Where does the modern state come from?
Economists attempt to answer a profound political question
It is part metaphor, part myth and part history. Thomas Hobbes thought life there was nasty, brutish and short. John Locke disagreed, proclaiming that it was where people first learnt how to own things. Jean-Jacques Rousseau described it as the place where people were born free, before they became ensnared in chains. Robert Nozick thought that people were so desperate to escape it, there was an inevitable result: the creation of a state.
This article appeared in the Finance & economics section of the print edition under the headline “Betting the farm”
From the December 23rd 2023 edition
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