Ken Anderson has a review of Phillip Bobbitt's Terror and Consent in the Times Literaty Supplement. Here is a taste:
[T]he success of Terror and Consent as an argument depends largely on whether “market” and “state” can be corralled together as Bobbitt proposes, or whether, instead, the categories fly apart. In my estimation, the argument is highly persuasive; its success as policy in the real world, however, depends upon something different: whether the market-state partakes of more than simply the ethic of the market. The logic of the market, after all, is to write off the past as past, cut losses and get out as soon as cost-benefit analysis says things are looking dim. Is that really enough? If these are indeed its market values, is the market-state sufficiently nurtured by other values to have the will to defend itself? And this defence is not only against external terrorist enemies, but against those, for example, who would see liberal democracy converted, in the name of multiculturalism, to a form of religious tribalism. George W. Bush and Tony Blair have found it weirdly easier, after all, to send whole armies to fight in faraway places than ever to say no to the demands of communalist, ultimately illiberal, Muslim groups at home.
As always, Anderson brings deep insight.
