Excellent book with much relevance for Primacy of Being for Politics, Ontological Politics and a Second Renaissance Politics

Summary

So the key idea is creating political and social organization and structures—including cultural ones and institutional ones—that support liberty. By liberty, I mean freedom from dominance, freedom from violence and oppression. The classic Lockean idea of liberty is the ability to act in my life freely: to act, speak, dispose of my possessions in freedom—but maybe even stronger, to do that without fear of oppression.

This is actually really difficult to achieve. On the one hand, we need some kind of coordinating authority—the state—to prevent the war of all against all, to avoid anarchy and violence. At the same time, we need to also avoid state oppression, so we don’t end up with a despot. This narrow corridor—this balance—requires basically having a state with power and authority, alongside the social, cultural, and civil society capacities to constrain the state, to keep it controlled. And that’s much more than just having rules like a constitution. A constitution means nothing without the will, coordination, or capacity of the citizens to enforce it against a would-be despot.

This is the essence of the book. For me, the value of the book is less about those core ideas—which are actually quite old in a way, though perhaps presented in a novel form—and more about their growing interest in culture. There’s starting to be this turn to norms and culture, even though their previous work focused more on institutions. There’s a lot of anthropological summary and literature here. I think the most valuable thing is the many anecdotes and examples in the book. It would also be worth reading the more rigorous papers they did, because this is obviously a more popular presentation.

Also, the framing of this is not really a trade-off but a mutual interaction. They call it the Red Queen effect: the idea that as the state gets stronger, civil society also needs to get stronger.

Summary Bullet Points:

• Key idea: building political, social, institutional, and cultural structures that support liberty—freedom from dominance, violence, and oppression.
• Liberty is framed in Lockean terms: freedom to act, speak, and dispose of property—without fear of oppression.
• Challenge: you need the state to prevent anarchy, but also need to prevent the state becoming a despot.
• The “narrow corridor” is the delicate balance between state power and the strength of civil society to constrain it.
• Civil society strength goes far beyond formal rules like constitutions: it requires the will and coordinated capacity of citizens.
• Novelty of the book lies not in the theory (which is somewhat old) but in the use of examples, anecdotes and the simple way of presenting this (the 2d diagram and the corridor).
• Noteworthy also to see their growing attention to culture and norms after their earlier focus purely on "structural" institutional factors
• The Red Queen effect: as the state grows stronger to manage complexity, civil society must strengthen alongside it to preserve liberty. (As in Alice in Wonderland where the Red Queen explains that you must keep running to stand still – in this case keep strengthening civil society to keep up with a stronger state or vice versa)
• The book is a popular presentation and their more rigorous academic papers are likely worth consulting.

Excerpts

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Clovis as an early entrant Into the narrow corridor by combining the Roman state and Christian Church with the bottom up egalitarianism of the Germanic tribes

Leaders of Germanic war bands didn’t wear purple or call themselves Augustus, but Clovis did. In doing so, he was bringing the blade of the assemblies and bottom-up norms of Germanic tribes together with the blade of the Roman model of a centralized state. What emerged was something greater than the sum of its parts. The blueprint for bureaucratic organization Clovis got from Rome and the Christian church got embedded in the diametrically different politics and norms of the Germanic tribes. This combination placed the Merovingians at the entryway to the corridor.

in these early post, Roman states the king is much constraint by the existing norms and semidemocratic processes. Here the example of Charlemagne

“The Salic Law didn’t resemble Roman law. It was much more like the codification, regulation, and strengthening of existing norms attempted initially by Draco and then Solon in ancient Athens. But in this process, the laws were also bringing the resolution of conflict under the remit of the state. By the late sixth century, legislation was taking a decidedly more Roman turn, incorporating elements of the Theodosian code. The Salic Law was another step in the fusion of Roman state structure with the norms and political institutions of the Franks. The significance of the way the Salic Law was formulated is evident once we get to the reign of Charlemagne, who reached the apogee of the Roman connection by crowning himself emperor in Rome on Christmas Day 800. All the same, Charlemagne did not act like a Roman emperor when it came to his relations with his people. The same assemblies, customs, and expectations that shackled Clovis’s reign constrained Charlemagne too. Two royal edicts issued at Regensburg in 789 indicate that agents of the state were misusing their power and the king received complaints from people that “they do not have their law maintained.” The emphasis on “their law[…]”