Philip Bobbitt, The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace, and the Course of History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002), 921 pp., $40.

Philip Bobbitt's The Shield of Achilles is a bad book. It is error strewn, it suffers from grand delusions of theoretical adequacy, and it is unscholarly. This judgment, however, being evidently a minority one, imposes an obligation not only to render the work's aim, thesis and argument fairly before criticizing it, but also to account for the book's evident appeal to the public, as well as to several distinguished historians who have endorsed it.

The former task is not easy, given the book's great length and convoluted development, but is aided by repeated statements of the author's aims and theses. The book, Bobbitt writes in his prologue, concerns the evolution of the modern state, in particular "the relationship between strategy and the legal order as this relationship has shaped and transformed the modern state and the society composed of these states." Wars and the attendant revolutions in military affairs, he argues, have been the engine of change in the constitutional order of states since the Renaissance: "each of the important revolutions in military affairs enabled a political revolution in the fundamental constitutional order of the State."

Bobbit holds that four great epochal wars transformed the dominant constitution of states in previous eras (Habsburg-Valois, the Thirty Years' War, the wars of Louis xiv and the French Revolutionary wars). Now the most recent epochal war, the Long War of 1914-90, has "brought into being a new form of the state-the market-state"-and put "the constitutional order of the nation-state . . . everywhere under siege." Major new developments-human rights as a universal norm, weapons of mass destruction, global and transnational threats, globalization of the economy, and global communications networks penetrating all states and societies-threaten both the sovereignty of individual states and the legitimacy of the international order by making it impossible for nation-states to fulfill their legitimating purpose-namely, to maximize the welfare of their citizens. What Bobbitt calls market-states, however, promise instead to maximize opportunity.

In an instance of the elliptical exposition that characterizes the book throughout, Bobbitt begins the substantive historical defense of this thesis at the end, presenting 1914-90 as a single Long War between fascism, communism and parliamentarianism to decide the dominant constitutional form of the modern nation-state. A brief excursus summarizing the historiographical debate over the revolutions in military affairs in the 15th-18th centuries is followed by three longer chapters covering the history of the state from the Renaissance to 1914. These chapters, together with the one on the Long War, comprise the historical core of the book, called Book i: The State of War, and the basis for its projections about the present and future. With them come five "plates" that depict in simplified form the patterns and correlations the author detects in history and that encapsulate his essential arguments.

Plate 1 lists six distinct constitutional orders of the state since the Renaissance-princely, kingly, territorial, state-nation, nation-state, and (emerging) market-state. Plate 2 links these to Bobbit's five epochal wars that "brought a particular constitutional order to primacy." Plate 3 lists the peace treaties that "end epochal wars [and] ratify a particular constitutional order for the society of states"-Augsburg, Westphalia, Utrecht, Vienna, Versailles and Paris (1990).

The last two plates concern Bobbitt's most crucial theses, those that tie strategic, military and constitutional factors tightly together. Plate 4 illustrates how "each constitutional order asserts a unique basis for legitimacy." In the princely state "the State confers legitimacy on the dynasty", whereas in the kingly state "the dynasty confers legitimacy on the State." The territorial state is legitimated by its claim to manage the country efficiently; the state-nation by its claim to forge the identity of the nation; the nation-state by its promise to better the welfare of its citizens; and the emerging market-state by its promise to maximize the opportunities of its citizens. Plate 5, "Historic, Strategic, and Constitutional Innovations", illustrates how "a constitutional order achieves dominance by best exploiting the strategic and constitutional innovations of its era"; it does this by linking the claimed innovations and dominant political characteristics of each era with their respective military innovations and leading features. For example, the absolutism and secularism characteristic of kingly states is linked to the gunpowder revolution, lengthy sieges and standing armies, while the trade control and aristocratic leadership that feature in the territorial state are tied to professional armies and limited cabinet wars; and so on with the other main types.

This historical basis laid, Bobbitt turns to the current crisis. The challenge to the nation-state from the current revolution in military affairs, and the nation-state's rapid loss of legitimacy, demands deep thought about the concrete transformations this will require of the new market-state in terms of security, politics and welfare. He surveys what he typologizes as the five policy choices now being offered for the United States after the Cold War-new nationalism, new internationalism, new realism, new evangelism (i.e., democratic peace), and new leadership (i.e., permanent American world hegemony)-but argues that none offers the new paradigm needed. Of three possible forms of the market-state (mercantile, entrepreneurial and managerial)-yet another typology-he concludes that the United States will be an entrepreneurial market-state, as it should. He ends Book i with speculation on the likely character of wars in the coming era of the market-state.

Book ii, "States of Peace", is about what Bobbit calls the society of states. It rests on a key assertion: "that international law derives from constitutional law-and thus follows the same periods of stability and revolutionary change charted in Book i." Thus, "contemporary developments in limiting sovereignty are a consequence of the change in the constitutional order to a market-state." This returns us to the grand historical pattern, once again unfolded from the end rather than the beginning. Two long and strange chapters then develop Bobbitt's argument that the nation-state era in world society, founded on the Wilsonian premise of self-determination, has now run aground on its inability to solve central problems presented both by nationhood itself and the new world emerging since the Cold War. The first of these describes Versailles and the entire post-World War I settlement primarily through the personality and activities of Wilson's adviser Colonel Edward M. House. The second links the famous Kitty Genovese incident (a gruesome murder in New York City in 1964, which bystanders did nothing to stop) to the war in Bosnia (culminating in the failure of the un or nato to stop Bosnian Serb atrocities at Srebrenica in July 1995), in order to demonstrate the death of the society of nation-states.

Book ii then returns to earlier history to show how "the great peace settlements of the epochal wars have shaped the constitutional order of the society of states." Brief chapters on the peace settlements of Augsburg, Westphalia, Utrecht and Vienna, and longer ones on Versailles and Paris (1990), summarize the provisions of the treaties and their supposed constitutional impact on the society of states. Accompanying each are short discussions of the interpretations given each settlement by leading jurists and theorists, and in the last section an analysis of various American schools and approaches on the relations between international law and international politics. These discussions are by far the most interesting and instructive parts of the book, demonstrating Bobbitt's expertise and authority in his own field and his ability to construct a tight, coherent narrative and argument. But the relation of these segments to his main argument is unclear.

The final section of Book ii, entitled "The Society of Market States", speculates further on the challenges to the new international order of market states, and the nature of war and peace in the coming age. The bewildering variety of the propositions offered and the absence or impossibility of proof or substantiation would seem to put this section beyond summary or critical evaluation, at least for historians. The author insists, however, that his arguments and prescriptions for the present and future derive from the historical scheme earlier developed and schematized, so even Bobbitt's futurology invites evaluation according to the standards of historical scholarship.

A Reach Too Shallow

As history, Bobbit's work unquestionably presents a broad panorama and offers a bold, arresting and apparently coherent set of theses and arguments relevant to the world today. The historical scheme seems compelling, the analysis of the current crisis cogent, the predictions and scenarios for the future important to consider. The overall recommendation-that America strive for market principles globally and in domestic politics, and continued American military domination and the ability to fight a series of low-level contests as the only way to avoid the next epochal war-offers a program congenial to many Americans today. These qualities, one supposes, have recommended the work to many lay readers and some distinguished scholars. What is wrong with it?

As historical scholarship, a great deal. The book suffers from so many grave defects of an evidential, logical and methodological character as to render it unreliable both for fact and interpretation. Stating such a verdict flatly, while being unable for reasons of space to bring full evidence for it, is uncomfortable. Since it is not possible to comment inclusively on over 900 pages of text in a review of a few thousand words, only a few of the book's technical historical flaws, though they are crucially important, can be discussed.

The first of these is inadequate research. Sixty pages of notes and eleven of bibliography may seem impressive, but the reading required to undergird so sweeping a reinterpretation of history as Bobbitt offers would have to be at least ten times as great and yet also more discriminating-a nearly superhuman demand, to be sure, but one that is inseparable from the undertaking. Apart from discussions of Bobbitt's specialty, constitutional law, the only topic among the many huge, controversial ones he discusses on which his reading is adequate is that on the 15th-18th century revolutions in military affairs.

Inadequate research contributes to other defects but cannot wholly account for them. Ungrounded generalizations, naked assertions, logical leaps, vague language, conceptual confusion, contradictions, arbitrary definitions, exaggerations and distortions, and major omissions of vital material abound. Then there is the problem of outright factual errors.

Factual errors are bound to occur in any book as broad and ambitious as this one. What counts is the level of their incidence and significance, and it is unacceptably high. Some errors do not directly affect the overall theses, but others demonstrate a general misconception of a problem important to the story. As to the former, for example, when Bobbitt writes that in 1798-99 France attacked and conquered Switzerland, the Papal States, Piedmont-Sardinia and Naples (which is like saying that the Soviet Union in 1947-48 attacked and conquered Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary), the factual error shows only that he misunderstands the nature of French expansion and the allied response in a crucial period of one of his epochal wars. But the statement that after 1815 the majority of Poles lived under Prussian and Austrian (rather than Russian) rule is not an incidental error. It shows that the author cannot have understood the Polish question either in its domestic or international aspects. It would be like trying to understand the American race problem if one believed that after 1865 the majority of freed blacks lived in the North.

Still other errors reveal the vagueness and vacuity of certain core concepts. When Bobbitt writes that the Congress of Vienna "recognized the state of Switzerland as a single state-nation", he demonstrates not only a misconception of what the Congress did, but the meaninglessness of his category of the state-nation. Similarly, when Bobbitt contends that Russia was able to withstand Napoleon's onslaught in 1812 through strategic retreat because "she [Russia] was not a territorial state, and her dynasty did not constitutionally depend on the support of the nobility and the army", he not only gives an absurd explanation for the strategic and tactical decisions made in 1812 and betrays an ignorance of major facts about Russian history, but again demonstrates how malleable and hence meaningless his concept of the "territorial state" is.

Finally, certain factual errors reveal misconceptions so basic that they raise questions as to the author's ability to deal with a whole complex of central problems and issues. Bobbitt describes European feelings about war and peace at the end of the 19th century as follows: "There seems to have been widespread agreement on two expectations: that science and technology would make war impossible and that international law would govern the relationships between states." This is like saying that the general late 19th-century view on the solar system was that the sun revolved around the earth. A misconception so fundamental and so contradictory to central, well-known facts established by a massive literature disqualifies Bobbitt from being taken seriously on the international order in prewar Europe or the origins of World War I, the start of the most important of his epochal wars.

Even more disturbing in certain ways than factual errors are instances of Bobbitt's twisting the clear meaning of evidence to fit his theory. Two examples: he praises Hedley Bull's "path-breaking" book, The Anarchical Society, for describing the international world in Hobbesian terms as without law, "a world of all against all and each one against every other one." Bull's book was indeed important-for precisely the opposite reason. His whole emphasis was on the international system as a society, anarchical solely in the sense of having no recognized lawgiver but otherwise involving real community, norms, rules and elements of law. Bobbitt similarly takes a statement by Bismarck defending his policy of pure Realpolitik in the interests of Prussia against his opponents' charge of lack of principle and makes it into something Bismarck then opposed: a manifesto for nationalism as "the authentic voice of the nation-state."

A Reach Too Far

Instances of Bobbitt's bad scholarship could be multiplied, but simply to indict the book in that fashion ignores the big picture: the book's theses and argument. Could they not be mainly right and very much worth thinking about, even if Bobbitt is not a good historian? A good question; but the answer is no. The broad scheme of war, peace and the course of history given here is equally flawed. It is, in fine, an imposing fortress of papier-maché.

The first problem is that nothing in Bobbitt's very grand scheme is ever proved. Nothing major in it-neither categories, concepts, fundamental assumptions, alleged links and causal connections nor definitions of critical terms-is rigorously analyzed, hypothesized and operationalized. Nor is any of it tested against contrary evidence and alternative views and shown to be more solidly based than competing schemes and interpretations. If one believes it, one does so essentially because it looks good, or because one wishes to believe it.

The second point is that under close examination the grand scheme falls apart. Central categories develop fissures and cracks and their contents leak out and mingle with others. Crucial concepts, when tested, prove tautological or simply empty. Vital causal connections and links between phenomena in different spheres prove nonexistent or unconvincing. Major generalizations central to it prove untenable. An example: One of Bobbitt's main contentions is that epochal wars and their peace settlements establish the dominant constitutional form of the state and the constitution of an era's society of states. The first of these, the Habsburg-Valois wars and the Peace of Augsburg, meet none of the requirements of the theory. These wars were not epochal but local and sporadic, and did not end in 1555 but continued underground until once more breaking out openly in the 1630s and ending in 1659. The Peace of Augsburg had nothing to do with them; it established only a temporary and unstable truce in Germany's religious conflicts, and led to no new constitutional order either in Germany or elsewhere.

Or take Bobbitt's concepts of different state constitutions-princely, kingly, territorial and so forth. Not only is each of these fuzzy in definition and the distinctions drawn between them arbitrary and artificial, but at least one and perhaps two (the state-nation and the territorial state) are figments of Bobbitt's imagination, corresponding to no historical reality whatsoever. Of the five great powers at the Vienna Congress that supposedly established and legitimated the dominant state-nation form, not one remotely fits his definition of it-and not one wanted or dared to do after 1815 what he says state-nations do, which is to put their people at the service of the state. As for the territorial state, its supposed legitimating principle-the more efficient use of the state's resources-would fit some states and not others in any era; and some of the central defining characteristics Bobbit ascribes to its era as opposed to others (e.g., the unimportance of dynastic succession, a coolly rational secularism in regard to religion, and the waging of only limited cabinet wars) are all flatly untrue.

Indeed, the whole notion that each different constitutional form of the state rests on a particular distinctive legitimating principle-so that nation-states try to maximize the welfare of all their citizens while market-states try to maximize opportunity-is unhistorical to the point of absurdity. Had Bobbitt done any serious study of his 18th-century territorial states, he would have seen that many of them, at least, saw their raison d'être in promoting the welfare of all their subjects as they saw it, and they tried to do so in part by maximizing their opportunities within the established order.

Alas, most instances of incoherence and conceptual confusion in The Shield of Achilles come down, ultimately, to the central one involving Bobbitt's notion of what drives the course of history. He vastly exaggerates and distorts the roles of war and peace settlements in constituting states and the international system. Yes, states to a considerable degree are made by and for war; but states exist and endure by and for governance. The constitutional changes that states have undergone over time (in a way far more uneven, contingent and complex than Bobbitt indicates) have had more to do overall with trying to meet challenges of governance than those of war, and those demands, while changing enormously in detail over time, remain essentially the same in kind: order, welfare and legitimacy. How rulers, governments and peoples conceive and try to meet these needs varies; their need to do so in order to endure remains constant.

As for epochal wars and major peace settlements settling major questions about the international order, yes, they sometimes have-but mostly in a negative rather than positive way, doing more to clear the ground and establish what cannot be done than to establish what the new order will be. This is true of all the genuine epochal wars and peace settlements that Bobbitt discusses. The Thirty Years War, for example, ended any possibility of Spanish Habsburg dominance in Europe as a whole and of Austrian Habsburg-Imperial-Catholic rule in Germany; it thereby cleared the way for France's rise and for a different kind of confessional though not secular order for Germany. Mutatis mutandis, the same holds for the War of the Spanish Succession and the Peace of Utrecht: they ended Louis xiv's bid for hegemony and opened the way for a balance of power system, but they did not really establish it. That took 15 years of further war, crises, major adjustments and new or revised settlements. The same holds even for the far greater French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars and the most ambitious and comprehensive peace settlement ever attempted, at the Congress of Vienna. Together they ended the Napoleonic bid for empire and laid the basis for a new order based on legality and solidarity, but even this genuine effort to solve all Europe's problems at once did not really establish a durable constitutional order per se. Within five years the solidarity eroded; within 15 the settlement underwent major challenges and revisions.

This points up a further weakness in Bobbitt's world-historical scheme: its neglect of what follows the epochal wars and peace settlements he tries to link too neatly together. What counts most in every case is not simply the war itself and its results, or the provisions of the peace settlement, but what actually happens thereafter, what states and peoples do with the opportunities and challenges presented. In other words, the determinist strategic-constitutional paradigm makes less difference than the contingent responses and adaptations made by many different actors.

The same observation applies to Bobbitt's epochal war and settlement, the supposed single Long War of 1914-90 between parliamentarianism, fascism and communism over which would be the dominant constitutional form of the nation-state. In the end, words are defenseless things, and so is history, at least in some hands. Anyone may choose to see this period as one long war over this central issue if one wishes. But this pattern may not be used to explain the origins of World War I and II, as Bobbitt seeks to do, or explain away the great issue that was settled by those wars and the settlement of 1945. World War I was not caused by a clash between supposedly proto-fascist Germany and parliamentary France and Britain. The war arose out of power-political strategic rivalry between Germany, Austria-Hungary and Russia, resulting from the fatal breakdown of their long triangular restraining alliance and leading to an acute security crisis for all three-especially for Austria-Hungary, which actually precipitated the war. The confrontation between parliamentarianism, fascism and communism was one result of the war, not its cause; and it was not the chief issue or cause of World War II either. In both wars, the central issue was a German bid to dominate the continent by power-political means, and that issue was finally solved once and for all in 1945. In the most important sense, therefore, 1914-90 was not one Long War.

A Saving Grace?

One question remains: If the main historical paradigm is not sound or helpful, what about the argument for an emerging new order based on a new kind of state, the market-state, and Bobbitt's discussion of new policies, strategies and paradigms necessary for that new era? How much is that worth?

Many of Bobbitt's individual thoughts and arguments seem to me sensible and insightful, many others foolish, some wrong, and one or two dangerous and even a bit sinister. The problem, however, once again, is that the whole discussion of the emerging market-state and the market-state international system is one long question-begging exercise; it assumes the point at issue that needs to be proved and argues from it as though it had been proved. Bobbitt greatly exaggerates the death of the nation-state, but more important, he does not render even comprehensible, much less probable or proved, the emergence and existence-indeed, the very definition and possibility-of his market-state. It is never defined by anything more concrete than an advertising slogan-"maximizing opportunity for all its citizens"-as if that were not a means by which many states of various kinds have often tried to promote welfare, improve their powers to govern and gain legitimacy. No serious attempt is made to show that the market, efficient for individual and corporate economic activity, can be made the basis for the governance of the state. The main evidence given for its emergence consists of selected extracts from speeches and press releases by Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, and the evidence offered to show that the historic transition to it has occurred is almost too ludicrous to discuss: the difference between the un-nato failure to stop the Bosnian Serb massacres at Srebrenica, supposed to prove the failure of nation-state principles to meet problems arising from nationhood, and NATO's intervention to stop Serbian "ethnic cleansing" in Kosovo three years later, supposed to arise from new market-state principles. This is like arguing that the shift from Anglo-French appeasement of Hitler beginning in 1936 and the decision for war in 1939 shows a fundamental shift in the constitution of the society of states.

Readers may choose to believe that a new market-state society of states is emerging, and they may read this book for counsel on how to meet its challenges. They should not believe, however, that the course of history supports this prophecy.