ABSTRACT
There are some, including sociologists, sociobiologists, and institutional economists, who believe in social evolution. If social institutions did evolve through some internal mechanism, it would be possible to derive a set of laws that could account for this dynamic process. In his last book Douglass North implied that his quest for a general theory of institutional change had not been successful, and that he had largely abandoned the attempt.1 Since then I have argued in The Ephemeral Civilization that institutional change is a response not to some sort of internal adaptive process but to the dynamics of the real economy. In effect, I employed the primary and secondary laws of social dynamics examined in Chapters 8 and 9 to develop a strategic model to explain institutional change. In this chapter I will briefly outline my strategic model of institutional change, and explore the possibility of deriving a set of laws – the tertiary laws of history – that can explain this process.
