This book provides a thorough and detailed examination of Israeli institutions and how they function. It explains the decline in effectiveness of the government and the spread of cultural malaise in the Israel of the eighties. Horowitz and Lissak trace the integrative and disintegrative trends in Israel and show how a society that had laid the foundations for a cohesive Jewish nation-state became increasingly vulnerable to centrifugal forces.

The book not only reflects a broad and comprehensive approach, but also focuses on themes that cut across institutional structures, such as the weakening of social and political cohesion in an overburdened polity.