Description
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 post-liberalism can the West survive.
No clear-sighted observer of contemporary geopolitics can afford to miss this bracing diagnosis of the West’s malaise and bold agenda for renewal.
Also available as an audiobook.
Table of Contents
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
