Quotation of the Day…

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… is from page 378 of Joel Mokyr’s superb 2009 book, The Enlightened Economy: An Economic History of Britain 1700-1850:

The Hobbesian view that insisted that order can only be achieved through firm third-party enforcement may well be true for many societies, but it appears that for Britain in the century following Hobbes’ death (1679) it was becoming an increasingly less apt description of social reality. What this means is that we cannot really place the efficiency of the state at the center of the stage of institutional explanation of the British economic miracle.