ABSTRACT
The accounts of primitive societies offered across two hundred years, from Adam Smith to Richard Posner, by economic theory in its different characterizations of the subject may be referred to a common model. This can be summarized as follow:
1 Primitive societies are at the early phase of a substantially linear historical evolution. The stage theory of eighteenth-century sociology was superseded in its naive formulation and then partially abandoned, but the evolutionary core of the theory has been preserved. According to Smith, primitive society was the “rudest” stage of human society; according to formalist economics and anthropology, primitive society was the society in which rational behaviours were strongly limited by the institutional structure; according to the contemporary economics of non-market institutions, primitive society is the place where high transaction and information costs together with high uncertainty about future events determine the emergence of institutions. These are the result of a rational behaviour – in particular, in the field of acquisition and distribution of natural resources, as the behavioural ecology has shown – but they are insufficient and inadequate because they do not give rise to the property rights necessary to make development and wealth accumulation possible.
