‘What would you do if you were the state?” So begins the greatest book of political theory you never read. “The State,” by the Hungarian-born economist Anthony de Jasay, was published in 1985 and has been kept in print by the Liberty Fund, a classical-liberal foundation in Indianapolis. Jasay, who died Jan. 23 at 95, was a gentleman scholar. He fled the communist bloc at age 23 to complete his education in Australia and later at Cambridge. After a career in finance, he returned to his academic pursuits, settling in Normandy, France, in 1979.
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