The political economy of feudalism in medieval Europe
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The political economy of feudalism in medieval Europe Andrew T. Young1 Accepted: 31 October 2020 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Why did enduring traditions of economic and political liberty arise in Western Europe? An answer to this question must be sought at the constitutional level. Within the medieval constitutional order, traditions of representative and limited government developed through patterns of constitutional bargaining. The politically fragmented landscape that emerged following the decline of the Western Roman Empire and the barbarian migrations was conducive to those patterns. In particular, that landscape was characterized by polycentric and hierarchical governance structures; within those structures, political property rights holders were sovereign and residual claimants to governance returns. I elaborate on why this environment of polycentric sovereignty promoted constitutional bargaining in the direction of good governance and greater liberty. Keywords Political and economic liberty · Medieval Western Europe · Polycentric sovereignty · Constitutional bargaining · Feudalism JEL Classification H11 · H77 · P16 · P5
1 Introduction Why did enduring traditions of economic and political liberty arise in Western Europe? We would like to know the answer for important reasons. There is overwhelming evidence that a stable environment of liberty is a recipe for sustained economic growth.1 Liberty is also desirable in and of itself; its presence acknowledges 1 This is not the place for a review of the large literature linking political and/or economic liberty to economic performance. However, drawing on the widely-used Polity IV democracy scores and Fraser Institute Economic Freedom of the World (EFW) scores, one finds that, for the last twenty years, every country (save one: Singapore) in the top 15 of GDP per capita had a democracy score of 8 or higher
This paper is based on prepared remarks for a plenary lecture at the 2020 Public Choice Society meetings at Newport Beach California. * Andrew T. Young [email protected] 1
Rawls College of Business, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, TX 79409, USA
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each individual’s dignity and worth. In light of both these reasons, understanding how traditions of liberty took root and endured is important because of how exceedingly difficult it has often proved to transplant them to other regions of the world. Any account of why enduring traditions of liberty arose in Western Europe must be at the constitutional level. Constitutions give form to the institutions of governance; they provide the prescriptions and constraints that guide and bind political agents. Adapting Douglass North’s (1991) felicitous phrasing: constitutions provide the rules of the game to which political agents conform. Will they respect individuals’ rights to representation in government? Even given representation, will political agents recognize that there remain limits to their appropriate spheres of governance
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