Comment

Michel Bauwens:

I read the main thesis of this book as follows and I found it very compelling: to each political system, corresponds a level of technology and defense capability; when one of the states or competitors in a peer polity system makes a technological advance that allow them to win wars, it makes the existing political system and constitutional system, obsolete; warfare insues; at the end of the process of war, the new political system of the victors become the new exemplar. In this way, Bobbitt distinguishes 6 different subsequent political systems since the Rennaissance's princely states in Italy, affecting the evolution of national states, culminating in the already obsolete nation-state, and which has been replaced by the now dominant market state. The book describes each phase in detail.

The interplay between strategic and constitutional innovation changes the constitutional order of the State. The relationship between strategy and law is such that any fundamental change in the nature of strategy will produce a fundamental change in law, and vice versa. There is no single, linear monocausal relationship between the two, but rather a mutually effecting circuit. Thus the French revolution brought about the Napoleonic revolution in tactical and strategic affairs, and the introduction of mobile artillery onto the Italian plain in the Renaissance brought about the first princely states. Epochal wars force the state to innovate—either strategically or constitutionally—and successful innovations by a single state are copied by other, competing states.

Book I, Part Three

The constitutional order of the 21st-century market state will supersede the 20th-century nation state as a consequence of the end of the Long War. A constitutional order is distinguished by its unique claim for legitimacy. Give us power, the nation state said, and we will improve your material well-being. The nation state, with its mass free public education, universal franchise, and social security policies promised to guarantee the welfare of the nation; the market state promises to maximize the opportunity of the people, and thus tends to privatize many state activities. Voting and representative government will be less influential and more responsive to the market. This does not mean that market states cease to be interested in the well-being of their peoples or that nationalism is any less potent, but that the State no longer claims legitimacy on that unique basis.

Book II, Part One

Book I focuses on the individual state; Book II takes up the society of states. The society of nation states developed a constitution that attempted to treat states as if they were individuals in apolitical society of equal, autonomous, rights-bearing citizens. This society, like all groups, has a constitution; its foundations were laid at the end of World War I, when nation states destroyed the imperial state nations of the preceding century. Perhaps the most important constitutional idea of this society is the right of self-determination of national peoples.

Book II, Part Two

Much as epochal wars have shaped the constitutional order of individual states, the great peace settlements of these wars have shaped the constitutional order of the society of states. The Treaty of Augsburg, the Peace of Westphalia, the Treaty of Utrecht, the Congress of Vienna, the Peace of Versailles, and the Peace of Paris all served to ratify the dominance of a new constitutional order and provide rules for the society of states.

Book II, Part Three

A new society of market states is being born. The challenges facing the society of states today are a direct consequence of the strategic innovations that won the Long War—the development of nuclear weapons, a global system of communications, and the technology of rapid computation. These have undermined the ability of any nation state to govern its economy; to assert its laws in the face of universal norms of human rights; to defend its territory against weapons of mass destruction; to tackle transnational problems like global warming, epidemics and terrorism; and to protect the national culture from outside influences. Market states will take up these challenges. Though there are, at present, no market states, it is speculated that they will come in at least three fundamentally different forms: mercantile, managerial, and entrepreneurial."

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shield_of_Achilles:_War,_Peace,_and_the_Course_of_History)

War, Peace, and the Course of History

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