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The Shield of Achilles By Philip Bobbitt ( Anchor )
Release Date: 2003-09-09
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Product Description
For five centuries, the State has evolved according to epoch-making cycles of war and peace. But now our world has changed irrevocably. What faces us in this era of fear and uncertainty? How do we protect ourselves against war machines that can penetrate the defenses of any state? Visionary and prophetic, The Shield of Achilles looks back at history, at the “Long War” of 1914-1990, and at the future: the death of the nation-state and the birth of a new kind of conflict without precedent.
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Amazon.com Review
The scope of Philip Bobbitt's The Shield of Achilles is breathtaking: the interplay, over the last six centuries, among war, jurisprudence, and the reshaping of countries ("states," in Bobbitt's vocabulary). Bobbitt posits that certain wars should be deemed epochal--that is, seen as composed of many "smaller" wars. For example, according to Bobbitt the epochal war of the 20th century began in 1914 and ended with the collapse of communism in 1990. These military affairs--and their subsequent "ultimate" peace agreements--have caused, each in their own way, revolutionary reconstructions of the idea and actuality of statehood and, following, of relationships between these various new entities. Of these reconstructions (including the princely state, the kingly state, and the nation-state), Bobbitt is most interested in the current incarnation, which he calls the market-state: one whose borders are scuffed and hazy at best (certainly compared to earlier territorial markers) and whose strengths, weaknesses, citizens, and enemies roam across cyberspace rather than plains and valleys. The Shield of Achilles is massive, erudite, and demanding--at once highly abstract and extremely detailed. There is about it an air of detached erudition, one noticeably free of the easy "decline and fall" hysteria too often present in contemporary historical analyses. --H. O'Billovich
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 The Heel of Achilles ( hatheway@edgewood.edu )
The Shield of Achilles by Philip Bobbitt is both more and less than has been reviewed. It is more in the sense that it is more of a familiar argument advanced by the Republican right for less taxation, less regulation, more presidential authority, more privatization, and the like--and less public investment, less social expenditure on health, education, and infrastructure. Dressed up as deep philosophy and insightful history, The Shield is in fact a poor substitute for both. It is, in fact, closer to a screed than an academic monograph. Over and above the lack of primary sources, this book offers a subjective monocausal explanation for the transformation of constitutional change in Europe for the last 500 years as background to the deterministic constitutional transformation the United States is allegedly undergoing--from that of a nation state to that of a market state. As such, the author suggests, we must get used to a plethora of market changes that will make the US less a constitutional republic than a free market playground, with all of the unsavory qualities of a deregulated credit default swap. Methodologically, the book suffers from an inability to distinguish necessary from sufficient with respect to causation, thus conflating causation with the author's subjective desire to "prove" the unprovable: a general thesis for historical transformation which can then be applied deductively to predict the future course of American constitutional, social, political, economic, and economic behavior. No, this book is to be avoided by anyone interested in historical analysis, but may be eagerly read by those interested in political propaganda.
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 The first volume of a three volume study. Volume 2 is Terror and Consent Third is in preparation.
This is a sweeping view of history and international relations that is illuminating, seminal, unique. A whole college degree is social science, government, history, law and strategy put together.
Beautifully written.
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Excellent theory....well worth the read ( ctc9808 )
To call this a seminal work is an understatement. I believe Bobbitt began work on this book around 1993 and finished a few weeks after 9-11. Careful and deliberate scholarship...how often do you hear that today?
It is a brilliant on a number of levels: political theory, history, law, economics, and a touch of sociology. As the title suggests, it does, indeed, chart the course of history....describing the context for today's emerging global society.
This work has immensely practical implications for those interested in transnational threats. The first three goals of good science are exquisitely accomplished - those of description, explanation, and prediction. As to the final goal - prescription - that is accomplished through various scenarios. And, I believe, done in a more than satisfactory manner.
I do, however, have an issue. And it's not with Bobbitt. I have consistently seen Bobbitt's ideas and theories elsewhere, emerging several years after the release of Achilles in works dealing with globalization, "the next stage of terrorism" etc. If Bobbitt is mentioned, it is in passing; and he is never given full intellectual credit as his work is expropriated in a shameless manner.
Read Achilles. It is stimulating and provocative. It has longevity. You will revisit it on an ongoing basis.
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A frighteningly insightful explanation of a frighteningly complex topic
Philip Bobbitt is a constitutional law professor. Having gone to law school and a few dozen legal textbooks along the way, I felt right at "home" trudging through this beast of a book. It's a difficult read, there is no doubt.
For the person considering reading this book: be warned. This is not lowest common denominator drivel or faddish revisionist history. It is not sensationally written, nor is it even pleasant at times. But this book is way too cerebral to simply be called pedantic. It is crafted like a contract is carefully crafted. It is precise, thorough, and, if you can get going with the scholarly vocab and prose, riveting.
What this book is is a masterwork on the nature of the state -- what is is, how it functions and thrives, and how it dies. Bobbitt takes you through the history of the modern state since its beginnings in the Renaissance in Italy with the "princely state," how its bases of legitimacy have changed, and how law, history, and strategy have, and do mutually influence and shape each other, and the successfully innovative state along with them. The end is a look at "possible futures," three hypothetical approaches (most, there are no absolutes) states will take in their metamorphoses into market-states, mirroring the three approaches that fascism, parliamentarianism, and communism were to the nation-state. It pretty much predicts a lot of things becoming relevant to us only as mere glimmers on the horizon, such as whether we will choose to integrate the economies of Canada, the US, and Mexico, with a common currency, and also strategic issues, such as positing that the market-state, with its ostensible abandonment of society-wide total wars where entire populations fight other entire populations such as with the end of the "Long War" (basically the name of the wars of 1914-1990 as one continuous conflict of what form of nation-state would be triumphant, a central theme of the book), will find its elite states in those that most quickly eschew giant military infrastructure of tanks and aircraft carriers for resistance against, for example, information system and biological weapons attacks.
In a nutshell, this is a book that tells you how the world works, at least through one very qualified lens. The book leads up to, as Bobbitt maintains, the present, where we are transitioning to a new form of the state, the "market-state" (the US began as a "state-nation," was transformed into one of the earliest "nation-states" by the Civil War and the resulting 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution), with, as each state form before it, though they are contiguous and continuous, radically different bases of legitimacy, threats, and advantages.
Along the way, I got a giant dose of actual, factual history, like about the wars of the Balkans, which I didn't know much about, the real reason we entered World War I, which I always wondered about, and, interestingly, even cutting-edge political prognostication, foretelling stuff like the North American Union the US is in the process of entering right now. There was even the "Kitty Genovese Incident" that is a law school staple in criminal law classes being used as an incredibly apt metaphor for the paralysis of action leading to the slaughters in the former Yugoslav states. And it's all in there specifically to show you how the state functions and how it and history, law, and strategy transform each other.
If you don't want to be a know-nothing about history, you'd better read this book. Also, if you don't like it, please don't write a review that looks like you stopped to look in a thesaurus every five seconds. Philip Bobbitt will always be smarter than you, sorry. I'm not sure I like what he either predicts by his genius, or perhaps simply repeats from his inside view of the State Department and Council on Foreign Relations (I guess it's both), but the simple fact is this is one of the most scholarly, and easily the most insightful, book I have ever read. A banal description of evil? Perhaps. Indispensable? Also yes. It's right up there with "The Prince," though obviously not as uh, "concise," since, you know, "The Prince" is about 90 pages and this is about 820 pages.
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The mountains heave in childbirth .... ( questionnaire )
.... and a little mouse is born. A flaccid bladder of utter banality inflated by the hot air of middle-brow legalism and obscurantist prose. No exploration of any depth or detail is carried out of the disruption wrought by a market-dependent way of life on the ecological, anthropological, cultural, social, political and psychological fibres that hold together the world's various societies, or on the fragility and volatility of the global market itself, which, of course, is portrayed as a fait accompli. Thus there is simply no contextual platform for the author's analysis, and, despite the standard air of portent, no clear picture of what law and militarism can or might actually do in the near future, and we are left non the wiser about what the course of history might actually BE. This work is fairly indicative of the mainstream American understanding of history; my advice is that they take a break from making it, or we are all in big trouble.
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