Rating: 
Summary: Almost there.
Review: A worthwhile read for its historical analysis alone.
Convincing and highly detailed in the way in which the
founding premise is presented. The books shortcoming
lies in the final iterations of the market-state future scenarios. Like climbing a mountain to find that the
view from the top is hazy.
Rating: 
Summary: verbose
Review: As a doctoral student in International Relations, with a Masters degree in Information Systems, I would like to make the following point to all my superiors: keep it simple.This book of 800 pages could have been written in 200 pages. The ideas are interesting but, because the book lacks structure, finding them is like bobbing for apples. The book, in fact, reads like some vast government report (reminding me of those old five-hour, Soviet-style speeches). Too bad, because there are some very sweet apples down below the water-line. An excellent first draft; please edit and republish.
Rating: 
Summary: A Massive Misunderstanding
Review: Bobbit is as glib as any lawyer- he's a professor of law- but despite his government experience he seems to have a large chunk missing from his understand of the economics of information. Bobbit's thesis, in a nutshell, is that rapid dissemination of information helps buinesses but is not good for government, as it forces leaders to think quickly. No, really, that's what he's arguing. He is particularly critical of the "Drudgeification" of the news, by which I take him to mean the democratization. He specifically arns that this rapid from is moving us away in the direction of direct democracy! Horrors. Bobbit reveals himself to be an elitist who believes that information should be controlled by a few parties, and that governance is best left to professionals in Washington DC. But it's not democracy that's threatened by the rapid flow of information; it's the media elite, the governmental elite, and the academic elite. The rest of us have more choice than ever, and thanks to the internet, more outlets for our opinions than ever, too.
Rating: 
Summary: Needs an Editor, But a Gem
Review: Bobbitt is an original thinker and the first guy to accurately put the last century (i.e. the 20th) in historical perspective. He traces development of government from princely Italian city-states, to kingly domains, through nation-states and now, after the wars of the 20th century, moving to what he calls market states. He discusses the various policy options Americans have to deal with these changes. Sure, he's long winded, but at least he has something to say. If you stick with it, I'll guarnantee you'll learn something. If you want World Relations for Dummies... look elsewhere.
Rating:
Summary: What's Missing
Review: Bobbitt's book, with its repetitive, self-referential structure and elegant literary ornamentation, resembles another Baroque production, the New Science of Vico. Maybe that's why the author's analysis is most convincing when he's talking about the 17th Century. The dish beneath the garnish is quite another meat, however; for the book's center is a hypertrophied version of a business strategy paperback like Reinventing the Corporation or Positioning. When discoursing about the history of the relationship between the nature of the state and the practice of war and diplomacy, Bobbitt sounds like an academic. When he plumps for his view of the present and heralds the somewhat anticlimactic wonders and challenges of what he calls the Market State, he sounds like a flack for the Chamber of Commerce struggling to generate some enthusiasm for the free enterprise system. The Shield of Achilles is a very worthwhile read, but not because its conclusions wash. Reading a book like this, which, sarcasm aside, is a very intelligent production, is valuable more as an occasion for thought than as a historical TOE. What's vividly missing from the book is finally more important than what is in it. Bobbitt managed to write a 900-page book about the state, warfare, and politics without saying anything about who benefits and who loses. He is often very good about the what and the how of history but the question of who is absent without leave. Thus he manages to write about the contemporary situation at great length without noting that in America, at least, the disparity of wealth between the rich and poor is increasing markedly so that a regime supposedly dedicated to increasing opportunity is actually reducing opportunity for most people. He claims that the media are becoming more democratic when, in fact, five corporations control something like 80% of airtime. There is also no mention of the enormous growth of prisons in the U.S., a social fact that must have some relation to the author's thesis. More generally, Bobbitt writes about tendencies like deregulation or privatization as if the intentions of their promoters were irrelevant. It is also puzzling that Bobbitt seems to think that the transition from what he calls the nation state to the market state continues the Cold War triumph of democratic institutions when political participation rates and even the 2000 American election suggest that democracy is in general retreat.
Rating:
Summary: All the philosophical depth of an in-flight magazine...
Review: Despite Bobbitt's excellent credentials, this book is a huge let-down. For a book supposedly covering vast swathes of history and offering keys to the future, it has some glaring omissions. Though he flirts with the ideas below in the text, you will consult the index in vain for any explicit mention of (among others): "Class struggle", "Credit, innovations in", "Disease, role of", "Freud", "Genetic engineering", "Monopolies", "Production, Distribution and Exchange, changes in means of"...etc. In short, it is as if some of the major trends in 19th and 20th century thinking, and several important current trends in technology, have no bearing on the past or the future, or if they do, they deserve only a casual mention.
Rating:
Summary: only the surface
Review: I disagree with other reviews which condider this text
a definite one. In particular, the book shows very clearly why 'war is the
continuation of politics with other means'. However it fails to see the second leg which is most
important and seldomly discussed: politics (therefore also
war) is the continuation of economics with other means. The book fails to show what rules international relations,
and at best it is useful. Certainly not definite.
Rating:
Summary: Partly good, partly not
Review: I found the best parts of this book highly interesting and original, since I like any book that proposes a bold thesis. However, other parts of this book (in my recollection at least 200-300 pages out of 800) are just random thoughts on U.S. foreign policy and other material which is in no immediate way related to the main points of the book. Hence, I think I will be returning to this book again later, but only to the historical parts of it, which thankfully are separated from the other fluff clearly in the chapter labels.
Rating:
Summary: Great book on a complex subject
Review: I understand why so many people have found the book frustrating and too long. It is not a book (like Huntington's Civilizations) where the author simply makes claims on how the future will be. It is a detailed sutdy of the past, of how wars and more pmportantly peace agreements shaped history.
For those who complian about missing the point of the book, I somehow found it very simple. History of the European nation-states, right now the world's most accepted form of governence where the states take the power and legitimacy from its people, has arisen from constant interaction of military and legal innovations. The author goes to great lenght to justify the thesis and in my opinion is very convincing.
The only missing thing in the book is the omition of factors other than those directly related to the topic. Still, one cannot blame the author for keeping those factors out since it would make a book that many already complain is too long, even longer.
Huntington or Fukuyama's approach may seem more direct and understandable to many from the western part of the world, but professor Bobbit goes into great effort to show that history is not over yet, and that we should not expect a clash of civilizations, rather a clash of market states trying to maximize the opporutnites of its clients, sorry citizens.
I definitely reccomend it.
Rating: 
Summary: The Emperor Has No Clothes, Folks
Review: I would have given this text a single star, but for the Herculean effort that went into its writing. As such, I gave it one star for substance and another star for effort. Still, putting in a Herculean effort is not always a good thing: a scholar is also under an obligation to come to the point in a manner which respects the reader's time horizons. Professor Bobbitt, despite his evident intelligence, writes on at length about minutiae, where reams of historical data are presented for every purpose other than to elucidate a general point. Despite the prolixity, there is also an air of shallowness to the text, as if the mountains of verbiage were designed to hide a paucity of actual substance. That said, let me be clear again that Professor Bobbitt is an exceedingly intelligent person - but the text **really** could have used better editing. The book promises to create a new epistemological "paradigm" through which we may better grasp the emerging nature of the "market state", which itself but the latest incarnation of an evolving state structure. That said, "just what particular form the State ultimately emerges.....cannot confidently be predicted." (233) The text's main points are somewhat vague and are stated without positive formulation, with the result being that one is hard pressed to confidently state what the main points actually are. It seems that were the basic points to have simply been summarized in concise bullet form, perhaps in a table, then we might have been able to shave hundreds of pages from the test. In fact, I spent far too much time deciphering items such as this:
"The market-state is, above all, a mechanism for enhancing opportunity, for creating something - possibilities - commensurate with our imaginations." (p. 232) In sum, the prose tends toward rambling; the flow of ideas is not quite coherent; and in the end, the text represents a flat rendition of European history without significant "theoretical yield".
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