There are two ways people coordinate their actions: through cooperation, exercised by economic power, and through control, exercised by political power. When economic and political power are held by the same people, the result is stagnation; when those who hold economic power are not the same people who hold political power, the result is progress. This book presents the ways in which economic power and political power can be separated, and how they can remain so, by analyzing the nature of power and the differences between economic and political power. The book then discusses the history of economic and political power, including hunter-gatherer societies, agrarian societies, and modern commercial and industrial societies. This background lends insight into why political and economic power were typically held by the same people, and why recently those without political power have been able to acquire economic power. Incentives play a key role in understanding how those two types of power can become separated, and why there is always a tendency for them to recombine. But ideas also play a crucial role, including the influence of the Enlightenment, on the progress that has occurred in the last several hundred years.
