cial order a public good. Because some individuals may free ride on bearing the provision
cost of social order in large societies, a voluntary agreement is likely to fail. This was
the main argument on which Hobbes justified in Leviathan the establishment of a state.
The internal wars of Hobbes’ time corresponded to the asserting of the state in England
and France through the victories of monarchs over the multitude of local lords. This
institutional success provided a peaceful internal environment propitious for the nascent
sustained economic growth. Many other nations in Europe and in the rest of the world
will soon try to imitate this pattern.
Once the concentration of force is realized and social order successfully maintained, the
possibility of abusing the asymmetry of force creates another threat against individuals:
the threat of dictatorship. The problem is then how to limit the state’s power to avoid
dictatorship. Since the state cannot commit itself, individuals swap potential dispersed
violence against potential centralized violence. One may wonder whether they are eventu-
ally better off. Olson (1993) provides an argument to assert so. In dictatorship, the single
ruler has an ’encompassing interest’ in refraining from preying on all revenues today to
have something to prey on in the future. In other words, his own intertemporal welfare
is tied to the individuals’ welfare. In anarchy, none has the force to dominate the others.
This gives every individual the incentive to prey as much as possible whenever possible,
leaving nothing to build the future. As it will be proved in this paper, Olson’s economic
argument does not constitute a limit to the dictator’s power. However it provides an
important intuition to understand dictatorship’s stability.
In the political economy literature, there are a number of works which consider predation