In the 1990s, a vision emerged of a frictionless world of globalization in which the West would become ever richer on the basis of a tech-based service economy, all underpinned by a rules-based liberal international order. It became the basis for the mainstream politics of centre-left and right.
Philip Pilkington argues that this vision was always delusional and is now dying. It is based on a doctrinaire and unrealistic form of liberalism and has given rise to hollowed-out financialised economies and disintegrating societies that can barely even reproduce their population or meet their energy needs. The US and UK find themselves ill-equipped to compete with China and other non-liberal states within an emerging post-liberal order in which what really matters is industrial capacity, realpolitik and military strength. Only by abandoning our liberal delusions and advancing our own brand of hard-headed postliberalism can the West survive and resist the grim domination of authoritarian foreign states.
No clear-sighted observer of contemporary geopolitics can afford to miss this bracing diagnosis of the West's malaise and bold agenda for renewal.
Inhaltsverzeichnis
Introduction - Navigating Metahistory
Chapter 1 - What is Liberalism?
Chapter 2 - Liberalism's Different Modes
Chapter 3 - The Rise of Hyperliberalism
Chapter 4 - The Dialectic of Liberalism and Illiberalism
Chapter 5 - Dispatches from the Traverse
Chapter 6 - Blood and Steel
Chapter 7: Demographics and Destiny
Chapter 8 - Deindustrialisation and the Rise of Funny Money
Chapter 9 - Madness: Commercial and Civilisational
Chapter 10 - Distorted Diplomatic Dreams of a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose
Chapter 11 - Neo-Pagan Ritual and the Big Green Blob
Conclusion - Our Postliberal Future: A Manifesto
