"As the Princeton University sociologist Kim Lane Scheppele observes in her very informed foreword, "Magyar’s analysis isn’t cheerful.” It is, however, both accurate and necessary, and should prove useful to scholars from multiple fields. By systematically working through his own definition of the mafia state, and by showing the weaknesses and blind spots of other analyses of post-communist autocracy in Hungary, Magyar provides not only a set of tools useful to academics and activists alike, but also a conceptual framework that facilitates a diagnosis of the Orbán regime and the state it has created, and that lays the groundwork for a possible cure.”
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