THE STATE AS AN ENFORCING AGENCY

In the preceding chapter, we saw how informal institutions emerge, how they are adopted by the individuals, and how they are enforced. Individuals respecting conventions, following moral rules, and adopting social norms cause, as an unintended outcome of their action, the emergence of social order. In close-knit groups, informal institutions suffice to provide stability of expectations and discipline among members, mainly when group members engage in personal relationships. Thus, in primitive societies, informal institutions alone are capable of providing social order, and often such societies can dispense with an additional institution that has the explicit mission of enforcing certain social rules. Does this also hold for societies that grow bigger and in which the relations between the individuals become more and more impersonal?

De Jasay (1995) gives an affirmative answer to this question by pointing out that the so-called Large Group problem “enjoys more generous credit than its intellectual content deserves” (p. 23). De Jasay criticizes the alleged analogy “between social groups with many members and n-person indefinitely repeated prisoner's dilemmas where n is a large number, or the players are anonymous, or both” (ibid.) According to his view, society does not possess the homogeneity that the game-theoretical analogy presupposes. Moreover, society must be conceived as the sum of small groups whose individual members are in fact engaged in contracts and relations with each other.