That’s my new paper at NBER. In it I boil down (and render a bit more systematic) some of the ideas in Rationalism, Pluralism, and Freedom in order to put them into engagement with the powerful analytic model of open access societies developed in North, Wallis, and Weingast, Violence and Social Orders, by way of a discussion of how the emergence of open access orders looked to contemporaneous theorists: Montesquieu, Smith, Constant, and Tocqueville.