In Fallibilist Philosophy current political polarity was explained as an aspect of the older conflict between Anglo and Continental philosophy. [via A&L Daily]

A thought thread woven through previous posts deals with the conflicting world views of those who seize upon an idea and become zealous proponents of it - taking it to extremes and so losing any value the original idea may have had - and those who maintain a critical stance, even of their own ideas, and so avoid turning them into dogma or caricature. The excitable extremists ride their notions into the ground and end up walking, or crawling, while the more critical not only keep their mounts they do better at choosing routes among the various turnings and forkings of paths. It's not just a difference in temperament. There's an element of personal integrity and intellectual honesty involved as well as courage. When uncertainty or doubt arises, as it always does when fully engaged, what is the useful response? Zealots deny and ignore it, redoubling their efforts and zeal, and so immunize themselves to knowledge, preferring belief and dogma. This isn't an innocent quirk, a charming or harmless character defect, since the end result is always blood flowing like water.

In Common Denominator Nicholas Thompson argues that a country's legal history greatly affects its economy.

MALAYSIA AND INDONESIA COULDN'T BE CALLED TWINS, but they might be called siblings. The adjacent Southeast Asian nations possess similar natural resources and their citizens speak similar languages and follow similar strains of Islam. But Malaysia's economy is prospering while Indonesia's is floundering. Malaysia's stock market is far more vibrant than its neighbor's, and its average resident is three times richer.

Economists might explain these divergent paths by pointing to the countries' different responses to the Asian financial crisis of the mid-1990s. Sociologists might find a cultural explanation in the close-knit community of Chinese immigrants who are the most powerful force in Malaysia's business community. Historians might point out that Malaysia's struggle for independence was much less bloody than Indonesia's.

Another explanation lies in the countries' legal systems, however. Malaysia was a British colony and its legal system is based on the common law: the set of rules, norms, and procedures that has guided the legal system of England and the British Empire for about nine centuries. Indonesia was a Dutch colony and its legal system derives from French civil law, a set of statutes and principles written under Napoleon in the early 19th century and imposed upon the lands he conquered, including the Netherlands.

According to research published by a group of scholars beginning in 1998, countries that come from a French civil law tradition struggle to create effective financial markets, while countries with a British common law tradition succeed far more frequently. While the scholars conducting the research are economists rather than lawyers, their theory has jolted the legal academy, leading to the creation of a new academic specialty called "law and finance" and turning the authors of the theory into the most cited economists in the world over the past decade.

Their explanation for the correlation centers on judiciary independence. Common law judiciaries are powerful and independent, able to check both executive and legislative behavior and interpret a body of law as it applies to particular cases in a large context. Civil law judiciaries are weak, expected to strictly apply much more numerous statutes that attempt to deal with every detail. It's the invisible hand vs. the iron fist of command.

What they have done is provide a giant statistical brief in support of the ideas of John Locke and James Madison, and they've updated those ideas for a world that's as interested in economic success as liberty. Creating a judicial branch that can check the executive and the legislature doesn't just protect individual rights and prevent the persecution of the government's political opponents. It improves your stock market.

If 18th-century reasoning can't convince modern constitution writers and lawmakers of the utility of protecting private property and putting judicial checks on other government branches, maybe 21st-century statistics—and economic enticements—can. Indonesia's market won't improve if the new finance minister comes into office this winter with a list of regulations culled from LLSV papers. But Indonesia's stock market might improve over time if the minister has read LLSV's papers and thought about the larger principles of judicial independence and judicial review they espouse.

This, at least, is the path being taken by the French government, for obvious reasons the most elegant and persistent defender of civil law. Initially, the French government ignored LLSV's findings. Then it dismissed them. Starting last summer, it began funding research through its Ministry of Rights and Justice into what the country can learn from LLSV.

Many previous posts attempt to illuminate other aspects of the basic conflict between those who want to minutely control the world and those who cooperate with it, those who make a religion of reason and those who find it to be a particularly useful tool but one of many. We see it at every level, from farmers that try to precisely control fields, crops and livestock to politicians that attempt to plan economies. In every case there is a destructive increase in order, an oversimplification of reality that has predictable effects - a brief increase in prosperity is followed by a much longer and much deeper collapse.

Other posts have dealt with why this is so, pointing out the impossibility of gathering sufficient information of sufficient quality to make useful decisions, the Knowledge Problem, the inherent instability of rigid constructs in an ever changing world, the Concorde Fallacy which prompts groups to treat sunk costs unwisely and persist with failed efforts, the unanimous fallacies of groups that prize group cohesion above even survival (an aspect of the Concorde Fallacy), and cybernetic approaches to systems thinking that see all of reality as a more complicated thermostat that can be controlled by feedback under the direction of some external power.

The common law approach - Whig rather than Jacobite, Anglo rather than French, complex rather than cybernetic, resilient rather than rigid, fallibilist rather than absolutist, cooperative rather than communal, individualist rather than collectivist - is a useful addition to the growing catalogue of heuristics that help achieve outcomes widely viewed as desirable by both camps.