Observing the Arab Spring of 2011, increasing accountability of authoritarian regimes around the world, and a contagion of decreasing tolerance of authoritarian regimes by their citizens, one might be forgiven for developing an optimistic anticipation of the reduction of authoritarianism, or at least of the most unaccountable authoritarianism. Liberal governments would more often have reasons to cooperate. By cooperating in appropriate circumstances, they enable themselves to deliver more of the goods that their citizens desire, even if they compromise their own autonomy to do so. “It is curiously true that after trouncing the claim to ‘divine right’ of the absolute monarchs, political theory allowed it to be transferred to the absolute State, and we have suffered it to persist to our own day, though our culture rejects the absolute and our outlook discounts the divine in politics.”