Medieval Iceland and the Absence of Government

I'm not sure if you're disagreeing with me or not.

Medieval Iceland was a violent place, and the threat of violence was much more overt than it is now. But it was not a society where disputes were primarily settled by killing.

> the research says that old Scandinavia's local ting was a bit more of a negotiating place for feuds than a governing/judging assembly.

It was a place to negotiate disputes (which sometimes ended up as feuds). It was a place to recite the (complex and sophisticated) law code of the saga period Icelanders. It was also a place to show off your prosperity and the quality of your alliances.

I have to reiterate. If you are at all interested in this stuff, read a saga for yourself. Whatever else you end up concluding, you'll get over the idea that these people were a bunch of doltish brutes.

> Life on Iceland was certainly even harder than in the rest of Scandinavia.

I'm not sure why you're certain of that. Iceland was settled by Scandinavians after all. People don't usually emigrate to a place where life is harder than where they started.

> That would probably have left less time over for that time's main sports -- pillage, etc.

Several times in the sagas you read of young men going off to raid and plunder, sometimes coming back to settle down at the farmstead. They pillaged, just not each other.

Have you ever seen one that worked at a larger scale than that? Bigger systems require more layers of organization: there are more places for disagreements to crop up, and resolving them is a bigger and harder problem. Disagreements about the fundamental defining purposes of an institution multiply, and these conflicts need to be resolved somehow. Everyone needs these definitions to be mostly compatible for institutions to function, and this just isn't feasible without some structure at larger size. At the size of a single family, it can work pretty well – doesn’t usually, but I know some families that are shockingly egalitarian. There also exist small companies, university academic departments, primary schools, research labs, etc. which are culturally uniform and cohesive enough for this to work. Even at the size of a city, I think it’s mostly impossible: the best we can hope for is widely supported representatives who operate transparently and are accountable for their actions.

Iceland is a pretty unique case: everyone there is pretty much everyone else’s cousin, and they’re on an island. They look the same, have roughly the same beliefs, etc. etc. And I’m still far from convinced that medieval Iceland was really so utopic.

I'm thinking of Sparta though, which was by many accounts pretty culturally uniform and egalitarian/meritocratic, at least for citizens.

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I think the best analysis I know is still Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. I also recommend The Federalist Papers, particularly Nos. 10 and 51, for a pragmatic solution to these kinds of problems, based on the decades of first-hand experience some smart blokes like Madison and Jefferson had trying to run fledgling democratic states. (And Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy is probably worth a read too.)

For a more literary exploration, read some Balzac novels: early 19th century France was the beginning of the cross-over from aristocracy to bourgeoisie, and rapidly growing cities quickly accumulated bureaucracies.

Yeah, but shareholders in corporations have a much more credible threat of exit. The more people exercise said right the more the price falls, and eventually the management is replaced.

I don't see where randomness comes into his explanation. Rather, I see his explanation for technological success as hinging on massive societies which specialize, which is in turn based on highly developed domestic agriculture, which is in turn based on the East-West axis of Eurasia with origins in the Fertile Crescent and East Asia.