阿基里斯之盾：战争、和平、和历史的进程 (2002)

The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace, and the Course of History is a historico-philosophical work by Philip Bobbitt. It was first published in 2002 by Alfred Knopf in the US and Penguin in the UK.

Theses

The work consists of two volumes, each written in three parts. Each part is preceded by a thesis.

Book I

Book I, Part One

The War that Began in 1914 will come to be seen as having lasted until 1990. Thus this Part introduces the idea of an "epochal war', a historical construction that embraces several conflicts thought to be separate wars by the participants, and the notion of the "Long War", a conflict which embraces the First and Second World Wars, the Bolshevik Revolution, the Spanish Civil War, the Korean and Vietnam wars and the Cold War. Epochal wars, like the Long War or the Thirty Years War or the Peloponnesian War, are fought over a constitutional issue. In the case of the Long War the issue was: which sort of 20th century industrial nation state--fascist, communist or parliamentarian--would succeed to the legitimacy previously enjoyed by imperial state-nations in the 19th century.

Book I, Part Two

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

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.