prior to or coincident with early political and military cooperation and the emergence of the formal institutions of the koinon, then we shall have good reason to hypothesize that such interactions contributed significantly to the willingness of independent communities to become part of a larger state. But all hypotheses need to be tested, and the only way to do so in this case is to ask whether, on purely theoretical grounds, it would make sense for a state with an essentially federal character to have its origins in shared religious and economic interactions as well as a need or a desire to develop greater military strength. What, in other words, could religious and economic interactions between communities have done to encourage the formation of political institutions of a federal kind, and why should the state, having developed those institutions, have had an interest in becoming directly involved in regulating those interactions, whether by reinforcing them, shutting them down, or repatterning them?
Tracking the totality of interactions between communities prior to the emergence of the formal institutions of the koinon, analyzing their function and impact, and then asking how the koinon as an emergent state responded to that history of interactions is one productive way to proceed. But in order to understand why, we need to pause to think carefully about the nature of institutions and how they emerge and develop over time.
INSTITUTIONS
The emergence of formal institutions is tremendously complex, a process that is particularly difficult to understand when, as in the case of the Greek koinon, we have no direct account of it. The very complexity and precision of these institutions in their fully developed state belie the possibility that they developed in an entirely accidental and ad hoc manner. To take only the most obvious example, around the turn of the fourth century the Boiotian koinon was governed by a council, to which representatives were sent by districts. These districts were composed in such a way that they had roughly equal populations, and they formed the basis for the appointment of judges to Boiotian courts, the payment of taxes, and the provision of manpower to the Boiotian army.30 This arrangement can only be the outcome of a deliberate and probably difficult process involving high-level planning by magistrates and political leaders as well as negotiation between the poleis and the koinon.31 Yet there are good reasons to think that these institutions were rooted in a history of cooperative interactions and arrangements—indeed, that they could only have emerged from that history. In order to explain why, we need to dwell momentarily on the nature of institutions more generally and the processes by which they emerge and evolve.
Institutions are typically, and are certainly in our case, endogenous to the society that uses them. Where the old institutionalism treated institutions as static entities that affected outcomes, scholars working in the field of the new institutionalism have shown that they are highly dynamic, humanly devised constraints that structure and pattern social interactions of all kinds.32 Sociologists have shown that institutions reflect the assimilation of cultural norms and practices into organizations of all kinds, including states; they are, in other words, socially embedded.33 The economist Douglass North has argued that institutions are created by actors in order to guide or constrain human action, to secure the cooperation of others in collective action, and to reduce the inefficiencies (or transaction costs) that would ensue if they were to attempt a particular activity without such an institution.34 Once created, on this view, institutions tend to structure individual behavior and are conceived as “the rules of the game in a society or, more formally, . . . the humanly devised constraints that shape human interaction.”35 They are analyzed primarily as structural elements in society, and institutional development is rarely given another look.36 While the idea that institutions are imposed from the outside, or from the top down, captures something of the process that must have lain behind the remarkably refined arrangements just described for Boiotia, in a political context such as the one that is our central concern it is difficult to accept the power implications of this claim. For actors to impose institutions that will govern the actions of others, they must either use (or have) overwhelming force, or they must secure the consent of others. But if they can secure the consent of others, should we not expect that those others would want to have a significant role in shaping the institutions? In a political context, in other words, institutions are more likely to be exogenous in imperial situations than in contexts of endogenous state formation.
One of the most intriguing facets of the process of state formation is the emergence of formal institutions from a situation in which there was no universally recognized system for the distribution of power or the resolution of disputes—only competing individuals and, in the case of the koinon, competing poleis interacting in a world governed by norms but not laws.37 In similar circumstances in the medieval Mediterranean, it has been shown that formal institutions emerged from arrangements made by merchant guilds, nonstate agents, to enforce contracts in the absence of state legal provisions. These institutions laid the framework for later economic growth.38 And the conception of institutions as rules cannot account for this phenomenon, for it assumes that the state has a monopoly on coercive power and can enforce its rules. But the very ability for a state to do this can only be seen as an outcome of institutional development.39
In an important recent book, the economist and historian Avner Greif has proposed an alternative approach to institutions that lends itself extremely well to the problem of institutional dynamics—the emergence and change of institutions over time—as well as to thinking about how institutions affect the behavior of groups, not just of individuals. Greif defines institutions as systems “of rules, beliefs, norms, and organizations that together generate a regularity of (social) behavior.”40 This definition incorporates both informal (rules, beliefs, and norms) and formal (organizations) institutions under the central fact that they all contribute to producing regular behavior, eliciting predictable responses and choices from individuals and groups. The claim that rules, beliefs, and norms play a role in generating regular behavior is superficially obvious, but the role of such informal institutional elements is largely ignored by most economists and political scientists, which is why institutional dynamics have been so difficult to understand. But if we see these institutional elements as contributing to the regularity of behavior, then we can see individual actions and the social and political conditions to which they respond as being recursively related and mutually constitutive.41 And this allows us in turn to see how institutions emerge gradually and endogenously. Change occurs when old institutions become inadequate, whether because of endogenous or exogenous factors. Yet those old institutions have a powerful effect on the direction of institutional change, for they provide “a cognitive framework, information, normative guidance, and a way to anticipate what others may do to coordinate their behavior with their responses.”42 Change tends thus to be incremental; the rootedness of institutions in the past, the way in which they are internalized by individuals such that they affect their understanding of the world, makes comprehensive, wholesale institutional change difficult and rare. Refinement will always be preferred to revolution.43 For this reason institutions are path-dependent and sticky.44 And the farther one travels along a particular path, the more attractive that path becomes relative to others, and the more costly it becomes to turn in another direction.45 But revolution—wholesale change—can occur when crises reveal the complete deficiency of old institutions, and when it does the path ramifies; such moments are critical junctures.46
AN EXAMPLE
Let me return from theory to history and offer one example (undocumented and undetailed for now) that anticipates the argument sustained over the course of this book. The belief that the Boiotians were a distinct population group contributed to a norm of cooperation, despite significant competition, among the many communities that comprised this group in the archaic period. This belief was promulgated above all by myths and by rituals that enacted those myths in sanctuaries common to all Boiotians. The norm of cooperation in turn facilitated exchange between individuals from different Boiotian communities, despite the lack of any formal means of enforcing contracts or recourse in the event of goods being stolen or buyers or sellers being
