The Founding of America as a Form of Exit
Balaji Srinivasan and A History of the American People
In 1970, the economist Albert O. Hirschman published a book called Exit, Voice, and Loyalty. Hirschman’s thesis was that there are two ways you can respond to ‘decline in firms, organizations, and states.’ These are voice and exit.
- Voice means trying to reform an organization by expressing your concerns.
- Exit means leaving the organization and starting your own thing.
As Balaji Srinivasan has pointed out, the founding of America can be viewed as a form of exit. I came across this idea again while reading Paul Johnson’s A History of the American People. Here’s the passage that stood out to me:
Behind the Pilgrims were powerful figures in England, led by Sir Robert Rich, Earl of Warwick, who in 1612 at the age of twenty-five had become a member of the Virginia Company, and was later to be Lord High Admiral of the parliamentary forces during the English Civil War.
Warwick was an adventurer, the Ralegh of his age, but a graduate of that Cambridge Puritan college, Emmanuel, and a profoundly religious man. Together with other like-minded Puritan gentry, he wanted to reform England. But if that proved impossible he wanted the alternative option of a reformed colony in the Americas.
Reforming England is voice. Starting a colony in the Americas is exit.
