1.  from Mika Haritos-Fatouros, “Cruelty: A dispositional or a situational behavior in man?” Behavioral and Brain Sciences (2006) 29, p.230


2.  from Albert Bandura, “A murky portrait of human cruelty,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences (2006) 29, p. 225

Why did people tolerate these displays of "unmitigated selfishness" and raise monuments to those "peculiarly American virtues" such as "audacity, push, unscrupulousness, and brazen disregard of others' rights. . . . .  That even during an era of legendary rapaciousness Wall Street figures could elicit feelings of awe and reverence, that they could become exemplars of national achievement and prowess, is an enigma. (p. 72) see Zaretsky


A distinctive vocabulary inscribed these men in urban-industrial legend.  Contemporaries, even critical ones, always described them as "bold," and "magnificent of view," full of "verve," capable of absorbing a hard blow without flinching, as "audacious," "keen," and possessed of that sangfroid that could stand up to the worst possible news.  Often treated as American primitives, observers marked and often celebrated their lack of education and refinement; they were profane and uncouth but endowed with native frankness, self-confidence, and blunt force personality.  The language of masculine virility and plebeian brashness also signaled their inspiring escape from unprepossessising origins. (p. 95)

Patrimonialism, until fairly recently, seemed an archaic social form, largely replaced by bureaucratic rationalism. That confident view of modernity, in the histories that Max Weber and his followers wrote, deserves to be challenged as patrimonial regimes reappear in states and firms throughout the world.

I drive past the Israeli prime minister's residence on the leafy corner of Balfour Street in West Jerusalem.  The roads are strangely quiet, the house dark: nobody is home.  For a year, this busy junction was the epicenter of possibly the most sustained and raucous protest movement in Israel's history, as the country seemed to be tearing itself apart.

On Saturday nights thousands gathered outside the walled, stone-clad mansion where Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel's longest-serving prime minister, was ensconced.  The King of Israel to his many admirers, his detractors accused him of having turned Balfour into an imperial castle ruled by members of the royal household.  When he was charged with corruption, the Israelis were roughly split between those who believed he had been framed by a liberal deep state and those who desperately wanted him to go.

Samuel A. Greene and Graeme B. Robertson, Putin vs. the People: the Perilous Politics of a Divided Russia (Yale, 2019)

Samuel A. Greene and Graeme B. Robertson, "Putin’s rule depends on creating foreign enemies — and domestic ‘traitors’.  He initiates conflict abroad to bolster support at home. But has he overreached this time?"  (Washington Post, February 24, 2022)

Henry E. Hale*, "The Continuing Evolution of Russia's Political System", in Richard Sakwa, Henry E. Hale and Stephen White, Developments in Russian Politics 9 (Duke, 2019).

Henry E. Hale, Patronal Politics: Eurasian Regime Dynamics in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge, 2015)

To solve this puzzle, it’s helpful to take the Ukraine crisis out of the realm of foreign policy and put it into the world in which Putin spends most of his time: that of Russian domestic politics. Viewed in that light, the war represents a continuation of Putin’s efforts to govern by presenting Russia as threatened by external forces bent on its destruction, and himself as the only leader who can successfully oppose them.

While we’re used to thinking of Putin as an autocrat, and he does wield an extraordinary amount of power, the moniker can mislead in some ways. He still has to deal with business executives, politicians, bureaucrats and security officials — many of whom wantonly steal from the state — as well as a public whose mistrust has fatally undermined his attempts to get the coronavirus pandemic under control. Worse, neither the elite nor the general public has any real faith in Putin’s ability to reverse nearly eight years of economic decline.

To maintain and consolidate his power in the face of such challenges, Putin has spent much of the last decade restructuring Russian politics around the idea that the nation faces existential threats from outside its borders, aided by traitors within. That framing tars all domestic opposition as tools of foreign powers and justifies the evisceration of independent media, civil society and political parties besides his own; it calls on ordinary Russians to make seemingly endless sacrifices for the greater good.

When we see his pursuit of domestic control and his foreign policy as part of the same strategy, each catalyzing the other, what Putin has done in recent days begins to make more sense. From the standpoint of domestic politics, exactly what Putin achieves at the negotiating table or on the battlefield is less important than maintaining a geopolitical confrontation sufficient in scale to justify his domestic repression and, ideally, with no end in sight.

That still leaves many unanswered questions. While the logic of domestic politics justifies creating international crises, does it really support all-out war against one of Russia’s largest neighbors, which is being armed and supported by the West? In making this choice, Putin is taking a gamble on his ability to shape and even direct Russian public and elite opinion. It’s a risky one. The story the Kremlin is telling about rooting out Nazis who supposedly run Ukraine is, after all, utterly absurd.

Discontent is likely to be fueled, too, by Western sanctions that will have both targeted and widespread effects. We simply do not know what price Russian elites are willing to pay for a war that few of them may actively support. While moving against the president from the inside is extremely dangerous, impatience with the costs to the elite of Putin’s rule, and the sense that something should be done about it, may grow rapidly behind the scenes.