With the author’s opening remark that “it has taken millennia for the network of states to extend over the whole planet” (p. 1), I found myself anticipating an explanation of the emergence of different features of states across time and place, as well as an account of the processes through which internally generated change emerges within this social ecology of states. That initial anticipation reflected my earlier working with students through Samuel M. Scheiner and Michael R. Willig’s collection of essays, The Theory of Ecology (2011, Chicago: University of Chicago Press). That initial anticipation also reflected my growing desire to conduct social theorizing through open and not closed systems of human interaction because I wanted to explore how I might incorporate ecological insights into theories of society. However, it quickly became clear that the author’s prime interest lay not so much in exploring the ecological order of human societies as in advocating for a normative vision of the progressivist scheme of social democracy, which he did through a judicious choice of analytical presuppositions.

After a few introductory pages, Pettit summarizes his analytical framework by asserting that “we must start in our quest for a genealogy of the state with a prepolitical society of moderately self-regarding, moderately rational, and mutually dependent agents. And we must take those individuals to operate under conditions of agricultural settlement, relative scarcity, and an approximately balanced distribution of power, whether the balance is achieved among members as a whole or within a restricted class” (p. 26). In those six presuppositions sits the hard analytical core of Pettit’s The State, recalling that Thomas Kuhn had explained that any scientific theory must possess some hard core of analytical presuppositions in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962, Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Pettit’s hard core almost unavoidably advocates for the progressivist form of social democracy that has been ascending throughout the Western world since the late nineteenth century.

These six conditions that inform Pettit’s vision of politics propel political thought along progressivist lines, with some of those presuppositions being more influential than others. The conjunction of people being moderately self-regarding and moderately rational enables the reduction of a society of myriad and varied agents to a massed society of nearly homogeneous agents. The condition of mutual dependence is a simple fact of life for which there exists no alternative, though such dependence is stronger the more densely populated the territory. The condition of agricultural settlement normalizes European patterns of living while scarcity is a general condition of human life. And then we come to the “rough balance of power between rulers and ruled” (p. 17). What are we to make of this assertion? It is the pivotal element of Pettit’s analytical framework and yet it can take him nowhere into his desired analytical territory because the truth-value of that assertion is surely subject to neither verification nor falsification. For instance, one robust finding from democracies is the high rate of success in the reelection of incumbents. Someone so inclined could aver that this finding shows how experience in office works to the benefit of constituents, leading those constituents to become increasingly willing to support the reelection of incumbents. In contrast, someone inclined differently could just as logically claim that incumbents gain electoral advantage because of the job-related familiarity they acquire, which offers them advantage in the acquisition of rents for supporters at the expense of outsiders in coalitional politics. With falsification being impossible, all that remains is dueling ideologies where victory belongs to the more skillful duelist.

One of the more oft cited of the Sherlock Holmes stories is titled “The Adventure of Silver Blaze.” In this story, it is a dog’s failure to bark that enables Holmes to solve the murder of a horse’s trainer by realizing that the murderer must have been known to the dog. Where Holmes focused on the dog’s silence despite his master’s murder, I focus on the absence of the ordinary language of politics in Pettit’s book. While Pettit’s book occupies 360 pages, it lacks any of the familiar paraphernalia we normally associate with political life, at least of the democratic form, by which I mean such activities as those touching upon prevarication, self-deception, rent seeking, and ideology. One of the seminal works in propelling the emergence of Public Choice theory was William Riker’s Theory of Political Coalitions (1962, New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press). Riker explained that democratic systems tend to be governed by parties forming coalitions of minimum winning size and not by parties trying to maximize the number of votes they obtain. One way that Riker illustrated this claim was by applying his insight about coalitions to the short-lived coalition in West Germany of the Christian Democratic and Social Democratic Parties in the Bundestag between 1966 and 1969. By including 90 percent of the Bundestag, this ruling coalition had no way to supply gains to its members because there were no outsiders who would supply those gains. Those few Germans who were excluded from the Grand Coalition did make some noise, but nothing like the noise made by the two large contesting parties after the Grand Coalition broke apart.

Pettit’s book reminds me of Holmes’s story in that it presents political phenomena within a soft and calm voice, as if one were playing a board game quietly without enthusiasm. With respect to Pettit’s book, what is particularly notable is the absence of so many of the phenomena we associate with politics and states, as well as the formation and maintenance of coalitions. There is little that states do in Pettit’s book other than to grow, and, moreover, what they do is common and uncontroversial, like a few friends gathering to play poker and starting with some brief discussion about the kind of poker they will play. In their forthcoming Reason, Ideology, and Democracy: A Study in Entangled Political Economy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan), Meg Tuszynski and Richard E. Wagner explain that political competition entails a continuing effort to maintain winning coalitions against erosion from such social forces as population dynamics and new technologies.

Ideology is also of high relevance for political competition because reality does not operate the same way in politics as it does in private action, as Vilfredo Pareto explained in distinguishing between logical and nonlogical environments of human action in The Mind and Society: A Treatise on General Sociology (1935, New York: Harcourt Brace). Pareto turned from economics to sociology because he wanted to understand why Italians turned so often to politics when his studies explained how markets were generally a stronger source of public beneficence than politics. Where Pareto recognized that markets entailed people acting on their own capital, politics entailed people acting on capital supplied by the society at large through taxation and regulation, with the entire operation camouflaged by ideology. Ideology was necessary to disguise the zero-sum character of coalitional politics through attempts to spread feel-good sentimentality throughout the society, much as L. Albert Hahn explained in The Economics of Illusion (1949, New York: Squier). Ignored by Pettit is a recognition that politics is grounded in continuing conflict among people over how they are to live together, which in contemporary times has been on vivid display in some intense controversies within meetings of school boards that have even led to threats of imprisonment of some of the disputants. This theme of continuing controversy was central to Carolyn Webber and Aaron Wildavsky’s magisterial History of Taxation and Expenditure in the Western World (1986, New York: Simon and Schuster). Similar in theme and tone, moreover, with respect to the ubiquity of conflict is Alexander Rüstow’s Freedom and Domination: A Historical Critique of Civilization (1980, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press), where human history is presented as an eternal struggle between freedom and domination, about which Pettit vanishes by assumption and not analysis of the human social experiment.

To be sure, the early days of Public Choice featured James M. Buchanan in seeking to organize Public Choice around exchange, in contrast to coercion, as illustrated by such Buchanan books as The Demand and Supply of Public Goods (1968, Chicago: Rand McNally) and Cost and Choice: An Inquiry into Economic Theory (1969, Chicago: Rand McNally). Whether democracy is coercive or transactional, however, is a more complex matter than a simple matter of assumption. That option is a false option that is a product of the closed-form modeling and its exclusion of the middle that has dominated Western logic for over two millennia, which is now starting to weaken through increasing efforts of scholars to work with increasingly complex schemes of thought. Where the middle is excluded by logic, either coercion or transaction and not both must be the source of democratic organization for the simple reason that nothing else is logically permissible under standard analytical conventions. Buchanan himself sought to escape this logical trap by shifting his analysis to the constitutional level where people are treated as selecting some agreeable equilibrium of coercion and transaction. Alternatively, a theorist can embrace the open-systems modeling of Tuszynski and Wagner, where societies are continually governed through both coercion and transaction without either option being able to fully vanquish the other.