Adrian Pabst

Faced with the ‘economy of exclusion’ that brackets fraternity out of the picture, the only genuine alternative is to bind higher purposes such as individual virtue and public honour to institutions and practices that can provide prosperity and flourishing for the many. In this essay, I argue that solidarity is key to an economy that is both more ethical and more productive. Both solidarity and fraternity rest on the idea of social reciprocity: for example, balancing individual rights with mutual obligations; brokering collaboration out of conflicts of interest by appealing to the common good that serves both personal interest and social benefit. In this manner, fraternity and solidarity can foster the interpersonal trust and cooperation on which a vibrant economy and flourishing society depend. The prevailing system is based upon a double impersonalism of commercial contract between strangers, and individual entitlement in relation to the bureaucratic machine. By making social reci...

Antonio Genovesi’s economic-political treatise on civil economy was a major contribution to debates in the mid-and late eighteenth century on the nature of political economy. At that time, Genovesi’s book was extensively translated and discussed across continental Europe and Latin America, where it was read as a foundational text of political economy similar to Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. The aim of this article is to contribute to the analysis of the mutual implication between the economic and the political order of society by revisiting Genovesi’s theory of civil economy, which he defined as “the political science of the economy and commerce.” First, the article retraces Genovesi’s conception of civil economy as a branch of political science and the role of “virtue” in ordering the polity according to “the nature of the world.” Second, it explores Genovesi’s theory of production as an inquiry into the proportionality conditions that productive activities should meet for a well...

In his other speeches and writings, Martin Luther King invokes some of America’s best traditions to articulate a vision of national renewal that has universal significance precisely because it emerges from a particular place with people bound together by a shared purpose: "Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy […] now is the time to make justice a reality for all God’s children […] We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline […] Again and again we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force […] many of our white brothers […] have come to realize that their destiny is tied with our destiny and they have come to realize that their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom".

King’s dream is not the abstract utopia imagined by Lennon but instead a reality that is already actualized (albeit partially and imperfectly) in history – the particular history of the United States and the universal history of humankind’s fall and redemption: "I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed – we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal […] With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood".

At a time of deepening division within and across nations, King’s prophetic words and his leadership are a rich reservoir for rethinking and renewing politics. His clarion call that ‘[i]n these days of worldwide confusion, there is a dire need for men and women who will courageously do battle for truth’  has even greater resonance today when truth is either determined by absolute technocratic diktat or denied by post-truth relativism.

Notions of anarchy and an artificial state-centric system underpin much of modern political and IR theory. However, the primacy of cultural association over anarchy and artifice has once again come to the fore, notably in constructivist and ‘culturalist’ approaches. The paper argues that these approaches make a valuable contribution to our understanding of the international but rest on a secular ontology that brackets religion and transcendent notions of morality and justice out of the equation. By contrast, the work of Edmund Burke offers an alternative conception of the international. Contrary to constructivism, Burke considers association not as socially constructed but as reflecting a natural order governed by customs and traditions. Such an order gives rise to ‘commonwealths of culture’ governed by a transcendent morality that for Burke is God-given. Contrary to ‘culturalist’ approaches, Burke conceptualises identity not in essentialist terms but rather as an organically evolving reality that is shaped by both ideas and material forces – notions of common humanity and universal standards of justice, which are mediated through history and embodied in particular practices. For Burke, the international requires ‘obligations written in the heart’, which are more fundamental than the formal standards of ‘papers and seals’.

Both academic research and political debate have focused on the European Union's much-mentioned but little-understood 'democratic deficit'. By contrast, this article shifts the emphasis to the issue of the EU's crisis of legitimacy. It begins by suggesting that neither the process nor the outcomes of EU-wide decision-making appears to command majority support. Is this lack of democratic legitimacy merely the result of institutional 'design faults' or does it reflect a wider and deeper crisis underpinning the EU's entire political project? My argument is that the dominant models of integration – neo-functional supranationalism and liberal intergovernmentalism – rest on three errors: (1) the primacy of economic integration over political union, which has led to a market-state that is disembedded from society and a citizenry that is subordinated to the joint rule of the economic and the political; (2) a premature process of constitutionalisation that culminated in the rejection of the 2005 Constitutional Treaty and the flawed Lisbon Treaty; (3) the current institutional arrangements that concentrate power in the hands of supranational institutions and national governments at the expense of the Union's citizenry. The first section puts the question of democratic legitimacy in the context of the EU's current slide towards disintegration. Section two provides an account of the EU's crisis of legitimacy and explores the main causes that have led to this predicament. Section three suggests that some of the origins can be traced to the inception of the European project in the post-1945 era. Section four argues that the prospect for a core EU (around the Eurozone countries) is rapidly receding. Section five outlines a new settlement that focuses on the idea of a Europe of nations, while the final section develops this thinking in the direction of a civic commonwealth that is grounded in the shared culture of European countries.

Brexit and support for anti-establishment insurgencies suggest that British politics is moving away from the old left-right opposition towards a new divide between the defenders and detractors of progressive liberalism. As the essay suggests, progressive liberalism differs significantly from both classical and new liberalism. It fuses free-market economics with social egalitarianism and identity politics. Both the hard left and the radical right reject this combination and want to undo a number of liberal achievements.
British politics is also moving in a post-liberal direction. In the economy, post-liberalism signals a shift from rampant market capitalism to economic justice and reciprocity. In society, it signals a shift from individualism and egalitarianism to social solidarity and fraternal relations. And politically, it signals a shift from the minority politics of vested interests and group identity to a majority politics based on a balance of interests, shared identity and the embedding of state and market in the intermediary institutions of civil society.
This essay argues that post-liberalism is redefining Britain’s political centre-ground in an age where neither progressive liberalism nor reactionary anti-liberalism commands majority support. First, it charts the ascendancy of progressive liberalism over the past quarter-century. Second, it contrasts anti-liberal reactions with post-liberal alternatives before exploring why earlier iterations of post-liberalism failed to gain traction with the political mainstream. Third, it provides a discussion and critique of Theresa May’s post-liberal conservatism, notably the tension between free-market globalisation and free trade on the one hand, and the support for national industry and the indigenous working class, on the other hand.

The distinction between constitution, as the set of fundamental normative premises ensuring the cohesion of any given polity, and contract, as the formal covenant agreed upon by the relevant stakeholders in that polity, is central to political economy. This paper outlines a conceptual framework for the political economy of constitution based on the above distinction. Our argument is that constitution in the material sense, that is, as a relatively stable configuration of interests prior to formal arrangements, determines the way in which formal rules and procedures operate within a specific historical context. The paper develops the constitutionalist tradition towards a ‘constitutional heuristic’ that helps to detect feasible organisations of political-economic interests in society. Stratified social systems are rooted in multi-layered connectivity and provide a structure for organising partially overlapping interests beyond purely contractual covenants. This conception of constitution has far-reaching implications for economic policy because it charts a course beyond the dichotomy between consensus and conflict. The political economy of constitution focuses on the multiple interdependencies within the social domain, which give rise to substantive arrangements among stakeholders. This approach enables the identification of policy domains, thresholds and measures congruent with the material constitution of any given society.

Trump’s election represents primarily the failure of Clinton’s brand of progressive politics. Her courting of Wall St, Silicon Valley, and Hollywood celebrities alienated the forgotten men and women (the one memorable phrase in Trump’s victory speech) of America’s industrial working class. Whereas Obama carried places such as Wyoming River Valley in northeastern Pennsylvania and Youngstown in Ohio, Clinton’s neglect of the Democrats’ traditional base came back to haunt her as the industrial ghost-towns across Michigan, Wisconsin and Iowa went with Trump. It was not simply white men but also a majority of white women – those without college degrees – as well as about 30 per cent of Latinos and around 8 per cent of African-American voters who together with the Republican core support ensured Trump’s triumph.

The reservoir of resentment that the Trump movement has tapped into is closely correlated with the contempt in which the leadership of the Democratic Party holds working-class people. In the former heartlands along the Rust Belt and in the south, Clinton and her clique on the Democratic National Committee are viewed as arrogant, snobbish, uncaring about ‘ordinary people’ and mostly serving the interests of their friends at Google and Goldman. There was a palpable sense that the Clinton campaign did not care about the party’s traditional base it took for granted. Her ideology betrayed the very people it purported to represent. Clinton’s liberalism of the ‘professional class’ is empty, and this void is now occupied by Trump’s insurgency.

Brexit is part of a tectonic shift in Western politics. An alliance of socialists and conservatives rejected the status quo of remote bureaucracy, mass immigration, and multiculturalism in favor of more self-government and the protection of settled ways of life. A similar realignment is underway in Western countries where the establishment is threatened either by old nationalist parties or by new, insurgent movements that are often far-right on questions of identity and social cohesion and far-left on welfare and the economy – such as Front National in France or Trump in the U.S.A.

This paradoxical convergence marks a reordering of politics that cannot be mapped according to the old categories of left versus right because they are part of the same liberal logic that is now in question. Indeed, from the 1990s onwards both the center-left and the center-right tended to fuse economic with social liberalism, notably financial and trade liberalization coupled with equality legislation in support of abstract ideals such as diversity and inclusivity. In neither case did mainstream parties consider how the privileging of minority interests might affect the rest of the economy or the majority of society.

Amid the backlash against the effects of globalization such as economic injustice and the impact of mass migration on communities, the centrist consensus is breaking. While many reactions are illiberal and even anti-liberal, there are also signs that the debate is shifting in a direction that can be described as ‘post-liberal’ – committed to greater economic egalitarianism and an updated version of social (small ‘c’) conservatism.

Britain's vote to leave the EU is part of a tectonic shift in Western politics. An alliance of socialists and conservatives rejected the status quo of remote bureaucracy, mass immigration, and multiculturalism in favor of more self-government and the protection of settled ways of life. A similar realignment is underway in European countries such as Austria, Italy, the Netherlands, and France, where it could see anti-EU parties force similar referenda or even seize power altogether. Support for anti-establishment candidates in the USA reflects similar trends,

Thus we are seeing a parallel process in both Europe and North America—a
reordering of politics that cannot be mapped according to the old categories of left versus right because they are part of the same liberal logic that is now in question. Indeed, from the 1990s onward both the center-left and the center-right tended to fuse economic with social liberalism, notably financial and trade liberalization coupled with a raft of equality legislation in support of abstract ideals such as diversity and inclusivity. In neither case did mainstream parties consider how the privileging of minority interests might affect the rest of the economy
or the majority of society.

Following the 2008 global credit crash and repeated civic breakdown (including urban riots from Los Angeles via London and Paris
to Malmo), questions of ethics and culture, which the hitherto hegemonic socioeconomic liberalism had seemingly settled, have returned to the fore of politics: substantive rather than merely procedural justice; the common good instead of purely private profit or public utility; shared cultural bonds based not on individual entitlement claims but on more mutualist, reciprocal models of contribution and reward. Such questions are part of a new debate that can be described as “post-liberal”—greater economic egalitarianism and an updated version of social (small “c”) conservatism.

Ante las amenazas globales, la tarea consiste en cómo organizar a creyentes y no creyentes alrededor de un programa compartido de caminos de crecimiento y desarrollo más viables ética y ambientalmente. Algunas de las más efectivas formas de organización acostumbran venir de iniciativas ciudadanas a nivel local, capaces de poner en contacto las diferentes dimensiones – ecológica, económica y política – en un movimiento que busca resistir la pérdida de rumbo de un camino actual en el que las cosas y a cada uno se ve como una mercancía.

No por casualidad estos movimientos – como en el excelente caso de la “organización comunitaria”15 – tienden a tener una dimensión pan-religiosa y en este sentido a transcender la instrumentalización moderna de la fe como un medio para el poder o la riqueza (o ambos a la vez). La “organización comunitaria” fue pionera en los EEUU e implica educar y preparar a los que la integran para que lleguen a ser líderes. Los líderes llegan a ser los co-creadores de organizaciones poderosas, amplias, diversas cultural, económica y religiosamente y con presencia en el vecindario y el lugar de trabajo.

Estas organizaciones son autónomas y se gobiernan de forma democrática. En contraste con los movimientos centrados en un solo tema (como son numerosos nuevos movimientos sociales que aparecieron en los 90), las organizaciones basadas en el vecindario – y el lugar de trabajo – son multifacéticas, orientadas a la acción y dirigidas por un amplio equipo de dirección. La principal tarea de los líderes es reclutar, educar y desarrollar a nuevos líderes que construyan relaciones capaces de sostener y hacer crecer organizaciones orientadas a la calidad de vida.

Di fronte alle minacce globali, il compito riguarda le modalità di organizzazione di persone di tutte le fedi o di nessuna fede intorno ad un programma condiviso per forme di crescita e sviluppo più morali e praticabili a livello ambientale. Discutibilmente, alcune delle modalità più efficaci di organizzazione tendono a provenire da iniziative civiche a base locale che sono in grado di collegare tutte le diverse dimensioni – ecologica, economica e politica – in un movimento che cerca di resistere alla deriva verso la mercificazione di ogni cosa e di ognuno.

Non a caso questi movimenti – come è precipuamente il caso del cosiddetto ‘community-organising’ – tende ad avere una dimensione pan-religiosa e sotto questo profilo a trascendere la strumentalizzazione moderna della fede come veicolo di potere o di ricchezza (o di entrambe allo stesso tempo). Il ‘community-organising’ ha avuto origini pionieristiche negli USA e implica istruire e formare membri per diventare dei leader. I leader diventano co-creatori di organizzazioni potenti, a base ampia e ad elevata diversità culturale, economica e religiosa nella comunità e nel luogo di lavoro.

Queste organizzazioni sono autonome e auto-governate democraticamente. Diversamente dai movimenti focalizzati su un’unica problematica (come i nuovi movimenti sociali emersi negli anni ’90), le organizzazioni basate nella comunità e nel luogo di lavoro si concentrano su molteplici problematiche, sono orientate all’azione e guidate da un team di leader ampio. Il compito principale dei leader e di reclutare, educare e sviluppare nuovi leader creando relazioni che possano supportare e fare crescere organizzazioni dedicate a preoccupazioni comuni che aggiungano qualità alla vita delle persone.

In the face of global threats, the task is how to organise people of all faiths and none around a shared programme for more moral and environmentally viable forms of growth and development. Arguably, some of the most effective ways of organisation tend to come from locally-based citizens initiatives that are able to link up all the different dimensions – ecological, economic and political – in a movement that seeks to resist the drift towards turning everything and everyone into a commodity.

Not accidentally these movements – as supremely in the case of ‘community-organising’15 – tend to have a pan-religious dimension and in this respect to transcend the modern instrumentalisation of faith as a vehicle for power or wealth (or both at once). ‘Community-organising’ was pioneered in the USA, and it involves educating and training members to become leaders. The leaders become the co-creators of powerful, broad-based and culturally, economically as well as religiously diverse organisations in the community and in the workplace.

These organisations are autonomous and democratically self-governing. By contrast with single-issue movements (such as numerous new social movements that emerged in the 1990s), community- and workplace-based organisations are multi-issue, action-oriented and run by a broad leadership team. The main task of leaders is to recruit, educate and develop new leaders by building relationships that can sustain and grow organisations around common concerns which bring quality to people’s lives.

In economics there is a fundamental distinction between risk and uncertainty. Risk is calculable and can be known using reason and measurement, whereas uncertainty is incalculable and involves judgement. Risk can be insured against, while in conditions of uncertainty nobody knows what other actors will do in response to decisions or events.

The 2008 global credit crunch and the ensuing recession have shown that the dominant model of contemporary capitalism tends to privatise profits, nationalise losses, and socialise risk – a new form of interdependence and financialisation of the entire economy. Arguably, this is part of a wider system that rests on the impersonal forces of ‘big government’ and ‘big business’, which together engender a centralisation of power, a concentration of wealth, and a commodification of everyday social life. For many individuals and groups in society, risk is seen as a systemic danger against which there is little personal protection.

We are witnessing two seemingly contradictory patterns: either a lack of belief and self-confidence that engenders a refusal to take individual and collective action, or else reckless risk-taking that ignores natural boundaries and anthropological taboos. Either way, there is a profound imbalance between healthy risk-taking and a reasonable degree of protection.

This is by no means a necessary state of affairs. Far from being a fated and inevitable process, this type of risk is a historically specific and contingent phenomenon. In this essay, I will argue for a different type of risk that can promote both individual fulfilment and mutual flourishing. Risk that encourages human creativity is key to vibrant entrepreneurship and truly competitive markets. That, in turn, requires a genuine market economy that reconnects risks to rewards through mutualisation and profit-sharing arrangements.

The alternative model I will outline draws on Catholic Social Thought and the ‘civil economy’ tradition. It rejects the impersonalism of the social contract between isolated individuals and the mere pursuit of either private happiness or public utility. Instead of the separation of contract from gift, this alternative proposes gift-exchange or social reciprocity as the ultimate principle to govern both the economic and the political realms. Risk- and profit-sharing models can mitigate systemic dangers while also providing more opportunities for ethical enterprise that is good business.

At present Labour in the UK is not a national party. Wiped out in Scotland and pushed back in Wales, Labour is no longer the ‘natural party of government’ in Britain’s Celtic lands where the forces of patriotism (and nationalism) are ascendant. In a sense the situation is even worse in England where Labour has been in retreat since 2005 and is now absent from vast parts of the country. To avoid becoming a regional party that represents a small section of society, Labour needs to adopt a specifically English strategy – building cross-class and cross-cultural alliances to regain the trust of the working classes, the middle classes and those former Labour supporters in the north and south who are voting UKIP or Conservative.

Post-democracy and cognate concepts suggest that the postwar period of democratisation has given way to a concentration of power in the hands of small groups that are unrepresentative
and unaccountable, as exemplified by the rise of multinational corporations and their influence on democratic politics. This article goes further to argue that this does not fully capture the triple threat facing liberal democracy: first, the rise of a new oligarchy that strengthens executive power at the expense of parliament and people; second, the resurgence of populism and demagogy linked to a backlash against technocratic rule and procedural politics; third, the emergence of anarchy associated with the atomisation of society and a weakening of social ties and civic bonds. In consequence, liberal democracy risks sliding into
a form of ‘democratic despotism’ that maintains the illusion of free choice while instilling a sense of ‘voluntary servitude’ as conceptualised by Tocqueville.

The current global economic crisis concerns the way in which contemporary capitalism has turned to financialisation as a double cure for both a falling rate of profit and a deficiency of demand. Although this turning is by no means unprecedented, policies of financialisation have depressed demand (in part as a result of the long-term stagnation of average wages) while at the same time not proving adequate to restore profits and growth. This paper argues that the current crisis is less the ‘normal’ one that has to do with a constitutive need to balance growth of abstract wealth with demand for concrete commodities. Rather, it marks a meta-crisis of capitalism that is to do with the difficulties of sustaining abstract growth as such. This meta-crisis is the tendency at once to abstract from the real economy of productive activities and to reduce everything to its bare materiality. By contrast with a market economy that binds material value to symbolic meaning, a capitalist economy tends to separate matter from symbol and reduce materiality to calculable numbers representing ‘wealth’. Such a conception of wealth rests on the aggregation of abstract numbers that cuts out all the relational goods and the ‘commons’ on which shared prosperity depends.

1968 marked a turning point in the history of America and the wider West. The post-war settlement showed signs of strain as economic reconstruction ground to a halt and the Cold War confrontation began to take its toll. Youth protests and the Vietnam War polarized society and fueled the flames of the culture wars pitting progressive liberals against conservatives. Millions of citizens lost trust in their system of government and politicians, which was exemplified by President Lyndon B. Johnson’s fall from grace. With the assassination of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy, the civil rights movement and the Democrats lost their most visionary voices that could transcend some of the deepest divisions along ideological and cultural lines, which continue to beset the left and the labor tradition.
An alliance of old moneyed classes and new secular educated elites took the Democratic Party away from the very people it had been set up to protect and represent – working-class communities that were proud, patriotic, and often religious.  Progressively, the Democrats became dominated by new minority groups, including students, middle-class feminists, public sector workers, and the fast-growing metropolitan professionals working in finance, real estate, and later the nascent tech sector. Over time, this engendered a new politics of economic and social liberalization that drove a wedge between these two sections of society with their diverging economic interests and cultural identity: one fearing the redundancy of its more ‘communitarian’ way of life, the other benefitting from globalization and cosmopolitan diversity. Caught between them is a fast-growing minority ethnic population whose members are either integrated and flourishing, or else segregated and struggling. King and Kennedy were cruelly taken just when their country turned its back on the New Deal and abandoned the spirit of sacrifice so characteristic of the Second World War and its aftermath.
The era ushered in by the events of 1968 changed the entire political spectrum as left and right took a liberal turn.  First the Democrats embraced cultural liberalism in the late 1960s and then the Republicans adopted economic liberalism in the 1980s. Later the Democratic Party under Bill Clinton fused the two liberalisms and (to a lesser extent) so too did the GOP when George W. Bush championed ‘compassionate conservatism.’ Both parties privileged the banks on Wall St. over the people on ‘main street’ and both were seduced by the siren calls of globalization. The domination of the global over the national and the local reflects the triumph of disembedded liberalism over all its ideological rivals. In turn, the convergence of the two liberalisms is reflected in the oscillation between the Republicans as the party of greed and the Democrats as the party of lust, as Rod Dreher has argued.
This is most of all shown by the ‘New Left,’ which ever since the late 1960s has rarely pursued a politics of inter-personal solidarity but rather predominantly one of impersonal emancipation. That means always at base the freeing of economy from political guidance and responsibility, and therefore a new mode of enslavement of people by economic avarice, however culturally disguised as a form of ‘liberation.’ Such a politics endlessly seeks to show that an overlooked ‘exception’ – of gender, sexuality, race, disability, religion or culture or inclination – does not and cannot conform to a shared norm or pre-given social role. For this reason, the New Left prefers progress to tradition, identity to class, and free choice to inheritance or common purpose.
Cultural liberalism and liberal market economics are mutually reinforcing in ways that undermine both national identity and the wealth of nations as both liberalisms privilege minority politics and favor vested interests. In the early 1990s, Robert Reich, Clinton’s secretary of Labor, spelled out some of the implications of this new liberal consensus: “There will be no national products or technologies, no national corporations, no national industries. There will no longer be national economies. At least as we have come to understand that concept.”  Three decades earlier, Bobby Kennedy had already argued that such economistic thinking would reinforce a system of government out of touch with people and their everyday existence. In a speech at the University of Kansas in March 1968, he said that the state of the nation is wrongly judged by gross domestic product:
It counts air pollution and cigarette advertising; ambulances to clear our highways of carnage; special locks for doors and the jails for those who break them. It does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages […]. It measures neither our wit nor our courage; neither our wisdom nor our learning; neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country; it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.

What Kennedy anticipated and Reich articulated was the Democrats’ betrayal of the national labor interest in favor of an open-border progressivism. It finds perhaps its clearest cultural expression in John Lennon’s song Imagine:
Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion, too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace… You…

You may say I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us
And the world will be as one.

The contrast with Martin Luther King, Jr.’s address ‘I Have a Dream’ could scarcely be greater. As in his other speeches and writings, King invokes some of America’s best traditions to articulate a vision of national renewal that has universal significance precisely because it emerges from a particular place with people bound together by a shared purpose:
Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy […] now is the time to make justice a reality for all God’s children […] We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline […] Again and again we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force […] many of our white brothers […] have come to realize that their destiny is tied with our destiny and they have come to realize that their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom.

King’s dream is not the abstract utopia imagined by Lennon but instead a reality that is already actualized (albeit partially and imperfectly) in history – the particular history of the United States and the universal history of humankind’s fall and redemption:
You [King’s black brothers] have been the veterans of creative suffering. Continue to work with the faith that unearned suffering is redemptive […] even though we must face the difficulties of today and tomorrow I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed – we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal […] I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today! […] With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood.

At a time of deepening division within and across nations, King’s prophetic words and his leadership are a rich reservoir for rethinking and renewing politics. His clarion call that ‘[i]n these days of worldwide confusion, there is a dire need for men and women who will courageously do battle for truth’  has even greater resonance today when truth is either determined by absolute technocratic diktat or denied by post-truth relativism.

There is a paradox at the very heart of the West. Compared with civilizational states such as contemporary China, India, or Russia, the West is the only civilizational community of nations and peoples founded upon political values of national self-determination, democracy, and free trade – as enshrined in the 1941 Atlantic Charter and embodied in the post-1945 international system. But at the same time, the West as a ‘political civilization’ and the liberal world order it underwrites erode the cultural foundations of Western civilization and thereby weaken the West’s ability to confront internal as well as external threats – economic injustice, ecological devastation, social dislocation, resurgent nationalism, and Islamic terrorism.

Davos-driven cartel capitalism, identity politics, secularization, and liberal/neo-conservative interventionism are hollowing out both Western ‘common culture’ and ‘high culture’ in favor of a globally exported ‘popular culture.’  As a liberal civilization, the Western political community – especially since 1989 – undermines both the common cultural customs, beliefs, and practices of its nations and peoples, and the intellectual, literary, and artistic achievements, which make the West a distinct, unique civilization. In this sense the West is its own first enemy.

Before returning to the liberal erosion of Western civilization, I will discuss recent critics and defenders of the West as they draw on liberalism to make their case. Underpinning their accounts is a conception of civilization that rests on three presuppositions. First, that civilizational identity is either fragmented and in constant flux, or else fixed and immutable. Second, that civilizations are either the product of other civilizations to which they owe most of their supposed achievement, or else self-contained and untouched by others. Third, that civilizations are either arbitrary arrangements of fact and fiction that mask a lack of coherence or purpose except the pursuit of power and wealth, or else that at their heart there is a single cultural code, which connects its essential identity to social norms.

These seemingly opposed assumptions are but two sides of the same coin that separates the modern era from what preceded it.  In reality, surviving civilizations combine historical continuity with discontinuity. They are resilient insofar as they develop. They go through multiple transmutations, changing shape precisely because they have a certain shape to begin with. Therefore civilizational identities evolve over time, and civilizations tend to flourish when they interact with one other and when each has a unifying language, which can translate principles into practices that mobilize the cultural resources of its members.

To speak of a distinct, unique Western civilization is thus not to imply any exceptionalism. Rather, recent discoveries in archaeology and anthropology – coupled with insights from global history – indicate that the West is something like an organic entity born of the interactions between the ancient civilizations of Rome, Greece, Babylon, Persia, and India, as well as the emergence of Christianity with its roots in Hellenic Judaism. The West grew out of the Roman encounter with Greco-Babylonian culture and its Persian and Indian influences and then the fusion of Greco-Roman culture with the biblical legacy. That in turn gave rise to the Europe of Christendom from late Antiquity all the way to the nineteenth century before morphing into the Concert of Europe following the 1815 Vienna Congress and then the Euro-Atlantic community after 1945. Far from being a linear history of progress or a series of absolute breaks, Western civilization is more like a collection of ‘family resemblances’ – all kinds of similarities without a single essence.

The liberal civilization that became hegemonic in the wake of 1989 and is now in crisis contained from the outset the seeds of its own destruction precisely because it posits liberalism as the West’s defining character. The liberal idea of a single civilization based on universal values not only inspired the ‘end of history’ thesis but also led to hubris, notably the ‘Washington consensus’ of global capitalism and identity liberalism that are weakening Western cultures. At the same time, the Western-dominated liberal world order shows signs of unraveling due to divergent interests and values within the Euro-Atlantic community on questions of free trade, immigration, and democracy promotion. Whereas the EU is primarily worried by a resurgent and revanchist Russia, the USA under Trump fears most of all China and Islamic fundamentalism. Unlike 1945 and 1989, contemporary liberalism is dividing the West and undermining the civilizational community on which the Western alliance rests.

To avoid a further slide into disintegration, Europe and North America need to recover exiled traditions of diplomacy and statecraft that can renew strategic thinking and political action, beginning with a shared sense of purpose based on a common identity rooted in an inherited history and culture. Rather than going their separate ways or merely reforming an increasingly divided transatlantic partnership, the task is to forge a Greater West that reconnects the Euro-Atlantic community to old and new partners in the wider European orbit, Asia and Oceania – notably Russia, Japan, India, and Australia. If the West wants to recover its global leadership position, it needs to renew the cultural association of Western nations and peoples and to build a partnership from Vancouver via Vilnius to Vladivostok.

In the face of global threats, the task is how to organise people of all faiths and none around a shared programme for more moral and environmentally viable forms of growth and development. Arguably, some of the most effective ways of organisation tend to come from locally-based citizens initiatives that are able to link up all the different dimensions – ecological, economic and political – in a movement that seeks to resist the drift towards turning everything and everyone into a commodity.

Not accidentally these movements – as supremely in the case of ‘community-organising’ – tend to have a pan-religious dimension and in this respect to transcend the modern instrumentalisation of faith as a vehicle for power or wealth (or both at once). ‘Community-organising’ was pioneered in the USA, and it involves educating and training members to become leaders. The leaders become the co-creators of powerful, broad-based and culturally, economically as well as religiously diverse organisations in the community and in the workplace. These organisations are autonomous and democratically self-governing.

By contrast with single-issue movements (such as numerous new social movements that emerged in the 1990s), community- and workplace-based organisations are multi-issue, action-oriented and run by a broad leadership team. The main task of leaders is to recruit, educate and develop new leaders by building relationships that can sustain and grow organisations around common concerns which bring quality to people’s lives.

The thesis that the secular system of modern international relations has medieval, religious roots is not new. Various accounts have documented how the Protestant Reformation and its late medieval antecedents represented a ‘revolution in ideas’ that broke away from the hierarchical arrangement of fragmented feudal polities, which was apparently characteristic of the Middle Ages, to the egalitarian society of sovereign states, which is seemingly synonymous with modernity. Linked to this is the standard story in International Relations that views the Renaissance, the Reformation and the Discovery of the New World as a radical rupture, which replaced the ‘Dark Ages’ with a new era of enlightenment progress. Such a supercessionist structuring of historical narrative reinforces the secularist bias that has dominated the discipline since the late 1950s and 1960s. As a result of the secularisation of international relations, the role of religion in international affairs has not so much been neglected and overlooked, as misrepresented and under-theorised.

Most contemporary international relations scholarship lacks an account of both the historical influence and the contemporary relevance of rival theological approaches in relation to the modern international order. Recent scholarship in political thought and in the history of ideas has highlighted some of the profound continuities between the medieval and the modern period. Building on these and other accounts, this essay explores the role of theological concepts in the genesis of modern international relations. The focus is on the contrast between the Franciscan legacy and the Dominican heritage. My argument is that the modern states system and transnational markets rest on late medieval ideas, notably Franciscan conceptions of inalienable individual rights, centrally vested sovereign power, and a natural state of anarchy that requires an artificial social contract. Against secular hegemony, which, paradoxically, can be traced to late medieval Franciscan theology, I contend that the Dominican tradition offers conceptual resources to chart an alternative modernity.

To suggest that we live in the (late) modern age assumes a particular meaning to modernity. But the modern project was never monolithic in the West, or elsewhere. On the contrary, from a global historical perspective, there was no single modernity but rather multiple and even rival modernities that were variously more secular or more religious. Moreover, ‘we have never been modern’, as the French philosopher Bruno Latour has argued. For modernity rests on an irresolvable aporia between the notion of human artifice (the social contract) and unalterable nature (the violent ‘state of nature’). Crucially, there are no absolute breaks in history that inaugurate new eras which supersede preceding traditions and ideas, including the notion that Westphalia ushered in modern international affairs. If this is so, then perhaps it is also true that (late or post-)modernity is best described as the ‘modern’ Middle Ages — the intensification and extension of certain late medieval ideas rather than a wholly new phase of history. In turn, this helps explain why the shape of contemporary international relations really is neo-medieval but in ways that have not been conceptualised by theorists of international relations.

The first section examines the historicist narrative of International Relations and traces it back to both Protestant and Catholic theology. The second section shows how the modern notion of secular imperium as an autonomous, neutral space on which the idea of the sovereign state rests, was invented and instituted by late medieval Franciscan theology, in particular the work of John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham. The third section argues that the conception of subjective, individual rights guaranteed by the sovereign state, independently of the Church, is similarly rooted in the nominalist theology of the Franciscans. This conception of rights can be contrasted with the notion of objective right (ius), and thus reciprocal rights and associative links between national states as contemplated by the (metaphysical) realist theology of Dominicans such as Thomas Aquinas. The fourth section focuses on the Franciscan invention of modern markets, based on sundering the immanent order of nature from the transcendent order of the supernatural Good in God, and on separating gift from contract. The conclusion suggests that the conceptual resources of the Dominican tradition can transform Franciscan modernity in the direction of a neomedieval international order wherein human beings are seen as naturally ‘social animals’ (not self-proprietors of subjective rights) and both states and markets help to promote the pursuit of the common good