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New Statesman
Philip Bobbitt’s ‘Garments of Court and Palace’
By GARRY WILLS
Published: August 2, 2013
One expects a book by Philip Bobbitt to be over 900 pages (“The Shield of Achilles,” 2002) or just under 700 pages (“Terror and Consent,” 2008). Then how can he diet himself down to a mere 200 or so pages of text on Machiavelli? Bobbitt is a great systematizer in the Toynbee mold — “Shield” gave us six different state systems since 1500 (princely, kingly, territorial, imperial, national, *market).
“Terror” focused on one condition (the market state), but that state is still in formation, so Bobbitt argued its case more (and more and more) extensively. Then how does he deal with Machiavelli so compactly in “The Garments of Court and Palace”? Very easily, as one can tell by the frequency of his self-citations in the new book. He just shows us how wonderfully Machiavelli agreed with Bobbitt’s longer works — as if Niccolò had read them half a millennium ago. Machiavelli is often viewed as surprisingly modern, but does that have to mean he must be surprisingly Bobbitt?
Machiavelli fits into Bobbitt’s scheme because he is the expounder of the first of the six state systems in “The Shield of Achilles,” the princely one (Machiavelli even graced the form with its Bobbittian name). Bobbitt believes that legal systems are changed by military strategies, often by military technology. So, in 1494, when Charles VIII brought bronze cannon into Italy, threatening fortress walls and smashing the governments that relied on them, Machiavelli had to propose new walls, along with new states to defend them. This must mean that Machiavelli was interested in new technologies for war — though in fact he was not very interested in forts (he thought they were less vulnerable to siege than to inner rebellion). In the encyclopedic “Art of War,” he suggests an improved design for forts, but he is still concerned with inner rebellion (he forbids an inner keep where the residents can hole up and tells us starvation is more effectual than siege). Nor did he invest his time or energy in the technological innovations of Leonardo (their one collaboration, diverting a river, was an ancient concept, and it failed).
What Machiavelli was interested in was old systems, and especially old military systems — Roman ones, in fact. These were powerful not because they relied on new weapons but because they were based on virtù, an expression of their manly religion. Unlike Christianity, which makes people humble and otherworldly, Rome’s religion instilled a thirst for glory and freedom in this world. In Christianity “the ritual is more mincing (delicata) than grand, without fierce or manly (gagliarda) energy.” Roman “ritual was as grandly ceremonious, but it added the energy of a sacrifice deep in blood and fierceness, slaughtering hordes of animals. By being terrifying in this way, it made men just as terrifying.”
Bobbitt thinks that Machiavelli’s prince could be ruthless, like the Romans, because he invented that new thing, “the princely state,” which must be preserved for the benefit of all. Thus crimes done for the state are no crimes. They are, in fact, rather altruistic. The prince must “subordinate all other indicia of right behavior to the one parameter of serving the state.” Those murdered are rightly murdered for being enemies of the state — a convenient rule for the prince, who is the state. He sacrifices himself to himself.
Machiavelli is even made to endorse Bobbitt’s concept of the market state, on the rather broad ground that he was the “philosopher” of Bobbitt’s first state, so he would buy into the sixth one as “our sublime predecessor.” The new book is more vague than was “Terror and Consent” about the military obstetrics of the market state. Here Bobbitt just says it is “coming into being as a response to changes in the strategic context.” There he told us terrorism is at least the partial cause of the market state, which mirrors it. If Al Qaeda can operate freely across national entities, relying on modern communications, computer funding and ideological inventiveness, then we must do so too, calling on creative minds “free of many of the legal and political restraints that bind government officials.”
This means continual outsourcing of previously governmental acts, and omnidirectional deregulation. The right must stop regulating abortion and pornography, the left must stop regulating hate speech and, through affirmative action, hiring — such acts “promote national values in defiance of the market.” Terrorists are “entrepreneurial,” so our market state must be an entrepreneurial state. Terrorists use the media, so we must use them (the media, we are told, are nimbler than bureaucrats). If they use Visa to finance strikes, so should we. We can abandon our own state limits to engage in “state building” around the world to cope with the terrorist state.
Bobbitt says the market state has been in process of formation for a while. In “Shield” one of its prophets would seem to be Oliver North. The entrepreneurial Iran-contra (arms for hostages) transaction “anticipated the new market state,” and was “a natural market response to the problem of overregulation” (by overregulation he means the Boland Amendment against funding the contras in Nicaragua). Old nation-state rules should not hamper new market-state solutions. That is what Bobbitt says happened in the Iraq war. The open nation-state strategy was a quick decapitation of the Iraqi government. But since the war was with the mobile “virtual state” of terrorism, what was needed was a market state mirroring its tactics. (Blackwater and all the other private contractors were too hampered by the nation state, not yet acting as the market state.)
But the best entrepreneur of the new counterterrorist terrorism was Dick Cheney, with his “enhanced interrogations” of captured terrorists. Bobbitt says torture may not be used just to score a political point or secure a judicial conviction. But the new state has to have new rules. In former wars, captives were forced to surrender their arms. In the new wars they must be forced to surrender their information. “There cannot be a ban on the collection of strategic information — information from terrorist leaders and senior managers — by whatever means are absolutely necessary short of inflicting severe pain when that information is likely to preclude attacks.” That is just the legal guidance Cheney got from John Yoo, a deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel. Neither Yoo nor Cheney thought waterboarding inflicted “severe pain.” The new prince, like Machiavelli’s old one, can commit crimes if they are in service to the state. The aim, after all, is to escape those “legal and political restraints that bind government officials.”
It has often been noticed that war makes adversaries end up resembling each other; but Bobbitt would have us start out resembling our foe. Terrorists, he says, are not just criminals. They have created a “virtual state,” and we have to create an entirely new kind of state to cope with it. This reminds me of the people who denounced democracy in the 1930s as too slow and stumbling to respond to the rise of dictators. Some would have had Roose*velt and Churchill create a new kind of state, baffling dictators with “good guy” dictatorships.
Not even Bobbitt thinks a new state was born of that crisis — his “nation state” runs unbroken from 1914 to 1990, and was able to survive World War II and the cold war. Only Al Qaeda and its ilk are enough to make us create an entirely new political order. Those who have seen the efficiency and lack of corruption in unregulated medicine and banks and Blackwater-type operations will have a little trouble hailing Machiavelli as a sponsor of the Higher Cheneyism.
Philip Bobbitt’s ‘Garments of Court and Palace’
By GARRY WILLS
Published: August 2, 2013
One expects a book by Philip Bobbitt to be over 900 pages (“The Shield of Achilles,” 2002) or just under 700 pages (“Terror and Consent,” 2008). Then how can he diet himself down to a mere 200 or so pages of text on Machiavelli? Bobbitt is a great systematizer in the Toynbee mold — “Shield” gave us six different state systems since 1500 (princely, kingly, territorial, imperial, national, *market).
“Terror” focused on one condition (the market state), but that state is still in formation, so Bobbitt argued its case more (and more and more) extensively. Then how does he deal with Machiavelli so compactly in “The Garments of Court and Palace”? Very easily, as one can tell by the frequency of his self-citations in the new book. He just shows us how wonderfully Machiavelli agreed with Bobbitt’s longer works — as if Niccolò had read them half a millennium ago. Machiavelli is often viewed as surprisingly modern, but does that have to mean he must be surprisingly Bobbitt?
Machiavelli fits into Bobbitt’s scheme because he is the expounder of the first of the six state systems in “The Shield of Achilles,” the princely one (Machiavelli even graced the form with its Bobbittian name). Bobbitt believes that legal systems are changed by military strategies, often by military technology. So, in 1494, when Charles VIII brought bronze cannon into Italy, threatening fortress walls and smashing the governments that relied on them, Machiavelli had to propose new walls, along with new states to defend them. This must mean that Machiavelli was interested in new technologies for war — though in fact he was not very interested in forts (he thought they were less vulnerable to siege than to inner rebellion). In the encyclopedic “Art of War,” he suggests an improved design for forts, but he is still concerned with inner rebellion (he forbids an inner keep where the residents can hole up and tells us starvation is more effectual than siege). Nor did he invest his time or energy in the technological innovations of Leonardo (their one collaboration, diverting a river, was an ancient concept, and it failed).
What Machiavelli was interested in was old systems, and especially old military systems — Roman ones, in fact. These were powerful not because they relied on new weapons but because they were based on virtù, an expression of their manly religion. Unlike Christianity, which makes people humble and otherworldly, Rome’s religion instilled a thirst for glory and freedom in this world. In Christianity “the ritual is more mincing (delicata) than grand, without fierce or manly (gagliarda) energy.” Roman “ritual was as grandly ceremonious, but it added the energy of a sacrifice deep in blood and fierceness, slaughtering hordes of animals. By being terrifying in this way, it made men just as terrifying.”
Bobbitt thinks that Machiavelli’s prince could be ruthless, like the Romans, because he invented that new thing, “the princely state,” which must be preserved for the benefit of all. Thus crimes done for the state are no crimes. They are, in fact, rather altruistic. The prince must “subordinate all other indicia of right behavior to the one parameter of serving the state.” Those murdered are rightly murdered for being enemies of the state — a convenient rule for the prince, who is the state. He sacrifices himself to himself.
Machiavelli is even made to endorse Bobbitt’s concept of the market state, on the rather broad ground that he was the “philosopher” of Bobbitt’s first state, so he would buy into the sixth one as “our sublime predecessor.” The new book is more vague than was “Terror and Consent” about the military obstetrics of the market state. Here Bobbitt just says it is “coming into being as a response to changes in the strategic context.” There he told us terrorism is at least the partial cause of the market state, which mirrors it. If Al Qaeda can operate freely across national entities, relying on modern communications, computer funding and ideological inventiveness, then we must do so too, calling on creative minds “free of many of the legal and political restraints that bind government officials.”
This means continual outsourcing of previously governmental acts, and omnidirectional deregulation. The right must stop regulating abortion and pornography, the left must stop regulating hate speech and, through affirmative action, hiring — such acts “promote national values in defiance of the market.” Terrorists are “entrepreneurial,” so our market state must be an entrepreneurial state. Terrorists use the media, so we must use them (the media, we are told, are nimbler than bureaucrats). If they use Visa to finance strikes, so should we. We can abandon our own state limits to engage in “state building” around the world to cope with the terrorist state.
Bobbitt says the market state has been in process of formation for a while. In “Shield” one of its prophets would seem to be Oliver North. The entrepreneurial Iran-contra (arms for hostages) transaction “anticipated the new market state,” and was “a natural market response to the problem of overregulation” (by overregulation he means the Boland Amendment against funding the contras in Nicaragua). Old nation-state rules should not hamper new market-state solutions. That is what Bobbitt says happened in the Iraq war. The open nation-state strategy was a quick decapitation of the Iraqi government. But since the war was with the mobile “virtual state” of terrorism, what was needed was a market state mirroring its tactics. (Blackwater and all the other private contractors were too hampered by the nation state, not yet acting as the market state.)
But the best entrepreneur of the new counterterrorist terrorism was Dick Cheney, with his “enhanced interrogations” of captured terrorists. Bobbitt says torture may not be used just to score a political point or secure a judicial conviction. But the new state has to have new rules. In former wars, captives were forced to surrender their arms. In the new wars they must be forced to surrender their information. “There cannot be a ban on the collection of strategic information — information from terrorist leaders and senior managers — by whatever means are absolutely necessary short of inflicting severe pain when that information is likely to preclude attacks.” That is just the legal guidance Cheney got from John Yoo, a deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel. Neither Yoo nor Cheney thought waterboarding inflicted “severe pain.” The new prince, like Machiavelli’s old one, can commit crimes if they are in service to the state. The aim, after all, is to escape those “legal and political restraints that bind government officials.”
It has often been noticed that war makes adversaries end up resembling each other; but Bobbitt would have us start out resembling our foe. Terrorists, he says, are not just criminals. They have created a “virtual state,” and we have to create an entirely new kind of state to cope with it. This reminds me of the people who denounced democracy in the 1930s as too slow and stumbling to respond to the rise of dictators. Some would have had Roose*velt and Churchill create a new kind of state, baffling dictators with “good guy” dictatorships.
Not even Bobbitt thinks a new state was born of that crisis — his “nation state” runs unbroken from 1914 to 1990, and was able to survive World War II and the cold war. Only Al Qaeda and its ilk are enough to make us create an entirely new political order. Those who have seen the efficiency and lack of corruption in unregulated medicine and banks and Blackwater-type operations will have a little trouble hailing Machiavelli as a sponsor of the Higher Cheneyism.
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