THE title of Bobbitt’s book is taken from Homer’s Iliad, in which the shield of Achilles is wrought by Hephaestus.

The design of the shield depicts a city at peace, where life is in perfect balance; compared to a city at war, where hate, chaos and destruction rule: “They went in and out with one another and fought as though they were living people haling away one another’s dead.”

Bobbitt quotes at length from Homer’s fable at the beginning of his book.

Bobbitt argues that throughout what he calls the “Long War” of the 20th century - 1914 to 1990 - the nation state was defined by its use of force and law to safeguard the security of its citizens. Now that has been replaced, he says, by a “market state” born in the Thatcher and Reagan years, using competition to help its citizens become richer.

Extracts from
The Shield of Achilles:

“We are at a moment in world affairs when the essential ideas that govern statecraft must change. For five centuries it has taken the resources of a state to destroy another state . . . This is no longer true, owing to advances in international telecommunications, rapid computation, and weapons of mass destruction. The change in statecraft that will accompany these developments will be as profound as any that the State has thus far undergone.”

“The market state depends on the international capital markets and, to a lesser degree, on the modern multinational business network to create stability in the world economy, in preference to management by a national or transnational political bodies.”

“The market state is largely indifferent to norms of justice, or for that matter any particular set of moral values so long as law does not act as an impediment to economic competition.”

“We are entering a period . . . when very small numbers of persons, operating with the enormous power of modern computers, biogenetics, air transport, and even small nuclear weapons, can deal lethal blows to any society.”

Al-Queda “is not a stateless gang . . . it is a virtual state . . . a malignant and mutated version of the market state.”

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