The fracture in the historical bond between capitalism and democracy now seems evident. The connection that had held, albeit ambiguously, throughout the era of industrial capitalism and Fordist growth today appears to be definitively broken due to financial neoliberalism, the offshoring of production, and the crisis of democratic institutions.
Liberal democracy is a Western affair, not a global one. It was born and evolved in the West during the late modern era, grounded in cultural, economic, and social preconditions that cannot be reproduced elsewhere. Its export has often been an element of neocolonial ambition. The world knows well how to distinguish good governance from oppression, order from violent chaos, yet it neither thinks nor organizes itself democratically. Nor does it admire the democratic West or aspire to emulate it—except in the production of goods and services. Today, liberal democracy concerns scarcely one-eighth of the world’s population. Europe, the West (which are not the same thing, or at least have not always been), and democracy have long since been provincialized. The West is the rest.
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.
After the publication of Postliberalism: The New Politics of Meaning (2021), by Adrian Pabst, the ranks of those criticizing liberalism and liberal democracies have grown – particularly those who take upon themselves the task of moving beyond a political phase marked by discontent and the erosion of democracy on a global scale. Some authors attempt to give meaning to this “post” by framing it as an alternative to both neoliberalism and populism. These include conservative thinkers (like Patrick Deneen), religious and theologically engaged figures (like John Milbank), and others who push their critique of liberal universalism to the edge of reactionary extremism (like Yoram Hazony), to the point that they appear more anti- than post-liberal. Pabst, a British political philosopher and Catholic, represents a more moderate, reformist version of this trend. He argues that modern liberalism has exhausted its capacity to give meaning to political, social, and economic life – because radical individualism, combined with a socially unbound market and a technocratic state, has reduced the human being to a consumer.
However exceptionally dramatic and complex current (new and old) conflicts like Ukraine and Palestine are, it is hard to believe that the vast and long-established network of legal relationships between states, and between the latter and non-state actors alike—the almost unlimited number of areas governed by over 250,000 international treaties, customary rules, and over 2,000 sectoral global regimes—will fall to pieces as a result of contingent geopolitical considerations (even though, admittedly, the new geopolitical context may stay with us for some time to come).
The polarization of different common culture is emerging, but tragically, it is not one that fosters unity. Instead, it is a culture of nihilism, driven by a logic of ressentiment—a narrative of injury that seeks revenge through a will to power. This culture’s negations, as Rieff once put it, lead to a nothingness that can be both radical and reactionary at the same time. The challenge of meaningful and effective governance under such conditions is immense, if not impossible. All of this is true in its own right. Add to it the multiple crises of global poverty, rogue states with nuclear weapons, climate change, mass immigration, and an increasingly unstable international order, and the stakes become even higher. My argument is that we are at a moment when the answers to these fundamental questions about the vitality and longevity of liberal democracy can no longer be taken for granted—not because of our polarization, but because we no longer have the cultural resources to navigate what divides us.
We are going through a certain era where human dignity is neglected but pride is mobilized and organized by right-wing populists. If we do not have a global conversation and global solidarity against this loop of political “ice age”, we are going to end up in a more infantilized world.
The twenty-first century marks a crossroads. The ending of the confrontation between East and West ushered in the possibility of a ‘new international order’ based on the extension of democracy across the globe, and a new spirit of peace. However, the enthusiasm which accompanied the fall of the Berlin wall and the end of the Cold War seems now far away. The crises and cruelties in Bosnia, Rwanda, Darfur, Afghanistan and Iraq have brought many to the conclusion that the new world order is a new world disorder.
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