These are a set of very short notes which will someday, with luck, assemble themselves into a review. For the moment, however, they're quite useless to anyone but myself, and I really don't know how they got indexed by a search-engine, though the thing was evidently dumb enough to give them a fairly high score for some keywords. Try back in a year or so, or better yet use Google (no, they don't pay me to say that.)
Mancur Olson, The Logic of Collective Action [How groups work, and why volunteerism is almost never sufficient to secure public goods. (Short version: if it's a public good, i.e. one from which everyone benefits without exclusion, why should you put yourself out to secure it? Surely somebody else will... Olson provides a detailed economic analysis to flesh this out.) How interest groups work, why people won't show up to union meetings but will overwhelmingly vote to make union membership compulsory, taxes and government, the weakness of large classes, etc., etc. Brilliant.]