The Assault on the State, Stephen E. Hanson
The Assault on the State, Stephen E. Hanson
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The Assault on the State
How the Global Attack on Modern Government Endangers Our Future

Author: Stephen E. Hanson, Jeffrey S. Kopstein

Narrator: L.J. Ganser

Unabridged: 5 hr 48 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 08/26/2024


Synopsis

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 UK, and the US, 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. Hanson and Kopstein outline a strategy that can reverse this destructive trend before humanity is plunged back into the pathological personalistic politics of premodern times.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Jan on March 18, 2025

An absolute must read today! The State is the machinery that sustains democratic institutions. The destruction of the State a'la Putin and Co. may be driven by base greed for power and money, but it intermeshes with the health and survival of democracy. A even partial destruction of the state will h......more

Goodreads review by Don on February 28, 2025

Eye-opening, revelatory, and scary on many levels. While many pundits, scholars and politicians talk about, dictatorships, and autocracies. The authors very adroitly introduce the idea of “Patrimonialism” which explains so much relative to both global affairs and current affairs here in America. Hig......more

Goodreads review by Jenny on March 21, 2025

I really thought the theories in here and the history of Russian, Ukraine, Israel, Britain were essential to understanding Hanson's thesis. He has a point that this is a pre modern age problem that has followed us into the modern age and that conspiracy theories of the deep state prevent administrat......more

Goodreads review by Kirk on April 25, 2025

The concept of patrimonialism as described in this book seems like an essential key in understanding what is going on in today's politics (Jonathan Rauch in The Atlantic wrote an article based on this book, if you want a taste). The writing is a bit repetitive, but it's an otherwise engaging read, a......more

Goodreads review by David on April 18, 2025

Hanson and Kopstein provide a valuable reframing of the current US and world political climate from the standard democratic-autocratic axis to something more insidious: patrimonialism. The orange one's fascination with and emulation of organized crime and its structures of governance is given a thor......more