Interview with Philip Bobbitt

Zachary Karabell (0:01)

We live in a world where there is a surfeit, a plethora even of negative information, couple of SAT words thrown in just for good measure. And much of that negative information leads us to a pretty grim view of the world and where it is headed. Any look at any newspaper or website or listen to the radio or TV provides ample evidence of what could go wrong. And so as a corrective to that, we are going to look at what could go right. What could go right doesn't mean that it will go right any more than what could go wrong means that it will go wrong. But it does mean that we're going to take a hard edge look at the alternatives with a full consideration of all the things that are problematic and negative. This is not meant as a Pollyanna view of the world or a rose tinted lens into a reality that is otherwise complicated. But it is meant as a way of saying, look, if we're going to spend so much time analyzing all that is problematic and wrong in the world, we ought to spend at least a little bit of time analyzing the things that could lead in a more positive and constructive direction. The legacy of human history has been a death dance between our ability to create and our ability to destroy. And the fact that we are here today speaking of it means that just narrowly our ability to create, survive and thrive has edged out in that dance our ability to destroy. So, we ought to be paying at least a modicum of attention to what could go right.

We are speaking today with Philip Bobbitt, Professor Philip Bobbitt, who is the Herbert Wexler Professor of Federal Jurisprudence and the Director for the Center for National Security at the Columbia Law School. He was a long time law professor at the University of Texas at Austin. But more important for our discussion, he is the author of several books that really do for our present world of nation states what deep thinkers of the past like Hegel and Marx and others have done to think about the world that we are in. Not saying that Professor Bobbitt is a Marxist, just that he has thought deeply about the world in books like The Shield of Achilles and Terror and Consent and a recent study of Machiavelli. Called The Garments of Court and Palace. And this is not just a man who has thought deeply about the world, but he's also walked the walk as he has talked the talk and served multiple stints in and out of the federal government, including legal counsel to the Iran-Contra Committee in the 1980s, stints on the National Security Council, and stints in the State Department where he has been an advisor and a strategist for multiple presidents. Welcome to the discussion. So, Philip, I wanted to talk to you first or ask you first, you know, you've written a lot about the state as an apparatus of power. So, if you could elaborate, what does that mean?

Philip Bobbitt (3:07)

I was trying to draw attention to the fact that the state is a template for legitimate action in a society that we take its fundamental premises, a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence, for example, more or less for granted, and that we may be living in one of those very rare moments in which the nature of the state itself is changing. I imagine most people who think about these things don't think about that possibility because they assume that the nation state began in 1648 after the Thirty Years' War and has continued more or less in the same mold since then. And the book The Shield of Achilles is an argument against that. It asserts that the modern state really begins a century earlier, that it is typically forged in war, and emerges from the sometimes decades-long wars with its premise of legitimacy changed. And with that idea, I sketched out a half-dozen different forms of the state, including the one we live in now, the industrial nation state, which I date to the 1870s in the United States and in Germany. And I speculated that that form of a state, industrial nation state, the 20th century state, was changing in a fundamental way that would change everything else. And that instead of focusing on the sort of symptoms of this change, political polarization, rise of ethno-nationalism within states, devolution, globalization, instead of focusing on these items, we might focus on something more fundamental. That the state itself might be changing, shifting beneath our feet. And that these were just symptoms of that deep change.