Robert Bates

is Eaton Professor of the Science of Government and a Faculty Fellow in the Institute of International Development at Harvard. His most recent books include and a volume he coauthored and coedited with Anne O. Krueger, Political and Economic Interactions in Economic Policy Reform.

"Some favorite books and why"

• John Stuart Mill,
  He encouraged me to think about how to think.

• Grant McConnell, Private Power and American Democracy
  By focusing on the details of government programs, he digs out the private groups that clothed their interests in the guise of the public good, and so achieve the power to loot the public domain.

• Steven Kaplan, Bread, Politics, and Political Economy
  The best book on the politics of grain marketing that I have read. Also of the politics of market reforms. Helped to convince me that economic historians do it better than development economists.

• Marc Bloc, Feudal Society ;
  Feudalism, he declares, is a form of political organization in an agrarian society where land is bountiful and people scarce, empires have fallen, and tribal war broken out; and in which the technology of warfare demands political organization above the level of the family and below the level of the nation state.
  Defining this form of political organization by its initial conditions, Bloc's analysis invites exploration by those of us interested in other agrarian societies which also fulfill those conditions. Might not his analysis provide insight into possible sources of political order in contemporary Africa?

• Elizabeth Colson, Tradition and Contract
  A clear, problem solving mind at work, demystifying cultural claims and focusing on the interests that generate them.

• William Cronin,
  Is it economics? Is it history? A work that effortlessly crosses fields.

• Alexis de Toqueville, The Ancient Regime
  As with other books I like, by focusing on particularities and details, this work discerns generalities and patterns. De Toqueville says more in one well turned paragraph than I say in a chapter.

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