Sugden's book may be brilliant but he and many others working in this area
limit their focus to a kind of rationality that excludes class interest,
among other things.

Sugden contends that conventions that establish themselves are those that
take root most quickly in a convention-free world. In his 1989 JEP article,
"Spontaneous Order," Sugden develops an example about who gets to gather
wood on a beach. He imagines a convention in which the first person on the
beach gets it all, and is able to leave some there for a time if he 
also leaves
a mark, such as two stones on top of the pile. It is more than a 
little ironic that
Marx wrote a series of newspaper articles in 1842 about peasants being
prosecuted for taking wood from forests owned by the Kaiser. In these articles
Marx demanded that the customary rights of the poor to the common land be
recognized against the abstract legal arguments of the government.
Here, a convention was overthrown through legal arguments, behind which
lurked organized class interest.

Conventions that favor some over others can become norms. Sugden uses
the wood gathering example again, arguing that if the second person on the
beach breaks the convention he must presume that the third person on the
beach will still support it. His argument is based on reason--the third person
will support the convention because he in fact hopes that at another time he
will be first. But isn't it more likely that the wood-gathering convention
will become a norm because (1) the first person is the Kaiser's agent;
(2) newspapers, schools, and churches proclaim that the convention is
virtuous; and (3) freedom of assembly is prohibited so that the second and
third persons are not allowed to talk to each other?

More of this, if you can stand it, in ch.2 of my "Are Worker Rights Human
Rights?" (UMich. 2008).

Richard McIntyre