As the century and millennium draw to a close, it is hard not to notice how visions of the “end” of various things have come to dominate popular thinking. As never before, we are impatient to get on with the future and be done with whatever is stale, makeshift, or established. Even the staider print journalists seem unable to conceive a topic except in terms of walls crumbling, bastions falling, myths exploding, highways to the future opening out. And of all the bric-a-brac of the past, nothing seems quite so dated, quite so discredited, quite so stifling, as government.

Manifestations of our antistate Zeitgeist range from the lawful (such as deregulation and privatization in the industrialized democracies), to the ragged (such as the devolution and disintegration of the Soviet bloc), to the apocalyptic (such as the Oklahoma City bombing). Underlying these instances is a fundamental distrust of state power. Auschwitz, the Gulag, and even (if you insist) Waco and Ruby Ridge should and will refresh this distrust. Suspicion of state power has a long and venerable intellectual pedigree, encompassing figures ranging from Locke, Jefferson, Madison, and Mill to antibureaucratic Marxists, libertarians, and Rawlsian liberals. But when chronic suspicions combine with millenarian enthusiasm, damage can result. As Garry Wills has put it, “Where the heated deny legitimacy and the cool are doubtful of it, a crisis is in the making.”