The Assault on the State

Stephen E. Hanson is the Lettie Pate Evans Professor of Government at William & Mary. He is the author of numerous scholarly books and articles on Russian, postcommunist, and European politics in comparative perspective. In addition to faculty appointments at Harvard University and Yale University, he has served in many leadership positions, including as Director of the Ellison Center for Russian, East European and Central Asian Studies at the University of Washington, Vice Provost for International Affairs at William & Mary, and President of the Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies.Jeffrey Kopstein is Dean's Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Irvine. He has written widely on democracy and dictatorship, political violence, and comparative politics. He has held faculty appointments at University of Toronto and Dartmouth College, as well as fellowships at Harvard University, Princeton University, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In addition to his award-winning books and articles, his popular writing has appeared in The Washington Post, the Atlantic, and the Globe and Mail.

What if the state as we know it didn't exist? Our air would be poisonous, our votes uncounted, and our markets dysfunctional. Yet across the world, in countries as diverse as Hungary, Israel, the U.K., and the U.S., attacks on the modern state and its workforce are intensifying. They are morphing into power grabs by self-aggrandizing politicians who attempt to seize control of the state for themselves and their cronies. What replaces the modern state once it is fatally undermined is not the free market and the flowering of personal liberty. Instead, the death of government agencies organized under the rule of law inevitably leads to the only realistic alternative: the rule of men. In the Assault on the State, political scientists Stephen Hanson and Jeffrey Kopstein offer an impassioned plea to defend modern government against those who seek to destroy it. They dissect the attack on the machinery of government from its origins in post-Soviet Russia to the core powers of Western democracy. The dangers of state erosion imperil every aspect of our lives. Kopstein and Hanson outline a strategy that can reverse this destructive trend before humanity is plunged back into the pathological personalistic politics of premodern times.

Acknowledgements1. At the Precipice2. The Deep State Bogeyman3. Beyond the Democracy Debate4. How Vladimir Putin Resurrected Tsarism5. The Wave: From East to West6. Reclaiming the Modern StateNotes