Show Notes
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#ratcheteffect #crisisdrivengovernmentexpansion #emergencypowers #institutionallegacies #ideologicallegitimation #CrisisandLeviathan
Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government is a work of economic history and political economy by Robert Higgs, first published in 1987 and later issued in a 25th Anniversary Edition. The book examines how the United States government expanded during major national crises such as wars, depressions, and security emergencies, and why those expansions tended to persist after the immediate emergency ended. Higgs’s central contribution is the ratchet effect thesis: government grows rapidly in crisis, may contract somewhat afterward, but does not return to its former size or scope. Rather than treating state expansion as a smooth or inevitable process, the book argues that episodic shocks, institutional changes, ideological shifts, and political incentives are decisive. It is both a historical study of twentieth-century America and a broader explanation of how emergency power becomes durable government power.