M.A.,

Greatly appreciate your tour de force posts on nation and state building; your explanations are very instructive and have shed some light on things for me.

In support of the digital SWC library I ran down some Google Books links for some of the authors you cite. One doesn’t need to cart around a desktop/laptop/netbook to read these or take notes anymore…an iTouch will get it done…. I used to use a library card and a typewriter back in the day…just amazing....well it looks like my reading list has grown

Aristotle - Politics

Thomas Hobbes – Leviathan

John Locke - Two Treatises of Government

Jean Jacques Rousseau – The Social Contract

Walt Whitman Rostow - Politics and the stages of growth

Samir Amin – Google Books appears to be light on complete digtal copies of his works


My 0.5 cent formal philosophical education for what its worth, included:

Voltaire – Candide

Niccolò Machiavelli –The Prince

Hermann Hesse – Siddhartha

During OIF1 in Iraq it was my observation that the dying limbs of the Iraqi state tree were triaged and kept viable with external IV’s and tech support. As a result of necessity a local shadow economy grew, flourished, and appeared to come to dominate much of the state’s economic system. Mass privatization via shock therapy methods combined with the simultaneous disintegration and attempted reformation of the political system (formal institutions and informal network structures) resulted in a Hobbesonian environment which made me question what I know about Locke’s thesis regarding the orderliness of man’s nature. Rostow’s construct (more familiar to me as engineering/business approaches), although reminiscent of the underpants gnome's business model in some respects, was in my opinion the way to go for the public works and utilities area in which I worked. My unit, lead by an amazing general, was able to provide security while using a balanced approach and as a result our oil spot/province experienced some level of stability during our time there….overall it was an invaluable on-the-job-training (OJT) experience.