Plan for a Century

Terror and Consent: The Wars for the Twenty-first Century, by Philip Bobbitt (Knopf, 688 pp., $35)

ANYONE who finished Philip Bobbitt’s massive, 900-pageplus The Shield of Achilles (2002) might not be surprised about the size and organization of its sequel, Terror and Consent-a 600-pageplus volume replete with book parts, chapters within chapters, Roman-numeraled subsections, bullet-marked sub-subsections, a conclusion, and a coda, all fortified with lengthy indented quotations, footnotes, and italicized passages. It would be easy to dismiss Terror and Consent as a rambling excursus in desperate need of an editor to prune away redundancy, extraneous argument, and circumlocution. Indeed, the book at times becomes a labyrinth of obfuscation, in which insights-often brilliant and original-are trying desperately to avoid blind alleys and somehow bump their way to the reader.

About the Author

Victor Davis Hanson

Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University; the author of The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won; and a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness.

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Terror and Consent: The Wars for the Twenty-first Century, by Philip Bobbitt (Knopf, 688 pp., $35)

ANYONE who finished Philip Bobbitt’s massive, 900-pageplus The Shield of Achilles (2002) might not be surprised about the size and organization of its sequel, Terror and Consent-a 600-pageplus volume replete with book parts, chapters within chapters, Roman-numeraled subsections, bullet-marked sub-subsections, a conclusion, and a coda, all fortified with lengthy indented quotations, footnotes, and italicized passages. It would be easy to dismiss Terror and Consent as a rambling excursus in desperate need of an editor to prune away redundancy, extraneous argument, and circumlocution. Indeed, the book at times becomes a labyrinth of obfuscation, in which insights-often brilliant and original-are trying desperately to avoid blind alleys and somehow bump their way to the reader.

About the Author

Victor Davis Hanson

Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University; the author of The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won; and a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness.