In Neither Liberty nor Safety Higgs provides an engaging account of the growth of US state power over the last century. He argues persuasively that the extension of government into all aspects of citizens' lives is facilitated by the exploitation of the fears of private citizens. He claims that those citizens are nevertheless less secure and less free, even though the state has insisted periodically that its extension of power is necessary for their protection and well-being.

The breadth of the study is impressive. The work begins with an engaging and rather disturbing account of how the state has used fear to manipulate the population to acquiesce to the expansion of its powers, particularly during war. Previous efforts by social scientists to analyse and explain the growth of state power are then critiqued, and Higgs convincingly shows that these tend to be rather one-dimensional and therefore limited in their ability to measure the extent of state power in both the economy and society. The importance of ideology is then discussed in a chapter which constitutes a response to critiques of Higgs's preceding volume Crisis and Leviathan. The remaining chapters of the work constitute an impressively far-reaching account of the expansion of US state power through the world wars, the Great Depression and the postwar years. Threaded through this history are the impact of the growth of state power on both the economy and individual civil liberties. The work closes with an account of the prospects for change, with the author concluding that neither socialism nor laissez-faire economics have any real chance of triumphing. Instead the US and other advanced industrialized democratic states will swing between high levels of state control and marginally reduced levels of state control.

The breadth of this study was at the same time its strength and its limitation. The hundred-year history of the interactions between the state and private capital, and the development of the US economy into a military–industrial complex that began with the world wars, was fascinating, and provides valuable insights for any student of contemporary US domestic and foreign policy. The author successfully demonstrates the harnessing of a whole population to support the war effort, and then shows how the powers secured in the name of the emergency of war were exploited well beyond that emergency.

The broad scope of the study meant that at times key claims were not adequately developed. For example, while the author explores the expansion of state power at the expense of the capitalist class following the Great Depression, and later its contraction following the war years, the work is insensitive to important differences in how the power of the state is experienced by different sectors of society. A recurring theme is the gradual erosion of private property rights and civil liberties, but are all citizens affected in the same way? Or is it the case that these rights are eroded more for some groups than for others?

Furthermore, those civil liberties to which Higgs refers are never really defined, and few examples are offered to support this claim. Two historical periods in particular, both discussed in the work in relation to the American war machine, have seen significant curtailments of civil liberties – the Cold War and the current “war on terror.” Readers would have benefited from a more detailed account of the lengths that successive administrations have gone to in the name of protecting the national interests from perceived threats in these two wars. Discussion of the recent Patriot Act was warranted. This would have allowed Higgs to foreground the theme of fear in the comprehensive historical analysis offered in the latter half of the work, rather than it being a distant echo.

The closing pages provide some helpful reflections on the implications of the work for other industrialized states. This again demonstrates the impressive breadth of the study. To ask that the author broaden the study even further seems unfair. Yet a nagging question remains. What are the implications of Higgs's conclusions for the rest of the world? The emphasis of much of the work is the effort by the US state to extend its power in the domestic arena, often justified with reference to external threats that menace its citizens. But that encroachment of US state power extends well beyond the state. What were its effects beyond US shores, in Latin America and Indochina during the Cold War, for example? What will be its consequences in the Middles East? And while the author concludes that the prospects for alternative forms of governance are limited in other Western industrialized states, is this true for other areas of the world, where the expansion of US state power is most strongly felt?