Professor Spulber traces the role of the state in the West and East for more than two centuries along parallel lines—first from the creation of the Welfare State in the West, and the Party-State in the East, to reform of the Western Welfare State by means of privatization and entitlement changes, to transmutations in the East through large scale privatizations and the creation of the "nomenklatura capitalism." He establishes an original connection between dismantling state enterprises and limitation of government functions at all levels in the West, and the collapse and then restructuring of the state on new foundations in the East.