Why do some nations become solidly, stably democratic, while other nations have difficulty establishing and maintaining democracy? Why are the people of some nations prosperous, while the people of other nations are poor, or considerably less rich? Why are the people of some nations relatively free, both in the negative sense of freedom from arbitrary coercion and in the positive sense of an ability to be able to enjoy good things, such as good jobs and good health, while the people of other nations are less free, in both the negative and positive senses?

In The Narrow Corridor, political economists Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson complete a trilogy of books devoted to these three large questions. In their first volume, Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (2006), they focused on the question of democracy, using technically formidable economic models to contend that nations with elites whose wealth is based on business rather than agriculture and populaces who are less motivated to confiscate elite wealth find it easier to democratize. In their second volume, Why Nations Fail (2012), they turned to the issue of prosperity, employing an informal, historically oriented style to argue that people in nations with competitive, inclusive institutions, prominently including business, flourish economically compared to people in nations with closed, extractive institutions. Finally, in their most recent, longest, and most original volume, they argue in a similarly informal style that the freedom and powers of ordinary people and those of national elites have advanced together over time in some nations, such as Britain and the United States, in what they call the “narrow corridor.”

In the narrow corridor, vigilant, rights-oriented nonelites in society constantly pressure, resist, and restrain the elites who control the government. The result is a powerful but constrained state that Acemoglu and Robinson call the “shackled leviathan.” A constant race between state and society redounds to the benefit of both, with people who are freer and elites who, though checked, enjoy greater wealth and command greater powers than the elites who run other types of states.

Three other major types of states identified by Acemoglu and Robinson are the “despotic leviathan,” the “paper leviathan,” and the “absent leviathan.” In a despotic leviathan, like China, the state and the elites who run it crush resistance but lose dynamism over the long haul by doing so. In a paper leviathan like Argentina, state elites preserve their position by failing to serve nonelites well, while forgoing the potential benefits of doing so. In an absent leviathan like India, elites fail to govern much at all, to their detriment and also that of their populaces, who find themselves trapped in what Acemoglu and Robinson call the “cage of norms.”

The Narrow Corridor can be useful in helping business ethicists to deepen our thinking on three major policy questions. The first, which The Narrow Corridor discusses at length, is in regard to the political economy of the United States. Should American business, as Acemoglu and Robinson suggest toward the end of their book, be part of a new grand bargain with labor and government (and presumably other relevant groups) inspired by the “cow trade” of 1930s Sweden, in which the country’s social democrats gave business and farmers reasons to support high wages for Swedish workers? The second policy issue is in regard to China. Should the negative perspective on that country’s past, present, and future political economy as a despotic leviathan in The Narrow Corridor lead American (and other democratic nations’) businesses, and business schools, away from engagement with China and toward the decoupling favored by national security and trade hawks? The third issue is in regard to the many “paper leviathan” and “absent leviathan” middle-income, lower-middle-income, and lower-income nations of the world, such as Argentina, India, and Nigeria. Should the negative evaluation of their political economies as ineffective, corrupt, and difficult to change in The Narrow Corridor similarly lead American and other wealthy-nation businesses and business schools away from current or potential engagement with these nations? Even, and perhaps especially, if one’s own inclinations are against a new American business–labor–government grand bargain along Swedish lines; for continued American engagement with China; and for a ramped-up engagement with nations like Argentina, India, and Nigeria, one can benefit in one’s own thinking about the proper path for American business going forward from engaging with the wide-ranging, provocative survey of freedom across the world in The Narrow Corridor.

The Narrow Corridor can also be useful to business ethicists to the degree that it leads us to engage in a reflective examination of whether and how our field now offers, or could offer, counterarguments to two troubling moral claims. The first troubling moral claim is that the business elites and the employees and consumers of shackled leviathans like Britain and democratized South Korea are engaged in a more ethical way of life overall—one more conducive to Aristotelian human flourishing, Benthamite greater good for the greater number, and Kantian compliance with moral duties alike—than are the elites and the people of “despotic leviathans” like China, “paper leviathans” like Argentina, and “absent leviathans” like India. Thus stated, this normative claim, I suspect, would be troubling to Acemoglu and Robinson themselves, as well as to business ethicists inspired by them (see, e.g., Jennings and Velasquez 2015). But what is wrong with it, troubling though it is, assuming the correctness of the positive claims by Acemoglu and Robinson about the efficacy of shackled leviathans for both their elites and their people in regard to freedom and affluence?

A second moral claim that is also troubling in its own assertion of moral superiority that comes from part of the left side of the political spectrum: the elites and the people of shackled leviathans have exploited and held back the people of other nations through imperialism, military power, and economic power and, in so doing, have engaged in, and are still engaging in, an exploitative way of life that, effective though it is for them/us, is ethically inferior, to the extent that it is distinctively exploitative of the ways of life of people in other, non–shackled leviathan, nonimperialist nations. Troubling that argument undoubtedly is—but what, if anything, is wrong with it?

The suggestion I want to offer is that the academic business ethics community associated with Business Ethics Quarterly and like journals can, given the normative bent of our field, make a better case for the comparable moral value of the ways of life of managers, employees, and consumers in different parts of the world than positively oriented political economists of either a pro–wealthy nation bent, such as Acemoglu and Robinson, or an anti–wealthy nation bent are likely to do. We in business ethics can do so in part simply by continuing and extending the field’s long-standing openness to Christianity and our more recent openness to Buddhism, Islam, Judaism, Confucianism, and other religious and quasi-religious traditions from around the world, all of which in one way or another emphasize the value of ethics other than those of effectiveness and earthly justice. More ambitiously, we could draw on Aristotle and empirical social science to contend that businesses and their employees in middle-income, paper leviathan countries are, or at least may well be, closer to a Golden Mean/Middle Way. In that middle-income middle path, one avoids either an excess of pressure on people to define their lives in terms of their chosen vocations (an arguable hallmark of life in high-income, shackled leviathan countries) or a deficiency of such pressure (an arguable hallmark of life in low-income, absent leviathan countries). Having made such a pro-middle-income-country claim, one could then proceed to integrate it into a broader case for the general moral equality of different modes of life in different nations.

The beginning of this review noted that The Narrow Corridor completes a trilogy. But both Acemoglu and Robinson are comparatively young (aged fifty-two and sixty, respectively), and perhaps their ambitious project of limning the political economy of the world through lengthy, accessible books as well as through technically oriented articles is not over. This reviewer hopes they have much more to say. Volumes by them devoted to military power, regulation, subnational governments, and international institutions, all touched on in The Narrow Corridor (which offers a negative perspective on the World Health Organization, chaired at one point by Robert Mugabe), would all be of great interest. Of the greatest interest from a business ethics perspective would be a volume on business that examines the (previously noted) vexed questions of America’s and other wealthy nations’ engagement with China and other despotic leviathans and with paper leviathans and absent leviathans. But whether or not they ever write such a book, Acemoglu and Robinson have given business ethicists new ways to see the world and a powerful perspective to draw from, and react to, in writing our own articles and books, and they accordingly deserve our appreciation.