This book has been long in coming to completion, and so perhaps a word of explanation is due. An Essay completes or, rather, replaces a project I initiated a decade and a half ago. I had long been perplexed and worried by states, and I had then an idea for “a theory of the state”. In outline it was simple and, at the time, quite appealing. States were to serve as supports for markets and, like markets, were to be justified only insofar as they were mutually beneficial. The primary functions of states, on this view, were to guarantee personal and property rights, control fraud and enforce contracts, provide for collective goods, and implement mutually advantageous distributions of resources. The account was to be supported by a contractarian moral theory. Elements for the whole were already to be found in the work of James Buchanan and David Gauthier, and my early formulations of the project borrowed extensively from their writings. I thought that states might be justified in redistributing wealth considerably more than these theorists were likely to find acceptable, and so I conceived of the project as a defense of a kind of “welfare state”. In some ways it was to be a corrective to the defense of the “minimal state” Robert Nozick and others defended in the 1970s.

This project failed for a number of reasons, most of them embarrassingly obvious now.