This introduction to the special issue in honor of Professor Yoram Barzel provides an overview of his scholarship and a summary of the contributions to this special issue. Each contribution advances or elaborates upon major themes in Barzel's theoretical and applied work on property rights, transaction costs, and political economy. The contributions fall into three categories: an examination of the foundations and implications of the ‘Barzelian’ method for social scientific analysis; Barzel's economics of property rights and transaction costs to historical case studies; and advances to Barzel's theory of the state, which includes an analysis of the origins of democracy and the rule of law.

How did the evolution of the rule of law become stunted in Sicily during the 19th century? The work of economist Yoram Barzel, particularly his property-rights approach to understanding the political economy of state formation, is uniquely suited to understanding the failure of Italy's unification process to secure the rule of law in Sicily during the 19th century. This failure can be explained by a lack of a credible commitment to the rule of law in the state formation process. I argue that this lack of credible commitment manifested itself in the abolition of previously existing parliamentary institutions as an independent collective action mechanism, as well as prior constitutional agreements that existed in the Kingdom of Sicily. The resulting uncertainty over the security and legal definition of property rights over land raised the transaction costs of competing for resources through productive specialization and market exchange. In turn, it reduced the relative costs of competition for land ownership and the use of enforcement through other means, such as rent seeking or organized crime.

Economics as a social science is about exchange and the institutions within which exchange relationships are formed and transactions are executed. Yoram Barzel's contribution to economics and political economy reflect this focus on exchange and institutions. In this paper, I will sketch a theory of real-existing socialist economies from a property rights/public choice perspective. Then I present the puzzles in political economy that such a system confronted in attempting to create a prosperous, regenerating and competitive economic system. I then conclude with a short discussion of the future for a progressive research program in political economy that takes institutional change seriously.

To be effective, an army must contain the extent of desertion among its ranks. This phenomenon rose to particular prominence in Europe during the 18th and 19th centuries, with the appearance of the figure of the “citizen-soldier” on the battlefield. This paper offers the first theoretical treatment of the issue of desertion from an economic perspective. Building on the work of Yoram Barzel on the “economic analysis of property rights,” we develop a “desertion as theft” framework. We then test the empirical implications of the framework against qualitative and quantitative evidence from Napoleonic France.

Every economic explanation assumes maximization. How strange, then, that few economists accept one of maximization's most straightforward implications: every observed institution is efficient. My aim is to persuade economists of this fact and thus to dissuade them from making illogical claims about social welfare. To frame my argument, I consider the “property rights approach” to institutions developed by Yoram Barzel. I speculate that economists resist what maximization implies about institutional efficiency because they think that efficiency-always precludes them from improving the world, and hope of improving the world is what attracted them to economics in the first place. But, besides being inconsistent, resistance is unnecessary: efficiency-always does not preclude economists, or anyone else, from improving the world.