The Collapse of Global Liberalism

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.

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