Paul Dragos Aligica is a Senior Research Fellow in the F. A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Mercatus Center at George Mason University, Virginia, where he teaches in the Economics Department. He received his Ph.D. in Political Science at Indiana University, Bloomington, where he was a student of Vincent and Elinor Ostrom at the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis. He has published extensively on institutional and governance theory, being the author of six books and numerous academic articles, exploring both the foundational and the applied side of alternative governance systems.

• Introduction; Part I. Public Entrepreneurship: 1. Public entrepreneurship, competitive governance and polycentricity; 2. Entrepreneurship and collective action; 3. Voluntary actions and institutions: charting the territory; Part II. Citizenship: 4. Citizenship, political competence and civics: the Ostromian perspective; 5. From institutionalism to models of social agents: citizenship in institutionalist context; 6. Citizens' competence, self-governance and the new epistocratic paternalism; Part III. Self-Governance: 7. Anarchy, statism and liberalism: the self-governance alternative; 8. Conservatism, interventionism and social evolution: the self-governance alternative; Conclusions.

'We are offered the best one-volume analysis of public entrepreneurship, citizenship and self-governance. Drawing on a lifetime of study and reflection on different continents, Paul Dragos Aligica shows how much we gain in governance theory by drawing on the citizen-centered approach that Vincent and Elinor Ostrom developed and practiced over the years. At a time when new forms of tutelage, nativism and paternalism are gained grounds in the world, Aligica draws on the Ostroms to renew and reformulate, in an inspiring way, self-governance as a vision and as a theory that can help to stem the tide of anarchy, statism and despair about the prospect of democracy and the human condition itself. Social science at its best.' Filippo Sabetti, McGill University, Montreal