As Judt wrote, the railroad represents neither the fearsome state nor the free individual.
Moreover, if the sovereign's failure to provide adequate protection to subjects extinguishes their obligation to obey, and if it is left to each subject to judge for herself the adequacy of that protection, it seems that people have never really exited the fearsome state of nature.
Indeed, they face a fearsome state-sanctioned competitor in the BBC.Fierce competition has created a scrappy, sometimes immoral trade.
Communism in the 1950's, Professor Gaddis points out, was seen not as a rival state but as a fearsome, state-sponsored, international conspiracy, one that threatened us from within as well as externally.
Some joked that it should be comparatively easy: just two years ago, Egyptian protesters toppled a more powerful president, even though he controlled a fearsome police state.
And chemical weapons, which he has employed against his own people, or biological weapons are threat enough, and much easier to construct in a secretive, fearsome police state.
The dreaded protests did not materialise, but the fearsome show of state power meant that security forces were already in place, sealing Cairo's Tahrir Square from traffic, before Mr Mubarak's verdict was issued.
If this were an ancient mariner's map, it would have scary drawings around the treacherous state budget, the fearsome beastie called redistricting and the dangerous marshes of voter ID, border control and anchor babies.
The seventh Workers' party congress, the first such gathering to be convened for 36 years, offered an opportunity for this isolated state and its fearsome young leader to open up (a little) and show a (slightly) friendlier face to the outside world.
But to Guggenheim the child-welfare cases and the delinquency cases looked all too similar: in both, the state possessed the fearsome power to remove children from their homes, and so in both that power had to be kept in check.
The idea of a Kurdish state is such a fearsome prospect in Turkey, such an unmentionable taboo, that it can only be spoken of as "undesirable developments".
