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In Neither Liberty nor Safety Higgs provides an engaging account of the growth of US state power over the last century. He argues persuasively that the extension of government into all aspects of citizens' lives is facilitated by the exploitation of the fears of private citizens. He claims that those citizens are nevertheless less secure and less free, even though the state has insisted periodically that its extension of power is necessary for their protection and well-being.
The breadth of the study is impressive. The work begins with an engaging and rather disturbing account of how the state has used fear to manipulate the population to acquiesce to the expansion of its powers, particularly during war. Previous efforts by social scientists to analyse and explain the growth of state power are then critiqued, and Higgs convincingly shows that these tend to be rather one-dimensional and therefore limited in their ability to measure the extent of state power in both the economy and society. The importance of ideology is then discussed in a chapter which constitutes a response to critiques of Higgs's preceding volume Crisis and Leviathan. The remaining chapters of the...