Soldiers of the State. - The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace, and the Course of History - book review

National Review, Sept 30, 2002 by Michael Knox Beran

Bobbitt grasps brilliantly the interplay of strategic innovation and constitutional change that made the modern state; but he is less sensitive, I think, to the third force at work, that of spiritual aspiration. A number of the constitutional mutations he analyzes came about, in part, because men sought a substitute for the unity of endeavor that had vanished with the passing of the Middle Ages. A desire to recreate the broken wholeness is evident in the efforts of citizens to revive, in the Italian peninsula, the civic life of Athens and Rome. It was in France, however, that the most thorough attempt was made to recreate, in the new environment of the state, a semblance of the old medieval coherence. Here was a kingdom in which, by the end of the 17th century, the political, spiritual, and economic life of the people revolved around the king. Louis XIV was the "roi-soleil" at the center of the new universe. Bossuet, the court preacher, believed that the monarchy, a "sacred" institution, was central to the spiritual meaning of France; Colbert, the finance minister, showed that Versailles could play a no less vital role in superintending the economic development of the realm.

The absolutist model of Louis XIV was never intended to be merely an archaic revival; on the contrary, Bossuet believed that kingly government was an ongoing work of "reason and intelligence." If the poetry of state was centralized in the drama of kingship, the intellect of the kingdom was concentrated in the royal ministries. This massing of bureaucratic brainpower was meant to facilitate progress through the rational direction of affairs; and the royal mandarins, charged with refining the principles of the Bourbon solar system, strove to reduce France to the geometrical order of a garden at Versailles.

It was at this time that an alternative model of governance was fashioned in England. There the "kingly state" never ripened into maturity. The Tudors, it is true, laid the foundation for such a state, and the Stuarts attempted to build upon it. But they failed: The idea that the political, spiritual, and economic life of the kingdom could be wrapped up in a coherent bundle was rejected as impracticable, and the various departments of life were allowed to operate independently of one another. Nor would there be, within any particular department, an insistence upon organic unity; people would instead take their politics, and even their religion, much as they took their other household goods -- by going to the market and seeing what was on sale, and at what price.

A great deal that is valuable in the modern "market-state," as Bobbitt calls it, was implicit in the legislation enacted by the Whigs after the Revolution of 1688. The Bill of Rights (1689) secured the "rights and liberties of the subject"; the Toleration Act (1689) protected certain categories of religious dissent; the Triennial Act (1694) required the "frequent meeting and calling of Parliaments"; the decision not to renew the Licensing Act emancipated the press. To the early years of the Whig regime may be traced, too, a number of innovations in the infrastructure of the capital markets, among them the creation in 1694 of the Bank of England -- which gave England interest rates lower than those on the Continent.