If, writing in his study in Renaissance Florence half a millennium ago, Niccolò Machiavelli advised rulers to learn when to use force and when to persuade, Peter Baldwin would counsel his readers to focus on the nonviolent aspects of state power. This not because he reckons force unimportant, but because the state has become so powerful that its main business pertains to the second half of the Florentine’s opposition. Command and Persuade, the main title of Baldwin’s book, is also counterintuitive. For one might, together with no lesser an eminence than Plato, think persuasion anterior to the command; in the dialogue Laws, the lawgiver prefaces each command or law with a persuasive preamble. Baldwin’s ordering affirms the opposite. If the command has been given, what role is left for persuasion? The answer has to do with the subjects of the law, the citizens, who have been shaped by the state, civil society, and through their own agency to need little persuasion to obey; when ‘seen over a long historical sweep’, Baldwin writes, ‘law and self-discipline have run in tandem’ (10). Here also lies the normative concern which motivates his effort: ‘Today, we are governed by more law than before…Despite our ever better-mannered and docile citizenry, law remains the workhorse of social control’ (353). BMCR readers who share this concern as well as scholars with an interest in longue durée accounts of the evolution of law and the state should find the book useful; additionally, those among us working on more specific topics like crime and punishment will find Baldwin to be a generous interlocutor.