A 2006 book on economic history and development studies written by three American professors has been published in Persian by the Tehran-based publishing house Rowzaneh.
The book ‘Violence and Social Order: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History’ has been translated into Persian by Jafar Kheyrkhahan and Reza Majidzadeh, who are both economists and authors, LISNA (lisna.ir), a local news website on librarianship reported.
The book integrates a study of violence into a comprehensive social science framework covering economic and political systems, according to a review by Cambridge University Press.
The three authors are the late economist Douglas Cecil North (1920-2015), co-recipient (with American economic historian and scientist Robert William Fogel) of the 1993 Nobel Prize in Economics; economic historian John Joseph Wallis and political scientist and economist Barry R. Weingast.
North was a faculty member of Washington University in Saint Louis. Wallis is a professor of Economics Department at the University of Maryland in College Park and Weingast is currently a professor at Stanford University and Senior Fellow at the research center of Hoover Institution in California.
Original English edition has 346 pages. Its Persian translation comes with 456 pages, including a preface, an afterword and seven chapters: The Conceptual Framework; The Natural State; The Natural State Applied: English Land Law; Open Access Orders; Explaining the Transition from Limited to Open Access Orders: the Doorstep Conditions; The Transition Proper; and A New Research Agenda for Social Sciences.
The book shows how economic and political behaviors are closely linked. Most societies, which are called natural states, limit violence by political manipulation of the economy to create privileged interests.
Such privileges limit the use of violence by powerful individuals, but doing so hinders both economic and political development. In contrast, modern societies create open access to economic and political organizations, fostering political and economic competition.
The book provides a framework for understanding the two types of social orders, why open access societies are both politically and economically more developed, and how some 25 countries have made the transition between the two types.
