Although dated, Bobbitt's work, a scholarly treatment of statecraft, can help the pro-life world understand how Big Tech could corrupt the market-states, which, the author argues, is replacing nation-states.
Reading Bobbitt's work is equivalent to a semester (or two) of college credit without the leftist lunacy that most colleges and universities now interject with their distortions of "social justice" (gender equality, which distorts heterosexual normativity; bashing the United States, which they think is the Satan of nations; or affirming racist groups like Black Lives Matter). Thus, the general reader will delight in whipping out his or her smartphone to learn more about historical events and persons mentioned in the text or defining polysyllabic and rarely-used words, like the wonderfully mellifluous "vertiginous" (703).
Pro-life readers will especially appreciate being able to "connect the dots" of Bobbitt's study with current events two decades later, and the epiphany that they will receive should motivate them to even greater action than reading Senator Josh Hawley's exposé of Big Tech, demonstrated in his masterly book The Tyranny of Big Tech (Regnery, 2021).
Of course, while Bobbitt's book is dated, all readers will appreciate his discussion of five developments that challenge the sovereignty of nation-states (xxii); or his commentary on cutting regulations and taxes (241), which will lead the reader to conclude ineluctably that President Trump was right on those topics and that American Democrats are wrong in their $3.5 trillion tax increases; or the "the six modalities of U.S. constitutional law" (660).
Bobbitt's work has at least one glaring omission of an important person who made world history. There is no mention of St. John Paul II and his role in the discussion of the collapse of communism in Europe (61), nor is the saint mentioned in the discussion of Poland's labor union Solidarnosc (622). There isn't even an index entry for John Paul II. I trust that Bobbitt doesn't think that it was only President Reagan or Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher who worked to end Communism in Europe.
While some items in Bobbitt's work, since it is dated, must be disregarded, such as the woefully outdated internet information (788), more items must be corrected or updated. Reading that "The democratic, capitalist, and parliamentary state no longer faces great-power threats" (8) is cringeworthy; Communist China was an enemy of the United States in 2002 as it is now, even more so, as President Trump showed us during his administration. Regarding his comments on the Second Amendment, a vital update is needed because of the destruction and death caused by Antifa domestic terrorists (237). Similarly, there should be an update regarding enemy states; the claim that "None really threaten [sic] us" (268) is naïve when we Americans know that Communist China wishes to destroy American intellectual and political power or that the Taliban has seized an entire nation from which international terrorism has a base.
Furthermore, since "corporations" in 2021 include the more powerful social media companies created by leftist billionaires who mine our personal data for their bank accounts, several of Bobbitt's statements about corporations and their involvement in the market-state need revision.
For example, Bobbitt's claim that "Business corporations cannot try people and jail them" (337) needs to be corrected. Big Tech social media companies try (as in determine the political correctness of users' opinions) and then jail (as in ban, block, censor, or quarantine) users if the leftist social media companies don't like what is posted.
Similarly, Bobbitt's claim that Nazi ideology as a governmental form has vanished from the globe is woefully premature: "The disgust and horror experienced by civilized people everywhere [over Nazi death camps] effectively removed fascism from the list of possible choices that nations might consider in forming states and marginalized it forever to the dormitory rooms of misfits" (610). Abortions performed in "clinics" run by companies like the monolithic Planned Parenthood are the death camps of today, and the Nazi "misfits" of the 1940s are today's Antifa domestic terrorists.
Moreover, the claim that feminism "has thus far been quite marginal" (658) is either utterly naïve or blatantly ignorant. Anti-life feminism, the kind that, unlike pro-life feminism, supports abortion, has managed to coerce corporations and governments to support abortion with donations (from the corporations) and tax dollars (from the governments) all in the name of "equality", a corruption of the Western ideal so that the unborn child's life is not equal to that of the mother and his or her father.
As a corollary, if Bobbitt cannot recognize anti-life feminism's impact on the globe, then no wonder he can assert the tiresome and misleading statistic that AIDS is the "leading cause of death among Americans under the age of twenty-one" (709) and not perceive or be bold enough to state that abortion is the number one killer of youth.
Instead of faulting his research, contemporary readers can use Bobbitt's commentary about the market-state to see how Big Tech is trying to corrupt (hopefully, not already has corrupted) the market-state. According to Bobbitt, "the market-state promises instead to maximize the opportunity of the people and thus tends to privatize many state activities and to make voting and representative government less influential and more responsive to the market" [211]. If this definition is true, then Big Tech would love the market-state because it's all about money: "the market-state is largely indifferent to the norms of justice, or for that matter to any particular set of moral values so long as law does not act as an impediment to economic competition" (230).
Bobbitt's commentary about political leaders in the new market-state is almost prophetic. "I speculate that leadership for this move ["to encourage the development of entrepreneurial states"] is likelier to come from the leaders of multinational corporations and nongovernment organizations (NGOs) than from leaders of the national security apparatus and the political establishment" (337). While it would be disastrous to think that Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook) or Jack Dorsey (Twitter) are those "leaders", I think a better example of such a leader who can function in the new worldview and who supports the pro-life movement was and is President Donald Trump. How desperately we need more leaders like him to counter the leftist ones in Big Tech who would destroy Western civilization!
Fortunately, Bobbitt clearly identifies the Achilles' heel(s) of the market-state: "the market-state's inherent weaknesses - its lack of community, its extreme meritocracy, its essential materialism and indifference to heroism, spirituality, and tradition" (290). Thus, if Big Tech thinks it can flourish in such a political arrangement, its constituent companies (the leftist Amazon, Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc.) would need to battle billions of people who oppose materialism, who aim to be heroes, who are spiritual, and who believe and follow tradition.
Finally, Bobbitt specifies some areas where the market-state could promote anti-life ideas, so pro-lifers must be vigilant against Big Tech's/corporations' efforts to harm or kill human beings. He recognizes that the market-state may ration health care by determining "to whom to give life-saving medical care" (710). In a futuristic scenario of one category of the market-state, Bobbitt conjectures that "anti-abortion laws [...] all vanished" (735) and, in another scenario, "assisted suicide [...] organ harvesting" occur (736; italics in original in both cases). A final example of a scenario for a future market-state lists "population control" as a "constitutional condition for a society of market-states" (802).
At 888 lugubrious pages, Bobbitt's work is challenging to read, yet necessary to understand how the Big Tech billionaires could distort our twenty-first century.