Charles S. Maier is Leverett Saltonstall Research Professor of History at Harvard University. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the Council on Foreign Relations, he has written a number of award-winning books, including Recasting Bourgeois Europe, The Unmasterable Past, Dissolution: The Crisis of Communism and the End of East Germany, and Once Within Borders.
An intriguing, sophisticated book about the relationships between the evolution of the modern nation-state and the concurrent forces of capitalism, popular politics, socialist responses, and bureaucratic governance. This is a deep and clever work, the culmination of an erudite historian's long grappling with humankind's mixed record of progress and failure. -- Paul Kennedy, author of <i>The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers</i> A true history of the present. The Project-State and Its Rivals is a powerful, insightful, and penetrating analysis of the major shifts in global order and social dynamics across the past century. There are few historians today who can venture to undertake such a tour d'horizon with equal confidence and expertise as Maier. -- Sebastian Conrad, author of <i>What Is Global History?</i> Charles Maier has produced a brilliantly innovative reconceptualization of twentieth-century history in terms of the interaction between states, resources, and markets. He sets a bold agenda for future thinking about the shape of the past one hundred years. -- Harold James, author of <i>The War of Words: A Glossary of Globalization</i>