Institutional evolution in the Icelandic Commonwealth

Birgir Solvason

Constitutional Political Economy, 1993, vol. 4, issue 1, 97-125

Abstract: The conventional explanation of the rise of social order in medieval Iceland, the so-called Commonwealth period, is constructivist in nature. In light of medieval legal thought, the explanation is unconvincing. The story of the decline of that social order is also problematic, in that no integrated theory seems to lie behind the explanation. By applying cooperation and rent-seeking theories to the historical record an attempt is made to provide an explanation that is more convincing, integrated and spontaneous in nature. Two main questions are posed; first, how did the Commonwealth emerge, and, second, why did it break down. Copyright George Mason University 1993

Date: 1993
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/BF02393284 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kap:copoec:v:4:y:1993:i:1:p:97-125

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... ce/journal/10602/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/BF02393284

Access Statistics for this article

Constitutional Political Economy is currently edited by Roger Congleton and Stefan Voigt

More articles in Constitutional Political Economy from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().