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

William III confirmed the Whig settlement partly for military reasons: Regulation was costly, and he needed cash to fight the Sun King. A long, desperate struggle between the two contending systems ensued; but although England eventually triumphed over France, the victory did not doom the principle for which the French fought. It is true that France began to move, after the defeat of Bonaparte, in a Whig direction; and in the days of Guizot and the July Monarchy French liberalism reached its zenith. Russia and Austria, however, two of the signatories to Castlereagh's 1814 pact, remained committed to the autocratic model of Louis XIV, and sought to defend it through a Holy Alliance with Prussia.

Philosophers, meanwhile, devised new theories by which the felicities of a communal existence could be secured without resort to an anachronistic absolutism. Romanticism supplied a theoretical justification for nationalism; bogus economic science and esoteric German philosophy, rearranged by Marx, supplied the basis for another theory, which held that men and women could realize their innate sociability through new forms of communal organization. These communes, it was believed, would be a great advance over the fragmented and hypercompetitive existence fostered by liberalism.

In the dark genius of Bismarck these two strains of communal longing were brought together. Bismarck's ambition was to sort the European peoples into their aboriginal "tribes"; and amid scenes of tribal ecstasy he united the German nation. The old Junker then proceeded to lay the foundation for the quasi-socialist Wohlfahrtstaat. Hitler, who perceived the crueler possibilities in these policies, carried them to an extreme: he called his program "National Socialism." These developments were paralleled in Russia: After the collapse of tsarist absolutism in 1917, the Bolsheviks attempted to implement a form of Marxian socialism; but Stalin, the consolidator of the Russian Revolution, recognized that socialism by itself could not secure the state. He began knitting nationalist threads into the fabric of the socialist constitution, and in order to fight the "Great Patriotic War" he revived the mystique of Mother Russia.

Bobbitt's book, splendid though it is, would be even more persuasive if it brought the reader to see, in the various wars with which it deals, the larger struggle between the aggrandizing communal regimes and the market-oriented free states. What Bobbitt calls the "Long War," in the 20th century, among the liberal democracies, the Axis powers, and the Soviet Union, seems to me to have been one episode in a continuing fight between those who accept the liberal (Whig) dissociation of experience and sensibility, and those who yearn for the simplicity and coherence found in a state where every aspect of existence is subjugated to a transcendent ideal. Such a narrative would help the reader to see that, although the liberal democracies prevailed in the Long War, their victory came at the price of some of their anti- totalitarian principles. Americans tolerated, in the middle of the last century, a highly militarized state, punitive tax rates, and a centralizing regime in Washington.