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JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. . Cambridge University Press and Trustees of Princeton University are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to World Politics. Es gibt wenig Menschen, die sich mit dem Nachstvergangenen zu beschaftigen wissen. Entweder das Gegenwartige halt uns mit Gewalt an sich, oder wir verlieren uns in die Vergangenheit und suchen das vbllig Verlorene ... wieder hervorzurufen. [The immediate past is but rarely the object of our interest. Either the present takes hold of us forcefully or we lose ourselves in the remote past and attempt . .. to re-create what has been wholly lost.] -Goethe Die Wahlverwandtschaften [The Elective Affinities] * For useful comments on an early draft of this essay, I am much indebted to

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The possibility and widespread practice of exit, on the part of dissatisfied citizens, has important, though highly diverse, bearings on the formation, solidity, and “quality” of the state. An association exists between the wide availability of exit and the condition of statelessness in a number of aboriginal societies as well as in Rousseau's state of nature. In the 18th century, the exit option—which became available to the wealthy as movable forms of property increased in importance—was hailed by such observers as Montesquieu and Adam Smith as a restraint on arbitrary rule or taxation. Today, on the other hand, such exit (capital flight) tends to render the introduction of needed reforms more difficult. Emigration-exit was benign in its effect on the sending countries in the 19th century and may have been helpful to the process of democratization in Europe. Lately, however, exit has been considered a threat to the existence of the state and has led to strong, though very different, defensive reactions in Ireland and East Germany. The small modern state can fend off excessive exit by providing a variety of public goods to its citizens; one of these public goods is “understood complexity.”

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