Today, in the wake of the 2008 Financial Crash, the Pandemic, the war in Ukraine and now Trump Mark 2, it can seem as if the post-1990 era of globalisation, which was supposed to be an eternal season (according to Tony Blair), is coming to an end. At a minimum, it is, for now at any rate, subject to profound modification.

At the core of this shift would seem to be the overriding of the economic by the political. It is at least perceived by several state actors that the interests of the global free market, expressed as ideally unlimited free trade (which has never been totally realised), are at variance with national self-interest in various ways.

This can mean that trade imbalances between imports and exports render some nations over-indebted, or over-confined to the provision of credit, which can sometimes amount to almost the same thing, as in the case of the United States of America. Or else it can mean that a relative lack of domestic manufacturing renders a nation too subject to the vagaries of finance, too dependent on others, and above all lacking in the material resources required for military self-defence. Or else again it can mean that an internationalised division of labour tends to impoverish the working and middle classes in the most ‘successful’ debtor-creditor nations, who also tend to rely on the export of services and the global monopolisation of information, including monetary information (this is again supremely true of the USA).

That might only be of concern to the poorer classes, but in reality the resulting social divisions can threaten the internal harmony of a nation, especially when the poorer actually start (as we have already seen in many countries) to constitute a majority and can then put ‘populist’ governments in power. At the same time, populist political movements depend for their funding and their political leadership on the backing of maverick capitalist oligarchs who see advantages for more anarchic modes of capital deployment in the capturing of states, rather than reliance upon the relatively ordered and legal norms of international trading.

Up till very recently, populists in power in smaller countries offered only confused programmes and could make little real difference, at least socio-economically: they were too constrained by the very global order that they challenged, yet could not realistically escape.

But with the populist capturing of the most powerful and influential country in the world, all that has abruptly changed—or so it would seem, at least for the present. President Trump has been able to threaten possibly swingeing tariffs on nearly every other country, though especially on China, in such a way that he appears to be putting the perceived interests of America above those of the international capitalist system to which America has hitherto been bound, and which America has largely crafted and sustained.

One could say that, till recently, the coincidence of America with global capitalism has disguised the way in which the economic and the political do not necessarily coincide for liberalism in every set of conjunctures. Today, in very changed circumstances compared to the year 2000, they no longer seem to coincide at all, as the tumbling global stock markets are witnessing.

This can prompt a question about the exact relationship between the economic and the political in general within a liberal order. If we define the latter, as a term of art (historical liberalism being rather more complicated), as any mode of social theory which takes the individual and her interests, fears and desires to be the normative unit, then it is quickly apparent that this involves a certain tension as to the relative priority of the political or the economic.

From the perspective of liberal politics, human individuals exist in a state of incipient conflict unless they agree to live under a sovereign authority enjoying a monopoly of licensed violence and an exclusive right to the ultimate underwriting of laws. Typically, these laws have to concern the protection of individual human bodies and individual human liberty, extended into the ‘prosthesis’ of private property.

As to the relationships between people and their owned domains, this is construed in terms of contracts, or free agreements between free individuals, backed up by law, such that, as Adrian Pabst and Roberto Scazzieri note, from the Renaissance onwards the pactum societatis between free individuals was seen to be underwritten by the pactum subjectionis between every individual and the governing power (Pabst and Scazzieri, Reference Pabst and Scazzieri2023).

And yet this liberalism remains typically and problematically ‘embedded’ beyond its own norms, insofar as it is assumed that sovereignty and law hold sway within a particular pre-given geographical area that is capable of being governed by a sovereign ‘state’. Since this pre-givenness tends to involve some sense of shared culture and ethnicity, that circumstance has encouraged the growth of a perception of ‘national’ identity such that ‘the state’ has evolved into the ‘nation state’. An awareness of cultural unity has often gone along with a theoretical supplementation of the bonds of contract with those of mutual ‘sympathy’ (as with Adam Smith), and that has in turn tended to nurture national welfare programmes.

Additionally, and especially in the Italian tradition, it has been seen that a contract only works where there is a pre-existence of social ‘trust ‘and ‘good faith’ between people already situated within defined social groups. In the case of the early Eighteenth-Century Neapolitan thinker, Paolo Mattia Doria, it was his Catholic and Platonic conservative resistance to the modern Spanish absolutism of Naples’ Spanish overlords that encouraged his sense that a flourishing market economy depended upon an informal and gradually habituated organic fluidity of inherited networks of plural relationships (Pabst and Scazzieri, Reference Pabst and Scazzieri2023, 46–7, 139–45; Pagden, Reference Pagden and Gambetts1989).

However, the more anarchic dimension of liberalism, which has at its core the free contractual agreement between free individuals, does not seem to be necessarily and inherently conjoined to the notion of the state, much less to that of the nation-state. Nor is it necessarily embedded in prior social relationships encouraging trust: contract can be more brutally necessitated, even if the overriding of good faith is a ‘cultural contradiction’ for capitalist success.

How property gets established is aporetic, since it is at once a norm and a fact. Stressing the former, one may see it as an authorised or customary entitlement, but stressing the latter, one will instead emphasise its foundationally anarchic character. Thus, Hugo Grotius in the early Seventeenth Century spoke of the right of ‘first occupancy’ as the ultimate legitimating ground of property, according to a law of nature prior to civil, instituted law. In Grotius’s own thought, this emphasis (in contrast to that of Hobbes, the other most crucial co-founder of modern liberal individualism) at once links up to a more internationalist perspective. Private property has a globalising, extra-national reach, just because the imperial occupation of apparently ‘unoccupied’ lands (the home of tribes lacking the supposedly ‘natural’ concept of private property) thereby acquires an immediate natural legitimacy (Milbank, Reference Milbank, Shortall and Steinmetz-Jenkins2020).

On this basis, one could suggest that the question of which has historical and conceptual priority, ‘natural’ private property or ‘entitled’ natural property, corresponds to the issue of which, from a liberal perspective, comes first, the economic or the political?

For even in the case of Thomas Hobbes, the reach of absolute power is not supposed to be able to override private contracts, since the making of self-interested contracts is the very ultimate basis of the power of the state as Leviathan. Thus, Hobbes’s secretary, William Petty, began to develop his ‘political arithmetick’, an early version of political economy, as a natural extension of his employer’s perspective (Milbank, Reference Milbank, Shortall and Steinmetz-Jenkins2020; Goodacre, Reference Goodacre2018). If this discourse was already concerned with utility as much as with rights, then that is a natural dimension of the liberal concern with the material body, as much as the spiritual freedom of the atomic individual.

The economy is, in this way, primary for liberalism, just because it begins with the individual and assumes his ‘privacy’ as a kind of absolute. Economics concerns in consequence a ‘free’ and ‘private’ realm later (and distortedly) termed by Hegel that of ‘civil society’, in distinction from the public realm of the state as such. Yet if economics remains, in this sense, according to its etymology, relatively ‘domestic’, nevertheless just as such it can overleap the bounds of its containing and authorising carapace, the political state (like a subset ‘diagonalising out’ of a set, in Mathematics), to engage directly with foreigners beyond its borders. International trade is, in this regard, inherently ‘piratical’, standing in a complex and inherently contradictory relationship to the liberal state, even though the latter alone is the guarantor of the security of private property and contract.

To the degree that it is such a guarantor, it is after all the political, and not the economic, which is primary for liberalism. Since only the state guarantees the rule of law and so the security and prosperity of the individual, and since there is no absolute beyond the state, the state must itself be regarded, as the very figure of Leviathan suggests, as being a super-individual.

Therefore, Hobbes conceived the relationships and contracts between states as analogous to those between human individuals—except that this time there is no ultimate enforcer (Milbank, Reference Milbank, Shortall and Steinmetz-Jenkins2020). Such a scheme ironically ensures that the internal supremacy of the political must render the model for international relations an ‘economic’ one in the sense of an ultimacy of ‘piratical’ (shifting, unreliable, often forcibly constrained) contract. ‘Diplomacy’ is merely a polite word for that. Just for this reason, the contemporary switch to a non-imperial, primarily economic ‘globalised’ order dangerously invites a surrender of order altogether (Galli, Reference Galli2010).

Clearly, there is something inconsistent and unsatisfactory about this, and that is just why the alternative option for liberalism is always empire (as already pursued by Hobbes’s protégé Petty), tending ideally to total empire and thereby to an international Leviathan. At this point, the alchemical conversion of piracy into global sovereignty permits a fusion of this more ultimate political order with the Grotian ultimacy of the economic as piratical seizure and primary accumulation of virgin and ‘underdeveloped’ terrain.

In these curious ways, therefore, liberalism is predicated upon the strict separation of the political from the economic, and yet, given the founding aporia of property (is it first outright seizure, or first nominal and legal?), it cannot really keep the two apart, and they keep interfering with each other. This mutual interference is covertly constitutive of liberalism as such.

It should be underlined here that such separation and its violation are only true of liberalism. Within all of pre-modernity, the economy was, as Karl Polanyi put it, ‘embedded’ within a wider social order with wider social purposes (Polanyi, Reference Polanyi2024). There was, as yet, no unleashing of ‘economic’ productivity or quest for profit as such and on its own terms. Similarly, as Polanyi also saw, there was an embedding of the political, such that there existed no ‘state’ as a professional machine over against the established social hierarchy (Milbank, Reference Milbank, Milbank and Oliver2009a). Political and legal rule were bound up with personal social control, and the same thing was true of economic arrangements. Since both politics and economics were thereby rooted in the social, there was also no clear boundary between sovereignty and government, or ‘ruling’ and ‘economising’ (Agamben, Reference Agamben2011). The latter was to a degree an emanation of ruling, while the former, political ruling, was distributed amongst social and economic functions, as we see with the ‘feudal’ order. Consequently, economic contracts, as in the case of ‘feudalism’, were also social obligations and channels of political participation and political control.

As Pabst and Scazzieri narrate, the specifically modern emergence of a strict boundary between politics and economics, certainly in theory and purportedly in practice, nonetheless occurred only gradually.

From the Italian Humanists onwards, a strong sense remained that the economic was ‘dispositional’ rather than interactively relational: that is to say that, as oikonomia, it concerned the judicious administration or ‘economising’ of the passions of an individual, the resources of a household, or the resources of an entire polity. The emphasis was on governmentality, or ‘police’, such that, as Bernard Harcourt has stressed, the regulation of production and exchange was proximate to other concerns of public ordering, including the administration of criminal laws and the infliction of punishment. The early Adam Smith still assumed this ‘police’ perspective for political economy (Harcourt, Reference Harcourt2011).

At the same time, political economy was already concerned also with free and horizontal exchanges between individuals and groups: the study of which process of ‘wealth accumulation’ Aristotle had termed chremastikē rather than oikonomia. This was increasingly construed in a non-classical and rationalistic manner as the balancing of one egoistic interest against another in terms of passion-modifying long-term perspectives (Harcourt, Reference Harcourt2011, 53–62).

It was thought that the state could appeal to people’s instincts in this regard. And the same considerations applied to the late Eighteenth Century Italian enlightenment thinker Cesare Beccaria’s ‘economic’ approach to punishment in terms of a system of proportionate and enforceable deterrents that was supposed to break with the savagery of punishment as a simple and often physical reflection of social outrage (Harcourt, Reference Harcourt2011, 92–102.). In this way, just as Beccaria’s allowance of a free market was balanced by his statist ‘cameralism’ in the economic realm, so, inversely, his state-disciplinary utilitarianism with regard to penal policy was qualified by economic considerations operating as a self-interested rational calculus on the private as well as the public level.

Yet as Bernard Harcourt has shown, with the thought of François Quesnay, a new paradigm took over. No longer was ‘economy’ thought of in terms of rational state organisation, which could still include inherently ethical considerations as to just price and so forth. Instead, under the influence of Pierre de Boisguilbert and his specifically Jansenist notions of human near-total fallen depravity, Quesnay newly thought of the economic as an entirely apolitical ‘natural order’ that operated a providential redirection of human vices and egoism without recourse to any appeal to virtue. Now one arrives for the first time in history at the notion that any state interference in the market is inherently likely to distort the benign workings of this natural order: a notion taken over by the later Smith in post-Calvinist Scotland (Harcourt, Reference Harcourt2011, 78–91).

It will be seen that the genealogical origin of the free market has nothing to do with empirical evidence. What it rather meant was that a hitherto inherently governmental function of ‘economising’ was now removed from that horizon, such that it was no longer seen as on a continuum with other ordering activities, such as the enforcement of laws and constitutional deliberation, both local (as with the French parlements) and central. Indeed, the constitutional now drops out of sight altogether for Quesnay, because the political function is reduced to the enforcement of laws protecting persons and property, and private contracts. There is accordingly no longer any need for representative consent (all consent being now expressed by market transactions), and political tyranny is the natural partner for what is deemed to be a natural economic order (Harcourt, Reference Harcourt2011, 92–102).

In this regard, we can see here the long-term foreshadowing of neoliberalism. And even though Adam Smith, as a good Whig, did not take Quesnay’s principles to this extreme, he still adopted them so far as to question the police des grains, despite the fact that these regulations were indeed needed to ensure the quality of food and its sufficient supply to all, including the indigent, and especially in straitened circumstances (Harcourt, Reference Harcourt2011, 45–8, 174). The folly of a sheer ‘free trade’ in agriculture—as already evident in the free trade arrangements introduced by Turgot when he was the Intendant of Limousin (1761–74)—was later shown up in the Irish and other famines.

Consequently, as Harcourt argues, it was a mistake on Michel Foucault’s part to construe ‘discipline’, whether in the economic or in the penal arena, as the simple opposite of a supposedly ‘good’ freedom from constraint (Harcourt, Reference Harcourt2011, 151–90). This duality appears to be itself captive to a liberal model of ‘negative liberty’ and to ignore the ways in which state disciplining was in fact ensuring the provision of sustenance, and genuinely free because honest market dealing, besides overriding the more unjust dimensions of lingering ‘feudalism’—or perhaps (one can add to Harcourt), feudalism further hardened and brutalised by a modern conversion of gift-exchanges into sterner and more coerced contractual bonds. (Yet at times, under any system, central government must sometimes protect the very lowest ranks from depredations by intermediate ones—subsidiarity can be paradox.) Equally, though inversely, Foucault failed to see how Beccaria’s ‘disciplinary’, since putatively educative approach to punishment, was an ‘economic’ modification of sheer judicial violence that was later actually modified or even abandoned by Bentham’s more nakedly ‘political’ approach involving total surveillance and so forth (Harcourt, Reference Harcourt2011, 103–20).

It follows that the real new modern official savagery that is seriously as bad or worse than ancient official savagery (the road to Guantanamo—as Foucault wanted to show), is only inaugurated post-Quesnay with the total duality between economic and political functions.

If the latter is about securing by whatever means the space of economic freedom within or between nation states, then all and every violation of this space can be regarded as external to natural order and therefore as ‘exceptionally’ but continuously subject to any punitive measures whatsoever. In effect, one has something like a permanent state of emergency, with consequently ‘zero tolerance’ for any and every violation now seen as totally aberrational and indeed terroristic. One can contrast this with pre and early modernity, when crime was still regarded as being in a much greater continuity with civil offences and interpersonal disagreements, and therefore punishment had more of a sense of ‘horizontal’ adjustment between victim and perpetrator, rather than being regarded in totally vertical and deontological terms as a violation of legality and sovereignty as such.

It is all too clear that today, with Trump, a mutated neoliberalism is exhibiting just this side of Quesnay’s legacy also.

More fundamentally, as already indicated, Pabst and Scazzieri describe the way in which the increasing modern division between the political and the economic results from the artificial disembedding of both from the social, which can be understood as the pre-existing plural realm of overlapping associations of many kinds, which are more ontologically fundamental than individuals taken in isolation.

Where this is taken into account, as in the case of ‘feudal’ arrangements, then the separation of the governance of personal relationships from the organisation of material resources and capacities is impossible. It also becomes clear that all social bodies tend to have a teleological purpose around some aspect of human flourishing (typically ritual-religious) that goes beyond both the political drive for power within certain boundaries and the boundless economic search for accumulation and security (Pabst and Scazzieri, Reference Pabst and Scazzieri2023, 13–37, 125–55).

In terms of this character of the social grouping, Pabst and Scazzieri acutely and originally note how its nature is also inhospitable to other dualities that tend to plague both political and economic science when they are pursued in isolation from each other.

Most significantly, the contrast between intended and unintended outcomes becomes too simplistic and often irrelevant. The aims of a social body are formed by habit over time in a fashion akin to a kind of collective art, in which typically the artist has only a vague sense of what he is aiming at, and the process of his working tends to modify and deepen his sense of the end he has in view.Footnote ¹

Equally, a social body exists both instrumentally for a certain purpose and also non-instrumentally, for the sheer achievement of association—which can also involve an evolving flexibility of purpose. It is a matter of praxis besides poesis and of forging the instruments of poesis besides achieving certain ‘poetic’ outcomes.

Finally, the social is not more collective than it is individually based; instead, it is composed of developing inter-relations, and reciprocally influential and contagious habits.

Outside this reality of social embedding in mutually exchanging networks of group alliances, the political and the economic tend to define themselves apart in terms of sterile and misleading contrasts: political intentionality, collectivism and non-instrumentality (state power as an end in itself) versus economic non-intentionality, individualism and instrumental purpose. All of that compounds the reduction of human association to the pursuit of power for its own sake on the one hand, and naked greed on the other. Even ordinary enjoyment, friendship and social recognition tend to drop out of sight, never mind any greater refinements of the human understanding of the character of the good life.

It is here vital to the case put forward by Pabst and Scazzieri that without social embedding, ‘political economy’ actually collapses into respective political and economic components. Thus, they are arguing for a true political economy that has never yet been, except possibly in the case of the economia civile of Neapolitan tradition after Doria in the wake of Vico and succeeded by Antonio Genovese.

Yet they also imply that, to a degree, political economy, in the traditions variously of Smith and Ricardo, had not as yet quite succumbed to a total disembedding. In terms of ‘sympathy’, Smith had an equivalent of Dorian trust, if more extrinsically to the economic sphere as such. Likewise, several liberal thinkers from Montesquieu to Tocqueville continued to see the importance of intermediary associations, if, to a degree (one might add), for liberal and modern Republican reasons of restricting tyranny—something only emphatically surpassed by the later Burke with his more traditional Platonic-Aristotelian natural law horizon that was somewhat akin (perhaps from the influence of Richard Hooker) to the ‘Cambridge Platonist’ perspective of Cudworth and Shaftesbury (who visited Naples) which impacted Doria.Footnote ² For this perspective, sympathy is extended from egoistic projection or spontaneous ‘animal’ identification with the human other, to a shared sense of an ultimate spiritual goal (Pabst and Scazzieri, Reference Pabst and Scazzieri2023, 62–95, 145–55; Milbank, Reference Milbank2009b).

It is only, as the two authors recount, when we get to the ‘marginalist revolution’ that ‘political economy’ is abolished in favour of ‘economics’, just because the latter is now seen as a purely atemporal and context-free science of rational psychology, which is to say of mainly utilitarian choices of the isolated individual and their possible combinations. At this juncture, even the ‘background’ of social sympathy and pre-existent social groupings constraining economic choices is lost sight of. Meanwhile, it is implied by the marginalists that the political is bizarrely a ‘private’ matter, the concern simply of those in power and the factions of those in power within a nation, and in relation to the powerful in other nations (Pabst and Scazzieri, Reference Pabst and Scazzieri2023, 18). The political only impinges on the economic once more, as with Quesnay, in terms of the enforcement of the protection of person, property and contract. Of course, in reality, the political shaping of any specific market in terms of money supply, property law, monopoly law, legitimate interest, workers’ rights and so forth goes well beyond this—but all that is inherently suppressed after Alfred Marshall, along with the productive rather than demand-led dimension of the economic process.Footnote ³

In order to overcome these limitations, as Pabst and Scazzieri suggest, we have to look beyond not just the marginalist legacy, but even the entire dominant modern perspective ever since Petty in England, and the Jansenists in France, towards the priority of society and association over either politics or economics.

In economic terms, this is to reject the illusion that there is any possible economically corralled measure of overall value. As Joan Robinson in mid-Twentieth-Century Cambridge pointed out, and as later Cambridge economists (lamenting the Cambridge economics sellout to neoclassicism in the 1970s), there is no total product of capital and labour because the components of capital can only be measured in terms of the deployment of labour, the exchange of its products and (we can add) the upshots of speculative investment. Concomitantly, there is no ‘Ricardian socialist’ paying of labour what is its due according to a labour theory of value, because (as for Marx) the specifically capitalist value of labour is only measured by its ‘conversion’ into commodity exchange both of products and of labour itself within market-exchange (Harvey, Reference Harvey2005; Cohen and Harcourt, Reference Cohen and Harcourt2003). For these reasons, the capitalist economy itself only exists in a space of social struggle between owners of various kinds on the one hand and producers on the other, and this social struggle is itself in part suspended from modes of dominant political control and state intervention and shaping of the law.

A more reciprocal, post-capitalist economy supposes instead that all social parties within an economy are understood in terms of productive contributions—which can include the managed ownership of physical capital and returns on the investment of productively earned money, provided that the former looks always towards the common good of human flourishing and the latter involves a true sharing in the risks of any enterprise.Footnote ⁴

In political terms this is to resume the tradition of minority report ‘pluralists’ like the Seventeenth-Century German Reformed philosopher Johannes Althusius who regarded exchange (‘of things, work and laws’), rather than domineering control as the ultimate basis of the political, besides the economic order (the aim of politics being ‘the shared advantage of social life’) (Pabst and Scazzieri, Reference Pabst and Scazzieri2023, 65, n. 1).

A genuine, because socially embedded, ‘political economy’ requires us to break with the dominance of the ‘contractual’, whether political or economic, towards the priority of the ‘constitutional’ in terms of a holistic recognition and attempted reshaping of any given human society. In that re-shaping, processes of ruling, distributing and the crafting of space for free and just production and exchange are all inherently involved (Pabst and Scazzieri, Reference Pabst and Scazzieri2023, 26–31). The political and the economic can be distinguished but not divided. Where they are so divided, then, ironically, either the economic tends to capture the political, as in the modern West, or the political captures the economic, as in the case of contemporary China. Either ‘fascism’ or ‘communism’ (as I shall presently argue) – in an evasion of socialism understood as the primacy of association and the natural exchange of gifts and virtues between purposive human groupings.

For in our own time, as already intimated, the tension within liberalism between the political and the economic has reached a new pitch.

Neoliberalism can be in essence construed as the extreme demand for the priority of the economic as constituting a purified liberalism. It has tried to break with postwar ‘embedded liberalism’ which to a degree attempted once more to root both the political and the economic in the social, and thereby to more fuse the economic with the political, in order to save capitalism from itself and to insulate the liberal democratic order against totalitarian challenges which, in the 1930s (rather as now), had arisen from both the multiple tensions within capitalism, and the tensions between the international market on the one hand, and the aspirations of classes and nations on the other.Footnote ⁵

The postwar order also sought, to a degree (as notably with the European Union) to insulate itself against the dangers of a democratic election of tyranny by erecting safeguards of legally guaranteed human dignity and fundamental rights, now extending beyond ownership to education and welfare, besides increasing political participation for collaborating groups like unions and corporations, as an informal supplement to political democracy (Moyn, Reference Moyn2015; Lind, Reference Lind2020).

Yet the disciples of Friedrich Hayek saw in this political culture of economic regulation, nationalisation and mild corporatism only a soft totalitarianism, likely to evolve into the hard kind on ‘the road to serfdom’ (Hayek, Reference Hayek2001).

From the catastrophes of the Twentieth Century so far, they drew a quite different lesson: namely that democracy is strictly subordinate to economic liberty and even redundant to liberty if it can be otherwise achieved—as later by General Pinochet in Chile. Previous liberalism, despite Quesnay, had generally not been pure liberalism in the sense that I am using it as a term of art; rather, it had insisted on norms of constitutional rule and of the regular rule of a fair law code—norms that have roots long before early modernity (Anderson, Reference Anderson2005). But now, neoliberalism asserted a much purer mode of individualism, which inevitably tilted the bias towards both the economic and the international, and tended to favour governance by global bodies bypassing democratically elected governments altogether.

There was always something utopian, and dangerously so, about this neoliberal project. Not only did it tend to undermine modes of social solidarity (the family, the place, mediating institutions, national identities) on which any order depends, it also failed squarely to confront the ultimate dependency of the economic upon the political. Of course, it wanted the state itself to legally craft the purely ‘free’ market with no interference in contract (in a specific ‘ordoliberal’ manner), but it was ambivalent as to whether it favoured the ultimacy of the nation state, the international law court, or international empire. Given that nation-states cannot readily be abolished, and that absolute sovereign order only derives from the sense of identity of a ‘people’, neoliberalism was unable to theorise how it would be rational for a nation-state to sacrifice its interests to those of the market if the objective run of the market was tending to undermine that nation’s prosperity and identity. It is not rational precisely because, in extremis, a nation can resort to warfare rather than trade in order to reassert itself, as we see today in the case of Russia.

This is one crucial reason why the neoliberal utopia has proved not, after all, to be ‘the end of history’. History has reasserted itself, not just in terms of religion and diverse cultural identity, but also in terms of the very conflicted character of modern liberalism itself: for this reason, the political nation state has inevitably reasserted its rival primacy. There only exist sovereign bodies making laws because there exist ‘peoples’ with reflexive identities, however atavistic they may have become, especially in the face of the decline of genuine, rather than politically and socially instrumentalised, religion.Footnote ⁶

Indeed, one can argue here that the neoliberal project has appeared to be plausible just because, for many decades, it was merged with the specific interests of one vast sovereign country, the United States. America embraced, for example, Ricardo’s ‘comparative advantage’ (the international division of labour), merely because it worked to its advantage. Europe was left to manufacture and export products, in a manner that left America free increasingly to export more lucrative and culturally controlling services; to subordinate Europe to her military purposes, and to ensure that the dollar remained the most powerful currency—with many seemingly ‘external’ transactions in fact being carried out in dollars, to America’s internal financial benefit.

The same set of policies was extended to Asia, but in the case of China, they came unstuck at the point where China deployed its unanticipated science and technology-powered manufacturing prowess and its credit advantage to build up a rival military still linked (despite mutations) to a rival set of civilisational values. It is that circumstance, combined with internal class tension, that has above all caused America to pivot towards the current protectionist agenda. Increasingly, the latter looks like an attempt to isolate China and to force other countries to side either with China’s mode of bastard communism or with America’s new internalised mode of economically liberal quasi-fascism. Everything appears to imply a preparation for war in some sense, including a readiness to risk the global fortunes of the dollar in terms of greater direct investment in the American state itself (even if it hoped that the world will have to rally to protect even a falling dollar, such being still its global reach).

To speak here of a possible third world war, this time directly between ‘communism’ and ‘fascism’, is not hyperbole. For it is completely wrong to suppose that allowing the free market within overall totalitarian state control is something novel and unique to China (Bockman, Reference Bockman2011). In fact, it was entertained by one faction with Communism almost from the outset, in a way that exhibits some affinity with ‘ordoliberalism’.

As Johanna Bockman has shown, right back in the 1890s it was realised that ‘the invisible hand’ and ‘the command’ economy’ are not opposites, as Hayek thought, but the same model of ideal utilitarian rational choice (whether of production or consumption) theory applied to Providence on the one hand, or the all-controlling State on the other (Bockman, Reference Bockman2011, 1–132, 157–214). Just as God may control absolutely by leaving us to our own sinful devices, so may the totalitarian state elect in some measure to do the same. Communism, as opposed to religious socialism, has no belief in ‘community’ or ‘association’ for its own sake, nor in fraternity, just as it has little Ruskinian valuation of universal human creativity—‘craft idiocy’, as Marx dismissed it. Thus, its capturing of the economic by the political is nonetheless entirely ‘economised’, just as conversely the American capturing of the political by the economic (exacerbated by the current US administration) is nonetheless entirely ‘politicised’, with profit maximisation becoming as much the pursuit of power as the pursuit of profit, and a Schmittian logic of sovereign exception and intimidating destruction being applied to management and commerce, besides state policing.

In the Trumpian era, it might indeed seem that liberal politics again rules supreme. We have returned to a world of competing nation-states, like competing individuals writ large, and ‘realism’ is once more the order of the day. But quite apart from the fact that the divides between the big ‘civilisation states’ actually remain to a crucial degree ones of cultural ideology that alone provides strong and oppositional identities, (even if this divide is one of converging opposites, as just shown), we can also see that the neoliberal mode of utopian idealism is not so ‘over’ as might appear.

Instead, what one can argue, after Pabst and Scazzieri, is that the economic mode of liberalism is further caught within itself in a tension between serving the state on the one hand, in a persisting ‘police’ mode of oikonomia, and serving only itself in the horizontal ‘exchangist’ mode, which inherently connects to ‘international piracy’ on the other. Conversely and concomitantly, political liberalism is not so obviously opposed to this piratical mode: the more the state becomes in effect a corporation, the more it seems to switch from productive shaping of the economy to sporadic and incremental trading, or ‘doing deals’.

In this regard, we can note that exactly the wildest and most irresponsibly speculative mode of capitalism (which is its most dominant driving motor), that of finance, was originally tied to the war-linked state debt of the English Whig regime in the Eighteenth Century and to the increasing printing of fiat money to provide unsecured loans (Sonenscher, Reference Sonenscher2022; Ingham, Reference Ingham2004, Reference Ingham2020; Graeber, Reference Graeber2014)Footnote ⁷. Similarly, the British may have favoured free trade in the Nineteenth Century, but only because they ‘ruled the waves’ thanks to an initial global piracy, later more politically tempered. Such free trade was really the protection of a vast global empire, which was rivalled first by America and then by Germany on precisely the basis of systematic protection of national industries. Once this rivalry had become successful, the British switched to ‘imperial preference’, since a formalised protection of its imperial domains had now become necessary (Hutton, Reference Hutton2024).

In this sense, mercantilism, the original main purpose of most ‘political arithmetick’, never went away and is returning in greater force at present. As we have seen, the supposed ‘rule-based order’ only survived for so long because it favoured America and was driven by its global sway. Rather, as with the old British empire, once it had become clear that this informal American empire was now rivalled by China, and that the nations of the global south were less and less subservient to the ‘rules’, more open and honest measures of protection were called for. At the same time, and unlike the British case, the US under Trump has decided to retreat to an older and more local mode of strictly ‘republican’ (after the model of Rome) land-based empire, involving proximate wholesale expansion of its terrain, laws and culture.

This new strategy has been undertaken partly in the interests of onshoring production, backed by a vast supply of natural resources and transport routes within the bounds of one’s own extended country (hence the interest in Canada, Greenland, the Arctic and Panama). It is for this reason that the neoliberal primacy of the international capitalist order appears to have been forsaken by Trump.Footnote ⁸

However, we have just seen how the more ‘piratical’ side of the liberal economic order is closely linked to the financial, and that in turn, and after all, to the interests of the political state, which can alone underwrite the power of money para-economically with the power of guns. It is just because of the lurking relative primacy of the financial over the productive within capitalism (relatively ignored by Marx, even though it is this primacy that subordinates production to the sheer extraction of profit) (Milbank, Reference MilbankForthcoming; see note 6) that for so long the United States viewed its loss of manufacturing with equanimity. This has only come unstuck for reasons of military security and social discontent. Yet at the same time, we have seen how financial and monopoly corporate interests of ‘big tech’ have switched to siding with Trump (Higgins, Reference Higgins2025). This is not only on account of his total victory (for now), but also because the most extreme ‘piratical’ wing of neoliberalism (as also in the case of Brexit) wishes to escape not just from irksome national regulations, but even from irksome international ones.

One could, in fact, speak of a division between neoliberals who imagine a totally peaceful order of competitive trade, on the one hand, and more extreme neoliberal operators on the other, who are really quite happy to view economic activity as a mode of near-criminal, permanent semi-warfare. This same faction favour the increased creation of purely corporate rule, collapsing the political into the economic altogether. To this end, nationalism is only an instrument.

This group tends also to have graduated from liberalism to nihilism, insofar as they seek more to underwrite the normativity of economic competition with an ultra-Darwinian view of nature, deployed to justify hierarchies of race, gender and civilisations, in the face of a perceived ‘woke’ attempt to qualify pure market competition via ‘diversity’ programmes (Slobodian, Reference Slobodian2025). In this regard, one can see the ‘Alt-Right’ as linked to a merging of neoliberalism with populism.

Nevertheless, this does not mean, contra Quinn Slobodian, that the nature of populism is exhausted, much less explained by such capture: the core of populism (however much it may be seduced by neoliberal appropriation) remains implicitly or explicitly angry about the consequences of neoliberal economics and resists ‘wokery’ not because it is a new shelter for anti-capitalism, but precisely because it is distraction from the promotion of class and human solidarity, as undertaken by an older Left. Equivalently, the more globalising wing of neoliberalism (which is as yet by no means emphatically defeated) has happily embraced ‘diversity’ and sees it as working to the advantage of corporate control.

At first, the operators of the nihilistic shift within neoliberalism escaped to island tax havens, but now they have the opportunity to dismantle American governance, legality, regulation and higher education in the interests of a total economisation of the political (Slobodian, Reference Slobodian2024). This is a dream beyond Hayek: the aporia of property is resolved in a nightmarish fashion at the point where Thiel and Musk seek to establish corporations (on this or on other planets) that are their own self-administered states, including ideally the United States itself. Beyond Quesnay, even dealing with crime becomes a matter of corporate economic control, in the hands of unsentimental vigilantes, in the face of the decline of regular policing (all too enabled by the liberal left). For, of course, the total economising of the political means that money is now directly armed: that every transaction in coin is enforced and backed up, mafiosi style, with the pointing of a gun.

At that point, in a new mode of fascism, the pursuit of profit is the law, and the contract (or ‘the deal’) is legal from the outset only because enforced by a godfather-like authority. Likewise, the independence of science and of universities is no longer required, because all of science is to be entirely bent towards the exigencies of technological research (or planetary exploration) aimed at the extraction of yet more profit.

In a now multipolar or perhaps dipolar world, it seems unlikely that the old mode of neoliberal globalisation will simply return, or that the United States will ever again want to support it. It is perfectly possible that Trump’s policies will work to some degree, especially because China will be profoundly hit by tariffs and has no strong market of internal consumers enabling it to readily do more reciprocal trade deals. There will be continuing tensions between the populist and neoliberal factions of Trumpism, and yet external protection and internal deregulation can horribly concur (with some restoration of working-class jobs circumventing the need for real socially equalising measures), tending to reinforce this new economically liberal mode of the fascistic. At an ideological level, the futuristic survivalism of the internationalists (who seem to think environmental destruction inevitable and a necessary price to pay for technological progress, which cannot, or should not, be existentially surrendered) fuses with the religious apocalypticism and Protestant Zionism of the more nationalist faction (Klein and Taylor, Reference Klein and Taylor2025; Butler, Reference Butler2024).

For these reasons, nostalgic liberal democratic resistance to Trump à la Martin Wolf, etc, is unlikely to succeed. Nor should we want it to, since its excesses of engendering inequality and global imbalances are just what have led to the populist reaction and the corporate mutation.

Instead, we need to realise that the fascistic mode of the collapsing of the economic and the political into each other can only be historically overcome by a break with the liberal tension between these two dimensions, which has never been stable and has caused endless human conflict, in ways that I have alluded to.

As Polanyi saw, we need to find a new way to re-embed the economic in the social, in the best traditions of mutualist socialism and Christian social teaching (to which Polanyi notably adhered). This re-embedding, as shown, involves inevitably an organic linking of the economic to the political and vice versa. For decades we have witnessed—thanks in part to economically redundant and economically problematic political competition between nations—a long-term falling rate of profit (despite its outrunning of an even worse decline in productivity), both encouraged by, and provoking further in response, capital’s return from the primacy of productivity to its original greater focus of rent and debt in neoliberal evasion of the demands for a fairer economic share that arise from a productive economy under state encouragement (Brenner, Reference Brenner2002; Piketty, Reference Piketty2017).

This is precisely why there has been no new adoption of Keynesian solutions of restimulating demand, as would seem to be required after decades of supply-side priority have stymied both profit and production. In contemporary circumstances of much more widespread discontent, the 1970s danger (from the liberal perspective) that such encouragement of the workers could tip over into demands for a permanent post-capitalist stabilising of the market economy in the general interest (which partially sparked the turn to Thatcherism) is much too strong.Footnote ⁹

Instead, the ultimately political and class interests of capitalism have preferred to exalt demand more feebly through a systematic debt economy, which, at the same time, permits a more effective ‘neo-feudal’ mode of social control. All this means that social democratic redistribution is no longer really possible. It was, in any case, unrealistically predicated upon an ethical attempt to tame a market process regarded as inherently and ineluctably unethical. Given this character (indeed) of the capitalist market, the taming is ultimately impossible and capital has retreated to its financial citadel with overwhelming state backing, as revealed by the rescue of the banks by quantitative easing after the 2008 financial crash.

If, today, states and peoples nonetheless see that they are threatened by this ultra-capitalist order, then they need to do other than follow the primrose path of populism, which will tend, under piratical oligarchic guidance, to lead the way towards neoliberal nationalist totalitarianism and ultimately global warfare. Along the way, society is not going to become very much more equal.

The alternative is rather to try to reimagine in a more radical way the benign corporatism of the New Deal and the postwar European settlement.

In order to prevent politics being captured by sheerly economic purposes, and equally economic production being stifled by bureaucratic book-keeping and impersonal bureaucracy, we need at once to rethink economic processes as socially responsible ones, and to rethink governance as involving (beyond individualist assumptions) a cooperation between interested pre-political groups, including localities, unions, businesses, religious and cultural associations, and their participation and representation in ruling. Whereas liberalism and, in consequence, the liberal state and market encourage people to think of themselves as isolated individuals, all traditional and pre-political groupings are only conceivable in terms of shared cultural horizons and shared understandings of the common good. Hence, representing these groups besides individuals, naturally involves a carrying-over of a communitarian attitude from work and locality to the political whole.

For such a vision, economic contracts should always be concerned with the debated discernment of objectively valid shared goods of flourishing and not just a compromise between self-seeking egos, while every firm should be legally required to pursue a clear social purpose, to treat its consumers justly, and to share its profits with its workers, besides its investors—who should ideally be consistently and personally concerned with the firm’s success.

That can be an honourable task in itself, rewarded by social recognition and prestige, but a further reciprocal incentive should be some sort of direct involvement in government to complement the democratic representation of individuals and places, and thereby render democracy more substantive and continuous. If one wants to call this neo-corporatism a more egalitarian and democratic mode of ‘feudal’ order, then so be it. Only this better mode of ‘feudalism’ can outwit the totalitarian oligarchic ‘neo-feudalism’ that is already upon us.

At the international level, what we equivalently need is not sheerly ‘economic’ free trade, nor sheerly ‘political’ protectionism, but rather a mutual protectionism of the kind somewhat attempted at Bretton Woods. This was abandoned by Richard Nixon, who first embarked on the road to American global protectionism under the guise of monetary anarchy—in reality, chained to the power of the dollar.

Mutual protectionism assumes the shared global priority of the social, the culturally relational and the civilisational over either the political or the economic. It allows negotiations that do not simply surrender the integral flourishing of a country to the exigencies of the global division of labour, with its iron insistence on the priority of corporate profit. There is nothing, from an ethical perspective, that justifies the social and economic imbalances that can sometimes result from this insistence.

That can be regarded as similar to the way in which there is no necessary good reason always to operate the division of labour within nations. For the Luddites of Sherwood Forest were essentially correct: technology can, in principle, be deployed to extend the creativity, autonomy and self-sufficiency of a worker or a group of workers, rather than to compromise these things.

As Pabst and Scazzieri argue, even during the Industrial Revolution, one can contrast the technological scope of the French ‘Jacquard loom’ with that of the British steam engine, or at least the typical way that the steam engine was deployed (Pabst and Scazzieri, Reference Pabst and Scazzieri2023, 62–95). The former was versatile and adaptable to different tasks and changes in fashion. It permitted the cooperation of different human capabilities and the merging of different material products. By comparison, the latter, under the exigencies of capitalist goals, encouraged the dividing up of single tasks between many hands, thereby impairing both individual creativity, dignity of labour and genuine collaboration.

The potentially positive and humanistic division of labour between capacities and materials can be alternatively understood, after Doria, in terms of the collaboration of different virtues and gifts (as on a Biblically Pauline model) rather than in terms of mere utility and profit, even if capitalism will always exploit any division of labour merely in those terms.

The authors also consider the way in which the ‘post-Fordist’ models of production appeared to offer once more a more flexible and creative division of labour. Yet over time, this has also been co-opted by capitalism, with micro-tasks of the information economy outsourced to poorly paid labour in the global south, Amazon packagers working in neo-factory conditions and all of us subject to a new alienation not just of our labour, but of our very identities. Today, our biographies and manipulated emotions have all become commodified sources of moment-by-moment mounting of profit, now, under ‘neo-feudalism’, indistinguishable from the further accumulation of the direct control of human behaviour.

To overcome this would require a systematic re-embedding of the economic in the social, such that every economic division of labour would be exclusively understood as a collaboration of virtues and gifts. Economic exploitation would thereby become definitionally non-economic—as inherently damaging the ‘household’ self-government of the individual, the locality, the corporate body or the whole human race.

In this fashion, we need to apply a principle of economic subsidiarity both within and between countries: a maximum degree of self-sufficiency is desirable, just because the only point of collaboration is virtuously to extend the range of individual and collective human good. That is the real ‘third way’ alternative, either to endless conflict and rivalry between isolated parties (again either national or internationally), or else to endless fragmentation and globalisation of tasks and supply chains, which tends to destroy our human dignity and the genuine inter-relating of free persons.

We have come after all to the end of the neoliberal end of history. What has now succeeded it is not just the return of ancient demons, but the revelation that the contradictions within liberalism beckon us once more, as they did in the middle of the last century, into darkness and tumult. That was only ended postwar by a certain sort of radical conservatism that tried to bridge the liberal gulf between the political and the economic. Today, if our civilisation is going to survive, we need to remove that gulf altogether.