Introduction

Summary

Like the weather, politics presents two starkly contrasting faces. Often, it comes in the form of calm and seemingly cloudless routine, stability, predictability, and consensus. When we survey the political landscape, for example, we readily observe settled institutions and practices that outlive, by many generations, those who operate and submit to them; widespread acquiescence in particular modes of political organization and acceptance of the values generally thought to underlie them; entrenched rules and principles widely affirmed within particular communities as a legitimate basis on which to criticize the conduct of their members; the regular circulation of bureaucratic forms and instructions, passports issued and honored, wills written and upheld, contracts enforced, wrongdoers peacefully brought to justice in accordance with accepted procedures.

As often, however, politics brings conflict, struggle, disruption, coercion, brutality, uncertainty, disorder, violence, destruction, fear, subversion, and menace: one thinks of bombing raids, pogroms, terrorist attacks, genocides, and “collateral damage”; of coups, revolutions, sweeping legislative change, invasions, electoral reversals, forced evacuations, conscription, hijackings, martial law, and the imposition of violent legal sanctions and penalties; of divided loyalties, naked ambition, sharp moral and religious disagreements, international realignments, and ethnic hatreds; and of intrusive surveillance, invasions of privacy, confiscations of property, arrest, interrogation, and torture.