Tullock’s research program explains both the cooperative behaviour and the coercive behaviour through the selfish interest of individuals (or the ‘individual reasoning’). The text also points to Darwin’s theory. Tullock describes a series of impersonal biological and social mechanisms that generate order/ induce cooperative behaviour and shows why the interest of the strong individual will not always act against that of the weaker one. He first explains the way those mechanisms work in the jungle, in communities that do not have a special construct to maintain order and enforce the rules of cooperation. Then, based on the same assumptions and mechanisms, he explains how civilized societies maintain order, how these societies possess that construct. It is worth noting that the jungle-civilization pair of opposites does not correlate with the anarchy-state pair. (Ionut Sterpan presents)

To read: Gordon Tullock – Edge of the Jungle

Handout: How selfish interest and natural selection induce and limit cooperative behaviour