"Is the state a necessary evil? Or can we hope to evolve beyond it? This book, in the tradition of Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia, sheds new light on persistent philosophical questions about the nature and justification of political authority." "Analysis of various arguments for the state show that they explicitly or tacitly rest on what the author calls the Hobbesian Fear - the conviction that mutual warfare would emerge in the absence of political authority. If the Hobbesian Fear turns out to be unfounded, standard arguments for the necessity and moral legitimacy of the state will be undermined." "One embodiment of the Hobbesian Fear is the theory that social cooperation is menaced by Prisoner's Dilemma-type situations. Yet advances in game theory suggest that if the Prisoner's Dilemma situation is repeated, cooperation usually becomes the winning strategy: practices and norms of social cooperation tend to emerge spontaneously."--BOOK JACKET.