Summary

This chapter debates the future possibilities for global order and governance by mapping a political sociology of the current global crisis, and specifically the crisis of neoliberal capitalism. It looks at the political and class projects of the main leadership constellations in the Northern capitalist heartland and how these coalitions are preparing strategies for ‘post-neoliberalization’ – that is, for the period that will follow the present deep crisis of neoliberal rule and accumulation. The chapter considers the prospects for several sets of long-term ruling strategies (e.g. towards a ‘post-neoliberal’, ‘green capitalist’ or ‘neo-neoliberal’ period) as well as more populist, authoritarian and more barbaric tendencies for the world economic, social and political order. These are explored as they are actually being developed by the different right and left agencies of global leadership, especially in the United States and in Germany.

Introduction: capitalism and political sociology

The question of how political agency is shaped has little to say about global leadership if it merely looks at state and global/inter-state institutions, the affiliated actors and their ideas and is neither combined with nor starts from an understanding of the historically concrete sociological aspect of the question – in short, a theory of capitalist development and capitalist crisis. This shortcoming has been characteristic of many political analysts who have interpreted the electoral defeats of neoliberal parties in the past few years of the crisis of neoliberalism merely in terms of the need for better communicative strategies. Furthermore, bracketing out capitalism results in theory that constructs either the institutions or the ideas underlying specific political leadership projects in a circular fashion. Leaders appear as self-reliant monads floating freely above and independent from social class structures. In other words, the political nature of ideas and actors thus becomes depoliticized, and the various ways are obscured in which these (successful) actors act as ‘organic intellectuals’ exercising, as Gramsci called it, ‘moral and intellectual leadership’.