Twenty Years of Postcommunism: Freedom and the State

Issue Date January 2010
Volume 21
Issue 1
Page Numbers 136-143
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Is the state a force for freedom, or its enemy? Do building liberal and efficacious state institutions constitute a necessary precondition for achieving the state of freedom? Or is state an endemic enemy of liberty, so that its champion, while tolerating state as a necessary evil, has to always fight against it to clear greater space for liberty? This is a central problem—perhaps the central problem—for classical liberal theory and its crucial distinction between the state of nature and the civil state. Which is better for liberty: nature or the state?

About the Author

Ghia Nodia is professor of political science at Ilia State University and director of the Caucasus Institute for Peace, Democracy, and Development in Tbilisi, Georgia. He is a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Democracy.

View all work by Ghia Nodia