My review is here. It begins,
Large societies are held together by the soft glue of social norms and by the hard nails of government law enforcement. In Anarchy Unbound, Peter Leeson argues that we tend to underestimate the holding power of social norms and to overestimate the benefits of government.
This part reads backwards to me, or is unintelligibly worded:
> However, one alternative that Leeson notes is the institution of credit. If the producer agrees to supply goods to the middleman on credit, then the middleman has nothing to steal until he has already lent goods to the producer.
Producer P wants to trade with consumer C, expedited through middleman M. If P supplies M with goods on credit, then M has the goods, and P just has an agreement. M now has goods to steal, and why would M have lent any goods to P? Perhaps there is some collateral missing from the explanation?
Alternatively, one way to build up trust is to start with tiny transactions, where each subsequent transaction size doubles, or more conservatively increases by say 1.5, up to the desired transaction size. At any given moment, the “float” at risk of theft is smaller than the accumulated transaction history, and it becomes more and more attractive to keep a good thing going rather than killing the enterprise via theft and risking retaliation.
Your conclusion seems to me to be in line with Deirdre McCloskey’s explanation of the Industrial Revolution: http://oll.libertyfund.org/pages/lm-mccloskey
The Mercatus Center sponsored a book panel on Anarchy Unbound in September.