Philip Bobbitt

Philip Bobbitt

Philip Chase Bobbitt (born July 22, 1948 in Temple , Texas ) is an American military strategist, constitutional lawyer , university professor and author . He became known through the bestseller The Shield of Achilles with his forecast of a replacement of nation states by the market state.

Life

Philip Bobbitt is the only child in the Bobbitt family. His mother, Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt, was the older sister of US Vice President and later President Lyndon B. Johnson . His maternal grandfather was Texas MP Sam Ealy Johnson .

Bobbitt graduated from Princeton University with a degree in Philosophy in 1971 . His work entitled About Wittgenstein and a Philosophical Theology was scientifically accompanied by Richard Rorty . In 1975 he graduated from Yale Law School with a JD ( Juris Doctor ). In 1981 and 1982, and again in 2004, he was given a research grant. At the University of Oxford in England, he achieved a Master of Arts and doctorate there in the subject Modern History in 1983. From 1983 to 1990 he was a Fellow at Nuffield College in Oxford , where he taught modern history. He later held a research fellowship from 1994 to 1997 at the Department of War Studies at King's College London . In 2004 he was accepted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .

Teaching activities

Until 2007, Bobbitt was a professor at the University of Texas at Austin , where he taught constitutional law. Two visiting professorships took him to Harvard Law School in 2005 and as professor to the Law Faculty of Columbia University in New York City in 2007 , to which he was appointed that same year. He gives guest lectures at the University of Texas and is a fellow at the university's Robert Schwarz Strauss Center for International Security and Law .

Government work

Bobbitt has worked for both Democratic and Republican presidents . He was one of the legal advisors to President Jimmy Carter and worked with Lloyd Cutler on the statutes of the CIA . In the Iran-Contra affair , he was legal advisor to the US Senate committee. During the presidency of George Bush he was an advisor on international law at the State Department . During this time he was director of espionage programs in the National Security Council . During Bill Clinton's presidency , he was Chief of Strategic Planning .

The Shield of Achilles

In 2002 Philip Bobbitt published the 900-page work that explains historical change in the modern age and the development of modern constitutional and international law.

The constitutional order of the market state of the 21st century will replace the nation state of the 20th century as a result of the end of the long war. The nation-state, with its mass free public education, universal suffrage, and social security policy, promised the well-being of the nation; the market state promises to maximize the opportunities of the people and therefore tends to privatize many state activities. The electoral and representative government will become less important and will follow market laws more closely.

Turning away from the monolithic idea of ​​the Westphalian nation state, he identifies five constitutional orders that arise in connection with strategic and technological innovations: princely states, royal states, territorial states, state nations and nation states. In Book II, States of Peace , it is postulated that the great peace congresses, which sorted out the winners and losers of epochal wars, wrote constitutions for the society of states and thus ratified every new constitutional order (Augsburg / Princely State; Westphalia / Kingdom State; Utrecht / Territorial State ; Vienna / state nation; Versailles / nation state). The book ends with a series of scenarios that anticipate the future development of the societies of the market states.

The shield of Achilles aroused great interest in diplomatic and political circles.

It won the 2003 Hamilton Awards Grand Prix and was awarded the Council on Foreign Relations' Arthur Ross Bronze Medal for Best Foreign Policy Book of the Year.

Publications

• Constitutional Fate: Theory of the Constitution . Oxford University Press, New York City / Oxford 1984, ISBN 0-19-503422-8 .
• Democracy and Deterrence: The History and Future of Nuclear Strategy . St. Martin's Press, New York City 1987, ISBN 0-312-00523-7 .
• with Gregory F. Treverton and Lawrence Freedman United States Nuclear Strategy: A Reader . New York University Press, New York City, USA, ISBN 0-8147-1107-3 .
• with Guido Calabresi : Tragic Choices . WW Norton, New York City 1990, ISBN 0-8147-1107-3 .
• Constitutional interpretation . B. Blackwell, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA 1991, ISBN 0-631-16485-5 .
• The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace, and the Course of History , foreword by Michael Howard . Alfred A. Knopf, New York City 2002, ISBN 0-375-41292-1 .
• Terror and Consent: The Wars for the Twenty-first Century . Knopf / Penguin, New York City 2008, ISBN 978-1-400042432 .
• Garments of Court and Palace: Machiavelli and the World That He Made . Atlantic Monthly Press, New York City 2013, ISBN 978-0-8021-2074-8 .

interview

• FAZ on June 10, 2013, p. 27: The danger is not the state, it is the mass of data in private hands. A conversation with the New York constitutional lawyer Philip Bobbitt, who already stood up for the surveillance state as Clinton's security advisor .

Web links

• Biography (en.)