often drawing on historical evidence to buttress his claims. It is to these issues that I address myself.