Essays in Trespassing

Only a few [economists] were so troubled to probe whether it was the quest for economic development that had wrought political disasters. My own reaction was to withdraw into the history of ideas. The most surprising idea I came across was the speculation that the expansion of the market economy would serve to restrain the “passions” of the sovereign and would therefore result in less arbitrary and more humane government. Economic growth would bring constraints that would put an end to despotism.

For Montesquieu, a more complex economy is a delicate mechanism that must not be tampered with. In [his] mind, this tampering could emanate only from the government of its head, the capricious sovereign. But the argument cuts several ways. If it is true that the economy must be deferred to, then there is a case not only for constraining the imprudent actions of the prince but for repressing those of the people, for limiting participation, in short, for crushing anything that could be interpreted by some economist-king as a threat to the proper functioning of the ‘delicate watch’. 

The principal “economic” explanations of authoritarian rule in Latin America today run along those same lines.

-- Hirschman in Essays in Trespassing (1981), p99-103.

Who'd have thought that what Hirschman wrote forty years ago (!) would resonate with the goings-on of one country half the world away from the countries that he initially wrote about?