War, Peace and the Course of History

The Shield of Achilles

"Bobbitt's book is in many ways a remarkable one. It is huge...breathtaking in its range of reference [and] forcefully written" David Runciman, London Review of Books

Philip Bobbitt teaches constitutional law at the University of Texas. He has held visiting fellowships at Nuffield College, Oxford and Kings College, London. He has served as Counsel to the Senate Select Committee on the Iran-Contra Affair, as well as Director of Intelligence and Senior Director for Strategic Planning at the National Security Council. He has written previous books on nuclear strategy, social choice and constitutional law. He lives in Austin, Washington and London.

This ambitious book sets out to reinterpret the history of the twentieth century as a long war in which conditions of outright military confrontation or of frantic "cold" competition lasted from the outbreak of the first world war until the collapseof the Soviet Union. He goes on to argue that this long experience of war has brought about a fundamental change in the constitutional basis of sates, and explores this idea through the notion of the "market state". By clarifying the relationship between constitutional settlements and military power, and by drawing on his firsthand experience in the heart of superpower planning, Bobbitt reveals a startling new way of understanding the past - and an awesome glimpse of the future.

Philip Bobbitt

The Wars for the Twenty-first Century

<I>Terror and Consent</I> argues that, like so many states and civilizations in the past that suffered defeat, we are fighting the last war, with weapons and concepts that were useful to us then but have now been superseded. Philip Bobbitt argues that we need to reforge links that previous societies have made between law and strategy; to realize how the evolution of modern states has now produced a globally networked terrorism that will change as fast as we can identify it; to combine humanitarian interests with strategies of intervention; and, above all, to rethink what 'victory' in such a war, if it is a war, might look like.

Philip Bobbitt

Books by Philip Bobbitt

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