A Papier-Mache Fortress

The first problem is that nothing in Bobbitt's very grand scheme is ever proved. Nothing major in it--neither categories, concepts, fundamental assumptions, alleged links and causal connections nor definitions of critical terms--is rigorously analyzed, hypothesized and operationalized. Nor is any of it tested against contrary evidence and alternative views and shown to be more solidly based than competing schemes and interpretations. If one believes it, one does so essentially because it looks good, or because one wishes to believe it.

The second point is that under close examination the grand scheme falls apart. Central categories develop fissures and cracks and their contents leak out and mingle with others. Crucial concepts, when tested, prove tautological or simply empty. Vital causal connections and links between phenomena in different spheres prove nonexistent or unconvincing. Major generalizations central to it prove untenable. An example: One of Bobbitt's main contentions is that epochal wars and their peace settlements establish the dominant constitutional form of the state and the constitution of an era's society of states. The first of these, the Habsburg-Valois wars and the Peace of Augsburg, meet none of the requirements of the theory. These wars were not epochal but local and sporadic, and did not end in 1555 but continued underground until once more breaking out openly in the 1630s and ending in 1659. The Peace of Augsburg had nothing to do with them; it established only a temporary and unstable truce in Germany's religious c onflicts, and led to no new constitutional order either in Germany or elsewhere.

Or take Bobbitt's concepts of different state constitutions--princely, kingly, territorial and so forth. Not only is each of these fuzzy in definition and the distinctions drawn between them arbitrary and artificial, but at least one and perhaps two (the state-nation and the territorial state) are figments of Bobbitt's imagination, corresponding to no historical reality whatsoever. Of the five great powers at the Vienna Congress that supposedly established and legitimated the dominant state-nation form, not one remotely fits his definition of it--and not one wanted or dared to do after 1815 what he says state-nations do, which is to put their people at the service of the state. As for the territorial state, its supposed legitimating principle--the more efficient use of the state's resources--would fit some states and not others in any era; and some of the central defining characteristics Bobbit ascribes to its era as opposed to others (e.g., the unimportance of dynastic succession, a coolly rational secularis m in regard to religion, and the waging of only limited cabinet wars) are all flatly untrue.

Indeed, the whole notion that each different constitutional form of the state rests on a particular distinctive legitimating principle--so that nation-states try to maximize the welfare of all their citizens while market-states try to maximize opportunity--is unhistorical to the point of absurdity. Had Bobbitt done any serious study of his 18th-century territorial states, he would have seen that many of them, at least, saw their raison d'etre in promoting the welfare of all their subjects as they saw it, and they tried to do so in part by maximizing their opportunities within the established order. (3)