The Assault on the State: How the Global Attack on Modern Government Endangers Our Future

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. 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.


Also available as an audiobook.

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, post-communist, and European politics in comparative perspective.

Jeffrey S. Kopstein is Dean's Professor of Political Science and Director of the Center for Jewish Studies at the University of California, Irvine. He has written widely on democracy and dictatorship, political violence, and comparative politics.

"A thoughtful and probing discussion of the great challenges facing the democratic state. Powerful and exceptionally well-researched, The Assault on the State has enormous implications for governance in the modern era."
—Don Kettl, The University of Texas at Austin

"Every once in a while, a book comes along that fundamentally reshapes how we think about the central problems facing our societies. This is that kind of book. With verve and sparkling clarity, Hanson and Kopstein make clear that the assault on the modern state is a phenomenon with global reverberations. This is an essential book – to defend the values of liberalism and democracy, we need to defend the modern state itself."
—Daniel Ziblatt, Harvard University, co-author Tyranny of the Minority

"An incisive, thoughtful, and spirited analysis of how personalist rule is assaulting and replacing the state – and what we can do about it. A must-read."
—Anna Grzymala-Busse, Stanford University

"An extraordinarily important book."
—James Goldgeier, Visiting Fellow at the Brookings Institution

"In this sobering book, Hanson and Kopstein cogently explain why defending the administrative state from would-be political 'father figures' is the key battle of our times."
—Juliet Johnson, McGill University

“short, clearly written and dreadfully important. It does not advocate this or that political or economic theory. It does not even particularly defend democracy. It gives us the unwelcome but unavoidable news that state bureaucracy – the thing we love to hate, the pantomime villain of politics, the second best source of jokes after mothers-in-law – is crucial to our happiness, freedom and well-being, and is in mortal danger.”
—Francis Beckett, The Spectator

“Hanson and Kopstein persuasively argue that the long-term impact of this global backlash against ‘unelected bureaucrats’ will lead not to freer societies but to ones marked by corrupt and personalistic authoritarian rule.”
—Foreign Affairs

“…deserves wide attention.”
—The Atlantic

"Hanson and Kopstein make a short, compelling case that an assault on the state is unlikely to return us to a romanticized freer era." 
—Literary Review of Canada