⚖Politics & Government

There is no neutral way to present a choice, so the default should be chosen deliberately — influential, and since tempered by replication failures.

Separates political effectiveness from moral goodness, describing how power is actually held rather than how it ought to be.

Diagnoses Soviet behaviour as driven by internal insecurity and prescribes patient containment rather than confrontation.

Intelligence failures are usually cognitive rather than informational, and the fix is structured techniques that force alternatives to be considered.

Argues that factions are inevitable and must be channelled through structure rather than suppressed by virtue.

War is the continuation of policy by other means, and friction — not planning — is the medium every plan has to survive.

Principles chosen behind a veil of ignorance about your own position give the fairest available account of a just society.

A nation is a community imagined by people who will never meet, made possible by print capitalism and a shared sense of simultaneous time.

Agencies behave the way their tasks and constraints force them to; blaming the people misses that the incentives are the design.

Found that most voters hold weakly structured opinions and vote on identification — the study every later model of electoral behaviour argues with.

Instability comes from mobilisation outrunning institutions, not from poverty — modernisation can destabilise before it stabilises.

Great powers pursue regional hegemony because anarchy makes intentions unknowable — the clearest statement of offensive realism.