What is liberté? Freedom. What kind of freedom? The freedom to do whatever one wants within the limits of the law. When can one do whatever one wants? When one possesses a million. Does freedom allow everyone to have a million? No, it doesn’t. What is a person without a million? A person without a million is not someone who does whatever they want, but someone to whom others do whatever they want.” Thus wrote Fyodor Dostoevsky in 1862, upon returning from his first trip to Europe. In just a few lines, the Russian writer grasped a contradiction that would come to define all modern political thought: the promise of universal freedom versus the reality of a freedom distributed according to wealth. What at the time sounded like a moral provocation now returns as a historical diagnosis of the increasingly worn-out relationship between capitalism and democracy, one that fully embraces the crisis of liberalism and that of freedom.
A never peaceful relationship
The relationship between capitalism and democracy has never been simple nor linear. On the one hand, it was the rise of the bourgeoisie that brought about, not immediately or without friction, the institutionalization not only of the rule of law but also of the democratic principle of political representation. On the other hand, the history of democracies is also the long and troubled history of struggles to expand those freedoms: against disenfranchisement, against inequality, against exploitation.
The golden age of this balance, the postwar boom, seemed to have found an apparently stable formula: regulated capitalism, the welfare state, broad-based growth. A fragile but effective compromise, in which politics regulated markets and not the other way around. Yet even then, that model was neither universal nor free of contradictions: it rested on global neo-colonial, gender, and cultural hierarchies and inequalities. In other words, it had an inglorious side. Not everyone benefited from the democratic promise of prosperity, but the idea of a “capitalism embedded in society,” to borrow Karl Polanyi’s phrase, did seem to make possible a productive—albeit flawed—relationship between capitalism and democracy.
Of course, from a Marxist perspective it appeared as the chloroforming of struggles for true universal emancipation, while from a neoliberal point of view it represented the antechamber of collectivist totalitarianism: for neoliberals, saving capitalism required severely limiting democracy. As we know, it was the latter that won the battle of ideas, burying the ideals of social liberalism and social democracy.
The neoliberal rupture
For neoliberals, social and social-democratic liberalism was a form of illiberal and irrational socialism that had to be opposed. Only economic freedom fully realized in the market could produce a free society, that is, a society in which cooperation arose spontaneously, without coercion, through economic competition; this alone was the guarantee of political freedom. The welfare state, in their view, was irrational on an economic level but also “ungovernable” on a political one: both because it was constantly riven by social struggles that made it weak, lacking in vertical authority, prey to conflicts among groups, and overloaded with demands; and because politicians governed in order to be re-elected, not according to rational principles.
Neoliberals thus attacked not only economic interventionism but also popular sovereignty: they wanted a State that was minimal and strong at the same time.
As early as 1980, Norberto Bobbio had noted this shift: whereas historically liberalism had attacked the socialist State, “now democracy itself, pure and simple, is under attack,” and therefore, “the danger is serious. What is at stake is not only the welfare state—that great historical compromise between the workers’ movement and mature capitalism—but democracy itself, that other great earlier compromise between the traditional privilege of property and the organized world of labor, from which modern democracy directly or indirectly arose (through universal suffrage, the formation of mass parties, etc.),” he wrote in his essay Old and New Liberalism.
Since the 1980s, the diverse neoliberal paradigm has taken hold. Thus, from an “embedded capitalism” we have moved, as Quinn Slobodian wrote, to a capitalism “encased” from democracy. The neoliberals wanted an unequal world, but one without war—regulated by a global market that would promote “doux commerce.” To achieve this, they sought ways to limit democracy, though never able to eliminate it entirely.
And today? Where do we stand now, as war rages on? What remains of democratic and social achievements? After having challenged the welfare state and popular sovereignty, has neoliberalism now come to question all other limits on the freedom of capital, including human rights and the rule of law? But can we still even speak of neoliberalism? Is it possible to rethink the ties between capitalism, liberalism, and democracy?
What is freedom?
From democracy to the financial and transnational neo-oligarchy
From being a universal (and therefore imperial) model, the West has now become “provincialized,” and with it, liberal democracy as well, argues philosopher Carlo Galli in his essay that opens the dossier, “The West is The Rest.” A minority political model outside the Euro-Atlantic world, it now appears to be in decline even within its own borders. Years of neoliberalism have produced “post-democratic” or, more precisely, “neo-oligarchic” societies, whose face is made up of “crisis-ridden free-market economics, subordinate populisms, shapeless and divided societies, states of emergency, neo-authoritarianisms, and digitized societies and states in which the subject is not the controller but the controlled.”
However, the diagnosis is not purely pessimistic; Galli emphasizes the role of collective organization and theoretical elaboration: “Without a movement from below, there is no hope of change,” but “for there to be action, there must be thought, an idea.”
The other side of neo-oligarchic domination is a regime of presentist historicity, which blocks imagination and the capacity to plan for the future—a temporal dimension analyzed by the philosopher Marina Calloni. With the end of social democracy, “one of the strongest symbolic images of the twentieth-century social contract has disappeared: the tripartition of time: eight hours of work, eight hours of rest, eight hours for love and leisure, while work time and life time now merge together in 24/7 capitalism. In today’s digital and transnational economy, one contributes to the creation of value even just by communicating on a smartphone. Resisting this new form of domination therefore requires reclaiming time, acting on a spatial scale that cannot be localist but must be transnational, just like the political, technological, and economic powers that currently control the world.
These powers cannot be understood without analyzing the process of financialization that has reshaped the economy over the past thirty or forty years. According to the historian Alessandro Volpi, this has “resulted in the creation of a monopoly now concentrated in the hands of the great American funds, the so-called ‘Big Three’ (BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street), which manage global savings.” It was politics that made their immense power possible, and politics itself is now subordinate to it. In this context, Donald Trump represents both a rupture and a continuity: on the one hand, the U.S. president rejects this subordination; on the other, he knows that such rejection is ultimately impossible, since much of the U.S. debt—and therefore the services available to citizens, now reduced to mere savers without genuine political freedom—depends on the Big Three. This is a global process, one that today seems to be fully submerging Europe as well.
The problem of the EU or democracy in Europe
After all, Europe is “caught in a vice between the United States and China,” unable to act as an autonomous power, divided by national interests, and yet condemned to integration if it wishes to survive, as economist Michele Salvati argues in the interview published here. The only path forward for the European Union is that of a true federation, with a common economic and foreign policy. This proposal frightens many, given the risk of further technocratic and neoliberal drift, but Salvati considers it inevitable: “What would the alternative be? The status quo of many small national policies, or Europe’s surrender to irrelevance in the new world order?”
It is also the only possibility for saving what remains of liberal democracy in Europe, already hollowed out by years of neoliberal policies, and for avoiding the completion of an autocratic turn that has now overtaken many Western countries, the United States foremost among them. Yet even for American democracy, the final word has not been spoken; it might still recover.
The condition for this to happen seems to be not only that Trump leaves office, but also that the U.S. Democratic Party manages to launch policies truly suited to the challenges of our time. According to the economist Emanuele Felice, such an attempt had already been made with “Bidenomics.” Former U.S. President Joe Biden did in fact address public debt, climate change, and support for lower incomes, but, Felice writes, “he lacked the strength to introduce the second necessary leg: a progressive tax reform capable of targeting rentals and redistributing wealth.”
This is the same limitation afflicting Europe: the inability to confront inequality, discrimination, and exploitation through new redistributive and inclusive social policies. Yet precisely therein lies the potential for a renewed democratic pact. Felice thus calls for “normalizing the exception” of the Recovery and Resilience Facility (PNRR), turning the expansive and redistributive momentum of Europe’s pandemic response into a structural policy capable of addressing collective problems.
Post-liberalism or recovery of political liberalism?
Liberalism has always excluded from its horizon of meaning collective, “social,” and “planetary” problems, because the individual is its organizing principle, argues the philosopher Wendy Brown in the interview published in this dossier. For this reason, “liberalism is exhausted,” and democracy must be rethought in a “post-liberal” and “reparative” framework.
“Reparation” does not mean “compensation,” but, rather, “mending”: it must repair the separation between the human being and society, and between humanity and nature—a separation that years of neoliberalism have produced, together with nihilism and ‘identitarian’ particularism. To achieve this, the State remains necessary: “States are crucial for implementing decisions, for organizing and enforcing regulations, restrictions, and limits. I think the issue we face today is how to keep States subordinate to democracy, instead of treating them as democratic icons. The task ahead of us, I believe, is to figure out how to separate states from democracy.”
If, for Brown, after years of neoliberalism the alternative must be based on “post-liberal” principles, the philosopher Lea Ypi argues that we must restore to freedom its political meaning—recovering the moral and political substance of the liberal tradition, against both neoliberalism and the authoritarian turn. Freedom is not the absence of constraints, but participation in the construction of a common world. It is, above all, “freedom from fear”: freedom from the fear of domination, exploitation, poverty, or avoidable death.
Understood this way, freedom is a form of power—of self-determination—that, to be genuine, must be universal and democratic. To preserve this democratic freedom, we must struggle: persistently analyze and expose the contradictions of the present, and reject the conservative ideology of self-regulation, according to which power is impersonal and diffuse, as if it were inevitable.
The best of the liberal tradition has always been, ultimately, the struggle for the empowerment of the powerless, which throughout history has become institutionalized in democracy. It is this struggle that must still today be stubbornly reaffirmed. Dostoevsky’s question—“What is freedom?”— remains a battleground, even today.
Cover photo: An older man holding an American flag and a water bottle sits beside a sign reading ”The emperor has no clothes!” during the ”No Kings” protest in Rochester, New York. Protesters gather during the ”No Kings” demonstration in Rochester, New York, on October 18, 2025, calling for the end of monarchic systems and advocating for equality and people’s rule. (Photo by Blnd Abdullah/NurPhoto via AFP)
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