Output details

New Model Army

The starting point for the research was the account of Athenian democracy in Josiah Ober’s Democracy and Knowledge: Innovation and Learning in Classical Athens (2008), a work which challenges the idea that democracy is structurally weaker than autocracy. Roberts sought to expand the research questions Ober asks. He discusses the relative strengths of democratic versus authoritarian nations going to war, yet nobody has suggested that the armies themselves on either side should be run on democratic lines. There has never been in the history of humankind a properly democratic army. The obvious objection—that it would be impracticable to orchestrate the trappings of democracy in the heat of battle—is rendered null by new technologies. To write the novel Roberts read widely in military history and democratic theory; he posited an army the size of a classical Greek polis linked with e-technology, and set them against larger traditional national armies in a near-future Europe. Roberts broke the novel into three, and wrote the third in an experimental stylistic approximation of an emerging group-consciousness. The research output has been disseminated as a published novel, and supported by blog-posts and interviews with SF magazines and other media. Roberts was invited to give the New Year's Lecture at the Universiteit Leiden, Campus Den Haag (5th Feb 2011) about the novel and its ideas by the LUC Brill Nijhoff Writing Institute; and in June 2013 he gave a TEDx talk at the Houses of Parliament about the novel and its research conclusions on the subject of democracy.