'The Bottleneck', review of the latest book by Nobel laureates Acemoglu and Robinson

This is the kaleidoscopic world of the two authors. It starts with the 'Gilgamesh problem', i.e. the need to bring the authority and power of a state under control so that only its positive aspects are taken into account and not its negative ones. This is achieved with a Doppelganger, i.e. a 'double', in essence a system of checks and balances. That since the epic of Gilgamesh, the first king of Uruk, the first Sumerian city and perhaps the first known real city dating back 4,200 years, was at the heart of that poem. The solution was found in a brilliant ploy: to place side by side with the nonchalant and arrogant Gilgamesh an alter ego, Enkidu, who was destined to oppose him (except later to come to terms in a joint conspiracy, but that becomes another story).

It is in nuce the first attempt to create a system of check and balance whose root will remain, according to the two authors, also in the construction of the American model of governance, the one that will make James Madison, one of the fathers of the United States of America, say that 'ambition must be opposed to ambition'. Although he had not imagined the difficulty of confrontation when ambition becomes egolatry.

This roundup on the entanglements between politics and freedom has an inspirer: Thomas Hobbes. More spectre than noble father. He is evoked above all by the suggestion of his Leviathan, the sea monster of the Bible, the representation of the strong state par excellence. The immanent state that controls the community through army, bureaucracy and the power to make laws. Acemoglu and Robinson use Hobbesian intuition to decline it with some specifics: that of the absentee Leviathan where anarchy reigns, a phenomenon that has long accompanied human history, or that where the rules are clan or ethnic (as in the case of the tivs of pre-colonial Nigeria); the other of the despotic Leviathan where the state overrides the rights of citizens, denies communities and suffocates society (and here the two authors range from Lagos, to Syria, from the history of China to that of the Reich); and, finally, the third option of the chained Leviathan. This is the solution hoped for as optimal and is that of the 'straitjacket', the place of choice for the exercise of freedom through society's participation in politics. Chaining the Leviathan is thus the only way to remove the shackles from our rights.

Despite the fact that the two authors' gaze has the world as its horizon, the example of maximum political virtuosity, i.e. the best chained Leviathan, is before our eyes. It is the fruit of the positive combination of the participatory institutions and regulations created from below by Germanic culture with the centralised bureaucratic and legal traditions of the Roman Empire, resulting in a unique and optimal balance. It was the time when the barbarian tribes invaded what remained of the Western Empire. And that encounter, more often a clash, created the ideal bottleneck of freedom. And here is the reinterpretation of history made by the two authors: not the myth of Magna Charta and the Parliaments of the 13th century, but the contamination that took place four centuries earlier.

One would think that today the new bottleneck is the arm of the sea we call the Mediterranean, the one where Fernand Braudel used to combine 'geographical time' and 'social time' to describe who we are today. Tomorrow's historians will tell us whether contemporary encounters and clashes will have brought a new definition of freedom. And whether that physical bottleneck will also have become a political bottleneck.

The bottleneck. How nations can be free

Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson .

Il Saggiatore, Milan, pp. 792, € 35