Philip Bobbitt's Theories of Changes in the Constitutional Order

[sbarrera]

Bobbitt's theories have a cyclical nature in that they are fundamentally about the growth and decay of the constitutional order. Note that he is a legal scholar specializing in constitutional law. So his perspective is from a legal understanding of what a constitutional order is and how one is derived.

Ultimately, law rests on strategy; that is, a government can only enforce its laws and maintain its legal system so long as it retains its monopoly on the use of force. When social or technological changes occur which undermine this monopoly then the order must shift to adjust. In other words, the order ages over time and becomes less effective, and a new order rises to replace it. A familiar narrative to students of historical cycles.

Bobbitt does not link these changes in the constitutional order to generational change specifically. And he's not bound by the length of generations in identifying when these shifts occur. So he doesn't theorize any kind of regular cycle, or two- or four-stroke pattern or anything like that. He just identifies "epochal wars" which forge a particular constitutional order, and appear at different times in history.

Now the concept of an "epochal war" sure sounds like a Fourth Turning. And some of Bobbitt's epochal wars are in fact wars during S&H 4Ts, which is not surprising, since both Bobbitt and S&H are looking at wars connected to major political transformation.

Here are Bobbitt's epochal wars and the constitutional order which came out of each one:

• 1515-1555 Hapsburg-Valois Wars THE KINGLY STATE (this was the end of the concept of Christendom as one secular domain with King's subservient to the Holy Roman Emperor and the Pope; instead each King was in charge of his own Kingdom completely)
  
• 1618-1648 Thirty Years War THE TERRITORIAL STATE (Peace of Westphalia, from which came the idea of territorial integrity of states. Many historians identify this treaty as the beginnging of the nation state, but Bobbitt reserves that term for a more specific period)
  
• 1667-1713 Wars of Louis XIV THE IMPERIAL STATE-NATION (after this you saw the global imperial struggle between Britain and France)
  
• 1792-1815 Wars of the French Revolution THE NATION-STATE (it's not the same as the State-Nation, Bobbitt gets very quibbly in his definitions)
  
• 1914-1990 The Long War THE MARKET STATE (after the triumph of the U.S. in the Cold War, we ended up in the current era of the Market State)
  

As you can see, he doesn't fit his epochal wars into a generational pattern, since some of them are a generation long, but others last almost a century!