Valentin Chirosca’s Reviews > The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace, and the Course of History > Status Update

to share information as a means of defense against disguised attacks. By these means, the next epochal war can be converted into a series of interventions and crises, instead of a world-shattering cataclysm or a stultifying and repressive world order.”

The parliamentary nation-state has emerged from the Long War as triumphant. Nevertheless, we should not expect that either this form of the constitutional order or the peace that recorded its ascendancy will be eternal. Mindful of the past, we can expect a new epochal war in which a new form of the State—the market-state—...

institutions that permit individuated and diverse cultural development in the context of nonaggressive relations.

The Long War was won by strategic innovations that we might nowadays call the development of weapons of mass destruction, the globalization of communications, and the international integration of finance and trade. These strategic innovations have brought with them new challenges

“We are inclined to forget that, until the mid-1930s, liberal parliamentarianism, not fascism, was the principal target of communists.”

The state-nation was founded upon the claim (made notably by Hegel) that the State furnished the ideal vehicle for the realization of the nation...

“The shift to the market-state does not mean that states simply fade away, however. If the acquisition of more territory is less important than before to garnering wealth, the luring of people and capital by the most attractive state policies is absolutely crucial…. The real shift is simply from public purposes to private purposes,

“When we lengthen our gaze, we will see more clearly that law and strategy have always been mutually excited switches on the same circuit, and that the State itself, as we have seen in Book I, is the mechanism of feedback.”