Appeals to “community” and to “the common” have become increasingly frequent in political thought. In this chapter, I focus on some of the reasons for the appearance of such appeals in the landscape of contemporary political thought. This chapter also highlights some of the uncanny intellectual links across the entire political spectrum, from European post-Marxist and American communitarian philosophers to the public intellectuals of the neofascist “New Right.” These links emerge and play out in a broader intellectual field that is shaped both by the political economy of Western Europe and North America after 1945 and by the failure to address the obvious shortcomings and negative effects of this political economy. Against this broader background, current appeals to community in political thought can be seen as a response to the lived experience of neoliberal capitalism, which has led to a legitimation crisis of liberal constitutional democracy. But I am also going to suggest that appeals to community invariably tend to drift into an antidemocratic direction.

This chapter evaluates the efficacy of Emulated Guardians, focusing on the EU’s out-of-court dispute settlement bodies (ODSs) and Meta’s Oversight Board, using criteria adapted from Peter Cane’s administrative law framework: rules, authority, and culture. It argues that neither body currently functions as a truly effective adjudicatory overseer of corporate power due to weak mandates and structural limitations. These shortcomings reflect a broader challenge of emulative institutions: they replicate formal structures from public law but lack the enabling sociopolitical contexts—such as democratic rulemaking or judicial authority—that underpin their role models. However, the chapter also identifies the performative potential of these bodies. By leveraging adjudicative symbolism and public expectations, both ODSs and the Oversight Board can incrementally expand their normative authority. This process, while slow and fraught, mirrors historical adjudicative strategies seen in domestic and international courts. Moreover, early practices show potential for innovation, such as integrating large language models into decision-making. By analyzing rules, authority, and culture, the chapter highlights the ambivalence of Emulated Guardians: while they risk becoming ceremonial “accountability theater,” they may also lay the groundwork for meaningful control over powerful private organizations. These findings have implications far beyond content moderation, applying to emerging governance challenges in AI, biotechnology, and other globalized sectors.

This chapter reflects on the future of governance in an era where corporate-driven, private arrangements increasingly dominate key sectors, from artificial intelligence to biotechnology and beyond. While public power still contributes through research funding and normative frameworks, the sheer scale and speed of private actors often surpass traditional regulatory capacities. Governance today rests to a considerable extent with the internal factions of corporations—engineers, compliance teams, and public relations—who shape techno-normative frameworks with little public accountability. The chapter argues that governance by emulation offers a pragmatic, albeit imperfect, path forward. Emulating public law principles—such as accountability, self-governance, and due process—into private contexts can inject public-minded values into profit-driven structures. However, traditional private law mechanisms, such as contracts and fiduciary duties, need repurposing to address the scale and public significance of corporate governance. Similarly, the role of infrastructure, code, and technical frameworks in shaping governance must be acknowledged alongside conventional normative tools. While these developments hold both promise and peril, they also mirror the incremental evolution of liberal public institutions. By embedding public law ideals into emerging governance constellations, we may foster accountability structures capable of addressing the complexities of modern global power dynamics—marking a critical step toward a more balanced and responsive future governance framework.

I start this chapter by briefly describing three possibilities for the future of capitalism and economic inequality. The first is that the rich continue to get richer; the second is a polar opposite approach that seeks to create economic equality at all costs; and the third involves the possibility of multiple forms of capitalism. Each possibility is explored in the next three chapters. In the remainder of this chapter, I explain why it is important to chart possibilities: doing so helps us understand potential paths forward and can meaningfully guide us toward the forms most congruent with our wishes. This world-making approach to psychology draws on theorizing around the psychology of imagination, which I develop here. I also return to value pluralism to help frame our understanding of the three futures that comprise Part III.

In this chapter, I examine attempts to respond to the scenario of unmitigated capitalism, where the rich continue to get richer. This second possibility focuses on how greater economic equality might be created. I discuss four approaches. First, I explore how taxation can be used to redistribute wealth. Next, I introduce the emerging idea of “degrowth” – the purposeful shrinking of some parts of the economy to protect the environment. Third, I examine communism as a means of pursuing economic equality. Finally, I outline socialism as a fourth path toward building more equal societies. I identify and articulate the strengths and limitations of each approach. These reflections lay the foundation for the third and final possibility.

I provide an overview of the book in this introductory chapter. The scope, limits, and style of the book are outlined. I introduce a central tension: that humanity has never been so prosperous, yet it often feels to many of us as though we never have enough. The view from manywheres is a central organizing principle in the book. The idea is to stay on the move between multiple disciplines, methods, and perspectives to comprehensively understand economic inequality. From this holistic view, I articulate a new vision for economic development – one based on the alleviation of poverty, the creation of fairness in our shared economic systems, and the pursuit and achievement of human capabilities.

Chapter 3 reviews Swift’s rapid emergence as England’s chief foreign policy propagandist and analyzes his ethical, religious, political, geopolitical, and economic reasons for opposing the War of Spanish Succession. He became a Tory partisan after two recessions and adopted the ideology of the old propertied elite against the new capitalist elite. He revealed a nativist strain and opposed foreign influences, including national debt and continental military involvement. But he did not abandon basic Whiggish political principles like rule by consent or the right to resist tyranny. He defended emergency executive action not as a pretext for absolute power but as a limited constitutional device for resolving an immediate and objective crisis, notably abroad. Unilateral powers can easily be abused but Swift shows himself concerned about that risk in a way that is not characteristic of authoritarians. His opposition to Dutch national debt went along with opposition to French power politics, revealing middle ground.

I present the first of three possibilities for the future of economic development and inequality. In this scenario, the rich continue to get richer, leaving the rest of us behind. I describe four implications of this continued concentration of wealth. First, the super-rich will continue to disproportionately influence politics, furthering fragmentation and polarization in society and deepening civic discontent. Second, economic inequality will amplify ill-health. Third, poverty will persist despite increased aggregate prosperity. Fourth, the climate will continue to deteriorate to our collective detriment. This dystopian possibility underscores the urgency of imagining and pursuing alternative futures.

In this chapter, I explore the virtues of capitalism. I begin by acknowledging that exploring the virtues of capitalism is not in vogue, politically or in the academy. I present evidence, however, illustrating the reduction in extreme poverty throughout the world since the proliferation of industrial capitalism. This reduction in poverty has been uneven, bringing inequalities in the reduction of poverty. In the last forty years, levels of extreme poverty have stagnated or even increased. Although much of the world has benefited from increased prosperity, many have not. I then present evidence illustrating correlations between the increase in global prosperity from capitalism and increases in educational achievement and life expectancy, and decreases in child mortality. I next discuss the process of creative destruction as a driver of capitalism and, ultimately, prosperity – and how this process allowed India and China to escape mass poverty and emerge as economic powerhouses. In contrast to dominant discourse, recent evidence from Branko Milanovic suggests that the economic rise of China and India has led to reduced global inequality.

I present the second master narrative of economic development. I show how capitalism has created wealth and prosperity for many. I present evidence from Our World in Data showing the distribution of this wealth and prosperity, how it has varied over time, and how it is unequally distributed between various global regions. I situate this unequal global rise in inequality within discussions of Adam Smith and Karl Marx, whose ideas about capitalism and communism are put in dialogue and placed in historical context. I discuss some of the processes behind this unequal rise in global prosperity, and some of the ways in which poorer countries are poor and how they might escape poverty.

Long before the COVID-19 pandemic, nursing homes were underfunded, under-regulated, and wildly at risk of a mass viral event. For decades industry watchers had called for oversight, but media accounts regarding home closures were misleading and poorly sourced. Increased private equity interest and legislative inaction heightened risks across the sector. COVID-19 was a perfect storm, preying on these systemic challenges and decimating robust, lively resident populations. More than 200,000 elder and disabled residents of nursing homes died of COVID-19 or related causes between March 2020 and March 2022. That number is grossly underestimated because nursing homes, which self-report their number of ill and deceased, feared bad reputations; many concealed deaths, mis-ascribed causes of death, or sent ill residents to nearby hospitals to avoid deaths on site. The conclusion of lawyers, staff, residents, and experts is that, while COVID-19 was a disaster waiting to happen, the mass deaths experienced in nursing homes could have been prevented. Since the initial years of COVID-19, some efforts by subsequent state and federal administrations have addressed inadequacies, but on the whole, little has been done to correct the many challenges the industry continues to face, even as the US elder population continues to rise.

Drawing on archival sources from Paribas as well as published statements from bank chairmen Jean-Yves Haberer, Michel François-Poncet and André Lévy-Lang, this chapter examines Paribas in the European economy of the 1980s and 1990s, the evolution of the bank’s business strategy amid the macroeconomic changes of market integration and market openings, and the bank’s perspectives on the Single Market and banking regulation in European economic governance. If carmakers like Volkswagen and BMW expressed enthusiasm about the business opportunities of the Single Market Program for their supply chains, production, and distribution and even supported the EEC’s efforts to develop environmental regulations, merchant banks like Paribas seemed rather ambivalent and even directly opposed to the regulatory and social dimensions of market integration through their lobbying efforts and business interest associations. In the early 1990s, the opening of Central and Eastern Europe presented new investment and growth opportunities making Paribas much more interested in business opportunities in Central and Eastern Europe, the “CEE,” than in the business environment of the EEC and its Single Market.

Americans have struggled to reconcile capitalism and war. Over three centuries of history, they have grappled with fundamental tensions between capitalism and security. The combination of war and capitalism often created disruptions and deep inequities that ordinary Americans and their leaders decided must be moderated for the sake of a more successful and politically sustainable war effort. For much of the nation’s history, capitalism was understood to be an insufficient provider of security; the U.S. military economy was semi-socialized, in both peacetime and wartime. But as the record of recent decades has highlighted, Americans have not experienced an ever-higher ratcheting of regulation and socialism, with each new war, over the long run. Rather, the historical record suggests that many postwar demobilizations served to reinforce capitalism. For the nation’s entire history, struggles over the economics of war and national security have been important parts of U.S. political development. This will continue to be the case in the current century, as Americans battle over economic policy and fight new wars, domestically and abroad.

This book has uncovered the role of multinational enterprises in the making of the Single European market by uncovering both firm strategies in the new business environment of an internal market as well as firm mobilization against to various dimensions of market governance. Together, the business cases covered in this book add a new, granular perspective to European political economy, not focused on the theoretical framework of capitalism, but on business strategy that constitutes its praxis. They also demonstrated the very different ways multinationals approached market integration and the Commission’s efforts to establish market regulations for the benefit of consumers and workers, with automakers most enthusiastic about the industrial focus of the market’s design, banks more interested in the new opportunities of market enlargement and its regulation than in deeper market integration, and commerce mobilizing against the threats of producer consolidation and the social dimensions of the Single Market.

Chapter 6 uses the insights gleaned from the interviews in Chapter 5 to frame intra-left legal debates over the determinacy of legal reasoning, the significance of legal consciousness and discourse, and the utility of reasoning from the designation “capitalist.”

Economic growth boosted living standards after it first surfaced in Britain in the 1700s. Why did it not arise earlier or somewhere else? Why did it spread quickly to northwestern Europe, but take longer to reach much of the rest of the world? The answer is not slavery, colonialism, or capitalism. Rather, it lies with advantages shared by much of northwestern Europe: institutions that secured property rights with benefits beyond a narrow elite; states that could rearrange property rights with credible compensation to improve transportation and agricultural productivity; cities made possible by productive agriculture that spawned agglomeration effects like those at work in Silicon Valley; skilled workers who could implement new ideas; and access to the ideas themselves from the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment. Northwestern Europe had these advantages for four reasons: its history, its religion, its intellectual heritage, and its distance from Eurasia’s steppes. Those four reasons are the ultimate causes for the onset of sustained economic growth in Britain in the 1700s and for its spread to northwestern Europe.

Liberalism and interest convergence influence all aspects of our socio-political world, and, in turn, social work practice, including social welfare policy, practice, and pedagogy. This chapter first defines the critical race tenets critique of liberalism and interest convergence, then examines how the entanglement of settler colonialism, racism, and capitalism are mutually constructed with racism and intersectional oppression. A global system of white supremacy created a racial hierarchy through notions of inferiority in order to maintain the dominant power structure, such that when white interests do not align with the interests of non-whites, it is nearly impossible for systems change to occur. Turning specifically to social work, the author outlines how social welfare policies and belief systems allow racism to flourish despite ideas of equality, freedom, and rights, and uncovers how social work conceptions of social welfare and social justice have aligned with the interests of the dominant group, rather than liberation and communal support, by supporting incrementalist reform rather than transformative change. Finally, the chapter envisions social worker roles that dismantle liberal notions of justice and create practices that support expansive views of merit, communal values over individual success, and equitable outcomes over equal rights.