When do countries democratize? What facilitates the survival of authoritarian regimes? What determines the occurrence of revolutions, often leading to left-wing dictatorships, such as the Soviet regime? Although a large literature has developed since Aristotle through contemporary political science [...]

The fundamental question of political theory, one that precedes all other questions about the nature of political life, is why there is a state at all. Is human cooperation feasible without a political authority enforcing it? Or do we need a state to live together? This problem then opens up two fur[...]