Adam Smith used the image of the Leviathan State to depict the command-and-control State, Vincent Ostrom together with some collegues coined a new image for the welfare state.
Since Reagan and Tatcher attack on Big Government, advocating for Small Government, until the moderate progressives decide to come to terms with conservatives and dilute the idea of Big Government, suggesting to take a third way (Blair and Clinton) which is after all bigger Government than Small government and a smaller government than Big Government.
Obama kicks in and at least start a new discourse. “It’s not an issue of big government versus small government. It’s an issue of smart government“. He says in 2010. That’s something similar to what I purported for local government in 2006 with local public entrepreneurship, which will then better framed and expanded to the national level by Marianna Mazzuccato who spke of an “entrpreneurial state”. But we were not framing the question in the right way. I started studying government through the lenses of the people and no longer through the lenses of an expert studying and advising government, local or national. In 2008 I started studying government through the lenses of city inhabitants. And there I realized we should have asked what Bob Reich today calls the most was able to conclude with
Ubuntu is a complete desktop Linux operating system, freely available with both community and professional support. The Ubuntu community, backed by Canonical, is built on the ideas enshrined in the Ubuntu Manifesto: that software should be available free of charge, that software tools should be usable by people in their local language and despite any disabilities, and that people should have the freedom to customise and alter their software in whatever way they see fit. “Ubuntu” is an ancient African word, meaning “humanity to others”. The Ubuntu distribution brings the spirit of Ubuntu to the software world. Ubuntu 12.04 LTS is the current long term support version, released in April 2012, codenamed Precise Pangolin. Take an online tour: http://www.ubuntu.com/tour/en/