Our talents and abilities are quantified by large organizations like state bureaucracies and private corporations. The intangible aspects of our personalities that we think motivate our decisions—loves, hates, desires, fears—are conditioned in organized ways. These organizations only rarely answer to particular people, but rather to their own and often seemingly mysterious internal logic.

We all know this isn’t quite right, yet most of the world has staked out its existence on this logic. The places that don’t are increasingly rare in a world where even the Taliban of Afghanistan submit to the advantages of a professional bureaucracy. No one has yet come upon a different material logic to outcompete it.

Some of the shortcomings of the underwriting assumptions are becoming clearer as we travel deeper into the twenty-first century. One of the most important is reproduction: having children has become an inconvenient and inefficient trade-off. Many of our friends and relatives will never do so. No known form of natalism has been able to reverse the great dying taking place within advanced societies. Unable to exist without its human substrate, yet also unable to sustain it, this technocratic paradigm has a fatal contradiction within it: despite its hegemony, it is incompatible with life.

Already in 1945, the writer H. G. Wells had a fit of despair as the specter of extinction loomed over all of humanity’s apparent advances. He laid out his fears in an essay that was strangely discordant with his career as one of the century’s great utopian modernists: “[T]he human story has already come to an end…The stars in their courses have turned against [man] and he has to give place to some other animal better adapted to face the fate that closes in more and more swiftly upon mankind.” The various strains of transhumanists and accelerationists are only Wells’s latest disciples, finding a solution to the paradox of high modernism without people in the potential emergence of new beings. None of them have yet produced humanity’s successor.

For now, the human element is still the load-bearing one. As members of that element, you and I will only come out the other side by prioritizing our own success in biological and material terms over our usefulness to others as human capital. For our own lineages to increase in power and fame in the centuries to come, it is necessary for us to establish a completely different paradigm of life.

 “Us” Is a People

When populations converge on a material and social paradigm of life that powers their expansion, history records it as the coming into being of a new people. Often, a truly great civilization can be traced to a very small founding population at its origin. At this stage, a shared form of life shapes a powerful in-group consciousness, kinship against enemies, stable intermarriage, and endogenous reproduction. The population shares a niche of material activity and production. They absorb or displace rival communities, and their form of life grows increasingly distinct and defined against those of other populations.

The name for this kind of event is ethnogenesis. Often, ethnogenesis begins with a population on the order of several thousand families, of which perhaps only a few hundred are really dominant. Sometimes, these groups rule over still-larger populations, in which case the initial population may become one dominant endogenous caste or class within a conquered society. An early status of nobility is a good heuristic in these cases since it often designates those families that helped establish a social order. 

This pattern holds quite well throughout history. Roman historians record that the original patrician families of Rome numbered about 200 or 300 families that were descended from the very earliest senators, a number that expanded after the first generations. Classical Athens and Sparta ranged about 20,000 to 40,000 male citizens at their greatest heights, a number which was surely much smaller at their outset.

Centuries later, the numbers don’t change much: about 8000 Norman landholders are estimated to have settled and ruled England after the Conquest; in France, the number of noble families in the realm never grew to more than several thousand even on the eve of the French Revolution—and only a small number of these had truly feudal roots. At the time of the American Revolution, the major centers of power—Boston, Philadelphia, the Virginia plantations, and so on—were generally each run by insular collectives of hundreds of families, which eventually intermingled as the most prominent among each group established the national WASP elite.

The reason for such consistent numbers is that this is a practical and useful scale for an “us.” The range of a few hundred to a few thousand families is what makes up a collective in-group capable of real bonds, cooperation, and a sense of common destiny. This is the scale of a real community that can cohesively act on the world. This is far smaller than any modern nation-state or even large city. Populations may rise and fall, but the scale of agency stays much the same: in a solar system where 100 billion humans span multiple worlds and moons, it will still be coordinated groups of thousands of people that drive history.

When collectives of this sort rule far larger populations, as the Romans, Normans, Franks, and WASPs did, they make up the foundational element of the resulting regimes. Their marks are often felt centuries after the founding people themselves disappear as a distinct population: Latin remained an institutional language for millennia, and the modern British parliament still ritually uses Norman French phrases in procedures like royal assent to a bill. Such vestiges reflect that the state itself was initially an organized representation of a particular people’s interests and so reflected their mores, language, culture, and religion. Without their distinct state-founding people, those nations and empires as we know them would not have existed. At their founding, the formal purpose of such governments was to pursue the common interests of those groups that had established them.

The identity of state goals with the organized interests of a people defined by kinship and common consciousness is straightforwardly assumed by the ancient authors on politics—for example, Aristotle’s Politics and Cicero’s De re publica—and is also part of the English concept of the commonwealth. A state exists to handle the most general level of a community’s affairs, and doing this it all assumes that a defined community with a common purpose and interest actually exists.

The Modern State Is Not a Political Community 

Western debates over topics such as immigration highlight a divide within liberalism on just what defines the body politic. Some countries, like France and Hungary, embrace an older mythos in which the democratic state rests on a real national community, either civic or semi-ethnic, that is capable of collective agency; others, like Britain and the U.S., have rejected this mythos, or see it as undesirable, and reserve collective action for special minority interests while seeing citizenship proper as focused on individual rights. In either case, the body politic is an ideological construct. The sort of collective action and identity possible among small groups of founding elites is not possible in a national population numbering tens or hundreds of millions. It was not mass populations that founded these states, but much smaller, highly coordinated subsets of those populations.

Like all institutions, states tend to drift away from the purposes for which their founders created them. In the course of time, the community that once erected the state often loses its original vitality, then hegemony, and finally its central position within its own regime. The displacement of the old Roman senatorial class, by upstart Latin-speaking generals and politicians of plebeian ancestry traces these steps.

When institutions become powerful and entrenched, the logic of state interest begins to override the more fundamental interests of continuity. The qualities which brought the state into being may ultimately conflict with and upset its stability and end up suppressed. The militant hero culture of the old patrician families gave Rome its empire, but also contributed to the civil wars that plagued it whenever expansion slowed or imported slaves conflicted with free plebeian interests.

The reformations of Julius Caesar and Augustus saved the institutional Roman state and its power, but they could not reverse the demise of its founding families. Plebeians had risen into Roman institutions for centuries at this point, and eventually, foreigners did so too. By the imperial era, the Roman state was at its height but most of the original patrician lineages that had built it up were extinct. The institutions of a people had parted ways with that people itself, and the former survived far longer than the latter.

Confusing your own material interests with the reifications that exist in the culture around you, whether those be symbols or institutions, is a lethal generational poison. You and I likely grew up in a culture where attachment to “patriotism” or “freedom” or “democracy” served an ideological purpose. These words stirred the feeling that we were part of the ruling regime’s own in-group. This assumption is at least notionally shared by nearly all modern states from North Korea to Canada.

Those reifications are echoes of a past era, but do not reflect the present. Not only does the regime you live under not represent your fundamental interests, but many Western regimes have no such conscious in-group at all. They are either no longer in the hands of those who once established them, or else their current descendants have substantively ceased to identify with their own forebears. They are not even in the hands of a new people—no process of ethnogenesis is underway in Paris or Berlin. Rather all these people and structures have become fuel for the technocratic world.

However, you still possess interests that you can examine and discover yourself. And further, you share those interests with your kin and collaborators. Your own biological existence and that of your lineage are tangible interests. So is the successful exploitation of a novel material niche, the continuity of a way of life, and the ability to pursue transcendent or spiritual goals. Once reifications distract from these goals, it is better to jettison them.

Modern states view their populations as human capital fully replaceable first by immigration, and then eventually by technology. A citizen may have rights and privileges, but these do not constitute a community that could make those real. The community of interest can’t be brought into being through paper. The idea that such a society can have a res publica is a fantasy, but the res publica of you and yours is not. It is only with the people with whom you undertake these things that you can share political life—the common matters of a real people that the ancient writers saw as the business of government.

Implicit in the technocratic paradigm under which we live is the idea that something other than human beings could be the agents of history: technology, institutions, good legal mechanisms, labor relations, or even the post-human intelligence yearned for by Wells and by modern AI accelerationists. In fact, no such replacement has arisen, nor is there any certain pathway to one in the near future.

Instead, we are left with a logic that leads to suicide. Either its expansion stalls due to forces beyond its control, or the process that has consumed all advanced countries finishes engulfing the entire world, eventually running out of resources and territory for further expansion. In any case, the result is the same: stagnation and decay under irreconcilable contradictions.

Your Material Future

Despite the dead end of the technocratic paradigm, it remains the null hypothesis of all thought and action, and the state to which all failed attempts at exit eventually return. This is exactly the process that is plaguing one of the most famous groups to resist modernity: the Amish.

The fanatical dedication of the Amish to a form of life, founded on religious conviction, determined their material existence. And despite their lack of explicit concern for material power and expansion—and outsize genetic maladies—they have won both these things. In the last 100 years, they grew from 5000 to 370,000 people, acquired huge amounts of land, and began to dominate the counties in which they were the most concentrated. While easy to romanticize, the Amish are showing more and more shortcomings.

The Amish spiritual vision translates in material terms into the life of the family farm based on communal manual labor. When prioritized, this translates into rapid expansion, because land quickly becomes locally expensive and so new colonies continually have to be founded. But despite the apparently large number of colonies being founded, new ones often house only a small number of people. The actual number of new colonies should be far, far higher, and the membership of each far larger, if the community wants to maintain its original vision of life.

When they deviate from the communal family farm, things degrade fast. In Holmes County, an Amish hub in Ohio with nearly half the state’s Amish population, one can find Amish men and women sporting smartphones and Adidas sneakers. Between a fifth and a quarter of the state’s Amish kids attend mainstream public school. The results are almost instantaneous: the fertility of non-farming families drops by a quarter, and that’s just in this early stage of the process.

When Amish families do not prioritize the material niche necessitated by their fundamental spiritual mission, they lose their center of gravity and assimilation follows. The smartphone and the public school are vectors of a more powerful rival consciousness. The only way to avoid it while maintaining the benefits of smartphone hardware would be to establish a closed Amish-only intranet for the hardware to operate on with a strict firewall against digital leaking from the mainline internet. Whether the Amish survive likely depends on whether they can achieve these kinds of collective-level updates instead of allowing their unprincipled exceptions to become new de facto norms which then eradicate their form of life altogether.

The collective consciousness that a form of life sustains is the most important thing your community shares. For your economic incentives to align with your social and biological ones, the work you do to secure material wealth should rely on the communal bonds formed under your collective consciousness as assets, not liabilities. If the bonds become liabilities, the incentive already exists to trade off against them—and even short-term gains on this front seem to guarantee defection. This is the major principle that the Amish get right, and their assimilation begins insofar as they stray from it.

But the Amish way of life is not relevant to our interests or ideals. There is no value to you or me in fleeing to the woods or the countryside. Fortunately, the principle is not unique to them, nor is it synonymous with a primitive form of life.

Industrial civilization itself leverages numerous traits: a population that is competent at it must be able to command loyal manpower, coordinate across large spaces with tight information, unite around high-risk ventures, and do all this while enduring physically and mentally demanding conditions. These are inherently valuable traits. Industry often seeks out such populations through offshoring precisely because this cultural complex is so hard to cultivate in a workforce that doesn’t already possess it, or which has lost it.

Our own task is not to preserve modernity or industrial society for its own sake, though we may yet preserve some parts of them. The real vital forces behind its development are not unique and could survive and thrive in other paradigms. Advanced technical achievements will continue only insofar as some part of the human substrate of technocracy finds a way out of this ideological trap.

This also means that advanced society is dependent on an agency that is willing to construct it for some higher purpose. It’s unlikely that agency can be constructed, but it seems that latent agency can be activated under the right conditions. Industrial titans like Matthew Boulton or Thomas Edison often had intense personal drives and motivations that can’t be replicated at scale, and fields like rocketry even depended on fully-fledged theologies motivating its pioneers to get off the ground. The same holds true of the corporate structures that make up the social organization of modernity: the first global corporate structures were religious orders and charter companies that drew adventurers to the ends of the Earth.

Historically, those periods where people shift from one way of life to another in ways that magnify and increase their best traits are extremely generative and can define entire epochs. The prerequisites of industrial and technocratic society itself—the corporate organization and commercial capitalism—themselves were born as English, Dutch, and French populations spread around the world. A mix of material, political, and religious factors led to significant populations becoming free landholders and merchants across the ocean, and eventually vectors of empire for the Old World. Their recent ancestors had lived in feudal serf societies where their talents were expressed in categorically different ways.

Acting on goals and ambitions that could not be expressed in the societies they lived in, these people formed an array of settlements, colonies, charter companies, pirate bands, religious orders, and other structures adapted to their particular goals and natures. Later empires told the stories of their growth as highly coherent and predestined affairs. But this was post-hoc myth-making. Their foundations were laid on the same scale of action that all founding populations historically act on: thousands of people, not millions. 

These groups possessed common goals and ambitions that could not be expressed in the societies they lived in. The forms of life that they eventually developed could not be completely planned in advance, but grew in fits and starts. Our task at present is to identify those capable of this kind of action, and to enter into community with those who share our most tangible interests. It is only once we achieve a shared consciousness on these terms that a new “us” can exist, and with it the foundation for a new way of life.

You might interpret this kind of move as mere technological laziness in an established industry, but you would be wrong. My friend faithfully applied a strategy used by countless AI-branded companies around the world.

Google was able to market its Duplex service as a personal AI tool even while it required human assistance in 40 percent of its calls a year after launch: 25 percent of the calls began with a human and 15 percent of the rest required intervention at some point. 60 percent of calls done entirely by AI is still impressive, but the accurate branding would be something far more like a hybrid outsourcing service.

Across the pond, one French founder quipped that “Madagascar is the leader in French artificial intelligence,” since the AI-branded startups in his country tend to outsource their hidden human labor there. Other examples are legion.

The pattern reveals something quite strange about not just AI, but the broader tech industry too: being “in tech” or “in AI” describes branding and a particular social sphere as much as anything to do with how the work is done. You operate in the world of VCs and startup CEOs, use a geometric sans-serif logo, and are on Twitter.

AI has only intensified this trait—in fact, you might not have to create anything related to deep learning at all. Companies can present as if they are “AI companies” while using no machine learning—up to 40 percent of AI companies in Europe alone do it—and still reap the benefits of higher funding and excitement. The supermarkets and HVAC companies trying to posture as “technology leaders” by dropping AI strategies into investor reports are on even more dubious ground.

The main reason this works is hype. AI is the future, the future is now, and looking too closely at the details could mean losing the bag. What makes AI interesting is that, unlike cryptocurrency or the early internet, it all somehow feels expected. AI is unmatched in how long-standing and ready-made the narrative of its own inevitability is, and the sense most people have that they understand its essence even if they can’t quite describe the technical guts.

Most consequentially, fully-developed AI is supposed to ultimately replace humans, both in specific domains of work and perhaps even as Earth’s apex life form—everybody “knows” that, somehow. From the perspective of this expectation, a tool that requires extensive human support is therefore early-stage at best and a failure at worst. In this setting, AI becomes something like a genre and a narrative de-linked from the capabilities of specific tools.

That narrative reflects a deeply held belief within tech itself: that the most significant problems are engineering problems, and more specifically technology problems. This is an attitude sometimes criticized as “solutionism.” This attitude is useful when it sees material potential where others may not, as with the early internet.

But can also lead to destructive overfitting. Elon Musk famously overestimated the capabilities of the automated robotics systems Tesla attempted to base its factory on, which couldn’t adequately handle many judgment-laden details like the fine-tuned corrections of screws, bolts, and fasteners that humans did naturally. Over-automation created disruptions in welding, battery pack assembly, and final assembly of vehicles. The whole thing left Tesla with a hefty redesign cost and Musk updated to a more human-centric view of how to make cars.

To the degree that any problem is an engineering or technology problem, the tech industry gains an immediate advantage in solving it. If it’s a software or computer science problem, that advantage often becomes a monopoly. The incentive of the tech industry, then, is to convince people that all significant problems are engineering problems, narrowly defined as those categories of engineering at which the tech industry does best. By acting as an epistemic cartel in this way, the industry pumps up the value of its work and guarantees its future capital flows.

This ideological hype is the stuff from which bubbles are made. But an AI bubble in deep learning won’t kill off the underlying technology, just as the dot com bubble didn’t kill off the internet. What matters more is that people are making decisions about technologies and their potential in an epistemic environment dominated by a hype narrative. That has blown up the share prices of AI-branded companies, but the scrambling of market signals also incurs huge opportunity costs on the level of both companies and the larger economy. Musk’s bet that 80 percent of Twitter could be fired without doing any real harm to the app itself seems to have paid off. The extremely high “tech” valuation of Twitter overfunded it to the point that it could get away with hiring five times too many people.

This colors how people understand the capabilities, function, and purpose of AI technologies. From the level of ordinary workers all the way to prominent founders, people are operating on ideology—either naively or cynically—instead of on the rigorous assessment of tools. When most beliefs and even market signals reflect ideological hype-mongering, you can no longer trust them as guides to the value of these tools or of their long-run technical potential. What they signal is successful large-scale conditioning into the tech industry’s preferred narratives about AI.

Any accurate assessment of the potential of deep learning tools requires a rigorous exclusion of hype narratives that is nearly impossible to achieve on the individual level. Investor bubbles may come and go, and while they attract retrospective criticism, they are a passing problem. The large-scale misallocation of resources, on the other hand, incurs compounding opportunity costs on a massive scale.

At its worst, such ideological hype causes a systematic over-investment in new technologies that do not actually yield much overall progress or development across society. Bubble-driven investment incurs large economic costs. Pursued in this way, AI may actually be an economic and industrial net negative. Misallocations can continue for generations, free-riding off the functional parts of the structure while the overall reality is one of decay and dissolution.

The Tech Industry’s High-Yield Ideology

A tool is what it does. Its nature is not determined by what people imagine it can do, think it should do, or even what its inventors originally intended it to do. Alfred Nobel first invented dynamite for use in mining, but its actual nature as an explosive made it useful in war. When its inherent capabilities are applied within some process or system, the tool gains a function within that system.

When the technology is new and the set of possible functions is large, figuring out how to implement such tools usefully is highly dependent on the worldview of the planner. What makes AI unique is the degree to which tech ideology and even science fiction inform that worldview across large swathes of society. Decades of storytelling about superior machine minds have primed society into a simple narrative: computers are smarter than you, lack your weaknesses, and will replace you in all tasks that matter as soon as the computing power involved gets strong enough.

It’s the ultimate in tech ideological cartel thinking. In the solutionist apocalypse, frail and fallible mankind is the most fundamental problem and AI will eventually solve it once we hit artificial general intelligence. Whether this is utopian or extinctionist is a matter of taste. That the underlying technology has changed several times—Japan’s distributed computing systems did not pan out in the 1980s—has never led to wavering in the basic story.

The intensity of tech ideology gets higher the closer you get to the tech industry itself, and specifically the closer you get to Silicon Valley. IBM is also a tech company, but an older New York tech company rather than a newer Silicon Valley one. That distance matters and the resulting tone is very different. In its public reports, IBM tends toward empiricism, dryly giving the numbers on who is using what.

Other distinct AI ecosystems also exist. Each tends to see AI as an issue through the lens of its own concerns and methods, and in a way that implies an expansion of its own power. In Washington D.C., AI tends to be a security question befitting the needs of the security and government complex. In China, AI ends up being part of the Communist Party’s attempt at constructing a population monitoring apparatus.

Each ecosystem is colored by the lens of those interests that make it up, and they all interact with each other to varying degrees. But the Silicon Valley ecosystem is unquestionably upstream of the rest; it is the hub of much of the advanced technical research and the place where the ideologies and philosophies around AI are at their most explicit, radical, and consciously promoted. It is where you will have long discussions about just how we might cross the line into agentic artificial general intelligence.

Day-to-day ideological promotion tends to happen at the hands of VC funds, startup CEOs, and the like. Recently, a16z cofounder Marc Andreessen and YCombinator president Garry Tan have both pushed “e/acc” (effective accelerationism) to hype young entrepreneurs into entering the AI world and VC term sheets, playing on a defanged iteration of the “accelerationist” ideas of philosopher Nick Land. A few years ago, a16z benefited from the boosting of “web3,” a meme with a similar hyping function for cryptocurrency.

Players like this receive the direct payoffs of tech ideology, both in AI and other fields. They directly benefit by shifting attention to their preferred problems and their preferred solutions for them. VC funds hype young entrepreneurs into creating startups that they become good at evaluating for potential success. If an industry is successful, they end up with stakes and influence over its leading firms. Those who run and own the startups themselves, meanwhile, benefit from later-stage investors operating on the same hype and from convincing clients of the necessity of adopting their product. A startup that taps effectively into society-wide hype is a startup that can rapidly increase its valuation and then pass the bag to less sophisticated investors. The tech ideology gets skin in the game.

AI’s Hidden Human Hands

Silicon Valley is also a hub for more explicit and developed philosophies of AI. Even top AI pioneers interact with these ideas, ranging from the Kurzweilian Singularity to Yudkowsky’s call to halt all AI development to the point of air strikes on rogue data centers. It’s where people are confident that minds are fundamentally mechanical and thus engineerable, that an eventual hard trade-off between AI and human dominance exists, and that all this may manifest in AGI take-over within our lifetime. Even the contrarians who advocate a Dune-inspired “Butlerian jihad” against AI accept these basic claims.

When you think of AI, you likely don’t mean facial recognition programs or traffic monitoring software, even though these descend from recent concepts of AI. Self-driving cars and LLMs are probably closer to the mark, at least for now, because they seem to operate with more autonomy and self-direction than we are used to.

But the acid test for “real” AI is independence from humans, up to the point of replacing them. Those creating deep learning tools are under pressure to show that their creations reach that standard. What happens in practice, though, is that companies simply hide the presence of human work and correction beneath the guise of a seamless experience. The human labor needed for everything from labeling data to editing AI outputs is massive and growing.

The San Francisco-based company Scale AI made its name, its $7.3 billion market cap, and its client list ranging from OpenAI to the U.S. military based on providing precisely that human support. While the company’s branding is that of a tech company, it founded an in-house agency called Remotasks to manage its core operations, the nature of which is something more like “outsourcing services.” Via Remotasks, Scale AI hires about 240,000 workers for data labeling services, many of them in regions like Africa and Asia. The company maintains a strict brand separation between the two. While the company’s position is that this is for client privacy, it’s hard to ignore the reality that “outsourcing services” is a far less sexy investor hook than AI and is far easier for competitors—of which Scale AI has many—to disrupt.

On the scale of global investment, as well as firms thinking in terms of massive economic transitions, the disparity between the ideology and the tool fuels the hype cycle. Employers think the tools are more advanced than they are, employees think their jobs are more at risk than they are, and investors think their gains are just around the corner. People ask which jobs they can eliminate, but not which ones they have to create.

In one recent case, scriptwriters have been worried about producers tricking them into editing scripts produced by ChatGPT instead of hiring them to write originals. However, conflicts over automation are not new in the film industry. The reality is that the elimination and merger of film jobs due to technology were occurring long before AI came on the scene. I asked a couple of friends who worked in Montreal’s huge film and music scenes what people were expecting. Their responses were surprisingly unfazed. “Honestly, the middle has already emptied out,” said Sarah, who does post-production work on feature films and series content. “The storyboard timelines that were 3-6 months are now a month or less, and so much has been combined that the same person might even be directing work.”

But what about the artist worries about images and music just becoming repurposed as training data for their own replacements? “Repurposing content is so normal already and not all of it is legal Getty Images-type stuff,” said my other friend, a music producer. “The internet already gave people the ability to trade and share materials easily. AI isn’t fundamentally changing that, but it does change the compression effect. If you’re using prompts on a generative AI tool like Midjourney to create art, you often lose some control over the final product, at least right now.” Were they worried about tools getting good enough to actually outperform them? “I mean, what are they getting trained on?” he answered. “The mass production might be a problem in the end. It’s good to democratize a creative tool, but that doesn’t mean that the high-quality output will increase. What happens when half of images online are AI-produced and that’s what Midjourney is learning from? It’s probably not as divergent as the purely human work it’s learning on now. I don’t think it’s going to make for better art.”

Both reported that despite the growing use of AI tools, many of their colleagues didn’t have a strong understanding of the underlying technical basics of generative AI. Absent this, people are left to operate on the assumptions of ideological hype. The problem is that this hype has already been propagated across industries and mass culture, while the work of figuring out how best to use the tools is usually slow.

This is not unique to AI; industries tend to move in lockstep. Trends, best practices, and “industry standards” tend to dominate both new and established sectors and both large and small firms. Think of how every company you use started deciding that they needed an app; that happened despite the average user of the average app abandoning it after a couple of uses. CEOs are as prey to the hype as anyone. A large organization that actually bucks the ideological alignments represented by “industry standards” is rare, and will usually come under immense pressure to conform.

You Can’t Trust the Signals

Decades ago, the economist Friederich Hayek described markets as operating on price signals that reflected the actions people took on the basis of their private knowledge and beliefs. Hype changes the nature of these signals. Like in a standard Hayekian market, people in AI or broader tech markets are looking at price signals and the behavior of market participants as sources of information. But when a sufficiently large proportion of investors are operating on ideological tropes, those signals reflect collective hype instead an aggregation of private bets based on diverse approximations of reality.

Nor is everyone necessarily fooled by the hype; for savvy investors, the bubble itself is the opportunity. George Soros once commented that “When I see a bubble forming, I rush to buy, adding fuel to the fire.” The results are clear: just this year, Nvidia—whose chips are fundamental to the current wave of AI projects—added $700 billion in market capitalization in 2023, traded at almost 20 times its expected revenues, and rocketed to the top of JP Morgan’s Hedge Fund VIP Basket.

AI is far from the only tech market operating on ideological hype. Cryptocurrency and vanity projects like the metaverse relied on the same pattern. Now that rising interest rates have stemmed the flow of easy money, the price of ideological misjudgment is increasing. Tech was disproportionately reliant on the low-interest-rate economy. The downturn hit tech fast but took several months to start impacting the rest of the economy.

The real story here is that these downturns didn’t affect much real value at all, either beyond the tech world or even within it. If Twitter is a good heuristic for just how much capital the systematic overvaluation of tech has soaked up, the misallocation constitutes a systematic disorder in the global economy. These are not market signals that can be trusted. The reach of this hype is not equally distributed. The intensity gets higher as one gets closer to the epistemic cartel of the tech industry proper. In contrast, legacy sectors that run on personal relationships—like finance or law—value their core employees and this affects how they use the technologies involved.

An investment manager I spoke to told me that experimentation with products like ChatGPT is still largely left to “vanguardists” like himself in his area of finance. In the broader finance industry, IBM estimates AI tool adoption at about 21 percent of professionals. His main concern was freeing up time for the tasks that actually mattered. “I use ChatGPT if I’m transcribing conversations, pulling out insights from a paper, stuff like that. For drudgery. It’s like having a personal assistant.”

Did he sense fear about job losses? “At the middle and senior level, finance runs on weak relationships. You know lots of people somewhat well, and more importantly, you can figure out the unique deals that no one else sees,” he explained.

“At the lower rungs, it’s different. But there’s been gradual upskilling already for the last hundred years. It used to be that someone paid a secretary to handle their busy work, but now an assistant will handle multiple executives using Teams, Outlook, and other apps. I’d expect the same with lower-level analysts: maybe it’s a quarter of the number of people hired, employees make $120,000 instead of $60,000, and their job has become using machine learning to assist mid-to-senior level people.” The real opportunity, he thought, might be using AI as an excuse to remove low performers. “Large firms are full of dead wood. Machine learning might be the ideal rationale to do reductions without blaming any one person. Hey, it’s just ‘technological changes!’”

The legal field yielded similar results. I spoke with two lawyers, Zach and Shannon, both of whom work at mid-size offices. The AI tools they used were targeted at lawyers and mainly for editing documents and sorting specialized contracts that need public disclosure. “The real work for lawyers isn’t in sitting and drafting anyways,” Zach told me. “It’s in quarterbacking deals and doing syndication on the fly. Diligence work is basically a way to pay your dues, but no one really wants to do entry-level work like that.” While Zach thought that support staff might get slimmed down, Shannon hadn’t even seen that yet: “The research tasks are changing, but it’s not at the point yet where you can do it without an actual person.”

The insularity of law and finance probably made them overlook the potential of AI technologies in some ways. Deep learning tools might cause certain kinds of job loss, but these companies tended to evaluate them by how they increased the value of their best-performing people, whose real contributions were often their personal judgment and ability to cultivate relationships with clients and stakeholders. Distance from the social influence of the tech industry also gave them resistance to tech-centric ideologies about the nature of AI.

Developing independent assumptions and models about AI is a tall order, especially for a company justifying its decisions to boards and shareholders operating on the same hype as everyone else. Rival ecosystems to Silicon Valley, like Wall Street or Washington D.C., have their own operating ideologies through which they interpret the world in ways that serve that particular industry. The task at hand for those trying to think about the most important problems in society—and the real potential or implications of deep learning—is to create an independent epistemic environment with both correct information and sane models of the world. This can’t be done in isolation, but it doesn’t take too many people either, at least at the start. The fundamentals of good analysis are good first principles and rigorous empirical assessment, and these usually require collaboration in small groups.

Presenting AI technologies as a dynamic of deep learning tools replacing humans violates both these fundamentals. Seeing it as a reorganization of certain kinds of labor and production, where human capital is reallocated to more useful roles, is more faithful to them. Nothing deep learning has yielded has even a theoretical pathway to altering the most fundamental operating norms of society or of institutions. Basic patterns like the growth and decay of institutions, principal-agent conflicts, or the tendency for bureaucracies to prioritize their own expansion, will all continue. However significant the changes that AI tools do make possible, they will operate downstream of these more fundamental patterns in society. Good models of AI technologies, or any other category of technology, are therefore downstream of good models of society overall.

With no immediate rival to the tech ideology’s dominant narrative around AI, we will likely see AI-branded technologies go through more than one bubble in the years to come. Their bursts will probably not undermine the propagation of the underlying technologies over the long run. But the real value of these technologies for material or social development is, on net, far lower than the hype suggests. In all likelihood, we will stop thinking of many deep learning tools through the lens of AI as their real functional niches become established and unremarkable.

But until the AI ideology faces displacement by something closer to reality, the systematic overvaluation of the tech industry as the vanguard of material progress is set to continue.

The video had been in my feed all morning. Notifications were popping up in group chats with my hometown friends. A bystander had recorded the whole incident while giving live commentary, and the video promptly ended up online for clicks. Many were angry that it was ever shared. I’ve always believed that self-deceit, especially about what kind of place you live in, is a far worse crime.

These kinds of confrontations do not themselves create a sense of a downward spiral—of the march of uncivilization. Healthy life can assert itself in moments like those. What makes for uncivilization is when life quietly slips away from the body as bystanders shuffle, chatter, and avert their eyes. What disturbed me at a more visceral level was the sense of growing collective impotence. I’d left town years before, but that didn’t matter. In every city I have lived and worked in since then, similar arcs of civic dissolution have played out before my eyes. 

I can recall my first times wandering through San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood or exiting the BART station at 16th St. Mission, keeping a wary eye out. The destitution didn’t really discomfort me, though. Growing up in the Vancouver metro area in British Columbia, I’d long been accustomed to these sights, especially from journeys through that city’s downtown east side. In high school, that neighborhood had played a role as a sort of nightmare scenario invoked in parental warnings. Say yes to drugs at a party, or start running away at night, and you just might end up among the tents and cardboard beds that filled the streets there.

It was not an empty threat. The endemic synthesis of poverty, drug abuse, and mental illness that we euphemistically just call “homelessness” might be written off as a tragedy of the poor, were it not for the fact that many of those living in this way were once good middle-class kids. It wasn’t uncommon to hear that someone’s problematic older sibling “ended up in the downtown east side.” It was a landing place for those kids who slipped through the cracks and disappeared. Sometimes, the fight against uncivilization doesn’t take place over territory, but over the lives of the people you love.

Of course, not everyone fell quite so far as to end up on a cardboard bed in the bad part of town. Some families had the money or the sheer willpower to dampen the self-destruction of their offspring. One common outlet for these more functional types was the frequent use of more respectable kinds of party drugs.

But eventually, a running mental baseline of MDMA-induced serotonin depletion has its consequences. I saw it take its toll on friends, especially as they reached their twenties and many people moved on from the relative decadence of university life. On more than one occasion, the party drugs facilitated or disguised spirals into full-blown mental illness. Other people had no need for chemical help as they underwent their own collapses into depression or conversations with schizophrenia-induced voices. 

There was a time when I was skeptical of the “mental health crisis,” but today a list of cut-off friendships, broken or abandoned families, suicides, and people who just exploded and vanished has made me rethink that. There is a reason that the industry for helping people navigate or terminate the increasing number of social ties defined by psychosocial damage control is so lucrative.

It’s difficult to exhaustively define this ongoing human scattering that seems to be playing out across classes and places. In a body, dissolution is the mark that it has undergone too much damage for its fundamental harmony to maintain itself—it is the process of dying. But the people that a dying social body leaves behind don’t cease to exist. They live to endure the process of dissolution and must struggle to find a way forward. 

It is usually depressing to realize that a social script that defined your whole life is meaningless. But the end of a particular pattern of life does not mean the end of life as such. In the late Roman Empire, the early Christians made a big bet against the norms of the society around them. A millennium and a half later, the early Puritans risked life and limb on the belief that the New World, not England, was where a better society would be built. In both cases, they gave rise to forms of life whose full development they could never have foreseen: respectively, the medieval and American civilizations. 

Their example is instructive. There is never any guarantee that things will work out quite so well, nor that you will live long enough to see it even if it does. You are left in a position to take reasonably good bets on what is worth pursuing and to operate accordingly. By building up strong social bonds that are disciplined by a tangible common purpose, you have far more reason to invest in the social capital of your relationships and to expect others to do the same. You escape the process of uncivilization by targeting a healthy form of life and cultivating that instead.

A Better Form of Life

Every form of life is a pattern of material self-organization that draws in its constituent parts into tight, dynamic relationships informed by their place in the whole. Mitochondria may once have been lonely prokaryotes, but now their role is defined by the activity of powering an entire cell. Collectives of people are no different, and they remain healthy insofar as they are able to continually draw their people into their basic pattern of life. I learned this valuable lesson in the walls of a little Byzantine church.

The community had established itself under constraints, especially that of sky-high city rents. To solve this, it took over an aging, ramshackle wooden house and converted it into a space for both worship and living.

When you arrived on a Sunday morning, you pushed past the metal gates at the entrance, headed up porch steps, and moved through the front door into what would have been a living room. There, you crossed from earth into heaven. The golden glow of candlelight reflecting off icons, the rhythms of chant, and the slow undulation of a crowd on its feet let you know that you had entered the vital core of something active and alive. The liturgies were full immersions into a total way of living, thinking, and being. Everything had meaning.

It was the beautiful services that first brought me to the little church. What sticks with me to this day was seeing a collection of people with different strengths, temperaments, and backgrounds—often with little else in common, and occasionally ones that might have been foes elsewhere—transform into a single body.

Some had come upon the little church in dark times of their lives or in the middle of great personal struggles. They were exactly the kinds of people who, in most other places I spent time, would have eventually slipped out and been forgotten. Here, things were different. The bonds that formed over shared meals and time spent together were personal and deep, but also animated by an explicit command: love your neighbor as yourself. Once people knew you, they checked on you. If you didn’t show up for a while, you would get a text from someone asking if all was well. Sometimes, a person had a bad day or a bad month. When they came back, it was to open arms. For those who needed them, the community maintained a number of rooms above the church with token rent requested from those who could pay it.

This openness did not entail a lack of obligations. In a small community, things only happen because people do the work. Someone has to bring the food for common meals. Someone has to chant and read and assist at the altar. Someone has to prepare the eucharistic gifts. There was no central directive for most of these things. Instead, people took them on through personal callings and individual encouragement. I was surprised that it was sometimes those dealing with the greatest personal struggles who were the most dedicated to their roles, which became stable anchors in their lives.

Many people found strength in confession and spiritual direction with the priest. Those who undertook this received religious solace, but also more direct individual instruction on how to correct or better shoulder the disorders in their lives. It was largely not a place of dramatic transformation or flashy, instant healing. Instead, people formed deep roots over time, drew strength from those around them, and grew. Sometimes, they found themselves becoming central, supporting figures in the community. 

The pattern of life in the little church was greater than any single individual, including the clergy. Those ordained as priests and deacons had authority, did formal teaching, corrected, and occasionally censured where needed. But the centrality and necessity of their role as cultivators did not make them sufficient to embody the form on their own. The pattern of life grew and reproduced itself through an increasing intensity in the lives of its members, a growth in its complexity and coherence as the community itself expanded. Love of God and love of neighbor were its highest callings, and I saw both translate into deeply felt instincts and actions among those who spent time in the fold.

This experience was completely different from what I had seen elsewhere. Having become used to the dissolution, it was a shock to become immersed in a body of people so obviously alive, with its form and ligaments exhibiting health and vitality. On those occasions when people still slipped away, it was an obvious failing and a pain to those who knew them. 

But another aspect of it all surprised me as well. The rhetoric about the love of neighbor was something I had seen beyond the walls of the little church. Rather than health and life, it had been in the service of something chaotic and destructive.

The Good Samaritan’s Bastard Children

Living in a big West Coast town means becoming familiar with tent cities and the fights that come with them. What sparks it off is when homeless encampments annex formerly public parks—often with direction and oversight from activists—and make them functionally off-limits to the locals, especially in what were once “nice” areas. The sudden loss of space and threat of violent crime, along with open drug use and prostitution, tends to shock the locals out of complacency. The homeless crisis is easy to ignore until it spills out of its confined areas.

In these circumstances, the affected neighborhoods tended to rally in their own self-interest, organizing against threats of violence, property crime, and the seizure of public space. Whenever this happened, an array of full-time activists, as well as mobilizable students and sympathetic professionals, turned out to champion the cause of the tent cities. The language they favored was that of neighborly love. “Defend our neighbors without homes!” was the sort of thing I would hear them chant. On its face, it was the very same ideal I had heard preached at the little church. And yet, the fruits of it were entirely different.

The total absence of real communal ties was evident to me from the start. I remember meeting a friend for late-night coffee shortly after such an encampment had sprung up near where we lived. He did not hide his sentiments. “They need to burn that place to the ground,” he muttered at one point as we looked out into the night, less than a mile from the tents. Drug use and property crime were spilling over into the broader area. “It’s too bad there isn’t somewhere to move them,” I ventured. “Somewhere they can actually get clean and start doing some useful work.” 

“Maybe. Who knows?” he responded. “They just need to get them out. They’re stealing, they’re selling drugs. It’s getting bad.”

Perhaps there was a time when the locals would have seen such camps as a place of misfortune that was in some sense still part of the community, or at least populated by people with whom they had a real neighborly kinship. By the time we were sitting there, that time was long gone. As this pattern played out repeatedly across the large metro region, robberies and harassment sparked counter-offensives. Locals yelled when they drove by obvious camp dwellers. They used cameras to confront and document outsiders wandering through their neighborhoods. Facebook groups sprung up to monitor the situation. The most violent incidents saw a homeless woman set on fire, and a mass shooter in one of the suburban towns target multiple homeless people in a single night, killing two. 

Despite the talk of neighborly solidarity and human rights, the actual bonds involved grew weaker and vanished over time. The encampments reproduced the social dynamics of survival and codependency. Addictions were not broken, and the criminality that threatened both people and property only ever got worse. There was no concept of collective moral reciprocity, nor even any real unified community to have such duties toward. The communities in play were the local neighborhoods and the camps, and they were locked in a struggle for territory.

The professional activists that positioned themselves as defenders of the tent cities had no conception of imposing or even encouraging a better pattern of life for those involved. Instead, they handed out their own supplies of heroin and other drugs, supporting “clean” addictions as their solution to overdose deaths. Meanwhile, the ample public money dedicated to providing proper shelters ended up funding dilapidated hotels to the benefit of well-connected beneficiaries, the ranks of which included the wives of both the mayor and the province’s top public housing executive. The dirty secret of homelessness is that it’s an industry, and no one is going to abolish their own industry.

By proclaiming a self-serving ideology in which reciprocated ties and social duties did not exist, what such activists had helped to establish was a parasitic dynamic. The established neighborhoods were expected to extend toleration and material support on an open-ended basis, which the tent cities received free of any social or even legal expectations. But in practice, this was not sustainable. Those living in the tent cities could not constrain the criminal and antisocial elements among them. Conflict was inevitable.

The activist defenders of the tent cities had seized on a moral language deeply ingrained in Western societies. The notion of duty to neighbors, especially those who are poor and vulnerable, is a particularly strong inheritance from Christianity. But they were using concepts they did not care to understand. For the activists, the homeless weren’t neighbors in any reciprocal sense, just a battering ram to use in their own conflicts with society. By rhetorically re-premising neighborly duties as a one-way relationship of tribute and deference paid to the wretched by society, they rendered the very moral concepts they invoked useless. They demanded neighborly duties from strangers but provided no possibility of those involved ever becoming anything like real neighbors to each other.

It was not until the experience of the little Byzantine church that I fully understood the difference. Both used a language of neighborly love and leaps of faith on others. But one operated on the basis of a compelling form of life. Their radical charity extended an open hand toward others with the intention of integrating them into their own functional pattern of life. They did not see charity as an open-ended license to parasitic behavior. 

When members of the community fell out with each other, the practice of forgiveness was not intended to enable the behaviors at fault. Rather, forgiveness allowed people to move on from slights and return to baseline cooperation and affection with one another. It was not intended to facilitate destructive norms or people, particularly ones that threatened to undermine the community as a whole.

Moreover, the form of life practiced by the church community was both attractive and functional. As people embraced it, their lives improved in concrete ways. They took on roles of support and responsibility in their community and began to realize their own agency. They gave up destructive habits and formed healthy ones. Multiple categories of relationships—some egalitarian, and some not—existed to ensure moral correction, and the basic norms were clearly and explicitly taught by those with authority in the community. There was a way you ought to conduct yourself, a life you ought to live, and evil you ought to avoid. In extreme cases, that authority extended to initiating a formal censure through excommunication or barring a particularly destructive person from the space.

No counterparts to any of this existed in either the moral framework or the social structures of those who defended the tent cities. The norms and behaviors invoked were presented without any of the broader structures that put them in the service of life. Used this way, the very same moral norms that had served the life and health of the little church ended up giving cover to the most destructive behaviors. Rather than resolving civic conflicts, they only served to intensify them and make the concept of a neighbor meaningless to those involved.

The Logic of Christian Charity

Once, the extension of neighborly love to strangers and even enemies was a radical moral principle. Today, familiarity has made it banal. But familiarity is not the same thing as understanding. When Jesus told his famous parable of the Good Samaritan, it was to demonstrate his broader teaching that in addition to loving God, men should love their neighbors as themselves. A prudent follower asked who counted as a neighbor, and Jesus told his famous story:

A Hebrew man lay beaten by robbers and half-dead. The respectable gentlemen of his own people—likely his neighbors in the literal sense—avoided him as they passed by. Eventually, there came a Samaritan, whose nation was disdained and reviled by the Hebrews. Despite all this, he spared no effort or expense to nurse the injured man back to health. After telling the story, Jesus then asked who had fulfilled the law of love and acted as a neighbor to the Hebrew. “He that shewed mercy on him,” answered the follower. “Go, and do thou likewise,” Jesus instructed.

A casual misreading of the parable is that the Samaritan viewed all men everywhere as his neighbors, regardless of ethnic enmity or ability to reciprocate. But that misses the point. The Hebrew and the Samaritan were heirs to centuries of communal feuding, and their assumptions of mutual contempt and distrust were entirely rational. The virtue of the Samaritan is not that he considered all men to be his neighbors, but that he himself took a leap of faith and acted as a neighbor to someone who was not yet one. The Samaritan’s act bore fruit, and he left the Hebrew he saved behind as a true neighbor, perhaps even a friend.

The momentary decision to show mercy is not, strictly speaking, a rational act. Rivals and enemies don’t merit such expectations. Any moment in which one shows mercy or offers the hand of cooperation to an enemy is a leap of faith. But charity itself has a rational character to it: by putting aside private advantages to work for the welfare of another, you offer a moment where they can start to do the same for you. That bond of reciprocal commitment to a common cause is the beating heart of every friendship, brotherhood, marriage, cult, warband, aristocracy, and other instance of society that has ever graced the earth. The initial moment where an open hand is extended makes it possible for a new “us” to emerge.

Once the offer is accepted, the process of reciprocation begins. You begin to develop norms and expectations within the context of the new relationship. Here, the instincts of justice have to take over. A bond between people always exists for the sake of some goal, and how well the relationship helps its members achieve that goal is usually a good measure of its overall health. In the little church, the goal was to worship God together and assist each other in living Christian lives. In a family, it is to care for one another and establish a home. Even robbers have to do right by each other for a brief time in order to pull off a heist together.

The little church’s ideals of neighborly charity existed side by side with divine commands that, if followed, allowed people to trust one another, cooperate, and maintain the foundation of common faith on which everything else rested. The Byzantine liturgy includes extensive readings from sacred scripture: the community would hear the story of Ananias and Sapphira, whom God struck dead when they lied to the Apostle Peter about their charity in order to boost their reputations, and perhaps also the injunctions of the Apostle Paul to the Thessalonian church that “if any would not work, neither should he eat.” When meditating on their own relationships with God, everyone knew that repentance was the first step toward forgiveness and that real repentance must lead to a change in life.

In order to create the kind of environment where a leap of faith on someone is likely to be rewarded, it becomes even more important to enforce the basic norms of justice, truth-telling, and reciprocity, not less so. Among individuals or small groups, people can just leave or be excluded. But on the level of larger communities or societies, this isn’t an option. This means that allowing people to leverage the norms of good faith or mutual support with no intention of reciprocity only serves to establish parasitic norms instead. The members of the community might not be able to leave easily, but they can shift to low-trust expectations of behavior.

This puts the community into a death spiral: having burned the stores of high-trust social capital, its members are eventually no longer able to follow the norms required to build them back up again. A newly dead body burns up its last stores of cellular health before the full, visible decay takes hold.

When you have functional authority and control over a defined group, it is possible and right to punish parasitic behavior by censuring or removing the people who engage in it. In that case, it becomes easier for those within the group to make their leaps of faith on each other. But you exercise greater courage in the situation in which the Samaritan and the Hebrew found themselves, where no such basis exists. This is the case in which making such leaps is the most risky. But it is also when such leaps can become the basis of a new set of bonds, and a new pattern on which to cooperate and eventually draw in others into a higher order of life.

The Lesson of the Seed

The ongoing dissolution of bonds across mainline society is not merely a sign of social death. It is also an opportunity to establish a new and more functional basis for loyalty, cooperation, and the development of social capital. When the world around you is increasingly dysfunctional and the people are scattering to the winds, your ability to create something functional and unifying has a far greater impact. To understand how a new growth of social capital can take root amid decay, learn the lesson of the seed:

The seed begins with an independent vision of life and value. An acorn contains within itself the genetic vision that animates and becomes the adult tree and all its metabolic and immune processes. All cooperation within the body of the organism is organized around that vision, and the same is true of any functional social body. The early Christians lived their lives fully in reference to the messianic kingdom of Jesus instead of the pagan empire of Rome. The Puritan settlers in the New World embarked on ships to build the true and real Jerusalem away from the corruption they perceived in England. The Mormons created a new society on the American continent based on their mission of becoming planetary gods. The foundational vision implies encouragement of the behaviors that serve it and exclusion of those that undermine it.

The vision of growth contained in the seed admits no fundamental compromise with the world around it. It may have to contort into appropriate shapes, make use of local materials, find unique niches to fill, and accept whatever level of success its environment affords it. But its purpose is to fully realize its own genetic logic, not become recuperated into rival patterns of life. It will grow according to its own proper form, or not at all. Christians, Puritans, and Mormons were all known for being so morally inflexible and dedicated to the absolute purity of their faith that they accepted martyrdom and exile rather than worldly compromise. Whatever seed of a social body you build or join must have this uncompromising nature, or it will not achieve a new destiny.

As an organism operating on its own pattern of life, your new social body cannot act as a mere movement within the existing social body around you. An organism already in the spiral of fundamental decay cannot be salvaged from within, although some of its matter may pass along to what replaces it. The new pattern of life must have its own internal processes of reproduction, mobilizing resources and effort, constraining and encouraging behavior according to sanctioned ideals, and purposeful organization.

The Puritan leader John Winthrop prepared to lead the Massachusetts Bay Colony with a sermon titled “A Model of Christian Charity.” In it, he laid out in minute detail how the colonists would treat each other’s needs, conduct their work, manage resources, and relate to one another. This set them up with their own reference point of behavior distinct from the English society they came from. Any new social body has to develop its own extensive body of customs and conduct that aligns the life of its members with its fundamental vision.

However worthy your ideals and goals, they will remain useless if all the people around are mentally broken, physically decrepit, and unable to even carry out basic functions like reproduction. Modernity tends to resemble something like a nutrient-stripping monoculture crop: it homogenizes cultures, disciplines populations into collective infertility, and extracts the benefits of high IQ, cooperative norms, and other human capital without ever regenerating it. To grow, the little seed must pull material from the surrounding decay into its own superior pattern of life. For your social body, this means people. Not all of them will fit, and some will even bring corruption, but this integration is necessary for growth.

I saw this process play out repeatedly in the context of the little church. One friend had undergone personal struggles over the years he had been involved. But through his deep immersion in the community, he had taken on increasing responsibilities within it. He became a valuable source of advice and friendship to people within the community. He even helped to lead worship, assisting the clergy in carrying out the rituals and public teaching of the lengthy Byzantine liturgies. The Christian ideals of the community did not remain abstract concepts or purely theoretical teachings for him. Instead, they became ever more intense and real to the point of transforming his life. 

Those in the community had judged their leap of faith well, invested in their bonds, and reciprocated each others’ goodwill. Any social body that accepts an outsider is taking a chance that the new person can integrate into the bonds it has established and make them stronger. A truly compelling form of life often brings people in under the power of sheer attraction, drawing in outsiders through its obvious beauty and worth. This makes it even more important that the social body rigorously enforces its own norms on those who enter, reforming or rejecting behaviors that could threaten to undermine it. To transform strangers into valued kin and highly functional members of your social body, parasitism must be ruthlessly punished and excluded.

Parasitical strategies against your social body can take many forms. Sometimes, people attempt to gain social benefits from association without ever committing anything useful, or by lying about their contributions like Ananias and Sapphira did to the Apostle Peter. Sometimes, hostile outsiders exploit the internal trust and goodwill of a community for their own goals, as the poverty activists did when establishing their encampments. If a competing faction recognizes the personal functionality, high trust, useful infrastructure, and valuable resources of your own social body, it may target them for expropriation, taking control of your project for its own use. If that competitor is sufficiently powerful, it may try and simply snuff your community out through direct persecution.

A functional social body must have ways of evading and defending against all such attacks. The Christian virtues of poverty and non-worldliness had a strategic value in this context: by being relatively poor and powerless, as well as explicitly disowning political revolution, there was simply less obvious wealth to expropriate and less reason to suspect treason. The Mormons and Puritans took their congregations into the wilderness where they couldn’t be as easily persecuted. Your social projects will likewise need an appropriate set of defensive mechanisms against extractive social strategies.

Sometimes, the temptation to defect from your fundamental vision can even come from your own internal success. If your social body is disproportionately functional, it becomes tempting to exploit various kinds of arbitrage schemes against the world around you. Arbitrage projects of this sort differ from a simple trade deal that supplements the core functions of the community. Think of the Amish selling furniture to outsiders: it may be useful to them on the margin, but the whole thing could collapse and the Amish would be fine. 

Making arbitrage between your functionality and the decay of the surrounding system the fundamental activity of your body, on the other hand, aligns your incentives with the surrounding death spiral and not with the new pattern of life. If your social body of competent people ends up just becoming a way to find each other cushy jobs, all you’ve done is become disproportionately good at getting paid by the system around you. This relationship is symbiotic and even parasitic. You have now made yourself dependent on the old system specifically in its degraded, broken, and contradictory form.

Keeping loyal to your own fundamental vision, and developing the germs of behavior and reciprocation it contains into a cohesive social body, is an arduous task. But it is also a bet that you are better at identifying what is best in life than the stories you were told by the dying social bodies around you. The point of this defection is not to be original for its own sake. A redwood tree is no less strong and healthy for being in a forest of other redwoods—in fact, it is better off for it.

The real divide is between life and death, which is to say between growth and dissolution. You will have to abandon the dying social forms to remain loyal to the living ones you pursue. But with a social body serving that vision and operating on the right methods, you will be able to extend a hand to those left behind.

In 1993, Mann went to Angola to seek fortune in the oil industry with his friend Tony Buckingham. Within months of their arrival, the oil-producing city of Soyo was captured by anti-government rebels. It seemed like their oil venture was doomed—until, as Mann tells the story, he proposed a solution: reconquer Soyo. Mann and Buckingham called upon South African contacts, most of whom had backgrounds in the South African Defence Force and the shadowy Civil Cooperation Bureau (CCB), an apartheid-era counterinsurgency unit. One of these contacts, Eeben Barlow, was a former South African military officer who had seized the opportunity of apartheid’s collapse to recruit compatriots into a private military company (PMC) called Executive Outcomes (EO).

Together, they secured Angolan government contracts for EO to reconquer Soyo, and eventually help the government win the civil war. Their success in achieving an Angolan victory put Mann and his friends on the map. Soon, governments across Africa and elsewhere were knocking on their doors.

EO soldiers have since taken part in conflicts across the continent, and Mann has gone on to many more adventures. In 1997, his own PMC, Sandline International, was involved in the controversial Sandline affair in Papua New Guinea. In 2004, Mann was arrested for organizing a failed coup in Equatorial Guinea, and spent the next five and a half years in some of Africa’s most notorious prisons. He was released in 2009 after a pardon. His memoir, Cry Havoc, was published in 2011.

Today, Mann continues his work in the world of private military ventures, including with STTEP International, a PMC that has fought the Boko Haram insurgency in Nigeria. Known internationally as a mercenary, in conversation Mann is polished and confident in his positions. We were curious to learn more about what it means to get involved in war and statecraft as a non-state actor, the unconventional opportunities he has found, and how he thinks about his work. He sat down with Palladium to explain.

A soldier fights for king and country. Or in some cases, for freedom and democracy. A mercenary, on the other hand, puts his life on the line for cash in countries not his own. Who ends up in this line of work and why?

Who ends up in the line of work? Ex-soldiers. And funnily enough, I get asked by a lot of kids on social media, “How can I become a mercenary without being a soldier first?” You can’t. Don’t try. Become a soldier. And then, if you want to, you can go into the PMC world. It’s the PMC world they want to get into, not mercenary work.

There is a long and, I think, very boring debate that one can have about the meaning of the word “mercenary.” You can be a mercenary doctor: you’re a doctor, but you’re more interested in the money than you are in curing patients. So a soldier is someone who fights in wars, or is ready to fight, or is in uniform, and the mercenary soldier is a soldier who’s doing it purely for money.

But now it does get very torturous. For example, if I joined the British army today, am I joining it because I wish to fight for democracy? No, I’m not. Nobody in the British Army that I ever met was doing it for queen and country. They’re doing it because they see it as an exciting lifestyle and the money is okay. Sometimes, it’s the best job they can get. But the motivation is, at least in part, financial. It is unlikely, really, to be patriotic. That doesn’t mean to say that we’re not patriotic. But that is not the prime motivation.

Is glory a motivator?

I looked it up once in Shakespeare, this whole business of soldiers and money. He referred to it as “bubble reputation in the cannon’s mouth.” What they were seeking was this moment of glory.

You know, I think this is a personal thing. I’ve never been interested in glory, not at all. I’m a British guy, and I’d joined the British Army. I wanted to be an officer in the Scots Guards, which is one of the King’s own guards, and in the SAS, which is the UK’s special forces. The rough American equivalent is Delta Force. The SAS and Delta are very close.

But we also have Gurkhas in the British army—men from Nepal who volunteer to join. They come and serve with the British army, which they do incredibly well. Now, are they mercenaries? I don’t think so. Most people don’t think so. And if you said that to one of them, he probably wouldn’t be very friendly; they have these kukris, these unique knives, and you don’t want to upset them too much.

I think another very interesting example is that of Oman: specifically, Operation Storm and the war in the 1970s. It was an insurgency coming through Yemen, a serious attempt to overthrow the ruler of Oman.

Nominally communist insurgents, right?

Nominally. The original ruler of Oman was not nominally, but actually a tyrant. Then he was replaced. It’s known as the British Foreign Office’s last coup d’etat. He was replaced by his son, who was much more reasonable. And then a long, hard-fought campaign was conducted against the insurgents. I was around at that time, and I very nearly did go to Oman.

Now, as a young officer in the British army, I could have been attending that conflict in three different ways. One, I could have been a British officer on secondment—an officer in Oman’s armed forces, but still a British officer. Route two: I leave the British army, and go to the Sultan’s armed forces as a contracting officer.

And route three, which actually happened: the SAS was secretly deployed in Oman to fight that engagement. In any one of those three routes, I could have found myself in exactly the same firefight. But is any one of those a mercenary? A lot of people will say that the second one, the contracting officer, is a mercenary. But really, he is contracted with the Sultan’s armed forces, the national military. And he’s just doing the same job as anybody else who is on secondment.

So the thing about the expression “mercenary” is that it’s a bit like calling a woman a whore. You know, does she sleep around? Or is she a prostitute? You know, there are many different ways to whore.

What matters is that if there is a conflict, how do the people engaged in that conflict actually behave—are atrocities being committed, or is it being conducted in a proper way? Now, a lot of civilians will just say “War is such a ghastly thing, how can you possibly start discussing whether a war can be conducted in a proper way?”

In fact, it certainly should be conducted in a proper way. Troops should not open fire on civilians, they should not torture prisoners of war, and so on. So although it may sound illogical, there are rules of war. And that’s been generally accepted for a very long time.

Now, if we go to the rights and wrongs of privatized warfare, there is a huge amount of privatization in war. There always has been. I mean, there were privateers. America had privateers too—very successful ones in the war of 1812, for example. And when the Royal Navy set sail to fight the Germans in the Second World War, there were lots of civilians on the warships; the maintenance crews stayed on the ships to work while the ships went into battle. This is privatized war.

You can get into a real muddle, I think, arguing about this. I would say that it’s inevitable that governments are going to hire private people to do some of the work in times of war or in peacetime military matters. It may involve logistical, security, or technical support. Are they mercenaries? If you want to sell your newspaper by using the word mercenary, then okay, fine. But what do you actually mean?

In fact, according to the African convention on mercenaries [the 1977 Organization of African Unity Convention for the Elimination of Mercenarism in Africa], I don’t think I’ve ever been one. They were actually planning to hang them. This was a convention of all the African countries in the early 1970s, and they really wanted to purge the mercenaries. They had just had the Biafran War and the Congo Civil War, where there had been some really nasty stuff going on, including some of the kinds of mercenaries who give mercenaries a bad name. So they really wanted to get rid of them.

Because they were planning to hang them, they had to define their terms very carefully. And those terms actually would allow me to say that I’ve never been a mercenary—even though I’m tarred today, over every bloody website you can imagine, as a mercenary. I don’t want to sound blasé, but I’ve sort of just gotten over that. If you want to call me a mercenary, call me a mercenary. But then I don’t really think you know what you’re talking about because you don’t actually know what I’ve done or tried to do.

How do you define yourself and what you do?

Well, what I’ve done, and what I do are not necessarily the same things. What I’ve done is, I was a general in the Angolan army for a short while when there was a war. We fought it and we won. That was for the recognized government of Angola, and I was enrolled in their armed forces. I’m quite proud of what we did. And I’m very proud of the guys that we did it with, both Angolan and South African.

In Sierra Leone, it was very similar. The RUF [Revolutionary United Front] were the masters of atrocities. If you’ve seen the movie Blood Diamond, you know that they used to go around chopping people’s arms off. They used to bet on whether a woman’s fetus was male or female and open her up to have a look. They were pretty easy to fight against, quite honestly. But again, we were part of the properly formed armed forces of Sierra Leone. So that technically is not a mercenary.

And then, I was involved with Papua New Guinea, remotely. But there was no war going on there. So it was more of a sort of civil contract.

The next thing is Equatorial Guinea, my attempt to overthrow the government—where again, no shot was actually fired. And the plan very much was that no shot would be fired. There was certainly no war going on. So again, if you go back to this convention, one of the things that is stipulated is that there has to be a war going on for you to be a mercenary. There has to be a war going on and you have to fight in it. If you’re a transport airplane pilot and you happen to carry a handgun for your personal safety, you’re not a mercenary according to that convention.

I don’t want to hang my hat on that convention; in the event, what happened was everyone approved it and nobody ratified it. Very African, right? Every country approved it at the conference. They all got home and then nobody passed it into law. 

PMCs and Wagner Group

A major difference between PMCs and professional militaries is that the latter are loyal to a particular state and can be ideologically disciplined. A military officer is conditioned into various norms: civilian authority, the chain of command, and so on. It’s not considered likely that the U.S. is going to have a military coup. But with private militaries, such discipline can’t happen easily. So is a PMC politically untrustworthy?

I mean, the short answer is yes. Clearly, I think we need to distinguish between—these are my distinctions—a PMC by the modern definition, which is pretty much what I would call a private security company. They’re in Iraq, they’re in Afghanistan, but what are they actually doing in those places? They’re escorting VIPs, guarding an embassy, escorting an incoming politician who wants to look at the troops. They are not there as soldiers. They may get shot at and then they may shoot back, but they’re not going to be told to go and capture the hill at grid reference XYZ.

Let’s take Aegis or Blackwater, the ones we all have heard about. They can be in a military situation somewhere like Baghdad, but they’re not actually the military. They’re not being told to go and clear streets. They are escorting people around. They’re guarding installations. That’s the kind of thing that they’re doing.

With Executive Outcomes, on the other hand, we went to the Angolan government. We said, “Okay, look, we will help you win your war. We’re going to come and fight. And if that means taking that hill, that’s what we’re going to do. We’re not here for security purposes, we’re here for fighting and winning a war.”

Now, it seems to me that there is a fundamental difference between those two things. The modern kind of PMC—that’s probably got a board of directors with a couple of admirals on it, and might even be on the stock exchange, highly respectable—they operate in a very, very particular way. Not like a mercenary company, not like Executive Outcomes. There is a real difference there. And actually, I don’t think that private mercenary companies are the way to go. I don’t think that’s the best way of doing things.

How does that square with your involvement in Executive Outcomes, Sandline, and the like?

Well, look, if I’m walking along the street, and a guy’s house is on fire, I’m going to help him. He says, “Have you got some men, and some firefighting equipment?” and I say, “Yeah, I have got loads of them, but it’s going to cost you. We’re going to charge you because I’m going to get my men and equipment in here. And we’re firefighters, you’re gonna have to pay us.” But that doesn’t mean that I think that private little firefighting companies are the way to go. I think the municipality should produce a proper firefighting force and it should be them putting the fires out. And in this case, that should be the UN or somebody like it. But if the UN is there, as they were in Angola and in Sierra Leone, and they are absolutely and completely failing to put the fire out, then it’s better that we put it out rather than watch it go on burning.

How has the PMC landscape changed? Are there more Chinese PMCs in Africa today, for example?

I’ve actually been consulted by and had discussions with the Chinese about this. And they are very, very interesting. They’re aware, firstly, that they are very unpopular with a lot of people in Africa. They are seen by Africans as a force for bad, rightly or wrongly. And they’re also very aware, interestingly, that there is a cultural clash on a security level. If you had 100 Chinese army guys, and you said, “Okay, you’re going to secure this mine in the middle of the Congo,” it would be very, very difficult. They don’t know what to do.

Of course, they can put in security. They can keep people out. But going in and winning hearts and minds—or when there’s an incident, following it up with a discussion with the village chief—that’s foreign to them.

They didn’t know how to do it, and they know they don’t. So they’re kind of trying to work that out. And at the same time, you’ve got actual events on the ground, some of which are pretty nasty. But then, you’ve also got Chinese mines that do manage. They hire local companies to handle security.

What people don’t realize is how many Chinese are in Africa not because the government sent them, but because of their own volition. They even buy a local passport. There are many, many Chinese in Zambia who are Zambian citizens. They vote. They pay their taxes.

The other growing security presence in Africa has been Russia. Wagner Group has been working in places like the Congo and competing with the French in Mali. What is the nature of Russian involvement?

The Russian thing is very different because Russia doesn’t have the money and the resources like China does. They don’t chuck around money like the Chinese do. And in Sub-Saharan Africa, Wagner is not like one unit with a clear sort of clear hierarchy or organogram. They’ve got different companies and can pop up in as many guises as they wish. But they will more often than not be paid for by a Russian oligarch in order to secure or win a certain asset from that country. Gold, diamonds, whatever.

As for private military companies in general, if we’re talking about an Executive Outcomes-type warfighting outfit, I would say that it is extremely difficult to do that now. It is highly, highly unlikely. Other than Wagner. They are supposedly doing that in Mali.

The Angolan War and its Interludes

In Angola, you were working for the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) government. This was a messy, multi-pronged proxy war. The MPLA was once the Soviet and Cuban proxy. Now it formed a government also recognized by the West. The National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) was originally the Western proxy, but now it was officially just a rebel group with no supporters. In Cry Havoc you write that, in reality, UNITA still seemed to have quiet collaboration from France, South Africa, and possibly the CIA. Why get into this messy situation?

Don’t forget that war had been going on since the late 1960s. The war had started as a war for the national independence of the Angolan people against Portugal, the colonial power. Then the Portuguese had a coup of their own back home in 1976, so they ran away.

There was a civil war between the different factions that had been fighting to get them out. That civil war then became the Cold War’s fiercest-fought proxy war. And it was going on, and on. It was about to all be sorted out with the Crocker Plan [negotiations were led by Chester Crocker, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs]. Everybody in the country would have an election and the results would be recognized—and were recognized—as free and fair by the United Nations. And then UNITA goes against their word, turns the whole thing upside down, attacks us, and restarts the war.

And I’m thinking: wow, these people. These poor people—10 million in Angola—have now been thrown back into a war that is 30 years old, because a greedy bunch of bastards wants to get into power and they don’t care what they’re going to do to get that. That civil war could have gone on forever because the MPLA had the oil revenue and UNITA was supported by De Beers [which is reported to have dealt with “blood diamonds” sourced in UNITA-controlled mines] and others—the CIA too.

Okay, so if I’m Joe Bloggs, ordinary Angolan, I haven’t got a chance. I’m sitting in this horrendous power play: oil and gas, diamonds, CIA, Russians, you name it. And I, Joe Bloggs, am absolutely screwed. Both me and my family. And by that stage, they’d eaten every wild thing. You could go into huge miles of bush in Angola and there wasn’t a single bird or animal because they’d eaten it all.

Here’s a government. It’s been elected. There was a peace plan. Now, we decide, let’s win this war with them and end it. And that is actually what we managed to do. Obviously, that’s me and a cast of about 30,000 others. I’m not claiming I ended it. But that is what happened.

To help win the war, you visited Moscow to acquire ODABs—a Russian thermobaric bomb—for the Angola effort. This was just a few years after the Soviet fall, in the famously chaotic Moscow of the 1990s. You wrote about being helped by General Karphukin, former head of the KGB’s special forces, Alpha Group. He confided at the time that the government was no longer fully in control of things. Can you tell us a bit more about Moscow during that period?

I mean, it was a very strange time in Moscow. You don’t need me to tell you that because anyone who was there, and anyone who knows about it, will confirm that. I just came up from Angola with this shopping list. I didn’t really understand what was going on. But there were a lot of banking and high finance people in Moscow who were basically trying to buy things cheap. That is the process that led to the oligarchs, or people who basically managed to buy for rubles—play money—things that were real, hard dollar-earning assets. That is how the oligarchs, most of them, came into being. They basically stole extremely valuable assets, on the pretext that they were buying them with rubles.

Now, when I was there, I think the realization had dawned that other people were coming into Russia to do the same thing—foreigners, that is. There was a sense that they were being raped. And on the one hand, you had people who were all in favor of being raped, because they just wanted the money. But on the other hand, you had a real resistance building. Around 1993 or ’94, something like twenty Western bankers were murdered in Moscow. I mean, it was really not a good place to be. And it wasn’t safe, because the gloves were off. It was a sort of semi-anarchy, I think, whereby certain Russian agencies were on a mission to stop things. But as mavericks—I mean, I don’t think they’d been told to do this by anybody. They had decided whether this was going to happen, or this was not going to happen. And they were making sure of that, sometimes by recourse to violence. So this stuff was sort of going on.

We were there for several months, so we started to pick up the vibe. And it became really quite frightening. Then, when I met the general, he said, “Well, you know, you’re right to be frightened, because all sorts of shit is going on here. And foreign agencies are here. And they are operating in a way that is not appropriate in a foreign country. They’re taking the law into their own hands.” If you remember, at this time there were all these nuclear and chemical worries going on in the West, that weapons and capabilities could be going into the wrong hands. Everyone knew that Russia was for sale. And you know, it was a real mess. Very dangerous.

The 1991 coup plotters offered Karpukhin a role in a restored Soviet government too, correct? 

The story goes that Karpukhin was told in the Kremlin to go to the White House [the office of Russia’s Prime Minister in Moscow, formerly known as the House of Soviets] and kill Yeltsin. And a few hours later, he was in the White House. At that time, if you remember, the White House was surrounded by tanks and troops. He called back to the Kremlin and said, “I’m with Yeltsin now. And if you want him, you’re gonna have to get through me. We’re with him.” And that was really when the old powers were defeated.

Had the ODABs you were acquiring for the Angolan government been misused, your name would have been all over war crimes. From your own investigations, you believe that they were used well. What was your mental calculus at that time?

I really wanted to end the war. Partly because that’s what we’d been hired to do. But also because from a humanitarian point of view, the war needed to be ended, badly. One could see it drifting on and on, as these African wars tend to do. If you look at the DRC today, it is still going through the same sort of wars that’ve been going on for 20 years. Different players, different names, but basically the same sort of nonsense. So I really felt that something dramatic should happen. If there was a way to just say, “Hey guys, this is it. This is over now. It’s won, so stop fighting,” then that risk was worth taking. 

At the same time, I had a very good relationship with the key players in Angola. They were Generals Joao De Matos, who was the head of the Angolan armed forces—who sadly is dead—and Joaquim David, who was the head of Sonangol, the national oil company. He was very, very important within their political structure. And I just knew those two guys were not going to do something stupid. We talked about it at great length.

The MPLA had taken harsh actions before. Early in the war, MPLA supporters and police killed thousands of pro-UNITA civilians. What made the government unlikely to take these kinds of steps once they’d acquired the bombs, in your view?

Because the Angolan leaders were very well-educated, civilized people. Very sophisticated people. And it was a civil war. They were very conscious of the fact that the people they were fighting with were Angolans.

And I think in any civil war, there’s an awareness that there’s going to be a settling afterward, and they can be very bloody. But also there is the awareness that we’re not fighting an existential, outside enemy. We’re fighting one another. So, in the event, I was right that they would use the bombs properly. It wasn’t investigations that proved that I was right. I was there. I was part of the process. We were still operational.

Did you witness the bombs being dropped?

No. But I mean, we were running the intelligence, or a lot of the intelligence, at the time. So we knew exactly what was going on. Most intelligence was coming from a King Air 200 plane that we kitted out with some sensors. So we knew what was happening pretty well.

In all these operations, it’s a bit unclear what your relationship with the British government is. Can you comment on just how much contact was going on?

No relationship.

Nothing formal or informal? No emails?

We adopted what I like to think of as deliberate naivety. We basically knew if we asked anybody, we’d be told no. And also, you know, Angola was none of their business. The British had no say on Angola, really. Where the British did get involved was when the Americans said, “Wait a minute: Executive Outcomes, what they’ve done in Angola, what they’ve done in Sierra Leone, fine. But this is not how we see the world working. This is not how we want the world to work.” And the British were right there with them on that. And that message was sent to us pretty clearly.

Your Angolan operations ended up including diamond mining. Some of those companies were apparently affiliated with Strategic Resource Corporation, the umbrella organization under which Executive Outcomes operated. You were also unsure about just how dirty some of the big competitors were willing to get in response—especially when an associate of yours died in a strange plane crash. What motivated the diamond venture?

Yes, strange story. My grandfather, believe it or not, was actually a director of Anglo American and De Beers, and a very good friend of Harry Oppenheimer [the South African chairman of De Beers and Anglo American]. We had actually no intention of getting involved with diamond mining until we were asked to by the senior Angolans. And the reason they asked this was because the mining companies—especially De Beers—were applying force majeure to the mining concessions [not fulfilling obligations due to circumstances outside their control, i.e. the war]. So they were not mining. 

And once we got to the end of the fighting, the Angolans were very anxious to try and get people back to work. They had to try and create jobs. And they were very anxious to get the mining industry restarted. So what they did was, they told us, “Look, we could set up a joint venture mining company with you. It will be very profitable because we’re the generals and we’ll make sure the company gets the best concessions. And we can then use you as a stick to beat up the other companies. Then we can say, ‘Hey, these guys are mining, so why can’t you?’”

Is your view that De Beers and the others were holding those concessions because they were opposed to the MPLA government?

Well, De Beers doesn’t want to do mining. They don’t want to produce diamonds. They want the price to go up. And that was why they wanted out. I mean, Angola is a very important country when it comes to diamonds. Ideally, no production at all from Angola would have suited them just fine, even though they were buying diamonds from UNITA. So it was better to continue the war. There were very powerful forces backing UNITA.

In Cry Havoc, you recount a meeting with Anthony Oppenheimer, at that time head of the Central Selling Organisation, the exclusive De Beers distribution channel. You claim that Oppenheimer invited you to a meeting where he offered payment in exchange for Executive Outcomes pulling out of the war. You come away insulted, having declined. As one of your colleagues asks: “What kind of fucking mercenaries are you?” Why refuse?

If you’re a highly-paid footballer, that doesn’t mean you’re going to take a bit more money and lose the match on purpose, does it? Quite a few footballers I can think of would be extremely upset if you asked them.

You would be a bad soldier.

I think you’d be a bad person! I mean, you know, that’s just not the way to behave. We decided what we were going to do for very good reasons, and not simply just making money. You know, the MPLA had won the election, they were the internationally recognized government. UNITA threw the entire country back to war, needlessly. And we felt quite strongly about that. Then, further downstream, by then we were on the payroll. We’d become comrades in arms with the Angolans. And so to have some little guy in London thinking he can just buy us out, I thought it was really insulting to us. And Tony felt the same way. So that’s the end of that meeting.

Attempting a Coup in Equatorial Guinea

Your name became famous thanks to your role in the 2004 coup attempt in Equatorial Guinea against its dictator, President Obiang. You were working with Sir Mark Thatcher, Margaret Thatcher’s son. At that time, Obiang still had a bad relationship with the U.S. You, Thatcher, and your collaborators wanted to pull off a palace coup and bring in Severo Moto, the opposition leader.

Your team got arrested in Zimbabwe and you spent five and a half years in prison. You were in two of the worst in Africa: Zimbabwe’s Chikurubi Prison, and then solitary confinement at Black Beach in Equatorial Guinea. Obiang pardoned you in 2006 and got back on good terms with the U.S. In taking on the Equatorial Guinea job, you were no longer “with the heads”—fighting with the government. What informed the kinds of contracts that you were willing to take?

There’s plenty of room in accepting contracts because you could always say no. And I think the principle of individual responsibility is very valid. As I was saying earlier, what matters is how you do things, not so much the label. It was very, very clearly established at the Nuremberg trials that you are individually responsible for what you do, regardless of your orders and the situation around you. You are responsible.

When we decided to get involved in Angola in the way we did, we thought about it long and hard. Same in Sierra Leone, same in Papua New Guinea, and same in Equatorial Guinea. Now Equatorial Guinea, as you rightly pointed out in rugby terms, was one “against the heads.” And that was the first time I’d tried to do that. Therefore, I knew that there would be a much, much greater obligation, that the morality had to be even clearer. Because now we’re going to try and overthrow a government.

Now, there was no war going on. And we certainly didn’t intend to start one. In fact, one of the options that were available to overthrow that government would have meant possibly fighting and we deliberately avoided that. The idea was no fighting, hopefully no bloodshed.

The first thing that I did when I accepted that we should have a go at this was to establish very clearly how bad of a tyranny it was. Before we really got down the track at all and before we got to the point of no return. You know, I was being told, “Oh, it’s a terrible tyranny. This guy really needs to be replaced.” And I didn’t take their word for it. I said, “Okay, well, great. If that’s what you’re telling me, then fair enough. But I’m now going to investigate that myself.”

Obviously, I couldn’t go to the place myself. So I sent Niek [Servaas Nicolaas “Niek” du Toit, former colonel of South Africa’s 32 Battalion] to Equatorial Guinea on a recce [reconnaissance mission]. An extended recce, as it turned out, because he was there for the best part of a year. And all the information I got back from Niek, which corroborated with other sources, was that we were justified to try and do what we were doing with assisted regime change. And remember, assisted regime changes were very fashionable at the time. The United States had just done one in Iraq.

“Bloodless” is something of a bet on your part. By the nature of these things, there’s always a chance that something gets out of control. In fact, it did get out of control in this case—just earlier than you anticipated.

The real plan was that we would have the new interim president, Severo Moto [Equatorial Guinea’s prominent opposition leader, who now leads a government-in-exile from Spain] land at the same time as us. And by that point, President Obiang would have been under arrest in his palace. There would have been a palace coup. We were to arrive in the early hours of the morning and the president would already have been arrested and would go to prison, and then Severo Moto would go to the broadcasting station and wish everyone good morning.

We only had 70 men. And I mean, we were very good, but we were not going to be able to overthrow a country with police and armed forces numbering in the thousands with 70 men. So I was planning to get off the airplane in a suit and a tie and be shaking hands. Now, that may sound a little bit far-fetched to people. But the point here is, we knew that there was a lot of opposition within the country, and indeed, there was a lot of opposition within the palace.

If you’re going to have a palace coup, it’s going to be done by people very, very close to the president. They’re literally going to walk into his bedroom and say, “Get up, you’re under arrest.” So it’s going to be family members, it’s going to be absolutely close. And Moto, the guy we were bringing in to try and set up democracy, had been the mayor of Malabo, the capital. He had been elected with a big majority, so much so that he’d frightened the president and was shoved into prison. He had then been pardoned at the personal requests of the Pope and King Carlos of Spain. That’s how high they had gone to get him out of that prison.

And my job, more than anything else, was to look after him. As you can imagine, the one thing we don’t want to happen is for someone to come out of the crowd and shoot the new guy. So more than anything else, we came as a close protection team for Severo Moto. And in theory, all we had to do is arrive and escort him to the palace.

Now, yes, you’re right. Things can go wrong. And that’s why we had a whole load of arms and ammunition in the aircraft—or rather, that’s why we were planning to have it. And that’s when we were arrested in Harare, while on our way to collect the arms and ammunition.

But the arms and ammunition, I mean, we had to have it in case things went wrong. To protect ourselves or even to protect Severo Moto. We wouldn’t even test-fire it. You know, even if we’d got it that night in Harare, test firing the weapons in the hold of the aircraft is not a very tactically sound configuration.

Reflections on African Prisons

While in Chikurubi Prison in Zimbabwe, you existed in two worlds. There was the day-to-day survival, but you also had to think about writing to lawyers, convincing your remaining contacts to help you, and negotiating with the local power brokers. You even thought about media headlines. What’s it like going from private operative to public figure under these circumstances?

In the Angolan story, the Sierra Leone story, and the Papua New Guinea story, I had been a key player. But nobody knew my name. Other people’s names had been all over the papers in South Africa and the UK about those things, but not mine. And that’s how I wanted it to remain. Even if we were completely successful in Equatorial Guinea, Simon Mann was going to be not on the radar if I could help it.

Obviously, when the shit hit the fan, that’s all out the window. I am right up there, and very public. Of course, what I’m really thinking about is my wife and the kids at home, because when all of that happens, they are going to catch it. It’s going to mean bullying at school, the wife’s going to get stupid comments made to her, and all sorts of shit is going to come out of that. It’s a horrible thing to live with. If you’re going to play these kinds of games, if you’re going to roll the dice in this kind of way, then that’s the risk you’re running. That’s the downside. There’s just no way around it.

What I must tell you is that when I was in prison, I had to be pretty ruthless about my own thinking. I had to look after the people I managed to get in there with me. You know, I had 70 people with me in Zimbabwe, and then 10 or 15 that were up in Equatorial Guinea. And so whatever happened, you know, I had to try and look after them, as best I could. And I mean, it didn’t go that well, but it could have gone a lot worse. But I had to make some really difficult decisions that probably went against my interest and the interest of my family. But I had to make that decision because of the men I was with.

You talk in the book about your personal routine. You kept a physical exercise routine, and you also wrote each night.

Looking after my own head, right? Staying sane was a big deal. Death is final, but going mad will last a long time. Worse than Zimbabwe was the eighteen months in Equatorial Guinea, because that was all in strict solitary confinement.

The really awful thing was, there’s no welfare state in South Africa. There was no support system for the wives and children at all for many of the men with me. And the money that should have come from my organization hadn’t gone through to those people.

And that is where I got really angry with my fellows, my backers. Because they did absolutely nothing to help those people. Which not only should they have done from a moral point of view—but also looking after me, because I was in prison with these guys. And they were coming to me saying, “Simon, you are responsible. You have to look after us and our families.” And you know, prison is a dangerous place. You’ve got to watch out. So, I was put into an impossible position by the people who should have been backing me.

How I dealt with those men in that place was the hardest test of leadership I would ever want to face. I must have done okay because I wasn’t killed. Now we are all friends.

How else did your time at Black Beach differ from Chikurubi? And how did you stay sane in solitary confinement?

In Zimbabwe, some days 20 people were dying a day. That’s a lot. The average was probably about 10 a day. So obviously, that’s horrendous. I wasn’t going to die, because I was too valuable. They were going to keep me alive because they could make their money. And I knew I wasn’t going to die. But just to be in a place where that’s happening is very unpleasant.

I built a flight simulator out of bits of paper. And that was very useful. But really and truly, the thing that made all the difference for me in Equatorial Guinea was that I could write. And I wrote these books, which are like adventure books, about a girl hero. And when I told my two boys—they’re older boys—about this, they said, “Well, Dad, that’s absolutely pointless, because she’s just you in a skirt.” I said, “What’s wrong with that!?” Any self-respecting shrink would make such hay out of that. “Oh, so you wrote a book in the first person and you were a girl?” Well, you know, you’ve got to find a girl somewhere!

Writing, and trying to write well, takes you into a completely different world in your head. And that was fantastic. The girl is called Cass—that’s her name, Cassandra. And so, at one point just shortly after I got out of prison, my wife Amanda said, “So, I suppose you are in love with this girl Cass now, are you?” And I said, “No, I’m not. I’m not even sure if I actually even like her. But I think she actually saved me. She saved my mind.”

How to Build a Private Army

When developing Executive Outcomes, your organization favored South African Defence Force veterans and a lot of former CCB people. The organization is racially mixed—when you look at available photos of EO, you see white and black soldiers together. That’s counterintuitive, given the apartheid connection. How did EO integrate its fighters into a cohesive force?

Well, there’s a very simple answer to that, which is that the black soldiers in Executive Outcomes were all ex-SADF. There was an organization called 32 Battalion. Very famous. They’re also known as Buffalo Battalion because their camp was called Buffalo Camp. And these were people who had been recruited by the South Africans to fight the Angolans, mostly. And they were very often of the Ovambo tribe. And so for those people, it was a very natural state of affairs that the officers they had would be the officers, and they were the men. That was normal for them. 32 Battalion was highly regarded during the South African frontier wars era.

It seemed like Executive Outcomes really put a high value on maintaining this distinct core of South African fighters. What was the thinking with this kind of South African operation? 

We didn’t need to take other people. We didn’t take British people! I mean, I got flack from some of my old comrades-in-arms, who said, “Hey Simon, what the hell’s going on here? You guys have this amazing thing, and you’ve made all this money. You didn’t ask us?” I said, “Well, no, I didn’t need you.” Because the South Africans were much better and much cheaper. They know Africa, they know the climate, and they know the health issues. And they were pretty desperate, because it was a desperate time in South Africa.

And, you know, the thing with any kind of force is that, obviously, morale is an issue. And cultural cohesion is required. Now, if everyone comes from the same military background, the same army, then they all understand one another perfectly. And in fact, in Executive Outcomes, the recruits had to actually—when they signed up to say that they were joining Executive Outcomes—they had to sign up and agree that they would abide by the rules, traditions, and customs of the SADF. And if a corporal told them to get their hair cut, they had to go and get their hair cut. They couldn’t say “I’m a civilian now, you can’t tell me what to do.” No, no, you don’t understand, we will tell you what to do. This is the old way.

Was Afrikaans the operating language?

Very much so. I think it’s often the case with old soldiers that they like it. They actually like the life before, and they want it to go on. At the time, because the ANC was taking power in South Africa, the whole society was very wobbly, right? For example, SADF officers’ pensions were being torn up by the ANC. They were saying “Well, we’re not going to pay you your life pension out when you were the guys that were assassinating us.” So pensions were being torn up. And that applied to the 32 Battalion people as well, the black SADF guys.

It seems easy to roleplay military culture and dress. In your book you described a scene in Sierra Leone where you observed the following at the presidential HQ: “Paraphernalia copied from a Hollywood Banana Republic military dictator…aping a Western cultural stereotype of a corrupt and violent African plutocracy.” You can even picture the guys in aviators and fatigues. What’s going on here?

I can tell you the story. So if we go back to the 1950s, okay, a lot of things in civilian life copied the military. The military was seen as the technological leader, and almost a fashion leader. Now, I know for a fact that about 10 years ago or something, there was a movie where the guys were U.S. special forces, and they had really nice uniforms. So the actual special forces got ahold of the movie and said, “Where did you get those uniforms for the guys from?” And they then copied them! So this is not unique to Africa.  

One of my jokes is that when I travel around these sorts of airports that I tend to end up in, like Dubai or Addis Ababa, these places where people are moving around, I’m very amused because I can pick out an oil and gas worker who’s really trying to look like a private military contractor. There is a kind of style in which the PMC guys dress. So you can get an oil man trying to dress as a military contractor. And then I recognize the actual military contractors, who are now busy trying to look like hedge fund investment analysts. So everyone’s trying to do their own thing.

I think it’s just human nature, and it’s fun. But Strasser, the president who that scene in Sierra Leone was about, was really something else. He was a very young guy, and was surrounded by his mates. The Minister of Education would be another young officer. And they were wild. They were having a ball. They would be out all night, pissing it up, smoking dagga [marijuana]. 

When we went into Strasser’s office, the smell of marijuana was strong. And then on his desk is this sort of beautifully carved, very African, wooden crucifix of Christ. About eight inches, nine inches high. A really nice one. But then hanging off it, are these little colored bird feathers—Juju. Black magic. Uh oh, here we go. Because God, juju, and marijuana could end up being a very dangerous cocktail for us white men who had come up here to try and do a deal with this guy.

And actually, Strasser was a great man, it turned out. I mean, he was young and a bit, you know, bombed out of his brain, and all this stuff. But in the end, he turned out to be a really good guy. 

I remember one discussion with him and Tony. Remember, we’d come there as the victors of the War of Angola. We were the people who ended the civil war in Angola. We were Executive Outcomes. And we were wealthy and powerful. And Tony said, “Look, we can help you. But what we need you to do is ABC, and we need you to agree to the following terms.” And Strasser sits there sort of leaning back with his shades and says, “But Tony, if I agree to this, then Britain has just re-colonized Sierra Leone!” And I remember thinking, good for you, mate. Because he was dead on!

The Spirit of the British Upper Class

One figure that crops up in your account is Nicholas Elliot, the MI6 agent who helped to track the Cambridge Five traitors. Elliot assisted you in Russia. What kind of impression did he make on you?

I adored him. As a person, as a human being. He became a very, very good friend to me. And I still miss him a lot. Obviously, time has moved on. But he did die young, very suddenly and in the middle of all of this, and Tony and I really missed him. Because he had abilities, knowledge, networks, and experience that we came nowhere close to. So he was so valuable. And just an incredibly funny and amusing guy. In the end, the Angolan security services got really worried as to how we’d managed to do what we’d done. And in the end, it all came down to my father having been at Eton! This Old Boy thing. Well, you know, you must know my uncle so-and-so, he’ll sort it out!

Did Elliot embody the virtues of the institutions he was formed in? Or did he have a unique personality, skill set, or intelligence? Was he made or born into his potential?

Well, I mean, he was a great man. And his father was a great man. His father was the very famous headmaster of Eton and also the head of the British Mountaineering Association—or whatever it was called then—that sent Mallory to Everest.

Did you come to any conclusions about MI6 or British intelligence more broadly, based on Elliot being part of that world?

[Laughs] Well, he told me lots of things about it that made my hair stand on end! He had a list of all the things which MI6 had failed to predict. Like the fall of the Shah, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the invasion of the Falkland Islands, and the invasion of Kuwait. And I think he had a couple of others. So he said, “It does make you wonder what we’re really there for, doesn’t it!?” 

That is pure Nicholas, because it’s absolutely spot on. It’s deadly humor. And he’s right. At the same time, he knows perfectly well what MI6 is there for and why you have to have one.

Your background in Sandhurst, the Scots Guards, and the SAS. You’re also an Old Etonian. Has your work been shaped by the British military culture that you were formed in? And is that older ethos still effective in shaping people?

In one sense, it definitely was. I mean to a lot of people, somebody who’s been to Eton, and then Sandhurst and the Scots Guards is of another age. Of course, that’s not true. Because you could perfectly easily be doing that today. In fact, my youngest son wants to go to Sandhurst and join the Scots Guards. And my eldest son did go to Sandhurst and joined the Scots Guards. So, to some people’s perception—I mean, I don’t know about the U.S.—but in the UK, to lots of people, if you were a guards officer then you are by definition this rather ridiculous, anachronistic person. But of course, that’s actually complete rubbish. Because they don’t know what they’re talking about. You see what I mean?

If you consider a 25-year-old who went to Eton, and about what they end up doing these days, what comes to mind is a hedge fund manager. The City of London has captured the vitality, or what’s left of it, of the British upper classes. Should we just take the current crop of Etonians, ship them out to Africa, and see what they make of themselves?

[Laughs] No! Well, you’re now asking me questions about the whole of English society. It’s a very, very complicated story. And if you ask 10 people the same questions, you get 10 completely different answers. Because obviously, societies change. I mean, it’s exactly the same in the United States. I’m sure there were preppy kids wandering around when I was at Eton from 1965 to 1970. But you think about 1965 to ’70, the whole Western world was in a social revolution.

You had the student riots in California, you had the hair, you had Woodstock, you had this whole thing going on. So, of course, it’s all changed. I guess you could say that the path I took, in a sense, is arguably a rather old-fashioned one. Because somehow, it’s like The Empire Strikes Back or something. In reality, it absolutely wasn’t like that. It was accidental. We were an oil company and we did what we did. It’s quite easy to become, I don’t know, a sort of lampoon target.

What would you advise someone young and risk-tolerant who doesn’t want to become a banker?

Well, I don’t think they’d ask me! But making something of yourself or not is up to you, isn’t it? Some people are going to make themselves into great artists and other people are going to be great at something else. If you want to be a soldier, then be a soldier. And don’t be hung up by the class aspects of the thing. If you really want to be a soldier, the best thing you could possibly do would be to get yourself into the Special Air Service as quickly as possible.

Now if you want to be a general, that’s something completely different. That’s not what you want to do. Because it’s a complicated business. 

And I wouldn’t recommend anybody try to do what we did. I mean, that could be fatal.

It seems like history gives us these periods when a lot of people all seem to do interesting things. Today, it seems like there is a kind of pessimism everywhere, and in the UK especially. It seems to be declining. Is pessimism warranted?

I don’t think it’s true. I think that the real stuff is going on all the time. And it’s just a question of which lens you use. I very, very clearly remember Tony Buckingham—my friend and one of the big players in this whole story—saying to me, “God, Simon, it would be so much better if we could have been Elizabethans. We could have been pirates! We could have sailed the seven seas, we could have been catching Spanish treasure ships!”

And I said, “No, no, no, Tony, don’t think that way.” Because the opportunities are out there. Obviously, it’s not going to be a sailing boat and a Spanish treasure ship. But it’s going to be something. It’s there. We have to be ready to grab it when it comes. I think the opportunities are always there.

This interview appears in print in PALLADIUM 08: Scientific Authority. To receive your copy of Palladium’s quarterly print edition, subscribe here.

Surrounded by the English wilderness in far-west Shropshire, a young Martin Rees discovered the cosmos. Born in 1942, he began his education in a school run by his parents in a repurposed Victorian mansion. Today, he recalls this home sparking childhood questions—like why high tides vary on the coast—that would only be answered when he began his scientific studies. After a few years at a boarding school away from home, he entered Cambridge University, where he discovered astrophysics and has since spent much of his career. From 2004 until 2012, he was Master of Trinity College.

Rees was fortunate to enter his field at a time when it was particularly creative and generative. Radio astronomy from Cambridge and elsewhere was generating evidence for the Big Bang theory of the universe’s origins. Relativistic astrophysics was delivering exciting new models of black holes and quasars. Rees’s work has helped to disprove Steady State theory, update models on how galaxies are formed, and enabled us to better understand the earliest conditions of the universe. Throughout his decades-long career, he has interacted and collaborated with luminaries like Joseph Rotblat, Freeman Dyson, and Sir Roger Penrose.

In addition to his research, Rees has dedicated much of his career to bringing science to the general public. He has written numerous books, lectured around the world, and advised governments and other institutions. He was appointed Astronomer Royal in 1995 and became a Life Peer in the House of Lords in 2005. From 2005 to 2010, he served as President of the Royal Society, first established in 1660 and today the oldest scientific academy in continuous existence. 

Rees’s latest book is If Science Is to Save Us. Looking to predecessors like the Great Exhibition and the Pugwash Conferences, he invokes an optimistic vision of science as a force that can improve society. But with increasing global turmoil, and with institutional obstacles holding back rising generations of scientists, realizing that vision is by no means guaranteed.

The Early Years of Science

In your new book, you take us through some of the early history of science. How would you characterize this earlier period when science is getting established as a discipline?

Lord Martin Rees: Well, back at that time, science wasn’t a profession. The Royal Society, until the mid-nineteenth century, was a place where most of the scientists were amateurs, though some of the leading ones were real polymaths. What they had in common was that they were wealthy enough to be independent, and they were lucky enough to have an education. 

And so it was only after the mid-nineteenth century that science became professionalized as an academic subject. If I look at Cambridge University, the idea of the undergraduate major in science as a subject to study—in American jargon—didn’t take root until the middle of the nineteenth century. 

These days, everyone thinks in terms of scientific ideas being the impetus for new technology. But although that may be to some extent true now—there’s a symbiosis between them, anyway—in the earlier days there was very little connection. With the invention of the steam engine, and of all the technology involved in its construction, they wouldn’t have thought they were using science at all. 

So technology, even sophisticated technology like shipbuilding, was in no sense based on science in the way that we would say that modern technology is based on science.

You mention Charles Babbage in your book, who in the nineteenth century attacked the Royal Society. It sounds like he thought math and physics had become stagnant. What was his critique? And as a former president of the Royal Society, do you think there was anything in it?

He was thinking about the UK. And it was certainly true in the UK that, throughout the eighteenth century, even the leading universities were in a pretty low state—no intellectual standards and so on. So I think the universities did, as he implies, sink into a torpor in the eighteenth century and in the early nineteenth century. 

And indeed, he was quite right about the Royal Society. And what happened in the nineteenth century in England was that an interest in science and technology was revived in a big way. One thinks of the Great Exhibition of 1851, which was an amazing show of all these technological achievements. And the first half of the nineteenth century saw the foundation of specialized societies: the Linnean Society, the Geological Society, the Royal Astronomical Society, and many others. And also the British Association for the Advancement of Science, which had a sort of outreach program. 

And I think those were founded mainly because there was growing public interest in science, but also because the Royal Society itself was not being at all effective.

What were the communities behind these generative, productive periods of science like?

It was all fairly amateurish. In Germany, the foundation of research universities is attributed to Alexander von Humboldt in about 1820. Thereafter, the Germans had the idea of a university where you would teach students, but also have people doing research. And of course, as I say in the book, that’s the model which we now have in the UK and in the US. And now, China has taken it up too. 

But in mainland Europe—indeed, even in Germany—they don’t quite have that model now. Most of the best research in Germany is done at Max Planck Institutes, which are severed from universities. And in France, it’s done by people supported by the CNRS [the French National Centre for Scientific Research] and civil servants. So Germany developed an institutional structure for science that was independent of academies in the 1820s. And other countries, including the UK, took longer to develop the sort of scientific components based in universities. 

Incidentally, I would recommend, if you don’t know it, The Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes, which is a fascinating book about science and culture in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. But the point here is that there was a sort of culture of science linked to the culture of the humanities. I mean, Shelley and Wordsworth were interested in science.

The Great Exhibition is part of this interesting turn that happened in the middle of the nineteenth century, the idea that science needed to have more public engagement. Until that point, as you’ve said, these were very restricted groups. The key thing was how peers within the scientific community received someone’s work. Why did science take this turn toward public recognition?

Well, I think it was a response to wider public interest. The early people who took an interest in science were limited to a small elite, educationally and financially. Whereas in the nineteenth century, there were lots of local organizations for following science and a far wider interest in it. And that’s what the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BA) met through its meetings around the country. They had 3000 people on a beach listening to a lecture by Adam Sedgwick, the geologist, in 1837. 

And there were bodies like that because science was becoming more advanced and more technical. So there was a motive, from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, to actually have organized teaching in those subjects. And as I said, science only became part of the Cambridge University curriculum for undergraduates in the mid-nineteenth century—mathematics had done so already. And of course, this led to career openings for people to teach at these places, and also to do research. 

The Challenges of Scientific Authority

You’re an admirer of the physicist Joseph Rotblat. You even met him later in his life. He left the Manhattan Project on moral grounds, and later ran the Pugwash conferences to promote nuclear disarmament. He also got political operators like Kissinger on board with his projects. 

Rotblat seems to have been quite successful in his initiatives. We could contrast him with Leo Szilard, another physicist who was working on the same issues but got sidelined by politicians. What made Rotblat so effective as a scientific advisor in this period?

For the first half of the century, Germany and Britain were the major creators of science, with most of the origins of quantum theory, Einstein, and all that coming from Europe. America only became a leading scientific power after World War II. And that’s partly stimulated by the war itself, of course.

In World War II, even more than in World War I, it was realized that science was crucial for weaponry. And of course, the most conspicuous development was the atomic bomb, which was an extraordinary collective achievement of science. And then, of course, we had the space program. Politicians were aware of the dependence of our civilization on having good scientists around. And especially after World War II, there was great optimism about science, because science had clearly been crucial in the war’s outcome.

I think one shouldn’t overemphasize the role of Rotblat and Pugwash, and all that. But the reason I wrote about them in my book was that the first group of scientists to confront the real ethical dilemmas of science in a big way were, of course, the nuclear physicists who built the bomb. And I got to know several of them in their later years, in the 1970s, including people like Hans Bethe. Many of them were exceptional scientists, but also people of some ethical sensibility. 

And they’re the people who went back to civilian life. But they had an obligation to try and optimally harness the forces they’d helped unleash during the war. And the Pugwash conference group founded by Rotblat and Bertrand Russell was an example of this.

The other feature of science, of course, is that it’s always been international. Mendeleev had the periodic table in the late nineteenth century, and there was lots of contact with the Germans in chemistry. So even when the world was divided during the Cold War, scientists wanted to keep in contact. And that was the motive for channels like the Pugwash conferences, where scientists from both sides who trusted and respected each other could get together. And bodies like that were, in fact, especially important when there were few other channels between the two sides. I think they were less important from the 1970s on, because there were a lot more channels after that. 

The nuclear issue was not the only important one. But I think the Pugwash movement was important in getting scientists on both sides together and offering a back channel to governments rather than direct channels. And from what I’ve read about the history, which was before my time, they had a role in easing the path to the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and all that.

What was the value of Pugwash to the political side? It doesn’t seem like they only found them to be useful messengers. Rotblat and his allies actually got important people on board with trying to curtail the nuclear threat. Why was the group so effective at that?

Well, they got politicians involved after the politicians’ retirement. There was this group, the Gang of Four, that was trying to move towards zero nuclear weapons. That was Henry Kissinger, George Schultz, William Perry, and Sam Nunn. And there were other groups like that. And of course, Robert McNamara, who was a great hawk at the time of Vietnam, spoke in his later years about the excessive risks that were taken during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. And he said that the U.S. was lucky as well as wise that it didn’t lead to a nuclear confrontation. 

So many of these people who’d been at the center of these decisions realized in their later years just how lucky they’d been, and how great the danger that they managed to avoid was. And therefore, they were prepared to engage with these groups at that time.

It’s hard to strike the balance in a situation where the science is uncertain but the state has to take action. You mentioned that when there is scientific controversy in a political question, it may be better for a scientist not to invoke their scientific authority. They should engage that point in public as a citizen. What is the difference between engaging as a citizen versus as a scientist?

Geoengineering is an interesting example. That’s an issue where everyone accepts it’s a sort of Plan B if climate change does turn out to be drastic and we don’t cut CO2 emissions. In fact, there was a campaign in Canada that was against any experiments that were at all relevant to geoengineering, whereas other people said, “well, let’s at least do some experiments so that we know it would work if we need it.” So this is a genuine controversial debate, and I think it’s quite right that it should be.

One point which I make is that many of these decisions which benefit future generations are, of course, doing that at the expense of money we could spend straightaway. So there’s a tension between instant gratification and doing something which will benefit future generations. Of course, the issue here is that politicians have a focus on doing what’s right for their own constituents before the next election. And so they’re not the kind of people who will think very long-term unless their voters are happy with it. That’s why in my book, I quoted the senior European politician Jean-Claude Juncker: “We know what to do, but we don’t know how to get re-elected when we’ve done it.” And he was thinking of the measures you need to stem serious climate change in the far future.

The other point is that because politicians normally have a difficult agenda of short-term urgent problems—especially at the moment—they won’t take very much notice of the scientific adviser who tells them to worry about these long-term questions. They’ve got urgent things on their mind. And that’s just human psychology. That’s why one thing I noted in my book as being very important to change is public opinion—the opinion of voters. Because if the voters can be made to think long-term and to care about the world their grandchildren will live in, then the politicians will respond. And that’s why I say that we should appreciate all the demonstrations that are happening now in favor of action to prevent climate change. 

I admire what I call the Disparate Quartet of charismatic individuals: Pope Francis, David Attenborough, Bill Gates, and Greta Thunberg—all very different from each other, but they’ve all done a great deal to make the public more aware of climate change. And they’ve affected the willingness to have legislation that favors clean energy. This, I think, is important because they change the opinion of voters, and the voters will then be happy. And then the politicians may make these long-term decisions. So that’s an example where public opinion is important.

Another example is the pollution of the oceans. When there was a bill passed in the UK to prohibit non-reusable plastic drinking straws and the like, that was because of David Attenborough’s programs that showed people the stomachs of fish full of bits of plastic. There’s also a scene [reported by Attenborough] of an albatross who returns to his nest and coughs up lumps of plastic for its brood. And that is an iconic picture, that millions in the UK saw. It became rather like the polar bear on a melting iceberg, you know. And that made a difference. The British politician certainly wouldn’t have used any of his political capital on a regulation like this, had he not realized that lots of people now cared about ocean pollution.

And so I think the lesson there is that if the public cares about something which is long-term, then politicians will respond. That’s why it’s very important to make the public aware. It is also important that scientists should get through to the public. But in many cases—except people like Carl Sagan, who were masters of this—this is best done through intermediaries, like the four charismatic people I mentioned, who aren’t themselves scientists but people who listen to the science.

During the COVID-19 response, we saw how politics engulfed everyone—even those trying to do objective work. There was this battening of the hatches on the part of many scientists. One quote that made some waves was Dr. Fauci saying that “attacks on me are attacks on science.” One side saw scientific authority under assault, the other as cover for a political agenda.

In retrospect, do you think that battening of the hatches was necessary? Or was it a bad move?

Well, let me say first, I think Fauci’s job when Trump was president must have been near impossible. I mean, the hard thing to get through to the public is that, very often, we just don’t know what the right thing is. And the question is, to what extent should we be precautionary in these measures one recommends? And the scientists have to illustrate that to the politicians and leave it to the politicians to decide.

There was a case in the 1980s—I think I mentioned it in my book—about Mad Cow Disease, which was a new kind of prion disease that wasn’t understood at all. And it killed up to 100 people. The government took rather excessive precautions against it, like banning beef on the bone. But the reason that was not irrational was that the Science Advisor, and I knew him at the time, said “Well, we are going to have 100 deaths.” But if the politicians asked whether he could say the chance of a million deaths was less than one percent, he had to honestly answer no. And of course, a one percent chance of a million deaths is more worrying than a definite chance of 100 deaths. And so, given the ignorance at that time, it was right to be overcautious.

And so there are lots of cases like that, when you’ve got to do what is in retrospect an overreaction by preparing against the worst case. So that’s just an example. So I just think that scientists should do their best. And then the politicians have to decide on this, on regulations which may prove to be overly stringent. 

But if you pay your fire insurance on your house, and the house doesn’t burn down, you don’t think it was a waste of money. You just accept that as a possibility. I think the public has to understand that there are cases that are analogous to that.

The nineteenth century kicked off the period when scientists wanted to engage the public. I wonder if we’re seeing the end of that cycle, partially as a result of these current conflicts. I do hear people say things like if people don’t have formal training, then they’re not going to understand how the precautionary principle works, or how statistics work. 

So, the claim goes, maybe it’s better that these things are kept among qualified experts. Those who aren’t qualified should not comment. Is that a change you’ve seen at all?

Well, I would have thought that the fraction of the public that has got some basic feel for science is still too low. But it’s going up, not down. I mean, there is noise caused by fake news. But I would say that with more people going to university and having at least some classes, the number of people who know a bit of science is going up. It’s still too low. And I have to say it’s worse in America; only recently do the majority of Americans believe in evolution. And that’s far worse than in Europe. But I think, in general, the number is going up. 

The other thing is to appreciate and not be bamboozled by statistics. One obvious case is if you have a test for some rare disease, then the false positives may outnumber the actual cases. And that’s a well-known phenomenon, but one has to try and get that over to the public. And it’s not trivial, but it’s not too difficult. So that’s an example of something where one wants the public to actually understand what the uncertainties are.

You’re optimistic, it sounds like.

I think things are improving. And I say in my book that scientists shouldn’t moan too much about ignorance on the part of the public, because it’s gratifying how many people are interested in things like space and astronomy, and all that. Kids love dinosaurs. So, the wonder of science is a separate thing. I think we should be grateful for that.

And I think, also, we should equally bemoan the public’s ignorance of other things. I think it’s just as bad if a low fraction of the public can identify Ukraine or South Korea on a map, or don’t know the basic history of their country. The results of a poll on those would, I suspect, be at least as depressing as when they do polls on scientific knowledge. If you’re going to be an informed citizen, I think you ought to know all those things to have an informed judgment. 

I think the number of political decisions that have a scientific dimension is probably going up. And so the importance of scientific knowledge, relative to geographical knowledge, is probably going up a bit as well. But the public—in a proper democracy where it can actually make informed decisions—needs at least some basic understanding of these things, a background in history and geography, et cetera. I don’t think it’s too much of an aspiration to hope for that. Lifelong learning on the web, and all that, can help with this sort of thing.

The Future of Research

In your book, you point out that published papers today are often judged by what journal they appeared in, rather than their own merit. You also say that the Nobel prizes have an effect where, again, scientific fields are seen as valuable because they’re represented in the Nobel Prize system itself. 

It seems like what you have in both cases is a compounding distortion effect on attention. It becomes harder and harder for an outsider not just to judge actual research, but to even pay attention to the correct things. How serious of a problem is this? 

Well, I’ve been in academia for 40 years now. So I think I realized a sort of randomness in the way these awards go, and the fact that they are in a certain set of fields. They don’t reflect how science is done, because so much is a team effort rather than an individual one. And even when work is done by an individual, it may be someone who is lucky, rather than especially brilliant. So for all those reasons, it’s a mistake to elevate people winning Nobel Prizes as being the great leaders and the great intellects of science, because that’s just not true. And so, what’s rather good is that there’s now a greater variety of awards and ways of recognizing scientists, and in some cases, of recognizing groups.

Going over to journals, this is an aspect of the way that I think that academia is getting a bit sclerotic in the way it operates. It needs to open up a bit. For instance, research is important, and it’s done in universities alongside teaching. But the way research develops may be better with lots of blogs, exchanges, and things like that. And the traditional model—where the only thing that affects your promotion as an academic is publication in good journals—is, I think, a mistake. It’s unfair because many people can make a bigger contribution by outreach, or by having a good blog, and things of that kind, and we ought to recognize that. 

That’ll make academic careers more attractive. Because, being in this world myself, I do worry that becoming an academic is a less attractive career path now than it was when I was young. That’s because there’s more bureaucracy and more audit culture. And also other forces, demographic reasons. Promotion is slower. 

An American example of this is that at the NIH, where the average age when you get your first grant as an investigator is now 43, or something like that. Shirley Tilghman, the former president of Princeton, was on the committee that found this. And she was worried! She contrasted this with when she was young—she’s about my age right now—when she got a PhD, then did a postdoc, and then got a grant and opened up her own lab. People can’t do that now. At that time—we’re talking about the late 1960s—the young outnumbered the old, because there’d been an expansion of higher education. And people also retired, they didn’t stay on after retirement.

This is worrying, really, because I feel that the people who are going to be most deterred by this difficulty of getting fast promotions are just the ones you want to keep in: the people who are enterprising, flexible, and would like to achieve something distinctive in their thirties. It was possible in the past, but is less so now, and so my worry is that they will go into something else. Well, we want some of them to go to start-ups and into other professions, but we want some of them to go into academia. Academia can’t depend just on the nerdish elements and people who are happy to spend most of their lives writing grant applications. 

So I think the health of academia, and of academic culture and research culture, is a bit under threat for these reasons I just mentioned. So there’s got to be some ways of recognizing achievements, other than through those journals. And also a way of perhaps encouraging more independent scientists.

The thing is, people have been studying these problems for a long time. Everyone’s very aware of things like the replication crisis, the grant problem, the problems of peer review, and so on. 

It seems like the institutions have a very hard time adapting even to what we know, or to quite well-established criticisms of the way they work. So how could such a thing actually happen? How could you actually change the momentum? 

Many things that I grumble about most are problems created by academics themselves. So they need to change. There’s some hope. In fact, I’m on a committee on research that was set up by the American National Academies. And I’m one of two Brits on this, as a former member of a National Academy. They’re trying to address this sort of thing. And I think collectively, they could have some influence on academia. So I do have some hope of changing these criteria.

But of course, there is a problem. It’s very easy for people who don’t have real credentials to get a lot of attention via social media, right? There’s got to be trade-offs to make sure that people who do solid work without much publicity get recognition, but at the same time avoid too much bureaucracy. And one related issue is whether pure research, which is clearly important as the basis for future technologies, is still best done in universities. Or should we shift more away from that model—which we in Britain and you in America still have—to a system where there are more standalone institutions? 

The disadvantage is, then you don’t get a direct link between the professors and the students. But you would give people the opportunity for full-time, long-term research projects, which they can’t do now because there are more distractions and more administration than there used to be in academia. And because most grants are given with reviews—you’ve got to do something good every two or three years, you know, and can’t do long-term stuff.

So I think the balance is shifting a bit in favor of long-term institutes, separate from universities and especially in some health topics and in technology—for clean energy and things of that kind, where the social need is a mixture of pure and applied science. For bridging the gap between the university and commercial work. I think there’s a case for more standalone institutes with specially directed targets.

Do you think that the research paper is still a useful unit of research?

Well, I think it’s one option. But you know, someone could do a successful blog. And, of course, someone might do a long-term project and write a book. So I think, the idea that you’ve got to write a certain number of papers in a three-year period, that’s obviously a constraint on your choice of topic. You’ve got to choose a bite-size topic where you know you’d have good results within three years. And that may militate against working on really important long-term projects. 

So I mean, there’s virtue in the research journal and research paper. And in topics like philosophy, it probably has a bigger role. Although even there, I think it is a mistake to sort of focus too much on that compared to blogs and papers in the wider literature.

Could finding more ways to fund independent research be a good idea? What strategies should people have on that front?

Those who currently aspire to academic careers face a nastily competitive and insecure environment, bedeviled by audit culture, where the requirement to meet short-term targets impedes a focus on long-term risky projects. My earlier generation was far luckier. Academia needs at least some of the people with ambition and flexible talent who hope to achieve something by their thirties. 

It’s good, of course, if some of these people create start-ups. Better still if, having made money by their forties, they become “independent scientists” in the mold of the independently-wealthy Darwin and Rayleigh in the nineteenth century, and Edwin Land and James Lovelock in the twentieth. Indeed, we need more such people in order to avoid groupthink.

A related issue is how fastidious we—or universities—should be in accepting donations. This is an issue in the UK. It’s not just cases like the Sacklers [a U.S.-based pharmaceutical dynasty often criticized for their role in the opioid epidemic]. Donations from leading fossil-fuel companies are being declined, as are those from defense contractors and from countries like Saudi Arabia. But I think there are inconsistencies. For instance, those who make billions from “crypto” are surely socially damaging—the typical non-savvy “investors” lose just as those who engage in online betting do. But these “super-rich” are accepted as prime donors to ethically-sensitive organizations like the California-based “Effective Altruism” group.

Lessons From Public Service

From 2005 to 2010, you were president of the Royal Society. You’ve mentioned that, in retrospect, you should have been more “activist” as a president. What would you have done differently?

The Royal Society has a very broad remit: science itself, advice on government policies, and a strong international dimension. In 2005, I was elected to a five-year term as the Society’s President. It’s an honorary post, and therefore can only be part-time for anyone who is neither retired nor independently wealthy. But there were many activities—fundraising, engagement with Fellows, “representational” events, attendance at inter-academy meetings overseas, and so forth—where I felt the Society would have benefited from a full-time President.

I believe that all scientists should, as individuals, be politically engaged. When their own work is concerned they have a special obligation to foster its benign applications and to warn against its downsides.

It’s less clear how academies and learned societies should become advocacy groups for specific policies. Clearly, they should offer assessments of scientific issues and policy options; they should make recommendations within their range of expertise; they should offer views on the curriculum of schools and colleges. And the need and scope of regulations on dangerous pathogens, climate, and so on can best be addressed by inter-academy dialogue. 

But academies should not adopt any collective stance that’s too controversial, either through being overtly party-political, or being ethically dubious in many people’s minds. For instance, should academies advocate the building of nuclear power stations? This is an issue where opinion in many countries is roughly equally split, both among people with genuine expertise, and among those with none. My line was that the Royal Society should not take a collective view on this, though I expressed my personal view in favor of R&D into improved fourth-generation nuclear reactors. And of course, there are other issues where there’s an ethical divide. For instance, the deployment of genetic techniques for human enhancement.

What about issues when there is a strong consensus among experts but some “dissidents” exist? This sharpened up for me in the context of the climate debate. 

Our policy was that a collective Royal Society statement required endorsement by the Society’s Council, which includes the officers plus eighteen elected members. There are around 1000 UK-based members altogether, among whom there will obviously be proponents of “dissident” viewpoints, but these cannot expect to “veto” a statement. On this basis, the Society endorsed the UK’s Climate Change Act, which enshrined the goal of major cuts to CO2 emissions, despite opposition from some “climate deniers” among our members.

Apart from climate policy, another issue that aroused controversy, though fortunately one peripheral to the Society’s main agenda, stemmed from a vocal faction of “New Atheists”—best described, I think, as small-time Bertrand Russells. There was little in their views that he hadn’t expressed more eloquently decades earlier. My line was that the Society should be a secular organization but need not be anti-religious. Of course, we should oppose, as Darwin did, views manifestly in conflict with the evidence, such as creationism. But we should strive for peaceful coexistence with mainstream religions, which number many excellent scientists among their adherents. 

This tolerant view would probably have resonated with Darwin himself, who wrote: “The whole subject is too profound for the human intellect. A dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton. Let each man hope and believe as he can.” If teachers tell young people that they can’t have both God and Darwinism, many will choose to stick with their religion and be lost to science. My own perspective is that if we learn anything from science, it is that even something as basic as an atom is quite hard to understand. 

This should induce skepticism about any claim to have achieved more than a very incomplete and metaphorical insight into any profound aspect of our existence. But this need not prevent us from appreciating the cultural traditions, rituals, and aesthetic accretions of religion, and its emphasis on common humanity in a world where so much divides us.

You also sit in the UK’s House of Lords as a crossbencher. What has your experience been like in this role? Where did it prove an asset, and where was it a hindrance?

In 2005, I became a member of the House of Lords in the category of “people’s peers.” This process involved being nominated, and then, if shortlisted, being interviewed by a panel. It’s important that peers in this category should be “crossbenchers,” with no party affiliation. And, because they don’t take a party whip, they can vote as and when they wish, without obligation to respond to a party’s call. I was an opponent of Brexit, for example—and feel sadly vindicated when I see the mess we’re now in. 

Most new peers enter via a different route: nomination by the Prime Minister or party leaders. Numerous such appointments in recent years have been criticized as rewards for donors, or cronyism: there’s a widespread view that reforms are needed. But membership remains a privilege, even though perhaps less of an honor.

I speak in the Lords on educational and scientific issues, and on some topics I care about—legalization of assisted dying, for instance. But I honestly haven’t been very active except on the select committees and “special inquiries.” I’ve tried to use the Lords, along with other commitments, to raise awareness of a topic that I’d devoted much of the last few years campaigning for: we need to prioritize the prevention of catastrophic risks. These include not just slowly emergent catastrophes like global warming, but those stemming from misuse—by error or by design—of ever-more powerful cyber, AI, and biotechnologies. I also helped set up the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER) in Cambridge.

Are there fields of knowledge today that you feel are not getting sufficient attention, whether from scientists or the public?

As science advances, its frontier with the unknown becomes more extensive. Among the most exciting areas on the current frontier are synthetic biology and robotics. But I think we need to keep a focus on the challenge of properly nourishing the 9 billion people who will be on Earth in 2050. Doing this without encroaching on or despoiling natural habitats will require novel technology: genetically modified crops, artificial meat, and so forth. 

But let me put in a plug for astronomy, the grandest of the environmental sciences. Thanks to improved instruments on the ground and in space, this subject is becoming broader. For instance, we know that most stars are orbited by retinues of planets. There are billions of planets in the Milky Way that could be abodes of life—but are they? 

Astronomy is also a “fundamental” science: understanding the very beginning of our expanding universe will require advances in physics that may take us further from our intuitive concepts than quantum theory and relativity already do. We must be open-minded that these concepts may be too deep for human brains to grasp—at any rate, any more than a monkey can understand quantum theory.

The young Henri Gregoire was ambitious from the start. With his humble beginnings, his ordination as a Catholic priest already made him a success. But devout as he was, Gregoire was not interested in merely reaching the apex of a rural clerical career. In the provincial capital of Nancy, he had immersed himself in the intellectual world of the philosophes whose ideas now influenced the throne. He had written poetry and debated at the local Nancy Academy. 

It was a productive intellectual frenzy, and it got him noticed. At long last, Gregoire had come on the radar of the illustrious Societe des Philantropes de Strasbourg (SPS). It was a para-Masonic organization of Strasbourg’s foremost scholars and reformers, and its avowed goal was “the physical and moral perfection of man.” The SPS provided a closed space where members could collaborate and discuss ideas. Its restricted membership was a feature—as with the Masonic orders, which initiated their members, and the salons, where eminent women known as salonnières carefully cultivated their attendees. The uneducated and uncouth were barred from entry. The fraternal language of the SPS did much to close religious and national divides, but it did not eliminate social rank.

The SPS and societies like it were part of a massive shift in the culture of European elites, especially in France. Throughout the early eighteenth century, the policies of the absolutist King Louis XIV had centralized political power and entire sections of French society. Tridentine Catholicism, with its emphasis on confessional unity, had stamped out rivals like Protestantism and established a religiously unified state. But the generations born under this establishment had increasingly come to question and even reject key parts of it. Gregoire and the SPS, for example, would have read Voltaire’s critique of the church and Rousseau’s social contract theory.

The result was a new social fabric that sprang up among the highest classes in French society, one informed by the project they called the Enlightenment. Advancements in the sciences, philosophy, and literature gained prestige and respect for participants. A new form of intellectual authority developed as well, with loose and informal groups of collaborators gaining recognition due to the quality and sheer ambition of their work. Titanic projects like the Encyclopédie, the 18,000-page collection overseen by the philosopher and intellectual Denis Diderot, grew out of such informal intellectual communities.

To join these circles, Gregoire had to prove himself through his familiarity with both literature and the sciences. Fortunately for Gregoire, his work had paid off, and as with all new members the Society unanimously voted to accept him, preserving “the sweet intimacy that must reign between Philanthropes.”

Despite its closed nature, the SPS foresaw the Enlightenment expanding far beyond its current circles. Previous generations of philosophes, like Voltaire, had seen the peasants and urban, lower class sans-culottes as ignorant, with no real role in the Enlightenment project. Gregoire, like the rest of the SPS, rejected this assumption. For the fruits of higher learning to reach every sphere of French life, all classes would ultimately have their role to play. In the words of the SPS program, the peasant would have his own place in “the beneficent philosophy of his century.”

Gregoire supported this expansionist wing of the Enlightenment, inspired by his religious career in the countryside. Working as a priest, he built libraries to educate his parishioners; his goals, as he related to a friend, were “enlightened piety, the purity of morals, and the culture of intelligence among the country people…fortifying their attachment to this type of work.” He participated in the Richerist movement, which asserted the rights of ordinary clerics in the church, seeing them as vehicles for lay education and development—clashing with the higher clergy as a result. The mobilized priest, morally and socially improving his congregants, was the religious counterpart to the worldly Philanthropist.

But Gregoire’s work also made him aware of a discomforting reality: the bands of enlightened men whose company he kept—and who were able to think in terms of France and its higher destiny—were only a tiny minority. They lived in a country divided into many languages, regional cultures, and private factional interests. Someone from Languedoc could hardly understand a Breton’s dialect, let alone think of him as a countryman. The new France taking shape existed mainly in the minds of Gregoire and his collaborators. Extending the culture of the enlightened to the country required a people ready to participate in it. To achieve their dreams, the enlightened would first have to make this France a reality.

The Beginnings of Regeneration

In 1787, Gregoire had an opportunity to begin laying out a pathway to this broadened Enlightenment. That year, King Louis XVI’s Edict of Versailles expanded toleration for non-Catholics, ending official persecutions and allowing them to marry freely. France’s Jews were among those who benefited. The move sparked a renewed debate among Gregoire’s enlightened circles: just what was the place of Jews in French society? 

Both exclusionary and tolerant attitudes were accepted in these circles. Nearly all agreed that assimilation would require the culture of France’s Jews to radically change. Gregoire published his response two years later as the Essai sur la régénération physique, morale et politique des juifs. 

Gregoire accepted the mainstream view of his circles that France’s Jews were currently not capable of assimilating into French society. But he also believed their condition was the fruit of centuries of exclusion. Persecution by French society had kept them from working in agriculture and trades and enhanced the power of their religious authorities to the detriment of Christianity. Segregation to ghettos, he claimed, even forced them into “dismal abodes” with “a continual fermentation of putrid air” that contributed to their physical decline. 

But under different conditions, history showed that Jews could become full members of the body politic. In Morocco, modern Jews still practiced agriculture and lived in relative harmony with society. French Sephardim already enjoyed greater privileges and had assimilated to a higher degree than their Ashkenazi cousins. And in the classical era, Gregoire wrote, Jews had been “a nation who had shone in armies of Alexander and of the Ptolemies…who, for four centuries, made a distinguished figure under the banner of the Roman legions.”

By dismantling the institutions which divided Jews from French society, integrating them into the mainline productive economy, and by transforming their culture, they would assimilate into France. Once “attached to it by the ties of pleasure, security, liberty, and ease…he will cherish his mother, that is to say his country, the interests of which will be confounded with his own.” 

Gregoire and his contemporaries saw French Jews as existing in a politically, morally, and even physically degraded state. But for Gregoire, these were more like the symptoms of social disease. “The Jew is born with the same disposition as we,” he wrote. The question, then, was how to restore them to health—and what a healthy social organism looked like at all. Gregoire called this process “regeneration,” and the concept became the basis of his political work. 

Regeneration had applications beyond French Jews, who were far from the only group his contemporaries saw as degraded. Enlightenment thinkers compared their new learning in science and philosophy to what they saw as popular superstition. Admirers of classical Rome contrasted its notions of civic virtue to the self-interest and corruption of the French state. Even in religion, many French Catholics—particularly some of the Richerists that Gregoire collaborated with—had been influenced by movements like Jansenism, which believed the Church was corrupted by religious superstition, theological ignorance, and moral laxity. Despite their differing worldviews, one theme prevailed over and over again: the social organism was sick, and needed curing.

The twin influences of Catholicism and Enlightenment culture informed Gregoire’s understanding of a regenerated society. Christian morals of charity and justice would direct the hearts of men. Public interest would drive political activity. The arts, trades, sciences, and industry would flourish as citizens were unbound from legal constraints and obsession with custom. Advances in agriculture and physical health would even improve the bodies of the population. His vision was not strictly egalitarian; the farmer and the statesmen should feel fraternal bonds, enjoy the same civic rights, and be ambitious and experimental in their work—but they served society in different ways.

One enduring theme was his insistence that regenerated man would learn to identify his interests with the good of humanity. Since no universal state or language existed, this meant that the national state was the best vehicle for creating an enlightened society; the French nation would be the vehicle by which individuals learned to cultivate reason and civic virtue.

But the reality was that not only the Jews were cut off from the French nation—nearly all so-called Frenchmen were as well. Gregoire’s Essai attacked Yiddish as a “Tudesco-Hebraico-Rabbinical jargon…[that] will doubtless one day be extirpated.” But only about 12 percent of France’s populace spoke the Parisian standard at all. Dialects like Occitan, Breton, and Basque dominated entire regions. France’s regeneration, and even its real national existence, could only begin once these various regions, statelets, dialects, and communities had been welded together into a national polity. To solve this problem, the enlightened minority would essentially have to colonize the national territory.

The language problem embodied a central paradox in regeneration: those who had not yet undergone it lacked the understanding, even the virtue, to appreciate its necessity. Those who were the objects of regeneration could hardly also be its agents. Education was necessary and as a result would be compulsory, Gregoire wrote, “else prove to me that the state cannot force its subjects to acquire knowledge.” But early resistance from subjects undergoing this regeneration would ultimately give way to understanding as they became citizens and learned what enlightened humanity was worth: “We must merit their gratitude in spite of them,” he declared.

The Essai had its critics when it was finally published. One English reviewer sniffed that Roman Catholic priests hardly had less ridiculous customs than Jews, while a number of Gregoire’s Jewish correspondents criticized its heavy-handedness. But by then, the young priest was no longer concerned with essay contests.  The monarchy was on the brink of bankruptcy, and Louis XVI had taken a radical decision. For the first time since 1614, the Estates-General would gather in Versailles. And in Nancy, Gregoire was elected to be one of the representatives.

With political power gathering in his hands, Gregoire had an opportunity to undertake the regeneration of France itself.

Making the French Republic

By the time of the king’s call in 1788, the state had been in gridlock for nearly two years. An absolute monarch in theory, Louis XVI had been battling the various parlements—judicial, not legislative bodies—in Paris and other parts of France to try to financially rescue the state. Louis and his advisors began planning to circumvent them instead. 

By calling the Estates-General, the king hoped to use popular support to overcome these obstructions. The three estates of church, nobility, and commoners had traditionally voted by order—one vote each, giving the clergy and nobles the power to outvote the commons. Despite this rule, Louis permitted double the number of delegates to be elected to the Third Estate as a nominal show of favor. But if Louis had bet on the support of the commons, he had miscalculated. The common people of France faced even more crushing financial burdens than the nobles. 

Among the aristocratic Second Estate, the influence of Enlightenment culture was also making itself felt. Nobles who had spent years in societies like the SPS even embraced reformism, with some choosing election to the Third Estate instead. Reformist nobles included the Marquis de Lafayette, freshly returned from fighting in the American Revolutionary War, the sexually scandalous but charismatic Comte de Mirabeau, and the Duc d’Orleans, the king’s own cousin. As for the First Estate, elections for clerical representatives ended up drawing the majority of their lot from the lower clergy, including Henri Gregoire. Many had been formed in movements like Richerism.

Before long, conflicts about how the Estates were represented had left taxation in the dust. Things descended into chaos. To secure its position, the Third Estate unilaterally voted to represent the people as a whole and redefine itself as the National Assembly, inviting the other Estates to join them. In response, Gregoire led members of the lower clergy to join the new body. 

Days later, the body met on a tennis court and vowed to remain united and to formally establish a constitution for France. Gregoire, among the first clerics to take the Tennis Court Oath, later found himself front and center in a famous depiction of the event. His ideas were making themselves felt too—one of the tasks to which the oath called the Assembly was “the regeneration of public order.”

The National Assembly’s success served to radicalize it further. By July, the body had been reconstituted as the National Constituent Assembly, and Gregoire found himself in its leadership roles for the next several years. By August, feudalism was formally abolished and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen had been promulgated, largely written by the Abbé Sieyès, another radical priest. The circles in which Gregoire had spent so many years were now attaining political power, and so were their ideals. Most of France still languished in backwardness, but now the time had come to expand the Enlightenment to the whole country.

Gregoire began aggressively advocating key elements of his regeneration program. He pushed for the removal of exclusionary laws regarding Jews—all became citizens by 1791. He also agitated in the Assembly on behalf of the gens de couleur, mixed-race property owners from the French colonies who sought citizenship in the new regime. This put him on the radical end of an already-radical revolution. From Gregoire’s perspective, the gens de couleur were living proof of ongoing regeneration—men with mixed African blood and French civilizational identity. While he did not consider Africans yet ready for full participation in republican society, the gens de couleur and enlightened French colonists would be the advance guard of regeneration in the colonies. All mixed-race and free black inhabitants received citizenship in 1792.

Gregoire also believed that it was time to expand his linguistic program to all of France. He summed up the work begun in this period several years later in a report to the new government. “Those who were in the Pyrénées-Orientales in October 1792,” he recounted, “wrote to you that, among the Basques…a large number were accessible to fanaticism, because the idiom is an obstacle to the propagation of knowledge.” In many departments, he found that “scoundrels founded on ignorance of our language the success of their counter-revolutionary machinations.”

He charged that linguistic differences prevented national unification, protected superstitious beliefs, and even undermined agriculture by maintaining multiple names for the same grains. “It is therefore necessary…to standardize their technical idiom,” he declared. “[And] it is necessary that the disseminated knowledge illuminate the whole surface of the French territory.” 

As with other parts of the regeneration program, the initial effort had to come from the top. Gregoire recommended that the national government stop the practice of translating its edicts locally and that it distribute pamphlets in French on useful knowledge like meteorology, agriculture, and basic physical sciences. Histories and even folk songs would bring French to the household and to the rhythms of working life. Municipalities, he declared, must use French in governance—by police force, if needed—and ensure the use of French measures and place names. 

Gregoire even proposed proof of French ability as a prerequisite for marriage, likening it to Swiss proofs of military service or ancient Roman duties to learn reading and swimming. As their regeneration was accomplished, Frenchmen would comprehend the necessity of the program: “To true republicans, it suffices to show the good; we are dispensed from ordering it from them.”

The unification of language ultimately became his most enduring initiative, undergirding later laws that established French as the language of education and governance. The Republic’s tumultuous life ultimately precluded it from fully implementing Gregoire’s proposals. But successive regimes, especially the public schools of Napoleon and later of the Third Republic, imposed French on generations of schoolchildren and effectively extinguished the role of dialects in public life.

Gregoire’s revolutionary efforts took a turn when the Assembly passed the Civil Constitution of the Clergy in 1790. It was a radical document that cemented recent confiscations of church lands, the abolition of tithes, and the dissolution of nearly all monastic orders. It also mandated the election of bishops and priests by citizens—even non-Catholics—and effectively turned the clergy into agents of the state who would swear an oath to the Constitution. 

Always a fervent Christian, Gregoire’s calls for priests to go out with “the Gospels in one hand and the Constitution in the other” were sincere. When he was elected Bishop of Blois, he set out on a tour of his diocese to preach both to the Catholic faithful. But his new rank also brought him into contact with popular opposition to the revolution, particularly from those loyal to his predecessor bishop—who, as far as many Catholics were concerned, no secular Assembly had any right to remove. Away from the center of the action, his immense patriotic faith wavered. “The most dangerous enemy of the people,” he remarked, “is the people themselves.”

Back in Paris, events were moving fast. France’s neighbors were threatening war, and the king’s conflicts with his new government had made him suspect. Gregoire, now a member of the popular Jacobin Club, had already attacked the monarchy in its meetings. When France declared war on Austria in 1792, the German Duke of Brunswick released an infamous manifesto. Written by one of Louis’s cousins, it threatened revenge on the French populace if the royal family was harmed. It served as political proof that the king was a traitor to the nation, and he was arrested soon after.

Gregoire’s moment came on September 21st as he addressed what was now the National Convention. Standing up amid the roar of the crowd, he called on them to put a formal end to monarchy once and for all. “Kings are in the moral order,” he reminded his colleagues, “what monsters are in the physical order.”

The official minutes record a long silence before the final vote on Gregoire’s motion. Once taken, the fate of a thousand years of kingship was decided.

“The National Convention decrees that royalty is abolished in France.” 

The delegates broke out into “cheers of joy.”

Regeneration by Fire

The French Republic was a state born in blood. Mere weeks before Gregoire moved to abolish the monarchy, the Jacobins had already mobilized armies of urban sans-culottes and armed provincial to overthrow the city government. Soon afterward, “surveillance committees”—in reality hardly more than vigilante bands—scoured the city for counter-revolutionaries. The prisons were quickly filled. 

Incited by radical members of the government, the popular tribunals turned into massacres. For several days, mobs hauled prisoners from their cells, enacted show trials consisting of only a few questions, and either freed or killed them on a whim. At the Prison de l’Abbaye, “guilty” prisoners were sent to a nearby courtyard where raging mobs, including children, made bloodsport of them. Four days later, nearly half of the prisoners in Paris had been slaughtered.

During the chaos, the property of royalist emigres was seized and redistributed to the impoverished population of Paris. The winds of the Revolution were picking up speed. By January of 1793, Louis XVI himself had been executed by guillotine. 

But Gregoire was not there to see the king’s death—he had left Paris several months earlier on the business of revolution. The Republic was now fighting for its life against an alliance of European powers. Along with several other deputies, Gregoire was inspecting territories annexed by French troops: Nice, Savoy, and Monaco. What he saw disturbed him, particularly in Italy. He complained of the “moral putridness” of the region in his correspondence. Royalist emigres attacked their presence, local officials demanded bribes for basic tasks, and local nobles and clerics incited crowds against them. 

While the Enlightenment had been underway in Italy as well, its real centers were in Naples and Milan, not the region of Piedmont in which Gregoire now found himself. The broad ideological unity and coordination of Paris, or even of provincial Lorraine, was simply not replicable here. Even the local Jacobins who should have been their most stalwart supporters were condemned by Gregoire as lowlives and spies of the aristocracy. Gregoire and his fellow deputies also had to deal with the fact that the most legitimately “popular” elements of the region were the most adamantly opposed to them. 

The problem was that the ideology of regeneration was meant to be the bridge from an Enlightenment restricted to a small elite to one in which the entire nation participated—but only after a moral, political, and even physical transformation imposed from above. This armed wing of the Enlightenment could not have existed without successive generations building up its core culture, norms, and ideology, propagating them through societies like the SPS. 

But the revolutionary experience had erased such careful barriers to entry, even as it inflamed the collective consciousness of its participants. With no agreement on who was included in the people, or when a particular group would be regenerated, anyone could appeal to the actual crowds outside the Assembly and mobilize them for support or violence. As Gregoire visited the frontlines of the Italian theater, riding on horseback in his clerical robes and urging on French troops against Piedmontese cannons, his enemies were exploiting exactly this contradiction. 

In Paris, meanwhile, those best able to inflame the mobs were now exercising power. Among these were men like the journalist Jacques Hébert and the actor turned revolutionary Jean-Marie Collot d’Herbois. Hébert used his writing to depict himself as a representative of the sans-culottes, and his paper was renowned for its lurid stories, foul language, and innuendo. Under the monarchy, he indulged widespread hatred of the Queen by portraying her as a nymphomaniac and Louis as a cuckold. Once the revolution was underway, he incited the most violent factions of the populace, defending the September massacres of prisoners as revolutionary violence. Collot, likewise, had come to power during the overthrow of the Paris government. Drawing on his skills in writing and oratory, he became one of the most extreme members of the Convention. Noting those who had voted against the immediate execution of the king, he began to denounce them in violent terms, preparing the way for a purge.

When Gregoire returned to Paris in the spring of 1793, it was just in time to witness the purge itself. The conflict between the moderate Girondin faction—which had tried to oppose the execution of the king—and a radical coalition of Jacobins, Montagnards, and sans-culottes was coming to a head. Over three violent days, from May 31 to June 2, an army raised by the government of the Paris Commune effectively held the Convention hostage and deemed the Girondins to be traitors. Radicals like Hébert, as well as the army, demanded that the Convention turn over the leading Girondins. 

On May 31st, the Montagnard hardliner Maximilien Robespierre called for the arrest of the Girondin leaders. The next day, as Gregoire presided over the Convention, things descended into chaos as the mobilized soldiers forced delegates to remain assembled at cannon point. When the dust settled, 29 Girondins and two ministers were under house arrest and the Jacobins were in control. By October, the Girondin leaders had been executed by the Revolutionary Tribunal, Robespierre was on the Committee for Public Safety, and the Terror was beginning to unfold.

The Revolution was beginning to outrun those who had begun it. When moderates in Lyon sympathetic to the Girondins tried to resist the Convention in the months after the purge, the government besieged the city. Once the Jacobins had consolidated their rule, the government sent deputies to begin its destruction, ordering the demolition of houses owned by “traitors” in addition to executions. Collot, one of those charged with the task, gave up on the guillotine entirely and began ordering the execution of entire groups with cannon. In Paris, the government ordered that a monument would be placed: “Lyon made war on liberty: Lyon is no more!”

As the bloodletting accelerated, Gregoire attempted to continue the work of regenerating France. Growing quieter in the daily strife of the Convention, he devoted himself to the Committee of Public Instruction—the same committee from which he gave his report on languages. The CPI had the mission of creating a new republican education system. While the old system had serviced around 50,000 men, the new one was to serve a much wider population.

The proposed system not only nationalized education but also restricted it to men. While a number of convents had maintained girls’ schools in the old order, republican education was tied to a masculine public square. When the republicans spoke about virtue, they conceived of it as the Roman virtus: manly courage, discipline, and self-sacrifice. In contrast to rabble-rousers like Hébert and Collot, leading Jacobins had built their careers on invoking Roman virtues. The young deputy Louis Antoine de Saint-Just was pre-eminent among them, a reputation which made Robespierre his most loyal ally. When sent by the Convention to review the military at the front, he promised “justice and severity as the Army has not yet witnessed.” Saint-Just made sure to deliver: officers faced the firing squad for insufficient performance. Later, when overseeing a hard-won victory against Austria, he ordered retreating soldiers to be shot.

Since virtus was an explicitly male quality, Gregoire and other revolutionaries conceived of their work as re-masculinizing France. The regenerated man of republican art is physically powerful: he crushes the symbols of royalty and reaction beneath his feet, the sciences amplify his abilities, the Constitution is his banner, and the heavens send lightning to announce his coming. Conversely, treachery was a thing expressed in feminine terms; Gregoire himself stridently attacked both the vanity of urban women and the ignorance of those in the country. While women’s associations played a role in the early revolution, the Jacobins ultimately banned all such organizations. Women were never granted full citizenship under the French Republic. 

In Gregoire’s rhetoric, treason began at the feet of unpatriotic mothers, who spoon-fed their children counterrevolution, religious fanaticism, and the hated patois. The Committee, Gregoire and the Jacobins believed, would need to root out these tendencies as early as possible from the young men in its schools. Gregoire devoted long hours to devising the necessary policies.

But in accepting a place on the Committee, Gregoire had also become an accomplice against his own religious goals. The Republic was now in a dechristianizing phase; a new Cult of Reason, operating under the leadership of Hébert, now carried out attacks even on Constitutional priests. Gregoire, who still defiantly wore his violet bishops’ robes to the Convention, was increasingly in the crosshairs. 

On November 7, 1793, the Constitutional Archbishop of Paris, a man named Gobel, was hauled before the Convention. There, he was forced to renounce his episcopate, and then his religion entirely. Gregoire was called on to do the same that very day. Making one of his few stands against the revolutionary majority, he refused. After he returned to his seat, “[e]veryone moved away from me as if I had the Plague. When I turned my head, I saw looks of fury directed at me…For eighteen months, I was expected at the scaffold.”

Soon after, Robespierre himself moved against the campaign and condemned atheism as aristocratic decadence. His political power was sufficient to counter the threat, and Gregoire likely escaped the Terror by the skin of his teeth. But soon, history overtook Robespierre as well—his head rolled by the end of summer. It marked a turning point in the Revolution: Robespierre’s enemies now consolidated as the Thermidorian faction and took control. The Terror was coming to its close.

The dream of early Revolutionaries of expanding the Enlightenment to all of France had failed. Instead of the “sweet intimacy” of the Philanthropes, France had felt Robespierre’s “swift, severe, indomitable justice.” Genteel intellectuals had been willing to join the clamor for bloodshed under the logic that revolution made it necessary—many now found themselves in mass graves, headless, after denunciation by those they had called friends. In a barbed illustration, the arch-royalist diplomat Joseph de Maistre illustrated their fate as Providence’s reply to hubris: “I accept your recommendation,” he depicted it saying, “but you shall be one of the victims.”

Despite their failures, the revolutionaries had created something new. The Republic had mobilized all of French society, raised ideologically-motivated mass armies, used law and language as nation-building tools, and established a regime that could rapidly assimilate the rising classes in France. It was a political logic that would last far beyond the Terror, and even the Republic itself.

A Republican in the Empire

Throughout the rest of its life, the Republic convulsed through several governments. Under a new government called the Directory, royalists and emigres began quietly returning to France, and the purged Jacobins radicalized even further in their time out of power. Soon, leading politicians were convinced that only radical action could save the state. To do this, they approached the rising general Napoleon Bonaparte. But on November 9, 1799, Napoleon betrayed his Jacobin allies and established the Consulate in a coup d’etat, which became his vehicle for consolidating personal power. His republican backers quickly lost control as well. In 1804, Napoleon became Emperor of the French.

Even though Napoleon removed certain radicals from power and reinstated some royal-era official roles, the Empire actually centralized and institutionalized the Revolution. The Imperial Senate included openly anti-imperial republicans and former Jacobins, including Gregoire. The Napoleonic legal code’s emphasis on individual rights in the court system reflected the goals listed in the Declaration of the Rights of Man. The Empire finally brought in a restructured secondary education system and definitively implemented Parisian French as the standard for education. It ended ghetto restrictions for Jews across Europe and even established a new Grand Sanhedrin to religiously underwrite the civil participation of French Jews, banning their involvement in moneylending. 

In some ways, it should have been the culmination of Gregoire’s dreams. Napoleon knew Gregoire personally and occasionally called on him. But while Napoleon generally saw the Revolution as an advancement, he was by nature a pragmatic opportunist; Gregoire, on the other hand, was a true believer. In the Imperial Senate, he became the holdout against Napoleon’s new nobility and refused his own title as an Imperial count. 

Napoleon bet that pragmatic statecraft would end the years of chaos and preserve the Revolution’s gains. Gregoire, meanwhile, was convinced that moral corruption lay at the heart of its failures. He had become disillusioned with the Enlightenment culture in which his career had begun. In his letters, he now wrote against the “so-called philosophes” and their thought which “would like to rip all religious principles…from the heart of man.” 

Gregoire never repudiated his fundamental Enlightenment ideals, nor did he end up sharing Voltaire’s stance that it should never have been a popular project at all. Instead, reflection brought him to identify more strongly with the Christian reformists of his younger years. Gregoire thought that while men like Voltaire and Rousseau believed that enlightenment could happen without moral and spiritual health, this amounted to hubris. In reality, it was the Richerist priests—and their successors in the Constitutional Church—who had actually been carrying out the work of regeneration. Gregoire worked for years to rebuild the Constitutional Church, which had been scarred by years of persecution and abandonment by many of its own clerics. But in 1801, Bonapartist pragmatism cost Gregoire his bishopric when Napoleon reconciled with the Papacy and put an end to the Constitutional Church entirely. 

For all of Gregoire’s agreement with some imperial policies, to him regeneration was effectively the purpose of the state. Insofar as it refused to pursue these goals, it delegitimized itself and became a liability to history. While Napoleon did much to cement the Revolution, he was ultimately a regime-builder. He did not entertain actions that could threaten his new consensus and did not feel bound to observe Republican political pieties. While Gregoire defended the original motivations of the Revolution, Napoleon recognized the efficacy of its means and institutions instead—and it was these that he sought to integrate into the new regime. The devout priest and the military emperor acted, in a sense, according to their natures.

No cause brought out this contrast between the two so much as the abolition of chattel slavery. Gregoire had opposed slavery from early on in the Revolution and was in close contact with abolitionists in Britain and America. As Consul, Napoleon reinstituted slavery in the colonies. He also took measures to reconquer Saint-Domingue, which at that time was under the control of the former slave Toussaint Louverture. Previously, Louverture had been seen as a stabilizer. He had expelled a Spanish military threat, was loyal to France, invoked republican language in his regime, and backed Catholicism as the island’s religion against its many vodou practitioners. He had also put an end to the violence carried out against whites in the early rebellion, when slaveholders and their families were torn from their beds by night and slaughtered. 

Napoleon, however, saw a greater advantage in backing the interests of the planters in restoring slavery to the island, and so Louverteur was captured in 1802. What followed was a brutal conflict in which both sides undertook racial extermination: French forces carried out mass killings of the black populace, while the rebels did the same to the whites. When General Jean-Jacques Dessalines defeated the French with British aid and declared the independent Republic of Haiti, he ordered the massacre of nearly all remaining whites on the island. After Dessalines himself was killed, the island was divided between a northern, black-ruled, and semi-feudal kingdom and a southern republic dominated by mixed-race families.

Gregoire became notorious in Europe for being among the sole defenders of Haiti, and he was continually in contact with its leaders. For him, Napoleon’s actions had endangered the prospects of French colonialism as a vector of regeneration in the New World in the name of temporary economic benefit. But while he encouraged his Haitian friends, he also emphasized that Haiti’s regeneration had barely begun. In particular, he spurned the northern kingdom and turned his attention to the southern leadership. Partially, this was out of republican disgust for the northern monarchy, but he also saw the south as far better prepared demographically to carry out the long-term mission. 

While supporting political rights for all Haitians, he stressed that regeneration was a process of including former slaves in the European culture from which they had been excluded—a process in which wealthy French free blacks and the gens de couleur already found themselves ahead. He also toyed with the idea, popular among physiognomists of the time, that “crossed races” could produce a “more robust” population even as it eliminated the color differences on the island. As ever, regeneration ultimately had to be physical as well.

Ever the guardian of the Republic’s legacy, Gregoire saw fit to oppose the pragmatism of Napoleon when it conflicted with the mission of regeneration. In the end, the Emperor seems to have come to the abbé’s view himself. During his final reign in the Hundred Days, he re-proclaimed the abolition of the slave trade. And while under exile on St. Helena, he expressed regret about not ruling Haiti directly through Toussaint Louverture.

Regeneration Without Enlightenment

Gregoire’s life ended with many disappointments. After Napoleon’s final defeat, France came under the rule of kings again. Even on his deathbed, he had to fight to receive the last rites from a returned clerical establishment that demanded he recant his oath to the Constitutional Church, something he never did. On May 28, 1831, he breathed his last. His funeral, attended by around 25,000 people, became a moment of Republican unity for a man who arguably helped ensure its survival—and ultimately, France’s return to a republican state years later.

Until the end, Gregoire was seen as a radical by his contemporaries. But within a century of his death, societies around the world underwent transformations as extreme as anything that he had endorsed. An alliance between liberal republics and the new industrial class saw slavery abolished across the Americas. Colonialism brought European institutions to nearly every corner of the earth, and Westernized colonial subjects repeatedly turned them against their rulers.

While Gregoire had seen the Republic as linked with the ideology of regeneration, its institutional forms were strategically powerful in their own right. In general, states that homogenized their national cultures and languages better mobilized their peoples, while empires that failed to do so—like the Ottomans and Austria-Hungary—collapsed as they became unable to match the coordination of their rivals. Napoleon’s bet had been that the institutions and social advancements established by the Revolution were not bound to the ideology of those who carried it out. It turned out to be a winning one.

Republicanism could operate distinctly from its Enlightenment ideological roots to a remarkable degree. In the case of Brazil, the country’s republic was implemented by its reactionary coffee farmers and planters following the abolition of slavery under its Emperor, Pedro II. Even the dictatorships that operated in Chile and Brazil in the twentieth century had a distinctively “republican” nature, emanating from professional militaries that collaborated with civilian elites.

But the ideology of regeneration proved similarly adaptive. The political rhetoric of restoring societies from sickness to health would be invoked again and again from South America to Asia, as well as in Europe itself—sometimes by transmission, other times by convergence. In Latin America, Simon Bolivar became the foremost representative of French revolutionary ideas as the region broke away from Spain. Bolivar was a contemporary of Gregoire’s and was even in Paris during the imperial coronation. Gregoire defended Bolivar’s revolution in the continent, while Bolivar accepted military aid from Haiti in exchange for a commitment to abolitionism. 

Bolivar, in turn, replicated both Gregoire’s revolutionary universalism and his belief that freedom depended on a transformed populace. For him, universalism—specifically, Pan-Americanism—could be the ideological vehicle to transform society. “Surely unity,” he proposed, “is what we need to complete our work of regeneration.” Although throughout the nineteenth century his prediction that Latin America would be divided among many regimes came true, these successor regimes replicated many of the policies on language and national identity that France had begun decades earlier. 

The concept of regeneration also became popular in Asia, both in the French colonies and beyond them. While Gregoire was known to Ho Chi Minh—who called him the “apostle of the liberty of peoples”—many of the national liberation movements in Asia found their way to Gregoire-style ideas and policies on their own terms. States from Meiji Japan to Communist China embraced various forms of “modernization without Westernization,” which accepted that national liberation depended on fully absorbing the advances made by the West, even as it used them to overthrow Western hegemony. Unlike figures like Gandhi, who identified anticolonial resistance with maintaining traditional life, revolutionaries in China, Japan, Korea, and elsewhere eradicated folk customs, imposed national languages, and rapidly industrialized their countries.

Ultimately, even some movements that reviled Gregoire could not resist the logic of regeneration. Zionists in particular opposed the popularity of Gregoire among liberal Jews, seeing him and his Essai as threats to Jewish identity. Yet the project of a Jewish state itself invariably took on the language of national regeneration—even down to the regenerated “new muscle Jew” of the Zionist Max Nordau. Zionist intellectuals like Theodor Herzl invoked the Maccabeans as opposed to the Hellenized Jews idealized by Gregoire. But his vision in Der Judenstaat of “a wondrous generation of Jews” living “at last as free men on our own soil” in a world “freed by our liberty, enriched by our wealth, magnified by our greatness” is undeniably one of a regenerated people. Though they rejected Gregoire and the assumptions of the old SPS, the early Zionists envisioned Jews contributing to “the physical and moral perfection of man” on terms all their own.

The ideology of regeneration and the republican power structures shared a remarkable adaptability, making them powerful tools for regime-builders and revolutionaries of many stripes. What neither the regime nor the ideology could replicate, however, were the conditions under which the Enlightenment culture had arisen. The dream that they might expand it could not survive the revolutionary experience. The Revolution passed judgment on France, and in doing so it changed the world, achieving many of Gregoire’s own goals. But it did so on the basis of its own structural logic, which proved irresistible even as it escaped the grasp of those who brought it into being.

Eliot had not only spotted his moment, but also his audience. Only four years earlier, Harvard graduates had gained the ability to elect members to the board of overseers, a privilege once held by officials of the Massachusetts state government and by local clergy. Eliot appealed not only to the powerful business interests in which Harvard alumni were increasingly well-represented, but also to the Transcendentalist ideals of self-realization which were increasingly popular in the mid-nineteenth century. “We are fighting a wilderness, physical and moral,” he informed his readers. The time of the “dead languages” was over, and the mission of national progress had fallen to the new industries and those in them. Later that year, Eliot became the youngest president in the history of Harvard.

The triumph of Eliot’s ideas was only possible because of the much broader, societal revolution that had already begun to change the values and goals of America’s national elites. What gets taught at universities and schools will directly impact a society’s power structure. Because of this, elites who participate in governance tend to favor the intellectual fashions that preserve the interests of those in power. These ideas in turn come to dominate and shape institutions of higher education. In other words, there is always a feedback loop connecting power and education, in both good and bad regimes.

This creates something of a paradox. While there are valid critiques of America’s elite educational institutions, the feedback loop between power and education means these institutions can never lead any useful reforms of education. After all, who would implement the reforms? The same academics and administrators who created the current consensus?

In reality, education under every regime is exactly as the regime wishes it to be. Therefore, the only way to change education is to change the regime. As Charles Eliot took the reins of power at Harvard, that change in regime had already occurred with the rise of industrial interests both in government and among the alumni of Harvard. Their values had once marked them as outsiders. But on the day Eliot assumed the presidency, they gained an important victory in the institutional landscape. American education would be utterly transformed as a result.

The Evolution of Harvard

History offers many examples of educational change brought about by regime change. The structure of elite education today traces its history to roots that, in their time, showed signs of great vitality. Harvard University, for example, serves as a representative for elite education in the U.S. Harvard’s prestige is largely due to it being the oldest and richest university in the country, but also comes from its profound influence on higher education curricula in general over the last two centuries.

However difficult it may be to get into Harvard, once a student begins their studies, the coursework is often shallow and undemanding. Grade inflation is pervasive, and since one’s grades are likely to be inflated anyway, a certain verbal facility—“bullshitting”—more than suffices to pass most courses, requiring little mastery of any challenging discipline. This condition is especially dominant in those fields called the “humanities,” which bear little resemblance to the rigorous studies that went by that name before the twentieth century. The telos of the Harvard undergraduate experience is no longer the formation of character. Most students now see a degree as a ticket into the upper reaches of the professional-managerial class.

This slow erosion of the curriculum has its roots in Eliot’s reforms, which he continued to zealously implement until the end of his presidency in 1909. Eliot’s own chemistry training made him keenly aware of America’s industrialization and he wanted higher education to better align with this trend. Eliot’s partiality to the philosophy of individual self-formation went hand-in-hand with influence from the utilitarian pragmatism popular in that era. These goals led him to insist on replacing Harvard’s prescribed curriculum with a system of electives. Over the course of his long presidency, he was quite successful in fulfilling this aim. By 1900, Harvard no longer had any required courses beyond the freshman year. As scientific specialization matured, Eliot’s successors introduced the concepts of majors and distribution requirements in 1914, giving birth to the modern system of U.S. higher education.

The history of the prescribed curriculum replaced by Eliot went back generations. Students read Latin, Greek, English composition, mathematics, natural science, philosophy, and theology. The entrance exam for 1869, the year Eliot became president, began with extensive exercises in Latin and Greek composition and grammar. Then came questions on history (such as “Pericles—The Man and His Policy”) and geography (students must be able to name the sources of the world’s major rivers). Finally, the exam presented arithmetic problems and questions about logarithms, trigonometry, algebra, and plane geometry—all of which would be difficult for any modern student, even with a calculator. Other topics, like natural sciences, philosophy, and theology, presumably awaited instruction at university.

This prescribed curriculum was not unique to the elite culture of nineteenth-century New England. American elites from the previous century held it in high regard as well.

In 1785, Thomas Jefferson wrote to his 15-year old nephew, Peter Carr, for whose education he had assumed responsibility upon the death of Carr’s father. The letter detailed Jefferson’s expectations for the boy’s studies, carried out to prepare Carr to enter the “public stage whereon [he] may begin to be useful” and so “pursue the interests of [his] country.” Carr would go on to serve in the Virginia House of Delegates and was instrumental in the founding of the University of Virginia.

Jefferson’s first criterion for Carr was that he should “encourage all [his] virtuous dispositions…and exercise them whenever an opportunity arises, being assured that they will gain strength by exercise as a limb of the body does.” He advised Carr to begin his studies with ancient Greece and Rome, “reading everything in the original and not in translations.” Carr’s studies were then to move on to Greek, Latin, and English poetry. In philosophy, the young man was to read Plato and Cicero. Jefferson also encouraged him to master Spanish and French: Spanish, for its practical value in the Americas, and French, because later studies in mathematics, natural science, and modern history were all to be conducted in that tongue.

In addition to bookwork, Carr was to exercise for two hours each day, not by playing ball games, “which stamp no character on the mind,” but in a more practical manner: “I advise the gun,” wrote Jefferson. Young Carr was to make his gun “the constant companion of [his] walks” while building up a high level of fitness through walking. Muskets in the 1780s generally weighed about ten pounds.

Jefferson’s ideas for the proper education of a rising elite were normal for the era. The curriculum he proposed to his nephew had its roots in the studia humanitatis, or “study of humanity,” launched by the scholar and poet Petrarch and his humanist contemporaries during the Italian Renaissance. Working in early-fourteenth century Italy and France amid decadent universities and turbulent regimes, Petrarch pursued his famous revival of classical Greco-Roman letters in culture and education both through his own writing and by creating a network of collaborators across Europe. He wanted to create a fellowship of learned men with interests spanning philosophy, literature, and politics, along with influential patrons who could fund and promote his work. Over the next century, this network connected dozens of ruling courts and universities, first in Italy, then all of Europe.

These early humanities curricula aimed to shape the character and capabilities of political and cultural elites. The intentions of the humanists very much extended to the political sphere, in that stable regimes that governed well were seen as necessary society’s highest aspirations. The humanists wanted future elites who were competent in the linguistic arts needed by rulers, diplomats, and administrators. They did not understand the practical dimension in a reductive, utilitarian sense. Rather, they understood that statecraft and the cultivation of the soul are inseparable.

For these early humanists, the true purpose of education was not the development of particular skills for commercial ends, but to nurture the virtues and build up a student’s character. Institutio, as they called this framework, gave students the moral and intellectual qualities needed to live as leading members of a polity. Practical wisdom was the essential virtue of a good education. They saw the literature of ancient Greece and Rome, especially Greek political writing, as an indispensable resource to develop such wisdom. Institutio was not simply about the individual either: they cared greatly about architecture, art, and music that could harmonize with and support a person’s moral and intellectual endeavors.

By the late fifteenth century, this profound humanities curriculum had reshaped the education of European elites in both Protestant and Catholic countries. A century later, the Jesuits adapted it into the Ratio studiorum to guide their famous schools. The logic of the humanists’ program was to reverse-engineer the mechanics of past, high-functioning eras of civilization so that the educated elites could apply those lessons in their own societies. It worked, and the social effect was comparable to the Confucian ethical revival that began in the Later Zhou dynasty and ultimately underpinned the renewed societal flourishing of the Han dynasty. Just as Confucius and his followers applied lessons from studying the social technologies of the Early Zhou, the humanists studied and applied the lessons from ancient Greece and Rome, as well as the dominant Christian traditions of theology. It lasted for centuries and was later the basis for all elite educational institutions in the New World.

Applied History For a New Regime

Petrarch created a curriculum for people willing to transform society and overcome what he saw as centuries of stagnation. His program taught students to read closely, think logically, write cogently, and speak persuasively. More importantly, it created a shared frame of reference among elites by imparting a mindset that enabled them to discuss social trends beyond immediate utilitarian concerns and prepare them for coordinated action.

An important aspect of Petrarch’s approach was that he made no attempt to reform existing institutions, such as the universities. That would come decades after his movement had gained influence and prestige. Just as today, he would have been ensnared by a quagmire of interest groups, all highly resistant to reform. Instead, Petrarch focused on developing his intellectual and cultural work, both personally and with fellow travelers. More important than fixing the dysfunction around him was educating a new elite who had the character to lead future reforms. Centuries later, the early founders and institutions that inspired Eliot did the same, establishing new scientific colleges with varying degrees of independence from the established, traditional ones. We can learn a lot from this wise strategy when thinking about the problems of today’s education system. Both Petrarch’s and Eliot’s reforms were only made possible by small groups that focused on their own private goals in learning and research, and cultivated intellectual cultures very different from those around them. Broader reforms only became possible once these had reached the right degree of maturity, and had found their natural bases for both students and patrons.

In the case of the “study of humanity” and of liberal education, the ethos they developed is one that we might call applied history. It is the study of everything students need to know to alter the course of history, informed by the goal of freeing them from the constraints of established narratives so that they can act on events as agents instead.

When Petrarch forwarded his humanist project, he believed Europe was the victim of civilizational amnesia. Deeply involved in the Renaissance rebirth of classical philosophy and literature, he obsessed over the relationship between contemplation and active life. His curriculum was about teaching students how to achieve this balance, regain the lost memory of their civilization, and carry it forward to future generations. Certain skills were necessary for this process. In order to engage with the intellectual output of antiquity, students had to learn the dominant languages of that era: Latin and Greek. And to engage with their own counterparts across Europe, students also needed fluency, or at least familiarity, with the languages of their own period. The result was a renewed intellectual culture that connected scholars from London to Florence. This was the fertile ground from which the liberal curriculum of education eventually grew.

Today we face a similar challenge to Petrarch, in that our institutions are no longer appropriate guides for navigating the chaos of history. To get the best of the future, we must train new elites that can replace these failing institutions with a new regime. But the tradition of liberal education we have inherited is all but dead, and substantially obsolete in its details. We no longer expect those trained in the liberal arts as they currently exist to be prepared to seize the course of history, as the curriculum was originally designed to do.

What kind of education prepares students to take the course of history into their own hands? The historical answer was to abandon the liberal educational paradigm in favor of developing expertise in a particular field. Through the twentieth century, the humanities and the so-called STEM topics (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) drifted apart, to the point where the fields largely no longer communicate. The social sciences, ostensibly replacing the humanities as bearers of ideological legitimacy, turned out to have neither the wisdom of the humanities nor the rigor of real sciences. The social sciences could not fill the vacuum left by our neglect of a liberal education.

Charles Eliot and other defenders of the current elective model of education argued that it would allow students to cultivate their private strengths without relying on a strict curriculum. But the ultimate result of stepping back from conditioning the minds of elites was that banks, private corporations, NGOs, and other institutions eagerly stepped in to fill the vacuum. These institutions are often involved in writing the educational scripts for what constitutes a desirable degree, course, and resume. The result is that students do not actually achieve new heights of self-realization. Instead, they join the upper-middle class.

Petrarch and his successors would shake their heads in despair. They saw no difference between teaching students the tools of self-knowledge and explaining their place in society. as well as what they should do with this position. Only once the student achieved this consciousness could they go on to break the mold in their own way.

Recovering the knowledge of the past was only part of the mission Petrarch and his colleagues were pursuing. Their admiration for the ancients was not based on their ability to merely pass on prior knowledge, but on their positive achievements. Studying the past was a way to give students a sense of destiny and of their place in the world, as well as of providing examples from which to learn. But the goal of liberal education was also to supply students with psychological and spiritual autonomy. The broad membership of an elite class must have confidence in their own judgments about truth and value, instead of relying on public acclaim.

Note how different this is from trade and professional education models. These seek to teach the practical knowledge and ideology of and for the productive middle of society that operates within an established order. Elites, on the other hand, must work both inside and outside the established order as they act on history. This also puts the student in apparent tension with the liberal curriculum’s focus on inheriting the traditions of the past. Although learning from them, the best students are not those whose ultimate loyalty is to tradition as such. Instead, they are those who cultivate the personal judgment and wisdom that let them break conformity with the past and make new contributions in their own right.

The work of cultivating elites has no set curriculum—either in Petrarch’s time or in ours. It’s often tempting to wholesale reinvent the programs of the past out of a sense of admiration, like some kind of totem that could let us replicate the achievements we admire most in history. But our context is very different from Petrarch’s, or even from Eliot’s. While America has deep roots in the classical heritage that make Latin or Greek worth learning, it also inherits modernity. The historical luminaries of our society wrote philosophy in French, translated science from German, and created poetry and literature in English. Spanish, Russian, and Chinese are now the languages that let us communicate with our spheres of influence in the Americas, and with our rivals across the globe. And in addition to the great religious traditions, an expanded wealth of knowledge about human evolution and our ancient past informs our sense of destiny in new and unique ways. The liberal curriculum of our own civilization is yet to be properly laid out.

What divides the liberal curriculum—both of the past and of the future—from the program envisioned by Eliot and his successors is its belief in the value of collective historical consciousness. Instead of homogenizing students, that consciousness reinforced the cultivation of individual abilities and contributions. It also had a universalistic impulse, believing that each society had its own chance to contribute to the greater whole of human knowledge and history. But unless a society’s best minds cultivated the right learning and character among themselves and the broader population, they would squander their chance and even lose what progress their ancestors might have made.

Our society’s institutions are buckling under the weight of accumulating dysfunction, and our higher education embodies the current regime’s neuroses instead of challenging them. Materially, we have the ability to shape history in ways few past generations could have imagined. But our historical consciousness is increasingly amnesic and the twin forces of learned collective helplessness and political conflict are crippling our ideas of what is possible. Whatever merits Eliot’s regimen of self-development might once have had, its evolved form has left our best students aimless.

We aren’t yet in the period of great reforms. The feedback loop still holds: applied history will only inform higher education when it also informs a new regime. But now is the time for private networks and seed institutions. Under these circumstances, it is Petrarch’s impulse that should inspire those who exit the universities and look for a different regimen by which to cultivate their souls.

The following essay originally appeared in print in Palladium 02. To receive original content in future print editions, subscribe here.

In 1961, President Kennedy gave America a mission: to walk on the moon by the end of the decade. The mission’s demands would accelerate materials science, computing, and engineering. But two of the most important missing components couldn’t be created by any MIT team. First, America needed a population that desired such a goal. Second, it needed people who could actually respond to the call, bring hard skills, receive training, and realize the mission.

These were not feats of hard science, but of social engineering. The American state had to mobilize people capable of creating and operating the required institutions, tolerate the disruption of institution-building, figure out the lines of authority and decision-making, and determine how much power to grant the founders on whom they depended.

Fortunately for them, it wasn’t their first time. The demands of winning the Second World War and of postwar reconstruction had conditioned an entire generation of American elites. President Kennedy himself earned honors as a naval officer in Asia, while his predecessor, President Eisenhower, was Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force and then military governor of the American zone in Germany. These decades also saw a degree of elite turnover as rising families like the Kennedys themselves entered the halls of power.

This turnover and the war effort also allowed the founders behind successful political machines, companies, and other organizations to build up personal ties with political leaders. They learned how to interact with government and to understand how each could be useful to the other.  It’s not surprising that novel disciplines from rocketry to cybernetics have roots in this period. These were the relationships which the administrations that built up institutions like NASA drew on. Jim Webb and Doc Draper, for example, had served in wartime roles similar to those they later filled in the space race: Webb was an executive at the Sperry Corporation and Draper was an MIT professor and aeronautical engineer.

America’s dynamic mid-20th-century elite came of age in an era where institution-building and mission focus were necessities of both domestic politics and a global war. The young officers of the Second World War became the leadership of the early Cold War and operated on similar principles. A shared mode of life led to an enduring set of norms that incentivized industrial progress. Most importantly, political leaders were willing to accept the near-term disruptions of working with such founders. In fact, they actively mobilized the kinds of founders who could make them happen. Political sanction was a strong signal of openness and drew the world’s best minds to America.

When we compare dynamic eras like this one to our own more stagnant situation, it’s tempting to think that we’re dealing with a policy problem. But policy is downstream from governance. Instead of cultivating and integrating productive founders, we have a governance culture of suspicion and conflict. It plays out in the ongoing battle between DC and Silicon Valley; in the rapid political disciplining of the internet; in the overarching antagonism which legacy institutions from the public sector to media to academia seem to have towards potential disruptors.

The real difference between these elite cultures is not in their policy, but in their modes of life. The conditions which created the 20th-century elite are long gone. The paths and spaces in which one could become this type of founder have become increasingly restricted. Elites lack the ability to mobilize, align, and integrate people operating in this role. These are the twin hurdles that a new culture of governance has to clear. Industrial progress begins as an act of social engineering.

The Fogbanking of American Social Technology

Most people are not born with fully-formed visions of what paths in life they should pursue. Instead, we observe cues of affirmation from those around us which mark out some choices as particularly desirable: praise, respect, reward, encouragement, and prestige. We observe these cues throughout our lives, beginning with our parents. These cues tell us which people should be imitated and which paths in life are worthy of effort and sacrifice. They communicate that a particular choice has social sanction. A particular career, social circle, class, or subculture is usually defined by its very strong norms of what is or is not sanctioned. People in those domains must follow these norms to be accepted and well-regarded—in other words, they must follow particular social scripts that mark them out as insiders to the group.

Sanction doesn’t come out of nowhere: it is consciously granted and regulated by those with authority. For example, the Unionist reporter Henry Raymond and banker George Jones co-founded The New York Times with the editorial strategy of using an objective and authoritative journalistic voice. Their goal was to counteract scandal-driven yellow journalism by creating an institution that could sanction what was or wasn’t legitimate news. When either explicit or implicit cues come from an authority figure—a parent, a teacher, an accomplished person, or a political leader—they carry inherent weight. When speaking with peers, we often appeal to such authorities to defend our choices. When we praise, encourage, or condemn a choice, we are often giving a cue that it does or does not possess sanction. Either we are in a place to grant sanction ourselves, or else we are propagating cues that originate with some external authority.

What paths in life receive sanction today? We only have to look at where graduates end up. Consulting and finance dominate the career paths of Harvard and Yale students. They are the final step on a path sanctioned from early childhood for talented children across the world. After over a decade of jumping through testing hoops and marking volunteer hours, followed by four years in a hothouse grinder where every romantic passion or idealistic dream is made resume-legible, success means 60-hour weeks filling out Excel spreadsheets.

This sorry state of elite sanction-granting is not purely the result of a passive decline. The hothouse is there on purpose, built and maintained via the privileged relationship such schools maintain with McKinsey, Goldman Sachs, et al. The endless supply of career-anxious and risk-averse interns and manager-track hires is a win for their immediate needs. But we also can’t think of it as a pure formal conspiracy. Most organizations are simply playing the cards they are given. Unfortunately, the long-term result is that all our most powerful and prestigious organizations fall under the thrall of this psychology—to a large extent, they already have. The recruitment mechanisms themselves are likely operating on inertia. It’s no wonder that similar patterns of thought and behavior exist among DC wonks, New York consultants, and San Francisco investors. The scattered exceptions in each field are nearly all beaten down and assimilated.

So, we might ask, how do we reform Harvard and promote new and better career paths? But this is entirely the wrong question. Sanction is a social technology. The thing about technologies is that they can be reverse-engineered. This is what the Air Force did when it forgot how to create heat exchangers for its B-2 Spirit stealth bombers and what the Department of Energy did when it realized it couldn’t create FOGBANK material for its nuclear weapons anymore. But they weren’t just trying to fix old, decaying exchangers or classified aerogels. They tried to make new and improved ones. Likewise, Raymond and Jones didn’t just try to fix yellow journalism, but created an institution to displace and govern it. You reverse-engineer a technology because you want to create something better.

Superior visions for what our society can achieve require superior organs of sanction. But the organs of sanction themselves begin with people. They are nothing more than the organized collaboration of people who recognize, train, and reward those worthy of esteem.

We Desire New Modes of Life

It’s easy to outsource the demand for people elsewhere. When we look back at prior eras in history, we can discern a fleshed-out political agenda. We can study a whole set of policy decisions that made up the nuts and bolts of that era’s great endeavors. It’s natural to think that if we can just resurrect the structures that existed when things were more dynamic, then we can correct our mistakes and set society on a better course.

But policies and institutions express the will of people committed to mobilizing society toward actual goals. Any institution or set of policies is created by people acting in a particular context and based on tacit knowledge which is hard to pass on. Once the deep understanding of those goals is lost, it is no longer possible to simply fix the institutions or to reconstruct old sets of norms. While systematic studies of policy are valuable, they cannot be the starting point. Without strong and dynamic people, you cannot have a strong and dynamic society.

A society’s progress depends on whether significant numbers of people are working toward goals that have never been achieved before and on whether they are able to mobilize resources toward them. People need to be able to act as founders, not just as members of existing institutions. The first step is to embrace modes of life that are conducive to vision and mastery. This cannot, for the most part, come from within existing institutions. They have neither the incentive nor the ability to create them.

However, the dominant institutions of a stagnant society are still centers of authority. This means that they regulate social sanction and can grant it to founders who they perceive as aligned. If successful founders receive affirmation and prestige from authority—instead of finding themselves shunned, attacked, or imprisoned—the result is a set of cues that encourages others to embrace experimental or contrarian pursuits as well.

As these cues propagate throughout society, people become increasingly willing to take the risks to develop new visions and goals. Successful boldness can expect a reward. An individual can observe how others built communities or working groups based on achieving these kinds of goals. They learn by observation how to convincingly relay a vision to others and win the loyalty of early collaborators. The modes of life which are necessary to work toward unique visions become increasingly clear and spaces in which those modes are embraced become more numerous throughout society.

Without the use of sanction to develop these cues and social scripts, it becomes extremely difficult to act in the role of a founder. It’s easy to think one is boldly rejecting established ways of doing things while still being assimilated into the same logic. Coding boot camps might be narrowly superior to a four-year degree. But its superiority is still one of economic logic; the end goal is still to optimize one’s position in the saturated realm of data science, delivery apps, and DeFi models. The personal “founder” brand that dominates the technology sector is just another version of this assimilation disguised as disruption. It’s far harder to operate on an entirely different vision, with an entirely different logic to achieving it.

But it is not impossible, even on the individual level. An important first step is to seek out or create environments that break the conditioning against risk and toward assimilation. Such environments are risky in and of themselves because stagnant societies are prone to shutting them down. When rent-seeking and regulatory capture make up the available income streams, productive disruption is an inherent threat. We might tolerate some upheaval in the world of food delivery, but the open internet proved far too unwieldy.

It may even be ideal to leave America or the Western world entirely—at least for a while. Abandoning the Harvard pressure cooker is a good first step, but abandoning the broader and more subtly degrading cultural pressures of American life is even better.

The process of breaking this conditioning has two aims: discerning entirely new goals and domains of action and developing the kinds of mastery needed to achieve those goals.

Some goals are so ambitious that they can’t be achieved using existing organizational structures, industrial and technical practices, or models of how the world works. Henry Ford, for example, didn’t just become marginally more efficient in established manufacturing methods to achieve his goal of producing cars. Instead, he completely transformed the manufacturing logic, based on specialization, assembly lines, and large lot sizes. Decades later, Taiichi Ohno once again disrupted Ford’s successors by establishing the just-in-time approach to inventory, stripping out waste, and training multi-skilled machine operators. Elon Musk, pursuing his goal to settle on Mars—and in the near term, to lower the costs of space transport by a factor of ten—did not just apply to NASA. Instead, he founded a company focused on changing the parameters of what is technologically possible in nearly every aspect of space transport. A healthy environment is one that helps one crystalize ambitious goals of this sort and better define what is needed to achieve them.

But once defined, success depends on purposeful action, which itself depends on achieving mastery in the relevant domains. Mastery can only be achieved through deep immersion in a field. Ford worked as an engineer in the Edison Illuminating Company, after which Thomas Edison himself encouraged his automobile efforts. Ohno spent his career with the Toyoda family, first in textiles and then engine manufacturing, before becoming the architect of the Toyota Production System. Musk is something of an exception for not having worked in SpaceX’s field long before he founded the company. Instead, he was able to become one of the few autodidacts in rocket science. But even Musk integrated people who had spent years and decades in the field and immersed himself in the operations and production of the company.

One of the major problems with over-specialization is that it becomes increasingly difficult to achieve mastery over a domain larger than what’s required in your immediate role. An ambitious goal, used to define a particular set of skills and domain of action, is a powerful orienting force. Great founders generally have to be great learners, but they learn to achieve a goal. Some may read and study widely to do this, while others are empirical and strictly draw lessons from their own experimentation. But however mastery in the relevant domain is achieved, it is done through deep immersion and by understanding the overall logic behind a project, instead of specialization in one small part of it.

At present, when America has offshored so much of its material production, the road to mastery might well lead to other continents. Whoever builds the manufacturing empire that puts America back at the forefront of semiconductor manufacturing will probably have to spend significant time in Taiwan. And we need only consider what it takes to build, say, a shipping and logistics operation connecting East Africa and Asia. Someone who cannot even assume basic security is going to have to build a far more functional operation than someone who has those luxuries.

Wherever this process takes place, it also creates a new form of conditioning. Someone who operates extendedly in a space built on risk and on achieving concrete goals stops thinking in terms of optimizing metrics and mundane resume legibility—frames set by established institutions just trying to maintain something they’re already doing. Operating outside those spaces means relying on close and personal relationships with others working on the same goals. This removes many of the possibilities to fake competency and forces a person to build real mastery over a domain. They learn to differentiate between ambitions that are impossible versus merely difficult. They have to both learn well and teach well. They have to create pools of real, living knowledge tightly bound to conditions as they really are. Long-term relationships are built based on trust and loyalty, not contractual terms designed for someone to be easily replaceable.

As institutions scale up, their founders need to maintain a deep personal knowledge of how and why they operate—they must be owners, not just managers. A lot of the knowledge may be proprietary or context-dependent. The relationships involved may be based on the trust of a particular person or group. They might operate in structures of exchange value, but they must appreciate the real use of what they build and do. A pure manipulator of exchange value is only possible because they can free-ride off what others have created.

These personal empires regularly face temptations to assimilate or otherwise water down the real core of their productivity. They may not be easily legible to others, they may face competitive or legal pressures, or their jobs may just be immensely difficult. One common way they can change the environment around them is by propagating their own norms and goals to greater numbers of people. SpaceX began with a vastly different culture to NASA; but what could happen if SpaceX systematically placed its people, trained in that culture, in important NASA roles?

This cannot just be achieved through mere training for a specific role. The organization has to deeply inculcate people into a total way of doing things. Its models for the world, its way of making decisions, and its standards for evaluating taste may well be hard to communicate through anything other than prolonged involvement. But as increasing numbers of people achieve mastery over the organization’s core domains, it also increases the possibility for succession and longevity. It’s a good strategy to seek out organizations at this stage.

Some number of people will meet with real success, building a personal organizational empire and the freedom of action that comes with it. These people are in a position to change society in lasting ways. In theory, this doesn’t take much convincing—legacy is a natural concern for people in this kind of position. Unfortunately, the result is often to buy a name on a university building, a fellowship title, or a brand-building charity program with little real impact on bettering society. This is a natural outgrowth of the reality that old, established institutions are a reliable form of sanction and are the easy route to securing a legacy. With that move, the old logic of resume-stacking manages to seize victory from the jaws of defeat.

But a successful empire has the resources for higher ambition. Founders who achieve large-scale success and a significant level of social sanction gain the ability to grant sanction in their own right. They can develop new sets of norms and cues around them, and propagate these norms in outsize ways across society. This position usually only occurs once existing centers of authority have themselves granted the founder sanction and when a degree of alignment exists between them. Figures like Bill Gates or Elon Musk did not always have the degree of authority they currently possess, but gained it over time. A founder who gains the ability to grant sanction in their own right is in a uniquely powerful position. In a society where sanction is directed toward specialization, such founders can instead extend sanction toward the development of mastery outside of existing institutions.

The Thiel Fellowships are a well-known example of this kind of leveraging. It doesn’t just give whiz kids a prize; it tries to actively overturn the view that college is necessary for everyone and it does so among a class of people where that belief is deeply ingrained: university students. But it’s only one initiative trying to solve a global, systemic problem. It’s also yet to be seen if anyone can fill the niche of creating the deep, formative ties which the old university system once served to develop.

Disrupting Yale is one thing; disrupting Skull and Bones is another. These are the lasting bonds by which living and dynamic modes of life are really passed on, down through the generations.

Behind Every Institution Is a Plan

America is a country littered with the wreckage of dead plans. The institutions responsible for its governance, economic wealth, and social reproduction were largely founded decades or centuries ago. This is not a bad thing in and of itself. An institution can last far longer if it solves the problem of succession. But the political settlements, human relationships, and conscious visions for society on which these institutions were founded have largely decayed, or even disappeared completely.

When institutions have outlasted the conscious missions that they were originally designed for, they become zombified. They may try to rebrand themselves, change their core competency, or put increasing effort into telling a convincing story about their continued relevance. One can still find plenty of rational agency being exercised throughout the structure, but it is no longer working toward its original goals and consequently no longer operating on its original logic.

One famous example in the business world is Western Union, which built up a powerful monopoly from the 1850s onward on telegraph infrastructure. By the early 2000s, it had abandoned telegraphy completely, moving its focus to payment transfers and other services. It continues to survive thanks to ongoing acquisitions and exclusivity agreements made possible by the remnants of its once-formidable monopoly power. Its executives were able to scale up new iterations and projects, but they couldn’t re-found the firm entirely. Even though it can survive in these new niches, it has decisively lost its position as the mover and shaker of American telecommunications.

Without the kinds of people who can re-found its most important institutions and the fundamental plan on which they operate, America will suffer this fate on a world-historical level.

Nearly all of its major institutions are essentially conglomerates of competing organizations. Nominally serving the ends of their parent institution, these organizations are utterly disinterested in whatever higher goals originally guided the structure—or even opposed to them. Military decisions serve private contractors, universities are in thrall to administrative bureaucracies, and big business pours money into consulting fees and marketing campaigns. The condition of the American state merely reflects this broader reality. There are countless dead plans weighing down the place, but precious few living ones.

Life in a maze of dead plans conditions entire populations into mediocrity. In a stagnant society, human skill and ambition are wasted on capturing rents or jobs that merely maintain the core structures, as well as on guarding whatever little patch they carve out in a zero-sum world. Risk is a luxury they cannot afford. In a dynamic one, they invest those talents in society’s growth and progress. When people have the sense of purpose that lets them take risks, and the ability to competently carry out a plan, the world stops being zero-sum. Individual effort has a compound effect as people keep on developing what has come before them.

The point of seeking out and propagating new modes of life is to break this conditioning.

Many great founders can come out of such experiences. But a founder who gains the authority of sanction can begin to break that conditioning on a larger scale too. Just as an organization, company, city, or empire propagates norms within itself, it can also propagate norms in the world around it. It can leverage its institutional wealth to terraform the social landscape. If the logic underlying its modes of life, its vision, and its plan is powerful enough, it can alter the course of a civilization.

This requires its own kind of vision. Many people who are successfully achieving an ambitious goal in their core domain don’t necessarily have any desire to change society as a whole. But they have an interest in doing so. The difference between living in a stagnant society versus a dynamic one is incalculable.

A dynamic society may face crises, but it also has reasons for great optimism. A stagnant one no longer has real life in it. Collapse and displacement could take a century, or it could come in a matter of years—but come, it will.

Building a New Center

A dynamic society doesn’t happen just because people wish for it. Instead, its major power centers and institutions have to actively promote the right norms and pathways. They must allow new spaces to continually open up in which new missions are pursued, new plans are developed, and new kinds of mastery are achieved. They must tolerate disruptions that might be temporarily inconvenient but can drive the whole society forward. They must be willing to grant public sanction to success in order to integrate it, instead of seeing it as an inherent threat.

Elites inherently have the power to crush these things, but a wise elite reserves this power for real risks. Those who fall prey to fear and weakness begin to use it indiscriminately. Societies run by such elites become stagnant and are eventually conquered by those who remained open to new vectors of progress. Elites don’t exist in a sealed space where they stand removed from this process. Questions about modes of life, about whether plans are live or dead, and about what organizations are built in their service are perhaps more relevant for elites than anyone else.

In any society, certain methods of creating wealth and surplus form the core of that society’s material productivity and growth. Those who decide how that wealth is used are, by definition, that society’s elite. Whether they are the immediate owners is less relevant than whether they ultimately have the power to direct its use. These two roles are merged in industrialists and landowners, but not in medieval clerics, Chinese party bosses, or the highest tier of American journalists. Nevertheless, all these classes had or continue to have a powerful influence over where a society invests its wealth and effort. Their modes of life and their plans make up the core infrastructure that shapes and conditions the rest of the social order. They don’t make up everything that goes on in a society, or even the majority of it, but they are the core subset.

This means that the context of elite plans has to be properly understood. Otherwise, one of two errors can drive an entire society off a cliff.

The first error is an overconfident but false understanding of how plans work. Societies that over-centralized planning in a few privileged bodies drastically overestimate how much a plan can calculate. The nature of plans is that they depend on contextual and often non-transferable knowledge and relationships. A society that could be totally centrally run would be so uniform and stagnant that it would never grow. Both China and America learned from the failure of the Soviet Union to fully utilize the skills and dynamism which existed in parts of its highly-educated and developed population.

The second error is the idea that since plans are context-dependent, it is impossible to plan or direct society in a centralized way at all. The breadth of what an institution can plan is dependent on its core competencies. But statecraft itself is made up of sets of core competencies. Creating law, assigning sanction and prestige, controlling information and technologies that require a state monopoly, aligning and disciplining other powerful actors, maintaining the ability to wage war, defending otherwise powerless clients—all these require privileged knowledge and institutional control which, by definition, impacts the whole of society.

No plan or institution can control all of society, but they can shape the course of its future. This means that the question of what kind of society we should have is an unavoidable one. The modes of life and the plans of a society’s elite—current or future—will bear fruit. A dynamic center creates a dynamic society. Those who pursue lives, visions, and plans that can successfully operate on this level will find themselves in the position to construct it if they have the will to do so.

What would it mean to have a society with widespread plans and planners, in which the population was imbued with both the consciousness and the capacity to seek out great missions?

First, it would mean a society with more widespread mastery of important and useful domains. Industrial and digital life creates powerful incentives toward specialization in tiny niches. But this ultimately makes society fragile and stagnant, since people cannot easily pursue new projects and ultimately become risk-averse. By way of contrast, imagine an organization where the average fully trained member or employee could be called on to take charge of strategic projects or departments. Such an organization would be more resilient, could better exploit opportunities that crossed existing specializations, and would be made up of people who could tolerate risk and propose bold goals based on personal executive experience.

A society of masters is far stronger than a society of narrowly focused experts. The ancient Athenian state privileged this kind of social order; numerous important positions were filled by lottery from among pools of Athenian citizens and it was expected that they could perform such social duties when chosen. Is there any major institution today that has this level of faith in its members?

Second, it would mean a society where pools of knowledge were kept tightly bound with actual productive work. Geographic separation between executive management and production lines only incentivizes the focus on shareholders and the financial short-termism which has devoured so much of American productive capacity. This is one of the most important areas where the more specific proposals of industrial policy can benefit industrial progress. Public backing for mission-oriented projects in fields like energy or material science has the bargaining power to set rigorous standards for how these resources are owned and used.

Finally, it would mean that institutions with the power of sanction understood themselves as playing a vital strategic role. Rather than gatekeepers of a stagnant social order, they actively spur the process of continual social and economic renewal. A dynamic elite must be a confident elite, one willing to exercise the virtue of liberality in its use of power.

The paths of industrial progress which such a society could undertake would be greater than anything we have yet imagined. But they will only be possible if people are willing to break out of our collective stagnation and give themselves over to plans, visions, and modes of life which are worthy of them. Great things are granted only to those who dare to pursue them.

But if the digital spin is new, the Schelling point itself is as old as America. It has underpinned everything from the country’s founding to its modern conduct as a superpower. Decentralization is generally a debate about centers versus peripheries: holistic, coordinated action versus localized, particular action. Western politics, particularly in America and the Anglosphere, has been crippled for decades by viewing center and periphery as two sides of a factional conflict.

In the realm of economics, markets and the state are consistently seen as two players in a zero-sum game. The dovish version sees the state as a necessary but ultimately corrective force, evening out the playing field; meanwhile, the hawkish version presents a parasitic state draining productive energy from a population just trying to get by. In regional disputes, cities are pitted against towns and rural areas. Growth is seen as necessarily favoring one or the other, and by extension educated urbanites versus ‘Middle America.’ In debates about social mores, the notion of common customs which shape the population is all but nonexistent. Debates center on the boundary between private freedom versus public restriction—whether drug use, owning firearms, sexual norms, or religious praxis.

The presumption of a zero-sum game is a fundamental error in nearly every one of these discourses. America’s greatest innovations were achieved by dynamic interaction between state power and market potential. Investment and coordination by the military, health, and research agencies like DARPA brought us GPS, numerous pharmaceutical drugs, the internet, and the Google algorithm. The same is true around the world; for example, South Korea’s famously competitive firms were the result of the Park regime’s aggressive industrial policies. On the regional question, the U.S. need not look far for an alternative. During America’s rise in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the development of each region was seen as necessary for the strengthening of the whole country. The Hamiltonian-inspired American System used both external tariffs and internal transportation investment to spur the country’s industrial development in both the east and on the frontier. When it comes to social mores, the very fact that opening certain questions to personal choice creates such conflict implies that most people realize this dichotomy is false. Central action on norms, administration, and law themselves condition the values, duties, and taboos of the population.

The cases are diverse, but the lesson is the same: center and periphery, when properly governed, interact symbiotically in a feedback loop. The health and development of the center feeds that of the periphery, and vice-versa. Good statecraft must use the strength of each simultaneously. It must recognize the dance between center and periphery, and consider both as components of a unified and dynamic whole.

The topic of decentralization, typically burdened by zero-sum thinking, deserves a fresh analysis through this lens.

Why the West is Watching Asia During COVID-19

The truth is that decentralization has happened around the world, across political, economic, and technological lines. It just differed from the popular American narrative in one important way: rather than decentralization against the center, decentralization has been carried out by central powers—to their own benefit as well as the benefit of their respective peripheries. Governments and corporations have both harnessed strategic decentralization to create  positive feedback loops between center and periphery.

Successful decentralization isn’t rebellion and fracture; it’s a constructive cooperation between central and peripheral powers within a holistic order. Centralized and decentralized actions solve different problems: scale and coordination on the one side, experimentation and localized knowledge on the other. This is a much better model for successful institution building.

Over the last decade, a number of East Asian states have captured the Western imagination—or at least an uncertain attention—as they appear to be winning on both fronts at once. Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, and China are the foremost examples. These states have simultaneously built resilient state capacity and productive markets. While many Western liberal democracies are succumbing to political gridlock and economic stagnation, they have been able to take decisive action and upgrade their systems in response to challenges.

These states are not identical. Singapore is a city-state; the rest are not. Taiwan and South Korea privilege voluntary action and privacy, while Singapore and China do not. Unlike the rest, China is a demographic behemoth. It is nimble in economics, but risk-averse when it comes to popular discontent, and its central government is used to routing around slow or corrupt mid-level bureaucracies.

But despite such differences, these states have demonstrated competency and energy in many areas which Western states appear to have lost them. The COVID-19 crisis has only accelerated this pattern. In that context, the PRC and Taiwan have established something like two ends of a spectrum. The former’s response was highly central and top-down—suppressed information it saw as destabilizing, but was able to respond on a large scale as the disease spread. The latter allowed greater participation by citizens, as well as free-flowing information which contributed to an early response. This reflects the different cultures of the mainland and Taiwan, the different scales as a large empire and a smaller nation-state, and the differences between the CCP and the government in Taipei. Both possess lessons for America as it works through and beyond this pandemic.

Decentralizing from the Center: Beijing and Taipei

Historically, China’s reform process was informed by observing how other systems had out-competed it on the economic front. Deng Xiaoping’s famous pragmatism was based on his willingness to learn from different systems. His attentiveness to Singapore is well-known, based on Lee Kuan Yew’s successful combination of a market economy with a more authoritarian and technocratic approach to governance.

More directly, the integration of Hong Kong and Macau gave the CCP a chance to import institutional knowledge to its newly-minted special economic zones (SEZs). For example, Leung Chun-ying—best known for his career as Hong Kong’s infamously pro-Beijing chief executive—played a key role in the development of Shenzhen as China’s premier SEZ. He both advised its urban reforms and positioned Hong Kong as a springboard for foreign investment into the mainland. By actively creating the space for local experimentation, the CCP is able to control the incorporation of desirable updates into its top-level policies. It continually updates its strategy, creating and integrating local systems to maintain sovereignty over “one country.”

The SEZs aren’t just restricted zones of tolerated markets, or interfaces to Western international capitalism. Within CCP theory, the economic development they spur introduces what Party theorist Ye Xianming calls the logic of capital to the country as a whole. They help to eradicate the “backward” characteristics which hold China back. The controlled interface to Western international capitalism allows the Chinese economic community to gain practical knowledge, and subjects institutions in the rest of China to a sharpening competitive logic without turning the whole country over to this conception of capitalism. The CCP sees the SEZs as ultimately propelling China and the party-state forward to complete the logical development of their social form. In terms of theory, at least, China is the world’s foremost Hegelian and modernist state.

The Chinese model has provided for striking levels of decentralization and experimentation, but it is inescapably touched by the culture of the CCP itself. The party feels, for good reason, that its central control is precarious, so it very carefully manages the process of incorporation. Openness to novelty is checked by a fear of destabilization. The CCP’s relationship with those it governs is hardly one of deep trust. This is especially evident in the watchful eye it keeps over the country’s internet, which makes the ubiquitous use of VPNs a necessity.

Off the coast, the government of Taiwan has embraced a more open model of digital governance. Taiwanese government figures such as Audrey Tang, a programmer who has taken on the role of Taiwan’s digital minister, have led these initiatives. Tang worked to build relationships between the Taiwanese government and the g0v (“gov-zero”) programmer and hacker community, which was devoted to building open source tools for governance—a combination which would be utterly bizarre in the American context, but has effectively upgraded Taiwan’s state capacity. These relationships have since become solidified and reflected in policy. Since 2015, this partnership has led to both the vTaiwan and Join platforms. These are not simply feedback mechanisms or digital comment boxes. Rather, they are structured to reveal Schelling points on policy issues, ultimately leading to emergent consensus positions. Around half of the Taiwanese population has participated in these sorts of platforms.

Taiwanese citizens took an active role in determining what sort of data has been collected and used throughout the early stages of Taiwan’s COVID-19 response. This resulted in numerous community-based apps which used both public and voluntarily-disclosed data to coordinate local responses. Two prominent examples were the creation of apps monitoring face mask availability and tracing contact. The former was coordinated in part by Digital Minister Tang, alongside g0v programmers. Real-time tracking of mask availability reduced shortages and allowed for efficient reallocation. The latter allowed citizens to share reports, symptoms, and other data which could then be used to determine if one had been in a high-risk area or if symptoms were serious enough to report to medical centers.

All this took place alongside more centralized measures: integration of national health insurance data with customs and immigration, real-time symptoms and travel history alerts for visitors to clinics, QR codes and online reporting of personal data, prediction of traveler infection risks, and the use of personal phones to fast-track low-risk returnees and track the quarantine of high-risk ones.

While central coordination remains essential to the Taiwanese model, it places a far higher degree of trust in local coordination. Citizens can organize and bootstrap responses without waiting on approval from official channels. Rather, successful responses attract the attention of these channels, which then act as platforms on which to scale up and support their implementation. Rather than awaiting entire new party platforms, the g0v culture which influenced this strategy focused on ‘forking’ governance by allowing live feedback as policies develop. On the civil service side, Tang’s approach also encouraged greater risk-taking among public employees.

Unlike the CCP, this relationship is more characterized by trust and openness between the government and population. But in both cases, the dynamic reinforcement between central and local actors has allowed these governments to develop a honed and responsive form of state capacity.

Decentralization Beyond Liberalism

Neither China, nor Taiwan present a model which can be imported wholesale into the U.S. context, or that of its allies. The CCP’s emphasis on centralization and control is based on a deep fear of its own population. This is a failure. As Taiwan showed, a relationship of trust and cooperation between state and people is needed to realize much of what these digital networks make possible. Nevertheless, China’s willingness to pursue ambitious projects, its belief that governance can be skillful and successful, and its ability to quickly grow domestic state capacity should be taken as examples. And while Taiwan’s model is more amenable to many Western social and political norms, it was developed in the context of a highly-educated and homogeneous population living on a small island, without the same political order concerns as a more imperial state like China or the US. A huge and diverse country like the U.S. cannot presume to import such a model.

But America can learn from both. Both the CCP and Taiwanese strategies have important insights, pointing toward a more fundamental model that can be adapted to local conditions—governance forks with American characteristics.

The core competencies of central action include coordination and scale. When action among a number of local actors is obstructed by insufficient capacity, information, competing interests, or other barriers, it can become more efficient for a central actor to coordinate local actors. Sometimes, it may even override them completely. Where local incentives compete with the common good, it provides a rational center for action where none would otherwise exist.

On the other hand, over-extension is often the cause of failure. A classic example is the calculation problem; the necessary knowledge for economic planning is sometimes dispersed among many local actors but inaccessible to a single central actor. Central actors can also find themselves over-applying a particular solution beyond its original context, so that it begins to create more problems than it solved. They can lose the expertise necessary for maintaining previously successful solutions, or fail to keep track of whether the local conditions for a previous solution have continued to hold.

One good example is bureaucracies: a common failure mode for a bureaucracy is that it becomes inefficient in solving the problem which it was formally created to solve, or that it loses the organizational owner who was able to direct it. However, this should not lead one to assume that a central actor as such is the problem. Modern American governing institutions are infamously plagued by ineffective bureaucracies. But Americans have also built effective bureaucracies and can observe effective bureaucracies in other countries today—ones that achieve their goals and are effectively managed by their owners. Forgetting how to cure a disease is bad, but assuming this means there can be no cure is much worse.

Likewise, peripheries are the scene of localized knowledge and coordination. A multiplicity of actors is often more resilient to failure. On a localized level, people can experiment, act on unique knowledge, and improve on what they learn from others. When properly stewarded, they provide an optimal level of variability to the system as a whole—one which keeps it dynamic and resilient. However, failures in coordination, scale, or information can become insurmountable without recourse to a higher-level actor.

In a healthy positive feedback loop, the center and periphery each act on their strengths. The competency of the center benefits the periphery, while the competency of the periphery achieves the goals which the center cannot. This is a functional order: each part plays its role in a system according to an overall logic. It operates teleologically, with the internal structures evolving as is necessary to fulfill the overall system’s goals. When it comes to a state governing a country, the goal is peace, law, strong social institutions, economic wealth, and so on.

As a general principle, this seems basic. As a guiding force of American governance, it has been thoroughly abandoned and memory-holed. The last remnants of the American System were abandoned in the early 20th century. By the turn of the century, the notion of a state which actively developed and stewarded the country had its new home in Beijing.

When the ability to govern—or even conceive of—a country as a holistic system disappears, the political incentive is for factions to arise. Polities tend to disintegrate from the top down. This is the situation we are struck with in America. Various factions of middlemen and rentiers, who have lost the ability to coordinate around the guiding logic of a holistic center, expropriate the productive health of the peripheries.

Reconciliation is only established through victory by a faction animated by the holistic logic of a new governing center, or collapse and foreign conquest. Victory of a faction operating on mere factional logic only accelerates the problem as they use it as a looting opportunity.

A reconsolidating victory can come from the center or periphery. The American colonies won a peripheral victory against the British center, and the resultant republic won a central victory against its southern periphery during the Civil War. China, now a decisive center, was an exploited periphery for much of its recent history.

Human nature plays a formative role in the tribal dynamics which so often occur when these systems collapse. But that same human nature drives cooperation and invention when things are arranged properly. That makes the symbiotic feedback loop approach to centers and peripheries a powerful mindset for states to have. Each allows humans to cooperate in a uniquely advantageous way. A stewardship approach allows states to responsibly order and govern these systems, and consider them holistically rather than as mere units of tribalized political warfare. Decentralization is often an effective tool to route around and supplant failed institutions or obstructive mid-level political actors. But that efficacy is determined by how well it serves the overarching goals of the country.

A New American System

Throughout the early-stage COVID-19 response, America’s major decision-makers faced numerous coordination failures. The messaging from the White House changed quickly, guidance from federal agencies was unclear, and entrepreneurs willing to put their manufacturing resources to use were met with counterproductive regulatory hurdles like the need for emergency-use authorizations when creating tests. Mid-level structures failed to adapt to allow for central and local action to coordinate on a response.

Federal actions did improve as time went on. For example, the White House helped to launch the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset, including pre-publication materials. This is an excellent example of central action overcoming barriers to information access so that private and local actors are better able to develop their own responses. But soon enough, political bandwidth was taken up with discussions about what form the bailout should take.

While the private sector responds as best it can to building the infrastructure for the pandemic response, America’s governing institutions seem unable to make substantive changes in how they achieve their mission. At best, there are instances of momentary collaboration, sure to collapse once the pressure is off and the blame-game begins.

As long as no clear center exists in the real structure of American governance—which sometimes overlaps with its formal blueprint, and sometimes does not—the necessary forms of decentralization will not occur either. Competent local actors are frustrated, factions near the center are busy with political conflict, and the middleman bureaucracies lack real ownership or direction.

The goal of decentralization is to unleash companies, cities, and other local actors to experiment and take risks in order to benefit the country as a whole. But if America as a whole has no center, then the logical move is for the most successful local actors to fill the gap—either by making a bid for the central power, or by reconstituting it locally. When California’s governor calls it a nation-state, he might just be taking a convenient dig. But there’s a reason the dig is effective. If a state is successful when the federal power is not, why continue to give it resources? If a region has no stake in the rest of the country, why continue to remain part of it?

The same logic is mirrored in subcultures which see technology as a way to outmaneuver an unsaveable state. When the tech sector seems bold and innovative, and the political sector is a bloated zombie, people start looking to technology as an escape hatch—whatever the realities of their intertwined relationship. But what is the most successful version of this project? A secession of Silicon Valley alone will not fill the vacuum of America. If Silicon Valley creates a real alternative, then it has not repudiated the center, but created an astonishing fork to replace it. If this happens, then Silicon Valley will need to honestly confront its goals sooner or later.

America probably isn’t going to disintegrate next week. But if it permanently remains without any rational, coordinating, or effective central power, then why should it remain together indefinitely? The Soviet and British empires disintegrated over a few decades. The Roman one took longer. But disintegrate they all did, when their centers of gravity vanished. And the constituents, for all their momentary liberties, mostly ended up the hapless vassals of other powers.

The same might have happened to America itself. The founding generation could have found itself reconquered, had they not ably used their diplomatic and military resources. Had a less determined union let the south secede or failed to take the west, the European powers might have reasserted themselves on the continent. If the American System had not successfully built a powerful national economy, the country might have become yet another resource trap, like so many other states in the Americas. At every stage, America succeeded because it was able to produce a coordinated center with the capacity to govern the country as a whole. It actively supported the creation and development of rising cities and states, increasing its territorial reach and overall might.

In order to coordinate this scale of policy once again, and defeat the middleman institutions that would resist dynamic coordination, the federal center will have to both rebuild its own state capacity and explicitly adopt a new model of what governance looks like. They will have to think in terms of building positive feedback loops on the political level, realizing the power of center and periphery alike. China achieved this capacity through a long process of reform, including importing expertise from outside the mainland. Likewise, the technological competence of Taiwanese institutions became possible in large part due to the government’s outreach to programmers who had participated in the g0v community and Sunflower Movement.

In terms of immediate response, the increasing calls to rebuild strategic American manufacturing may open doors to long-term action. Those involved in the response on the political or institutional level have a historically unique opportunity. The partnerships they build now with outsiders could substantively upgrade American state capacity, bringing in the most brilliant, competent, and innovative minds in the country to the highest levels of power.

In seeking allies, those already coordinating at the national level can privilege competency over formal jurisdiction when it comes to seeking allies. The competent bodies for local response are varied: city governments for the urban cores, states for the rural areas, and a number of private actors. Each have their own relationships with the federal level, and some with the executive branch. Under the pressures of the COVID-19 response, it may well be that Los Angeles and Utah are similar in terms of the number of people they have the capacity to organize, despite one being a city and the other a state. If so, it makes sense to prioritize these relationships at the same level.

Long-term, this evolution diversifies the number of political entities with which the center has direct institutional relationships. In the near-term, this would improve its ability to coordinate policy and share data. In a further-reaching scenario, it could open the door to federal authorization for SEZ-style designations in interested cities, or the evolution of national-scale digital governance tools, scaling up local successes to engage the American people as a whole.

The dynamics of American governance would start to resemble a barbell model, with central and local institutions taking precedence over certain state governments or outmoded federal agencies. Local policy experimentation on matters like housing and land policy, voting strategies, data sharing, and the like could accelerate under the aegis of streamlined central coordination, rather than multiple layers of state, federal, and alphabet agency regulation.

America has a massive, well-educated population. It has vast natural resources. It has more great cities in its borders than any other country. American companies are among the most resourceful and innovative organizations in the world. Why shouldn’t its state be likewise? The only excuse is a lack of will, vision, or strategy—or all the above.

Decentralization captures the imagination when it communicates creativity, experimentation, and energy. It represents a chance to step over sclerotic and outmoded bureaucracies. It is embodied in images of rising cities, new technologies, and rugged frontiers. The American psyche is entranced by these images on a deep level. They are synonymous with its rise and identity. But that rise was only made possible by the bold and effective governance which forged this promising multiplicity into a country.

If the real potential that decentralization holds for America is to be achieved, it will go hand-in-hand with a vital and dynamic center—or it will not be achieved at all.

“The people of Goldman Sachs are among the most productive in the world.”

Arguably, he was doing the duty of a CEO in defending his employees under media pressure. Still, it was high praise for a sector whose recklessness had thrown the world’s richest economy into chaos and who were rewarded for it with a bailout deal. And it raised a further question that had suddenly become relevant again because of the crisis: productive by what measure?

When Mariana Mazzucato discusses that question, the Blankfein quote remains one of her favorite go-to’s. Based at University College London and founder of the Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose, Mazzucato has spent her professional career on answering it. Her latest book on the topic is The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy, published in 2018.

The book is a tour de force of economics, history, and policy. Such breadth is arguably necessary for Mazzucato’s fundamental goal: reopening the debate about economic value, what it includes, and who has the power to define it. What should count as real economic wealth? Who truly creates it, who merely assists the process, and who might be actively impeding it? The answers to that question have directed how economies develop, how governments direct or impede production, and what forms of economic power come to dominate human life.

Once, the question of value dominated economic discourse. The French physiocrats argued that wealth was produced from the land. Conversely, Adam Smith tended to see landlords as a rentier class. Marx famously defined labor itself as the source of value. But this debate about value, once core to economic discourse, has long been de-emphasized in the discipline. As Mazzucato demonstrates, the marginal revolution in economics heralded a subjective, utility-focused approach that effectively sidestepped the historic debate about value—a sidestep that, in Mazzucato’s telling, drastically impoverished the discipline. An undergrad student today is likely to hear the above names once or twice in the opening lecture of an introductory course, and then only as a one-off primer. How did this happen?

Following a historical primer on how the question of value was obscured, the book takes the reader through the successive results. Chief among these are the rise of financial power and its cannibalization of large parts of economic life, the extractive institutions in technological and medical innovation, and the gutting of a once-innovative and bold public sector, which had produced immense value across fields from consumer technology to medical products.

Ultimately, Mazzucato exposes an orthodoxy of silence about value in modern economics, as well as in government. This orthodoxy, claims Mazzucato, has undermined public and private institutions and fundamentally weakened the ability of modern neoliberal economies to innovate.

But Mazzucato is optimistic: the glory days of innovation are not lost to the mid-20th century. By returning to the question of value, Mazzucato is calling for state and private actors to address, on a large scale, what forms of value our economic life should create. In taking this frame, it becomes impossible to flee political and social questions for the bloodless realm of technocracy—the minimization of governance’s moral and political judgements in favor of a ‘scientific’ cloak. Such an approach to economics restores the social and collective element to how value is created. It is a bold call, and one which undergirds the book’s detailed and multifaceted contents.

Mazzucato’s introductory chapters on the value debate are especially useful in how they subvert popular dichotomies. She begins with familiar names like Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Karl Marx, and Vilfredo Pareto. But they are no longer categorized and opposed to each other on the basis of ‘free markets,’ or other discourse tropes of the political commentariat. The important question here is that of what creates value—and on this point, Smith and Marx find themselves fighting on a similar front against their successors decades later.

A key tool for understanding the divide is the production boundary. As an accounting tool, the boundary determines what is considered production in national accounts. For example: modern economists generally consider a service worker at a hotel to be contributing to the labor market’s supply side, while someone doing chores in their own house is generally not considered to be part of a market at all. As countries developed national accounts records, the question of what to consider real wealth was vitally important. The sides which later economists took represent not only theoretical differences, but different sides in class conflicts, political battles, and strategies for national and imperial greatness. As Mazzucato notes, Adam Smith himself conceived of his project as “giving guidance to ‘statesmen’ on how to act to ‘enrich both the people and the sovereign.’” If early economists aspired to an objective understanding on how to achieve their ends, the ends themselves were immensely political.

Smith, Ricardo, and Marx took labor as key to understanding how value was created. Smith’s stricter production boundary leaves only primary and secondary sectors as productive, and excludes what we now call the service sector. His thesis takes labor—specifically, labor realized in a “permanent object” of material production—as the source of value. In doing so, he broke with earlier thinkers who had considered industry to be merely a facilitator of wealth drawn from the land, like agriculture.

Smith also highlighted what he considered to be the great enemy of production: monopolistic power. Rentier landlords, mercantilist protectionism, and competition-stifling guilds were impediments to the market’s freedom. Unlike many who invoke him in the present, Smith saw government as playing a leading role in establishing what he defined as a ‘free market’: one free from rent-seeking monopoly power, not from government regulation. Ricardo, in his turn, explored subjects like the distribution of income and the vital role of surpluses in spurring development.

Marx, in contrast to Smith, placed the service sector in his production boundary. Ironically, neither Marx, nor Smith considered government to be inside the production boundary—an assumption Mazzucato challenges later in the book.

As Mazzucato elaborates, Marx’s contribution was not, strictly speaking, the tying in of labor with value. Rather, it was his recognition that the capitalist form of production created a new form of society, characterized by class realities and relationships markedly different from what came before. But he also introduced a more subtle production boundary: what mattered was not occupation per se, but whether labor produced surplus value. Like Ricardo, he understood rents as redistribution and not value-creation. Despite his radical politics, Marx’s economic thinking—its focus on labor, on value, and on classes and occupations—was explicitly building on his predecessors.

For Mazzucato, the real rupture has a different source: the marginal revolution and the rise of utility rather than value in economic thinking. Built on the work of Leon Walras, William Jevons, and Carl Menger, this change shaped the rise of what we now call neoclassical economics. Its assumptions shape the discipline to this day, and it’s what undergraduates are regularly taught. Rather than focusing on how wealth was created and what counted as wealth, economists began to ask how utility—satisfaction from consuming a good or service—was satisfied by decisions on the margin. This allowed for the mathematical approaches used and abused in modern economics.

The notion of utility, in this sense, is fundamentally subjective. Mazzucato notes that discourses about just or unjust prices, like those in Thomas Aquinas, become not just outmoded, but impossible. Under this view, prices are not a reflection of some objective sense of value. Rather, value exists only in the eye of the consumer. Price, in turn, reflects utility gained by a consumer from an additional unit of goods or services. The production boundary becomes weak in terms of economic analysis, since all market exchanges are effectively contained within it. Only non-market transfers remain outside it. Most damaging of all for Mazucatto, the concept of “unearned income,” once fundamental to Smith’s conception of free versus unfree markets, effectively ceases to exist. While economists can continue to distinguish between monopolistic, oligopolistic, and competitive markets, the far more political question of whether market-based value extraction can be parasitic fades from view.

The debate might seem overly abstract. But its implications have had concrete effects on the economic and political life of the world’s most powerful countries and governments. In the remainder of the book, Mazzucato turns her focus to explaining how.

The next several chapters focus on Mazzucato’s bête noire: the leviathan sector of finance, its Blankfeinian mythos of hyper-productivity, and its power over both economic and political life. Its ascension is a tale all its own, and embodies how the more abstract themes of value impact the real economic life of families, workers, and countries.

The notion that finance is part of the productive sphere at all is relatively new in the history of economic development. Aquinas and other medieval thinkers treated it with suspicion, Adam Smith more or less ignored it, and Marx treated it as part of capital’s “circulation phase.” Economists in the 20th century also critiqued it—Mazzucato notes Keynes and Minsky—but these warnings were not earth-shaking at a time when financial services were a very low share of national output. Interestingly, Mazzucato points out that Keynes prefigured modern concerns about finance’s brain drain of engineers and scientists with his quip that, rather than participating in a success story of laissez-faire capitalism, “the best brains of Wall Street have been in fact directed towards a different object.”

Measures like GDP give the impression that measures of wealth reflect scientific and objective empiricism. Economics may find itself among social sciences and arts departments in universities—but unlike its counterparts in sociology or history, it aspires to the higher realm of expertise.

In reality, GDP and similar measures have evolved over time based on the judgment of those doing the measuring. Mazzucato covers notable problems and changes. Before 2008, the international System of National Accounts (SNA) considered R&D an input—a cost subtracted from final output. But that year, in-house R&D became considered a final output, since it increased the stocks of knowledge important for companies. As Mazzucato notes, the U.S. update of this measure in 2013 “added $400 billion—2.5% of US GDP— to national income overnight.” By its nature, this was a qualitative decision. So, too, are decisions about whether to measure black market economies (as in Italy), whether to legalize certain markets and begin to account for them (prostitution in the Netherlands, marijuana in Canada), how to distinguish profits and rents (the SNA has tried for years), and non-market economies (housework and social fabric).

This is important when we consider how finance became a major and powerful part of the ‘productive’ economy.

Finance’s case is founded on the notion that it is a necessary part of spurring production by allocating capital. This is true, in a basic sense. Household savings don’t always cover costs, and business revenues don’t always cover investments. If finance merely pooled and directed resources to match these needs, it would not be a very exceptional industry. But in reality, finance does much more. Like other firms, banks are profit-driven. Rather than simple matchmaking, they act strategically to channel their revenues, especially into interest payments and toward shareholders. This logic fuels speculation bubbles, which are then continually refinanced through securitization and other strategies for inflating assets without investment.

Mazzucato cites the case of the Australian bank Macquarie, which acquired the major British utility company Thames Water. Rather than provide direct investment, Macquarie ballooned the company’s debt to £7.8 billion ($10.05 billion) over the next 6 years. In other words, the company was leveraging the privatized assets they had acquired into increasing debt, thus saving their own revenues for interest payments and shareholder distributions. This might benefit the financial companies involved, but it is hard to make the case that public assets are well-served by privatizing them into the hands of risky debt-leveraging operations. The financial crisis in 2008-9 is the most infamous example of what happens when debt is used to inflate asset values, which are in turn used to back up financial instruments.

As Mazzucato points out, the large scale effect of finance’s market strategies since the financial crisis has been debt deflation, followed by unemployment and wage suppression: “in other words, value is extracted from labour’s share of earnings in order to restore corporate profits.”

Despite the reality of systematic value extraction in addition to real saving and lending, the financial sector is viewed as a key part of the economy. One of the key SNA revisions that cemented this status only came in 1993. That year, the SNA was revised to include a metric called ‘financial intermediation services, indirectly measured’ (FISIM). FISIM measures the differential in interest that borrowers will pay and lenders will receive in relation to a ‘reference rate,’ multiplied by the stock of loans. To the extent that this measure is high, banks are seen as providing real value to both. Mazzucato reflects that after this change, FISIM was considered a real productive contribution rather than a representation of services that were ultimately consumed by firms as inputs.

With the full implementation of this change by the late 2000s—”just in time for the 2008 financial crisis,” Mazzucato blithely notes—the financial sector has continued to make growing ‘contributions’ to GDP, particularly in the U.S. and U.K. And yet, events during those decades have made clear how different they are from other firms. Sectors like tech or natural resources can’t contribute to the money supply the way commercial banks can, and can’t as easily hedge parts of the economy against each other while playing both sides. Even the economic fallout has been to their benefit, as households are forced to compensate for the market’s sluggishness through private debt.

But this is far from the whole story. The financialization of the economy has unfolded far beyond the activities of banks. Mazzucato provides an account of the process which is both rigorous and approachable to non-expert readers. The effect is most obvious in asset management and the world of hedge funds, private equity, and venture capital firms. Once distinct from risk-averse pension funds, the rules on pension fund investments have been relaxed since the 1970s.

The differences between lender and borrower interest rates reflected by the FISIM metric theoretically represent a transaction cost on the movement of liquidity. But governments count them as productive contributions from the financial sector. Monopoly power and high charges for taking on risk—which might be assumed to lend themselves to more effective regulation—have gone hand in hand with unchained speculation. All these qualities which would be regarded as unacceptable inefficiencies in other industries and proof of government incompetence in the public sector.

Conversely, finance seems to exist in a realm all its own.

Such financialization has deeply affected the real economy. Mazzucato points to the American icons of Ford and General Electric: “In the 2000s, for example, the US arm of Ford made more money by selling loans for cars than by selling the cars themselves…Over the same period GE Capital, the finance arm of the enormous General Electric (GE) group, made around half of the whole group’s earnings.” Hard production is further undermined by short-termist pressures which divert revenues from risk-taking R&D toward share buybacks.

Mazzucato brings clarity to the situation in examining how private equity firms ratched up the debt to equity ratios in two vital services in the U.K.: care homes and water. Care homes increasingly went from family firm or local control to becoming parts of larger chains. Many of these have private equity involvement. Mazzucato examines the case of Four Seasons Health Care, where a series of debt expansions and resales ultimately left the company with an annual interest charge of over £100 (nearly $130) per bed per week by 2008. In the case of water companies, those owned by private equity firms—itself a result of English and Welsh water privatization in 1989—carried the highest net debt. Mazzucato points out that “the company with the lowest gearing (ratio of debt to equity) and the highest credit rating was Welsh Water, which is mutually owned.” Welsh Water is owned and operated as a not-for-profit operation by a single-purpose private company for the benefit of customers, with its board made up mostly of independent directors who do not play an executive role.

In all these cases, political decisions opened the path for the financial sector’s actions. Often, this was undergirded by an ideology which vaunted private sector discipline and efficiency, compared with public sector stagnation and sluggishness. The truth isn’t as rosy. In the case of Four Seasons, their financial straits later became severe enough that twenty-eight homes were embargoed for further residents.

Following her exacting discussion of financial power, Mazzucato spends the final chapters of the book on two other great myths in the modern story of value: innovation and the public sector. These chapters serve a valuable purpose in ensuring the reader doesn’t lose the forest for the trees. Ultimately, the stories we tell about economic value are the point here, not just another discussion about finance as such.

For Mazzucato—deeply influenced by Joseph Schumpeter, the great standard-bearer of innovation’s centrality to capitalism—the great myths around innovation surround its very sources. In particular, the true investments and risks which have driven modern innovation are far more collective efforts in her reading. In contrast, many of the rewards have been captured and privatized by tendencies similar to those in finance, and in the classic rent problems of thinkers like Smith.

One of Mazzucato’s great points of advocacy has been championing how many of the world’s biggest companies have built themselves on the legacy of state backed, publicly funded innovation. For example, nearly all major parts on modern smartphone, including touchscreens, were originally developed in university-based research facilities with public money. The optimization of these technologies into industrial products is the significant contribution of the private economy, but the foundational technological innovation itself does not originate in private industry. Other prominent examples include the role of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in developing the Internet and SIRI, the U.S. Navy’s creation of the GPS system used by phones and computers, and the National Science Foundation’s grant contributions to creating the algorithm behind Google.

One example that stands out is pharmaceutical drugs. It is a common refrain among American drug companies—and one Mazzucato examines in-depth—-that exorbitant prices are necessary for R&D revenues. But in her analysis: “research has shown that two-thirds of the most innovative drugs (new molecular entities with priority rating) trace their research back to funding by the US National Institutes of Health.”

Mazzucato contrasts the stages at which research is financed by public versus venture capital funding. Generally speaking, public funding tends to step in at risky, early-stage research—the stage where most ventures necessarily fail. The private sector generally desires greater certainty. Nevertheless, it is possible to speculate on uncertainty, and Mazzucato details how the biopharmaceutical private sector has repeatedly done so despite a patchy record of product delivery. It is very much worth considering the implications. Venture capital funds—like the aforementioned banks—take on risk, and are surely entitled to reward. But in these sectors, a large payout is seen as a sign of success—the public sector alone is seen as “inefficient” and an “obstacle” insofar as it actually earns direct revenues from its ventures, through taxation or otherwise.

The rest of Mazzucato’s survey of the innovation sphere takes the reader through other strategies of extracting value. Of course, there is the renowned debate on patents and intellectual property. By nature a monopoly, the equivalencies between rent and incomes from intellectual monopoly have been widely discussed, and Mazzucato’s overview is succinct.

Her following analysis of pharma pricing brings back the question of value in a very real way. Under heavy criticism for the old canard that high prices are justified by (much inflated) R&D expenses, companies have invoked “value-based pricing,” arguing that high prices reflect the value provided by the drug. But this value is often highly questionable, since true ‘free markets’ do not really exist in much of the medical sphere. The degree of investment and administrative specialization required favors large conglomerates and companies with the capacity to build expertise. Mazzucato cites the research of well-known oncologist and critic of pharmaceutical pricing Dr. Peter Bach, who has argued that true values-based pricing should lower prices in many cases.

But should medical necessities treated as such commodities at all? Who should be the buyer, and what their incentives? This is a political question, and one which should take into account that, as we have seen, much of this research is already publicly funded to begin with. Finally, we get a look at first-mover advantages and network effects: collective realities which generate the user base and mass data which companies effectively privatize in terms of value.

This brings us to the culmination of a theme which Mazzucato weaves through the entire book: the public sector as a true creator of economic value—value which could not just as easily be created by private counterparts.

In Anglo-American political commentary, John Maynard Keynes is still seen as the prophet of state investment. Mazzucato gives a useful introduction to his lens, but points out an important fact: Keynes was focusing on state activity during bad economic times. The spending he discusses is ‘counter-cyclical,’ intended to shock sluggish and shrinking output. In reality, states have been able to create value beyond the bounds of correcting market failures. The battles over measuring whether public spending multiplies value or not characterized much of 20th century economics. As Mazzucato points out, European austerity cuts may have provided test cases as cuts led to falls in total output. One study she cites finds that the multiplier value of public spending in advanced economies—the effect that an increase in public expenditure has on total production—is 1.5. What this means is that, on net, such spending creates more value on net than it destroys or crowds out.

Public choice theory holds its place in the University of Chicago’s legacy of ideas. With its focus on the potential of bureaucratic capture by crony corruption, it brought an attitude of caution—even suspicion—to the possibility of state intervention to resolve market failures. With a risk-averse attitude toward government failure, it served as a powerful ideological tool in government turns toward privatization. The IMF and World Bank became vehicles for global pressure, backed with development dollars, for growing states to shed their assets to the private sector. The idea was that the private sector would, in most cases, do a better job. And where market failures existed, governments ought to be stringent in ensuring that they did not do more harm than good.

Some decades later, it’s time for test cases. Mazzucato takes cases from healthcare and other public initiatives: particularly prominent is Britain’s National Health Service (NHS), in which the private sector has had a creeping presence thanks to outsourcing.

In that case, “internal markets” were intentionally created and hospitals turned into trusts and encouraged to contract services. As Mazzucato details, the result was increasing levels of private-public administrative bureaucracy. Importantly, the resulting markets were hardly competitive, since only a few specialized firms can service particular needs—a fact which doubtlessly makes collusion easy, even informally. Such administrative transaction costs create no direct value, but grow with privatized outsourcing. While current information on the NHS appears unavailable, Mazzucato contrasts the capture by such administrative costs of 30% of total healthcare expenditure in the U.S., compared with only 6% in the NHS prior to its marketization phase. With vertical integration along supply chains long proven to create economic gains for multinationals, it should not be entirely surprising that the reverse trend in the name of privatization might actually raise costs.

Mazzucato also looks at examples like Scottish infrastructure and private contractors which work with both U.S. and U.K. governments. Particularly troubling is the pattern of contractors repeatedly winning contracts despite multiple breaches and fines. One example is the British security firm G4S, which has been fined for “at least 100 breaches of prison contracts between 2010 and 2016 including ‘failure to achieve search targets, smuggling of contraband items, failure of security procedures, serious cases of “concerted indiscipline,” hostage taking, and roof climbing.” Nevertheless, G4S and similar companies across service sectors continue to win contracts, thanks to their dominance in a niche industry requiring specialized administrative expertise.

One of Mazzucato’s most startling citations is a study showing federal approval for contract billing rates which net these private companies 1.83 times more than it pays federal employees in compensation and more than 2 times the private sector equivalent—and all this despite the fact that the actual workers in contractor firms often suffer poor wages and conditions. Rather than lean and efficient services, privatization appears to have led to administrative bloat, price inflation, and a gutting of state capacity.

This gutting is, in essence, the most harmful aspect of the whole operation when it comes to state capacity. In a world where existing technologies are built on the legacy of bold and successful public investment, states have been convinced that they should not and cannot achieve great things. Cuts undermine previously successful initiatives, leading to propaganda about inherent public sector inefficiency, and then to the capture of state achievements by private capital. And, adding insult to injury, the cronyism continues and even worsens.

Mazzucato’s challenge is not just to revive the economic debates about where value comes from. It is to bring that debate to the center of modern questions about economic growth and innovation. The consequences of 2008-9 have not simply been economic, but political. It is difficult to see how the populist movements which have rocked Western countries since then could have grown without that period. Moreover, stagnation has allowed China to increase legitimacy as a superior alternative and partner for countries seeking economic growth. Political consequences are the wellspring of history’s great conflagrations. When the polity breaks down completely, internal appetites turn from growth and stability to spite and revenge.

Instead, Mazzucato calls for an “economics of hope.” A bolder and competent public sector does not come at the expense of private initiative, but rather creates opportunities for willing private actors. Markets, in this understanding, become tools to be used rather than hedges by cowardly states or some kind of economic ‘state of nature.’ She points to the great Austro-Hungarian economist Karl Polanyi’s understanding of markets as “deeply embedded in social and political institutions. They are outcomes of complex processes, of interactions between different actors in the economy, including government.”

Particularly vital is the rebuilding of the public sector’s in-house capacity for innovation. The private sector, which has outsourced much of its production line abroad, will likely have a role to play here. The mission-oriented approach which Mazzucato calls for, and has written about in her other work, does not subsume the economy into the bureaucracy of a leviathan state. The age of the Apollo missions, and of the research which undergirds modern technological and medical knowledge, existed side-by-side with a dynamic private sector. So too do the state-directed market economies of today. Mazzucato refrains from providing a fleshed out value-theory of her own; however, her clear goal is that economists and governments alike to cease viewing value as a purely subjective and individualistic measure.

The Value of Everything is absolutely worth the deep and reflective read. It will remain a vital resource for those interested in going beyond the tropes which make up much of public economics commentary. Ideally, it will also become a valuable guide for those who create bold and enduring alternatives to spur on the governments and innovators of the future.

This has occurred for one very simple reason: inertia.

But the room for inertia is fast disappearing. The Arctic region is on track to becoming a central geopolitical theater. Climate change is the driving force in this transformation. While many countries are still treating the climate as a future problem, the Arctic region is living it out. Polar amplification means that the region will be disproportionately impacted by climate change—and sooner than everywhere else. Disappearing ice, rising temperatures, increased precipitation, and thawing permafrost, are just a sample of what Arctic dwellers already face. The politicized debates which rage in southern regions of the U.S. and Canada are absent here—to deny these realities would get you laughed out of any corporate boardroom operating in the region. It’s hard to stare straight at large blocks of melting ice without concluding that something is happening.

So why are North America’s Arctic states looking at all this and shrugging? A few options seem viable. Do the governing classes actually reject the climate change predictions altogether? Is the combined capital might of the U.S. and Canada so tied up that nothing more is possible? Could the political will be absent thanks to more immediate electoral concerns? Or worse—could the types of statesmen capable of tackling the problem simply not exist?

The opening of the Northwest Passage as a trade route will change everything. Though now occasionally open in summer, the passage is not yet clear enough for shipping. But climate change will open it as a potential route. At that point, investment in infrastructure will become the deciding factor in making it a reliable alternative to the Panama Canal—a successful grand plan will make the route through the Bering Strait a key international shipping lane and point of geopolitical contention. In 2013, the commercial bulk carrier MS Nordic Orion saved around 1,000 nautical miles in its journey from Vancouver, Canada to Pori, Finland by traveling through the Northwest Passage instead of the Panama Canal.

The Arctic regions, so far from the bulk of the American and Canadian populations, are now finding themselves far nearer to major rivals. Geopolitical relationships that were once west-east have become north-north. Building around the Northwest Passage opens up possibilities for transportation infrastructure, mining, and general development of the Arctic. In previous decades, governments could maintain basic social infrastructure and otherwise shrug that the markets for development simply weren’t there. Now—unable to put out of mind what has so often been out of sight—the region’s importance is growing in the halls of power.

Russian assertiveness in the region is well-known: staking claims on the Arctic seabed, for example. But much more important is its ongoing expansion of a northern military presence, on bases ranging from the far-northern archipelago of Franz Josef Land, to Wrangel Island, just over 800km from the Alaskan town of Utqiagvik. China is also entering the Arctic game in earnest, having released its policy white paper in 2018. China’s ambition as a “near-Arctic state”—already with observer status on the Arctic Council—is demonstrated in the goal a “Polar Silk Road”: close Chinese cooperation in the development of international northern shipping lanes. The Belt and Road brand that is so familiar in cities like Kuala Lumpur or Nairobi is suddenly entering a sphere shared by state and territorial capitals like Juneau, Whitehorse, and Yellowknife.

Presently, the Arctic Council brings a number of players together—and successfully enough, compared to the incompetence and hot air that characterize a lot of “international bodies.” Eight member states, six indigenous organizations, a number of working groups, and a panoply of observer states and NGOs provide a framework for cooperation. When Canadian relations with Russia were strained over its annexation of Crimea and other actions in Ukraine, the Arctic Council proved a useful diplomatic backchannel.

However, the major challenge is not the region as it currently exists, but rather how it will develop in the coming decades. The situation begins to look uncomfortably similar to how Central Asia was routinely ignored, up until people began to realize that China had steadily prepared trade agreements and built up cities like Urumqi as a jumping point into the region. By then, competition was already at hand.

There’s no feasible model of development where the market goes first. Significant and lasting development won’t be possible without planning and investment from federal powers in the south. But national leadership and mobilization of this sort has become almost non-existent since the mid-20th century post-war era. National leadership has given way to self-absorption in the squabbles and faux excitement of electoral politics. Responding to geopolitical pressures in the region means a return to a more active, state-driven development strategy.

First Movers And Arctic Power

Why does the Arctic matter at all for strategic development?

Sure, maybe the shipping traffic will increase. A logistical problem, perhaps, but is it really existential? As for Russian or Chinese rhetoric, the overall security measures for North America, like NORAD, are firmly intact. Militarization of the Arctic space doesn’t seem imminent. In the most hands-off scenario, federal governments could simply adapt as needed on the margin and otherwise leave the region as it is: sparsely governed, strategically irrelevant, and resigned to continuing as a continental backwater.

To answer the question, it’s important to understand the different forms of power.

The Arctic is a global space. Ultimately, it is not only states with formal Arctic territory that desire to operate in the region. China’s audacious claims to be a “near-Arctic state” are possible because of its size, and by a loud public relations effort to present itself as a global juggernaut. But other Asian and European countries are also eyeing a more accessible Northwest Passage. Moreover, companies that want access to near-Arctic markets (Eurasian or northern European), but also desire the stability of U.S. and Canadian business and legal norms, would benefit from northern hubs tied in with or exporting to these markets.

In short, anyone desiring access to Arctic trade routes or market opportunities will be looking out for an optimal mix of physical infrastructure, economic opportunity, and political stability.

To understand why this is important, we need only look back at the geopolitical contests to control strategic trade regions in prior decades, and the advantages accrued to the victors. The Panama and Suez Canals were each the objects of significant diplomatic and—in the latter case—military strife. The Panama Canal ultimately came under Panama’s control after significant local agitation and diplomatic wrangling, and is still one of its major economic prizes. The Suez Canal was so important to the interests of nearly every major power that Egypt’s victory in the Suez Crisis is popularly seen as the once-mighty British Empire’s final tipping point. Nicaragua has long desired a canal of its own, with the latest attempt at development involving a now defunct deal with a Hong Kong-based private developer.

Control over key transportation infrastructure is not just an important marker of sovereignty. Revenues are crucial for reinvesting in more development. And infrastructure built down the line will face the further obstacle of having to integrate with the existing systems built by rivals and which, if successful, have become normalized in global operations. One need only think of the difficulties faced by the U.S. in building new transport infrastructure, when so many of its existing systems were constructed decades ago and are difficult to integrate with radically different and upgraded plans. But even natural resource and manufacturing markets have a difficult time bargaining with established rivals, as any developing country in negotiations with established trading blocs knows well.

The Northwest Passage will become more accessible. Currently, though, ice conditions block full shipping. But if the predictions pan out, waiting until every state and company with a stake in the Arctic region is knocking on North America’s doorstep will almost certainly be too late. The infrastructure question is one to be addressed now—before necessity tightens its grip.

At present, Arctic sovereignty is a bloodless principle. To give it real teeth, deep water ports and expanded energy hubs are necessary to establish proper on-the-ground control. Regional governments on these north-north frontiers, who recognize passivity as a real threat to the future, have agitated for these measures to little avail. Both security and construction require well-maintained heavy icebreakers, and neither the U.S., nor Canada has them. The U.S. is down to two icebreakers, and only one of them is able to break through the heaviest forms of ice. While both the Obama and Trump administrations directed funding toward icebreakers, priorities like the U.S.-Mexico border wall have taken up bandwidth in recent years. Canada has been trying to acquire a new heavy icebreaker built since 2011 under the Harper government. But construction of the projected CCGS Diefenbaker has only just been moved to a new shipyard, four whole years since his successor took office.

North America can thank its lucky stars at the continuing success of current security agreements in maintaining the status quo. There is internal debate as to whether Russian activities like bomber patrols should be interpreted as a defensive stance or provocation. NORAD has continued to work more or less effectively at maintaining U.S. and Canadian air security.

I had the opportunity to discuss the topic with Will Greaves, an assistant professor at the University of Victoria and Arctic expert.

Greaves cautioned against Russia alarmism, seeing strategic signaling rather than expansionist planning as the chief motivator. Under this hypothesis, Russia sees no real benefit to instigating direct military engagements over Arctic space, particularly given their outsized dependence on the region. Greaves went a step further, questioning whether Russia would even benefit from territorial expansion: “Russia already has more Arctic territory than they can effectively govern, and they can’t even reap the benefits of their resource wealth in the undisputed territory.”

Nevertheless, it’s unlikely that the U.S. and Canada can long abide such actions even as a defensive measure. Northern governments have repeatedly requested expansions of Arctic security patrols. While heavy icebreakers or nuclear attack submarines will require time to plan, fund, construct, and mobilize, an initial step would be for the two countries to further expand the presence of their respective coast guards. However, such a move would only work as a short-term stepping stone. Countries with the capacity for significant presence in ice-covered Arctic waters will become preferred partners in security, business, and research. Doug Chiasson, a specialist in the World Wildlife Fund-Canada’s Arctic program with whom I delved into the topic, termed this position “hard water power”—in contrast to naval forces with advantages in brown water (rivers) and blue water (open sea).

When the overarching geopolitical logic translates into on-the-ground realities, the results are plain: infrastructural, institutional, and economic development constitute forms of power because they are the hard mechanisms that shape entire regions. To be in such a position in the Arctic region, it will not do to wait until shipping routes are already in use.

Whatever country makes the necessary investments to gain a dominant position can maintain a leading role for decades to come. The infrastructural ins and outs of Arctic development are far from mere logistical problems. They are the vehicles of geopolitical will in the north.

Arctic Nation-Building

Northern regions are viewed as massive budget sinks by U.S. and Canadian federal policymakers. Structural unemployment and social assistance has created an image of dependency. However, regional governments have themselves pushed for greater investment in sustained economic growth. Moreover, a number of initiatives exist as successful examples of what can be made possible by an active strategic mindset. While currently small, these are the testing grounds for best practices which can be scaled up and applied in bolder projects.

Besides the usual fishing and tourism, the Northwest Territories has established several diamond mines, which generate significant revenues, and establish a logistical presence. Russia already has a significant dependency on its northern resource economy, with 75% of the country’s oil and over 90% of its natural gas production coming from the Arctic region. Russia is also dependent on the region for other minerals, timber, and fish. The Scandinavian countries have likewise pursued mining activities, and perform extremely well in terms of public investment and linking northern regions to the south.

But in terms of real nation-building, these are preliminary steps. Discussions of expanding energy production are always controversial in a northern environment, for reasons of conservation and environmental responsibility. But resource development, conducted the right way, is an opportunity to build up long-impoverished communities. Many northern residents depend on diesel which is trucked or flown in. Local governments and investors have pointed to projects like Norway’s Snohvit LNG field and Johan Castberg oil facility as examples of responsible Arctic development. Such investors generally look to national governments for strategic vision in long-term northern development.

One of the most vital components for developing human capital in the region is the scaling up or development of urban hubs. The city of Anchorage, Alaska, is perhaps one of the best examples: despite its remote location, the city boasts a population of over 290,000. Its strategic location in global transport as a refueling station and shipping gateway places it on the radar of both countries and companies. However, the city’s initial growth occurred thanks to actions taken by the U.S. federal government in the context of World War II and the Cold War. By the 1950s, investment in military installations and civilian air transport grew the city’s population by nearly 15 times its pre-World War II level. The establishment of major highways allowed the city to connect with other parts of the state, further expanding its ability to act as a regional hub. The growth of Alaska’s energy industry—and the state’s long-term mindset in investing the proceeds—created the basis for growth throughout the late 20th century and into the present day.

Since it will be far easier to scale up Arctic hubs rather than continually build new settlements, their ability to trade is among the most vital elements of development. Shipping infrastructure and road networks are among the most pressing investments in this space. One need only consider the impact of the Interstate Highway System on American trade, work, family connections, and life in general. The ability to move goods and people efficiently undergirds all other aspects of development.

But the Arctic has remained undeveloped because it’s difficult to build roads and infrastructure that can handle the damage of harsh winters and permafrost that covers everything. In the summer, the thawing of the permafrost makes the ground unreliable and difficult to build on. So, most ground shipping in the Arctic is done in the winter, when the ground and water freezes hard. But even this is not a new or insurmountable challenge—the U.S. completed the Alaska Highway just after WWII, and some permanent roads are still being built.

At present, capital remains a major barrier; for example, lack of capital is one of the main obstacles to western Nunavut’s Grays Bay Road and Port initiative, a 227km all-weather road project that would connect a currently defunct mining project with a deep sea port.

But by themselves, roads only connect communities on land. To build infrastructure that can effectively service and govern sea traffic, expanded deep water ports are necessary. Compared to other Arctic countries, the U.S. and Canada are woefully behind. Some initiatives have tried to address this problem, only to meet with the obstacles of costs and logistics. As with other projects, companies and foreign trade partners look to national governments to show initiative in strategy and primary infrastructure funding.

However, successful expansion of such transport infrastructure is not an end in itself. The ultimate goal is to see growth in industry, trade, and population. These are the necessary building blocks of a north which is not only growing, but flourishing and self-sustaining.

To achieve that goal, Arctic states will have to ensure that economic partners—from governments to the private sector—have credibility in their commitments to a development plan. Rather than relying on markets in order to excuse passive approaches, a different strategy would be to treat markets as useful signalling mechanisms to indicate confidence. This integrates markets into the planning process in order to overcome the classic calculation problems which arise from trying to over-manage the various processes of development. Rather, development-oriented states can take tips from previous Western and non-Western efforts like in directing the energies of markets and harnessing the feedback loop of information to discern where the best opportunities lie.

Northwest Territories Premier Bob McLeod has suggested that a special economic zone (SEZ) model could accelerate development. While such models would likely have to be tested on a localized scale and then expanded, it could potentially incentivize capital investment—likely responding to the direction of initial public infrastructure and research funding. However, the SEZ model is most successful when pursued as part of a broader state plan for reform or development. McLeod’s strategic vision for the Canadian north would see an SEZ paired with a northern military base serving 5,000 personnel, expanded coast guard presence, a locally-based federal Arctic affairs department, civil service rotation program, three more deep water ports and icebreakers apiece, and a population goal of 1 million northern residents by 2050. Though the specifics are tailored to Canada, it’s a scale of thinking appropriate for many of the Arctic states.

The final plank in that vision is important. Infrastructure and incentives won’t amount to anything if the Arctic population isn’t there to support it. In 2019, the combined population of Alaska and all three Canadian territories stands at 850,000. The Russian population is more than double that figure. Though Scandinavian countries have small Arctic populations, they make up for it with superior infrastructure and economic integration with the south.

The chicken-and-egg problem is that it’s difficult to expand family size, stimulate internal migration, or convince immigrants to settle in northern climes. Convincing some migrants to go north is not entirely impossible; throughout the process of writing this piece, the Arctic experts I spoke with mentioned the presence of Syrians working in Nunavut, Filipino communities in the Northwest Territories and Alaska, and so on. But the majority of immigrants to the U.S. and Canada choose more comfortable southern states and provinces. The types of industries which need to be developed in the north require skilled labor, which could come through incentivizing domestically trained workers, or retraining and certifying foreign workers. Canada does in fact have such a program.

Still, the deterrents are strong. Housing and medical services are poor in many regions, particularly in the Canadian north. Unemployment is high, especially in indigenous communities. Without infrastructure and spurring on industry, incentives to settle in the north are weak, despite the high incomes possible in both the public and private sectors. One possible use of an SEZ is the ability to offer significant incentives for domestic migrants—say, zero taxes on income earned in the first five years. Likewise, work visas could be issued for the SEZ specifically. While temporary foreign worker programs have always been politically controversial, one possible solution could come in the form of federal initiatives that allow northern residents to personally sponsor foreign workers. In addition to the economic contributions provided by such workers, this would also provide direct benefits to local communities, who often rightly see temporary worker programs as displacing the domestic labor force.

In the long run, it will be some combination of family growth, domestic migration, and new settlement from abroad that achieves the northern population levels necessary to underpin industry, community, —and ultimately, sovereignty. However, strengthening this position will in turn influence the broader cycle of Arctic development. As the region continues to be an area of operation for a number of both great and small powers, those countries who pursue infrastructural and economic development will be in the strongest position to negotiate and bargain as north-north ties continue to grow.

The Human Footprint

It’s difficult to change strategic direction and infrastructure development midstream. This means that plotting an economically and socially sustainable development path is an imperative for Arctic states. If development is overly reliant on a single, finite industry, a collapse scenario would devastate these communities, leaving them even worse than they were on their own. Likewise, a failure of social cohesion between indigenous and non-indigenous communities—as well as newcomers—will cause a political crisis. The deep local knowledge possessed by northern residents is unique, and any serious development strategy will institutionalize this feedback loop.

These tensions don’t start and stop in the north. People and organizations based in southern communities also threaten to shortstop the north’s development, particularly on environmental grounds. Environmental groups can be divided into those with a focus on sustainable development, and those that generally see development as an ecological threat. Arctic development, any real Arctic development, will accelerate the differences. Premier McLeod and others have previously compared environmentally-justified southern intransigence to the colonialism of past eras. During our conversation, Greaves noted that this is inseparable from Arctic experience: “They were treated as colonies and they viewed themselves as colonies. It was only in the late 20th century that they shook this off, but the history is still highly relevant. That power balance is deeply woven into their relationships with the rest of the country.”

Regional governments are already well-aware of the politics of development. Both public research funding and incentives for private investment have opportunities to focus on industries which will compliment sustainable growth. But climate change presents risks for Arctic investors. Increasing volatility in weather and sea ice patterns threaten both infrastructure and the industries that rely on them—meaning that technology and emergency response have to be developed well in advance.

Investors are waiting for national governments to commit—in security, infrastructure, and research. In other words, the reality of central coordination is impossible to overcome. Without a clear understanding of the economic, social, and ecological risks involved—and the institutional and technological fixes—governments won’t realize the north’s potential.

What does failure look like? Governments will continue making marginal adjustments necessary to accommodate increased traffic—to a degree. But as trade between Eurasia, Europe, and North America accelerates, decisions will be made regarding shipping and transport routes which go beyond immediate capacity. The questions will be about the next 20-50 years. With no signals of seriousness from those countries in effective control of the Northwest Passage, the result will be diversion to other routes or lost trade. Without effective hubs on at least the level of Anchorage along the route, there is also little reason for companies to invest in the sorts of support industries which generally crop up along trade routes, nor for the harder-to-predict downstream effects of economic development on such hubs to occur.

In that case, the benefits to North America will effectively take the form of rents—charges for continued security and transportation support—and a few scattered industries. A key opportunity to project north-north geopolitical and economic power into the Eurasian sphere will be lost, along with trade opportunities for the benefit of U.S. and Canadian citizens.

Is this the mindset of a continent intent on establishing a secure and influential foothold through to the year 2100 and beyond? Doubtful.

Moving Northward

Arctic states that fall back from the challenge of a coordinated and ambitious program of development through incompetence or apathy will not see an undeveloped Arctic. What they will be confronted with is a rising Arctic region in which they are subordinate. Even in the best case scenario, where open conflict is not in the interests of any major player, economic clout on the northern frontier will suddenly bring neighboring powers much closer.

Waiting for some ambitious company to devote throwaway funding on high-risk experiments won’t suffice. The markets have spoken; states must think in terms of northern nation-building—and follow through on security, infrastructure, and population growth. First-movers on all these issues will expand their negotiating power with fellow Arctic states and benefit from new trade routes. The spillover effects of such innovation could even benefit national and global economies more broadly.

That all this is based on a model of increasing climate change impact cannot be overlooked. Climate instability is a potential threat to growing Arctic communities as well, giving the region as much of a stake as anywhere else in finding solutions. The institution-building that happens here could itself provide a basis for reforming approaches to resource conservation and sustainable development in other parts of the world.

The Arctic region is no longer a far-off frontier. North-north ties and development will make it a center—a hub and a meeting place between continents.

On the right, Donald Trump campaigned on issues of protectionism, immigration restrictionism, and economic reform, all overtly for the benefit of the American worker, who had been left out of the prosperity of globalizing capital, or had even seen the collapse of their towns and industries, with no realistic alternatives.

Tucker Carlson has taken up the torch with calls for a new conservatism that doesn’t just serve capital by calling for lower marginal tax rates, but takes a more active approach in the hopes of creating an economy where normal young people, who don’t have immense talents and privileges, can afford to have families and homes at a reasonable standard of living.

On the left, the rise of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has highlighted and accelerated a growing sympathy among millennials for a more aggressively socialist politics, calling for measures like increased minimum wage, curtailing of the political power of large companies and monopolies, and visionary state-directed economic programs like the proposed Green New Deal.

Much of the left millennial energy has been organized under the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), which by membership is the largest socialist organization in the U.S. in over a hundred years.

It’s relatively easy to analyze this awakening through an economic frame: something big happened to the economy in about 1973, and since then, the median wage has stagnated. Jobs have become far less stable. Productivity and GDP have continued to grow, but the proceeds have increasingly gone to a wealthy minority. In response, many people, having little to no stake in economic growth, have decided that this is a political problem, and are agitating for something different.

Combined with the wage stagnation, the basic costs of middle-class life have skyrocketed: housing, health care, and education. This combination of stagnating wages with rising costs has been termed the “middle-class squeeze.”

In May, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) offered a concise summary of its report on the middle class:

“Middle-class households feel left behind and have questioned the benefits of economic globalisation. In many OECD countries, middle incomes have grown less than the average and in some they have not grown at all. Technology has automated several middle-skilled jobs that used to be carried out by middle-class workers a few decades ago. The costs of some goods and services such as housing, which are essential for a middle-class lifestyle, have risen faster than earnings and overall inflation.”

Within the last decade, it was still possible to hear commentators using statistical magic to write off the squeeze as imaginary, or just the result of poor millennial work ethic. Tone-deaf optimists assured people that things were getting better; after all, global poverty is declining.

The culmination of this was the Avocado Toast scandal: a young Australian millionaire chastised millennials for spending too much money on avocado toast and expensive coffees when they could instead pour their discretionary income into real estate or their own businesses. The subsequent public discussion brought the economic fundamentals of the squeeze to widespread attention: there’s no amount of saving with a normal wage in a negative-real-interest savings account that would ever allow one to buy a house in a major city, and most don’t have what it takes to start a business. Confident dismissals of the economic problem have since fallen by the wayside.

The history of this problem is interesting: from the period after World War II up until the fall of the Soviet Union, the American-led bloc and its political and economic structures were engaged in an ongoing struggle against a rival power. Ironically, one of the main ideological battles fought by this political machine was in defense of a spontaneous and politically neutral market economy against a coordinated and state-driven one. Complicating the narrative, the U.S. itself had engaged in extensive coordination between political and economic power from the New Deal to NASA. Western industrial might was not the result of spontaneous order free of hamfisted central planners, but the result of high-risk public investment and coordinated political strategizing, which enabled new technologies and markets alike to form. Ultimately, both societies manifested social orders in which managerial bureaucracies played important roles and which acted on a truly global scale, beyond the formal contours of nation-states. They were less different than they pretended to be, but in the process of ideological differentiation, the U.S. emphasized the uncontrolled market.

The Soviet collapse initiated an era of apparent liberal hegemony—a neoliberalism, which had incorporated the conservative reaction that originally carried Thatcher and Reagan to office. Many of the internal alliances which had shaped the Cold War era disappeared. New opportunities and new industries emerged, none of which were faced by overarching political pressures toward class collaboration. The impacts directly hit labor. Gains reflected in wages were concentrated at the top, weaker in the middle, and negative at the bottom.

The blame can’t be placed entirely on the pressures of globalization: employer power plays a significant role. Corporate power’s monopsonistic influence on labor markets, by firm consolidation, limited choices for workers, and direct tools like non-compete agreements, has significant effects on productivity and wages. A recent assessment by Glen Weyl, Eric Posner, and Suresh Naidu calculated 5–18% lower employment than a competitive labor market; likewise, they calculated that labor’s share of surplus is suppressed from what it would receive in a competitive market by a factor of up to nearly 30%.

Given the political vacuum surrounding the economic interests of labor, it’s not surprising to see candidates, policy wonks, and agitators of all kinds trying to fill it and build a new political coalition out of the working-class electorate.

But that working-class electorate is deeply divided. While there may be some agreement about automation, outsourcing, trade, and globalization in general, working-class Trump voters are not interested in following the progressive movement’s recent hard-fork to the left—especially on social and cultural issues. Even in the miraculous case of a political figure who is able to achieve a social-issue ceasefire, it’s unlikely that the coalition would remain stable. The temptation to defect on the arrangement and litigate social issues using whatever power the coalition had amassed would be too great. And at this point, even a successful ceasefire would freeze the social landscape in a way disagreeable both to the social conservatives reeling from accelerated changes and to those who think not enough social justice has been achieved.

It’s not possible to understand this internal divide without disaggregating the bloodless abstraction of the working class. While it is possible to theoretically or ideologically abstract the economic relationship, real workers exist in a complex web of loyalties and interests. Family, religion, culture, geography, and numerous other ties obfuscate the attempt to make class the definitive foundation of people’s identity.

DSA members are often concentrated in America’s large metropolitan centers and have some post-secondary educational background—even if currently unemployed or underemployed and pessimistic about future prospects. Due to the social values inculcated through university education and urban life, they are natural antagonists to rural, more religious Trump voters who are hostile to innovations in moral entrepreneurship and social rituals, such as pronoun usage, and especially don’t like such innovations being forced on them. These groups don’t like each other. No current political figure is strong enough to bridge that divide to create a powerful new coalition, despite the largely similar economic grievances.

The second big problem facing this resurgence of labor politics is that these factional interests don’t exist in isolation; in the absence of any strong organizations able to endogenously coordinate their power, to get anything done they have to collaborate in parties and institutions with allies which have distinctive and often contradictory interests—for example, institutional unions in the Democratic party coexist with powerful financial lobbyists.

This necessity for collaboration gives us an important hint about the fate of these movements. The vital point is that their bedfellows are by no means the movements’ equals in power and influence. Corporate power, foreign lobbies, the national security state, establishment cliques, and other interest groups in each party command organizational power, personal networks of influence, and often the backing of wealthy donors.

However, the mere existence of potential rivals does not, in itself, mean the end of a political movement. In fact, the ability to cooperate with and sometimes absorb such rivals is part and parcel of even the most radical political shifts. A good example is the important role played by former Tsarist officers in the development of the Red Army after the Bolshevik seizure of power. Men as prominent as the aristocratic Imperial Russian Army general Aleksei Brusilov, who gave his name to Imperial Russia’s greatest World War I military achievement, played a key role in developing the Soviet military apparatus. Rather than socialist revolution, their motivation was to defend Russian territorial integrity and rebuild the Russian state—a task for which they saw the Bolsheviks as the only option. Thus, the Red Army began its history with a majority of former-Imperial officers, including most of the staff at its military schools.

The example illustrates a larger point: significant transformations are generally not the result of a single agent, goal, or even set of motivations. In reality, multiple narratives are often in play, and coordination between them can be fleeting or incidental. In the case of Russia, the Bolsheviks were hyper-aware of their fragile military position. The same pragmatism that led them to absorb a large Tsarist officer corps led them to place the Red Army hierarchy under stringent political monitoring. They also worked to ensure that ideologically aligned officers were quickly trained and promoted, a task largely completed by the 1930s.

When analyzing how different factions cooperate, it’s important to take account of power differentials. Differences in things like a faction’s size, coordination ability, or human capital will impact how strong its role is in a coalition. If a particular faction—say, a party or an organizing body—is dependent on much more powerful collaborators, it will likely find itself unable to achieve any political goals which deviate from those collaborators. What this means in practice is that their work ultimately realizes the goal of their superior instead, since they can be successful only insofar as they integrate with this broader agenda. If a faction is strong, it may be able to use its collaborators as vehicles; if it is weak, it will likely function only as a support structure for these greater patrons.

This phenomenon is not merely the pattern of political upheaval, but also of everyday political life. Examples include anti-nuclear environmental groups, which have historically ended up functioning as a lobby for fossil-fuel interests. Likewise, many apparently avant-garde arts and culture magazines in the mid-20th century were ultimately discovered to be the product of a multi-pronged CIA front operation. In each case, the activist base functioned as a vehicle for larger and better-organized interests and was only able to fulfill its agenda insofar as it played this role.

One particular manifestation of this phenomenon is that of recuperation: the capture of a radical idea, movement, or set of images by establishment forces, followed by their integration into the power structure. As a result, they end up serving to entrench and legitimize the very power structure they initially sought to transform. One pertinent example is the World Economic Forum’s practice of flying out selected activists to Davos, where they proceed to ritually call out attendees and provide a spectacle of elite self-critique. Proposed by the French Marxist Guy Debord, the concept of recuperation is used to identify the pattern of how entrenched power structures can effectively react to and incorporate disruptions rooted in social alienation. This allows the structure to “refine its mechanism of spectacularization”—that is, to offer temporary or even illusory satisfaction while never addressing the fundamental tension.

Debord’s notion of a “society of the spectacle,” as well as his collective’s politically charged artistic responses, became ingrained in the punk, culture-jamming, and other pop-critique scenes, and were ultimately sold back to their participants ad nauseam. The recuperation of Debord’s project itself is a spectacular dialectical twist.

The awakening labor sympathies on both wings of American political life exist in a position of weakness. On the Democratic side, the Obama administration showed how even a popular president had difficulty challenging entrenched interests within the permanent institutions. The remnant institutional labor machines are still active, but have proven unable or unwilling to reverse the broader labor losses of the past few generations. Bold policy ideas alone cannot undo this. Moreover, the party’s left has not managed to expand far beyond those already in the Democratic voter fold. Even within their own party, figures like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders do well with educated whites, but suffer with black and Hispanic voters, and with less-educated whites. Those swathes of the country’s working class outside their party’s bounds would be even harder to flip; the cultural biases of educated whites in the party drive them apart from socially moderate or conservative segments of the country’s working class.

Despite all this, they may have more institutional capacity to work with than their Republican counterparts. While Trump won the presidency based on a populist campaign, he did not possess an array of institutions and staffers ready to implement his program. The administration’s beginning saw many positions going unfilled, and ultimately several entrenched factions managed to reassert themselves to some degree, particularly the war-hawks. Currently, it seems that Trump’s personal instincts are the only major barrier to a full-scale return of the entrenched agendas. While a number of media personalities and intellectual journals have begun delving into a new pro-worker conservatism, it is uncertain to what degree the project will achieve institutional longevity. The conservative wing has deep biases against unions, taxes, and other traditional labor solutions, which are obstacles to acting on pro-labor rhetoric.

British journalist Aris Roussinos has contrasted American attempts at a new conservatism with the sovereigntist projects in Europe. Unlike their American counterparts, these movements have achieved state power and have embraced a more rigorously post-liberal politics founded on Christian cultural roots, national sovereignty, and family-focused economic development. Hungary, Poland, and other countries involved in projects like Visegrad had barely a generation of experience with liberalism. Presumably, this also means that internal stakeholders were better able to adapt when political actors arose wanting to implement a new agenda. While segments of American conservatism may look favorably upon the results, the absence of political prerequisites would make it extremely difficult for an American equivalent to reorient domestic political structures. Roussinos explicitly draws the comparison with the left’s own populist resurgence:

The analogy is with the Democratic Socialists of America’s use of the language and symbolism of Communism to advance a modest and rather boring form of social democracy within the Democratic Party. American conservatives flirting with the genuine illiberalism or post-liberalism happening in Europe are merely using it as a piquant spice to enhance the attractiveness of a modest reform movement within conservatism, a fiery dash of Hungarian paprika on the same old American stodge.

The reality which Roussinos is hitting on is recuperation. Absent the political machinery, or more flexible existing interests, to become a dominant power within the American system, these movements face a role as inferior partners within their various networks of collaboration. Their bombastic rhetoric may spark initial opposition—even vehemence and violence—but ultimately the structure proves remarkably adaptive. Even a successful presidential run, as in the case of Trump, simply leaves the victor in a state of siege, able to sometimes block actions from their opponents but incapable of larger-scale reforms. The rhetoric of the popular movement becomes inducted into the political marketing world of PACs, think tanks, lobbyists, and grifter candidates—but without any real intention of achieving its original goals.

Enough of the original movement defects to the power structure, or is digested by it, that the threat is effectively neutralized. In the words of Debord and his collaborator, Daniel Blanchard: “[the capitalist order] must involve the public by incorporating elements of representation that correspond—in fragments—to social rationality. It must sidetrack the desires whose satisfaction is forbidden by the ruling order.”

The possibility for failure is deep, abiding, and structural. Where does this leave the worker? After all, the vast majority of people depend on their own labor to make a living.

The success of these resurgent labor-oriented movements will be determined by whether they can expand and develop their coordinating institutions, and collaborate with factions and currents at the top of the overall elite power structure.

One or more of the current factions would have to find a way to seriously expand its reach across party lines—say, by abandoning its divisive cultural commitments. As discussed above, that outreach across factional lines, pragmatically deescalating cultural divisions, is currently unthinkable for both sides. It would amount to a drastic shakeup of current party bases and a shifting of political allegiances. This could only occur if driven by new organizational energy that had already built up significant trust outside the current factions. Historically, such shifts occurred under the influence of non-party institutions which were able to effectively defend and mobilize particular demographics into a political force. Examples of this would be the development of the religious right, or the older union movements themselves. The development of such institutions could herald a longer-lasting shift. The return of concerns like industrial policy to political discourse are a factor to watch for this. The new area could be fertile ground for such line-crossing organizations to find their footing.

Recuperation isn’t inevitable. Though divided across parties and regions, workers, if they were to conceive of themselves as such, are still able to exercise power through the same means: coordinated action to determine the conditions under which that labor is provided. This results in the array of familiar tools, from collective bargaining to the general strike. Effective labor organization can even circumvent the need for more centralized policy solutions—for example, Germany did not introduce a uniform minimum wage until 2014, traditionally allowing industries to set these standards via negotiation.

But ultimately, the fate of labor depends on the character of the most powerful ruling factions in society, centered around the state. If the elite of the state sees it in its interests, and has the capacity, to discipline and guide capital towards growth and competition rather than political entrenchment, and to allow workers to take a share of the growth, then it can happen. If the state is captured or thwarted by crony factions with a larger interest in being able to exploit their own fiefdoms than in the health of the whole society, then no amount of labor organizing can overcome this entrenched power.

Concretely, there are a variety of problems which are essentially impossible to tackle without state political power: breaking up labor monopsony, strategic antitrust enforcement, attacking rent-seeking, and traditional concerns from healthcare to housing policy. State political power in the form of export-oriented industrial policy may also be used to address globalization issues.

But industrial policy is exactly the kind of state-driven reorganization of the economy that could involve a renegotiation of the position of labor in general, not just with respect to globalization; labor reforms could piggyback on and collaborate with reforms driven by other concerns as well.

Under industrial policy, the state takes an active role in spurring domestic industry and innovation. Advocates point to the successes of the Asian tiger economies in leapfrogging competitors and creating some of the world’s most advanced economies in only a generation. The most successful mix of policies tends to focus on spurring upstream industries via public research, investment, and sometimes with state-owned enterprises. This creates direct and indirect spillover effects down the development chain.

An important aspect of industrial policy is the use of export discipline to increase overall productivity. This is done by exposing strategic industries to the global market—the most cutthroat and competitive market to be in—and using it to test the economic fitness of companies. By allowing less competitive firms to be weeded out, resources and workers can transition to the more competitive ones. States can use their resources, and this competitive process, to pick those firms that are willing and able to do the job, and then use them to accelerate the overall productivity of industries. This is particularly useful when it comes to mission-oriented policies, which can spur the tackling of strategic economic goals from energy, to transportation, to space.

This is where the question of recuperation naturally arises. One of the effects of export discipline is that it tends to favor large, centralized, and integrated firms. In addition to natural tensions, the very market power that benefits the industrial policy process brings with it the threat of subversion and capture. The necessity of state alignment becomes obvious, as the state would need to ensure that large and mature firms remain in alignment, or else are strategically split up. But at the same time, the regular use of antitrust laws to break up such firms at the get-go would merely undermine the export discipline strategy.

So, to the extent that the state was pursuing a labor-benefit policy, and to ensure alignment, other tactics besides antitrust would be needed.

An interesting implication of this kind of industrial reorganization is that it accelerates the end of an apolitical economics. More specifically, it breaks the frame which treats the state as a manager at best and interfering brigand at worst. Rather, the state in this scenario becomes an active participant in the collective creation and distribution of wealth.

Political possibility is in the air again, now that old political coalitions are breaking down and the neoliberal consensus around globalization is increasingly viewed with distaste. But the working class is plagued by deep divisions, and it is naive to think that class alone is sufficient as a rallying mechanism. While currents on both the right and left have become conscious of the tie between labor’s disintegrating power and the populist upheaval, the very fact of their division makes their recuperation all but guaranteed. Existing interests and institutions are there to embrace labor in its vulnerable state and recuperate this new energy for their own ends.

If the new energy amounts to anything real, it will be because it develops a state consciousness and awareness of those tasks that only political power can see through—organized enough to coherently identify its allies and foes, and to become a formative power within the state.

This tension has been reflected within Catholic political thought. The popes of the 19th century took a strong stand against the militant and revolutionary liberalism of their day. Those of the 20th century—as well as the ecumenical Second Vatican Council —attempted to seek areas of cooperation and common understanding. But decades of cultural conflicts and deepening reflection on the modern world by Catholic minds has seen the rise of a new, critical, and confrontational approach. Nor does this approach break the continuity of teaching. On the contrary, it is reflected in the teachings of successive popes, and not least in that of the first Supreme Pontiff from the Americas: Pope Francis. The global reshaping of the Catholic Church and the orientation of this teaching points toward an ever more direct and dramatic confrontation between the Catholic and liberal worlds.

The consequences are by no means restricted to practicing believers. The Catholic Church includes nearly 1.3 billion in its ranks, around a seventh of the human population. In those countries where it has long existed, it remains a powerful institutional force. In other regions, especially the global south, it is advancing via population growth and conversion. The signs are already there. There are Africa’s 200 million Catholics, many of whom travel to Europe not just as migrants but also as priests and monastics. Further east, the Vatican continues diplomatic efforts with China on behalf of a growing Catholic populace estimated at 12 million or more. Latin America continues to experience strong population growth. But while the Church’s makeup and centers of influence are fluctuating, they have done so many times. Its intellectual and social influence will ripple far beyond its membership. Such is the nature of an institution which has survived through the rise and fall of multiple civilizations.

The Birth And Death Of Fusionism

Much of the 20th century relationship between the Catholic and liberal worlds has been a product of Europe and the United States. The former is not only the home of the Roman See, but also the region where two world wars shaped Catholic concerns. The latter has been the seat of global liberal power since the close of those wars, and was also the major foe of global communism. Moreover, its large Catholic population became influential across American society, from its labor movement to its conservative intelligentsia. Meanwhile, Christian democratic parties in Europe appeared to harmonize the aims of Christian values and liberal politics.

The Second Vatican council, which ran from 1962 to 1965, was widely understood to have emphasized areas of common ground between Catholic teaching and liberal concerns, such as human dignity (with results considered bridge-building by advocates and betrayal by critics). Yet this period was, in many ways, a high point for those who favored cooperation. The cultural upheavals of the 1960s-70s saw turns toward moral norms which the Church could not abide. As a result, realignments occurred in the following decades along the lines of social issues, benefiting conservative parties. The rise of neoliberal economics also fueled the decline of the organized labor movement in which Catholics had been so present.

With the renewed anti-communism of Thatcher and Reagan, a coalition began to build around social conservatism and free market economics. A number of Catholic intellectuals and publications would contribute to this “fusionist” position, which was most prominent in the English-speaking countries. However, its last hurrah came within years of the 2008 U.S. election. Conservative positions in the culture war on marriage and secularism had been lost. Moreover, its “compassionate” capitalism had prevented neither the economic crisis of 2008-9, nor the stagnation faced by huge segments of the American electorate. With populism reshaping the global political spectrum, the fusionist experiment is widely viewed as a failure. The same has echoed throughout the Western world, with populist movements in Hungary, Poland, Italy, and other countries embracing a Catholic language on cultural and social issues combined with various programs of social support for families.

Papal Teaching And Liberal Man: A Tale Of Two Anthropologies

The question of Catholic political thought is not merely a sociological one—that is, Catholic thought is not reducible to the spectrum of beliefs among those who self-identify with the religion. Rather, it is shaped by the reflections and actions of a hierarchical organization which exercises teaching authority over the broader population of believers. This hierarchy exercises a power called the magisterium, a term which refers to the teaching authority of the Pope and bishops in interpreting the Catholic faith, its sacred tradition, and its application through the course of history. The highest expression of this authority is in the Pope’s role as supreme pastor and teacher of the Church—an ex cathedra dogmatic pronouncement on matters of faith and morals—or in the decrees of ecumenical councils. However, the daily public teaching of the Pope and bishops through encyclicals, letters, homilies, and the like also has a binding authority known as the ordinary magisterium. It is in the magisterium that the highest religious teaching authority is to be found, and it is here where the pattern and the continuity of meditation on liberalism and the modern world has the strongest implications for Catholics.

A survey of papal teaching on the question of liberalism reveals an increasingly sophisticated understanding of our current age. Moreover, it is ever more confrontational toward it, and this has developed through successive popes, confounding the categories of “conservative” and “liberal” Catholicism imposed by current political structures.

To understand this development, it’s important to return to an earlier age of the liberal project. In the early 19th century, liberalism remained a militant, secularist, and often anti-clerical force. The Church of this period had already been rocked by the events of the French revolution, and saw similar forces rising near its center in the guise of Italian nationalism. But beneath these events lay a political doctrine, and it was in this context that the Papal magisterium began to address this doctrine in detail. Pope Gregory XVI released the encyclical Mirari vos in 1832, condemning the notion that religious belief is irrelevant provided that one is moral (indifferentism), the liberties of conscience and of publishing without regard to truth, and the severing of religious and political authority by the separation of church and state, among others. A generation later, Pope Pius IX added his voice in a response to the forces of Risorgimento, which pursued a liberal Italian nation-state and targeted Rome itself. In 1864, he published the encyclical Quanta Cura, which included the well-known Syllabus of Errors. These documents were wider in scope and confronted a liberalism which was developed but also increasingly diverse.

In the modern context, the declarations of Mirari vos seem arbitrary. But it is in Quanta Cura and the Syllabus that the Papal magisterium began to discern and target fundamental differences between itself and the liberal doctrine. Unlike later rivals—Marxism, National Socialism, and the like—liberalism has never had a foundational text or unified doctrine, though certain themes have consistently reoccurred. The documents condemned a variety of propositions found in the literature of the day which were thought to be incompatible with Catholic doctrine.

Most fundamentally, the encyclical and Syllabus targeted the idea that there existed a rational “secular truth” which could ignore the truths and values proclaimed by the Church. They countered this with the stance that human reason and conscience do not exist in an autonomous sphere divorced from the world. Religious claims could be true or false, but they cannot be relegated to the private sphere in favor of a neutral state. Affirming that the Church’s claims were true and bore consequences for social and political life, Quanta Cura and Syllabus defended it from demands of subjugation by secular powers. More particularly, they rejected the claim that either private reason or the public state could get away with disregarding these truths.

To the modern reader, this seems presumptuous, even arrogant. But it bears consideration that modern states and their citizens do not act differently. Both governments and individuals must make decisions, pass judgements, and set goals. In order to do this, one must have some kind of desirable end in mind. This in turn depends on a value system and a view of the world.

While some differences about the nature of reality can co-exist with each other, others cannot. Universities have faced internal battles on the teaching of evolutionary biology, first between scientists and religious objectors, and today between scientists and social constructionists. When governments fund university departments, they participate in this battle over truth. The same holds true for cultural mores. The definitions of marriage and gender are not merely arbitrary points of private opinion. Based on the progressive view, governments have legislated penalties against certain kinds of speech, schools promote a particular vision of morality and justice, and both public and corporate power fund the advance and popular celebration of these values. Many would not even consider this a real clash of moral worlds. These values are merely those things which all good and respectable people believe—despite being only a few years old. In reality, a certain pattern of belief and behavior has been normalized, and it socially and legally excludes those rival patterns which contradict it.

However, there is a key difference between the old order and the new. In the age of Pope Pius IX, the understanding of truth was explicit and formal. Currently, those with the power to shape the beliefs of society do so freed of any duty to affirm the source of their judgments. Moreover, the lack of any formal institutional approach allows for new factions to quickly arise and overthrow their predecessors. The radicals of the 1960s have become the worried centrists of the 2010s, and the classical liberals have taken to making podcasts rather than mounting barricades. But the arbitrariness of liberalism’s principles and taboos is merely the effect of its structure. Even in 1864, Pius IX sensed that when liberalism unleashed the individual from the spiritual, moral, and communal worlds, the main beneficiaries were the bearers of power:

And, since where religion has been removed from civil society, and the doctrine and authority of divine revelation repudiated, the genuine notion itself of justice and human right is darkened and lost, and the place of true justice and legitimate right is supplied by material force, thence it appears why it is that some, utterly neglecting and disregarding the surest principles of sound reason, dare to proclaim that “the people’s will, manifested by what is called public opinion or in some other way, constitutes a supreme law, free from all divine and human control; and that in the political order accomplished facts, from the very circumstance that they are accomplished, have the force of right.” But who, does not see and clearly perceive that human society, when set loose from the bonds of religion and true justice, can have, in truth, no other end than the purpose of obtaining and amassing wealth, and that (society under such circumstances) follows no other law in its actions, except the unchastened desire of ministering to its own pleasure and interests?

The rise of liberalism as a doctrine cannot be separated from the social mechanism of that rise: a bourgeois class which was increasingly influential, confident, and intent on removing the obstacles to its power. The values of individualism, meritocracy, and social liberation served specific goals. The tie between doctrine and power was not an observation specific to the Church. From a very different perspective, Karl Marx noted the alignments of French revolutionary factions with class interests: legitimists with the landed gentry, Orleanists with the wealthy merchants, and social democracy as an alliance between the middle classes and the burgeoning urban proletariat. Two forces must be distinguished in this account of liberalism. The first is that of a class promoting a particular ideology. The second is that of the ideological belief system itself. If a particular class maintains its power, then ideologies can well change with the interests of that class. In the 20th century, concerns about socialism led some parts of the business class to see fascism as a lesser evil. Likewise, an ideology can be adopted by various classes sharing similar interests. Marxism has been the tool not only for Western urban workers, but Chinese and Cuban peasantry.

The point of this observation is that the transformation of society by a liberal political order was not only a matter of debates on truth. Social and economic life was in the thralls of the industrial revolution, which brought about both a new technological world and the poverty of mass dislocation. From this strife, liberalism began to confront the rising power of socialism. With members of all classes among its ranks, the Church likewise confronted the crisis.

In 1891, Pope Leo XIII released the historic encyclical Rerum Novarum. It is generally known for its rejection of an unbridled market and its affirmation of labor unions as a method to secure social and economic dignity. It also called on employers to subject their economic interests to greater social and religious duties, such as time off on feast days. Written at the end of the 19th century, it promoted a notion of property tied to familial ownership, particularly of land. In the tradition of Aquinas, it affirmed that this property was subject to the good of both spiritual duty and the commonwealth, while the commonwealth likewise must respect the rights of the family according to natural law. It also called on states to recognize that while the rights of all must be respected, the duty of justice required a focus on those segments which made up the bulk of the commonwealth but lacked the private resources of wealthier classes.

While much can and has been written on the differences between the liberal and Catholic ideas of property, it is what underlies this difference which is of deeper concern. In Rerum Novarum, a distinctive ordering of life exists. Economic power is subject to the good of the commonwealth, which is safeguarded by the state. The political power itself is subject in faith and morals to the spiritual authority of the Church, which is (as we saw in the earlier encyclicals) the guardian of those truths which allow humans to realize their highest good. Popes Gregory XVI and Pius IX had condemned a doctrine where religious authority was subject to political authority, with the latter warning against power divorced from truth. Pope Leo XIII was confronting the economic consequences of such a divorce.

Nevertheless, there is an optimism in Rerum Novarum which is hard to miss. At the time of its writing, a number of private associations had arisen for the benefit of workers. In addition to the growing power of organized labor, even employers and wealthy benefactors had, to an extent, embraced a culture of public responsibility. Charities, insurance associations, and workingman’s associations had begun to create a support structure to alleviate the excesses of the industrial revolution. The encyclical praises these and ends on a hopeful note that such developments will resolve the crisis of labor. In this sense, Rerum Novarum can perhaps be viewed as the beginning of a period where the Church began to see opportunities for cooperation, taking the best of liberal achievements and turning them toward Christian values. The coming decades would see two world wars eliminate most of the remaining Christian monarchies in Europe and the rise of ideologies hostile to Catholicism. Its post-war engagement was with a triumphant and vigorous liberal international order.

The Second Vatican Council is often viewed as the Church’s attempt to engage the modern world from its highest levels. While this is an over-simplification, elements within the council did desire rapprochement and an end to the battles of the past century. It is also true that a renewed witness and evangelization was front and center in the minds of the council fathers, and especially of the popes who oversaw it: John XXIII and Paul VI. The results of this council were of monumental significance. On the one hand, the council provided a renewed framework for addressing a host of theological and social concerns. On the other, it created conflict between “traditionalist” and “conciliar” factions within the Church. The former believed that a number of the council documents had sacrificed clarity for the sake of diplomacy, or worse, capitulation. The latter often adopted a similar reading of the council documents, but embraced and sought to accelerate what they considered to be the “spirit of Vatican II.” Liturgical reforms to the rites of the Mass became a battleground. Some sought to protect the ancient liturgy against what they saw as a new, stunted ritual, while others implemented changes far beyond anything which the council had sanctioned. Many of the splits and factions from this period last to the modern day.

For the moment, we’ll refrain from going down the rabbit-hole of post-conciliar politics. Rather, our interest is in the council’s approach to defining and contrasting the Church’s doctrine with those promoted by the world around it. The council fathers discerned that it was ever more vital for the Church to defend and champion its view of the human person as an integral being: material, social, political, religious. This commitment was not merely intellectual, but was born in the fire of war. It underpinned many anti-Hitlerist Catholic writings, such as those of the White Rose dissidents and Bishop Clemens von Galen of Münster. Likewise, Catholics underwent severe persecution along with Eastern Orthodox Christians under Soviet rule, particularly those of the eastern-rite Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church.

Among the documents most positive toward the post-war political order was the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, entitled Gaudium et Spes. In this context, the council fathers began with a reaffirmation of the human person, its nature, its dignity, and its telos in the world. It begins in the beginning, reasserting the Christian understanding of man as bearing the divine image, as a being created for communion with others, and as a creature who finds himself in a fractured and darkened state:

Although he was made by God in a state of holiness, from the very onset of his history man abused his liberty, at the urging of the Evil One. Man set himself against God and sought to attain his goal apart from God. Although they knew God, they did not glorify Him as God, but their senseless minds were darkened and they served the creature rather than the Creator…Therefore man is split within himself. As a result, all of human life, whether individual or collective, shows itself to be a dramatic struggle between good and evil, between light and darkness.

While this doctrine might seem all-too-familiar, its implications for the Church’s role in the world are enormous. As a result of this belief, it can never accept a vision of man that separates him from his telos. The notion that human society can exist as something distinct from human nature is a contradiction in terms. Thus, it declares that modern minds have used freedom “perversely as a license for doing whatever pleases them, even if it is evil.” As it develops, the document squarely targets the moral construct of the sovereign and autonomous individual:

Coming down to practical and particularly urgent consequences, this council lays stress on reverence for man; everyone must consider his every neighbor without exception as another self, taking into account first of all His life and the means necessary to living it with dignity, so as not to imitate the rich man who had no concern for the poor man Lazarus…As God did not create man for life in isolation, but for the formation of social unity, so also “it has pleased God to make men holy and save them not merely as individuals, without bond or link between them, but by making them into a single people, a people which acknowledges Him in truth and serves Him in holiness [Lumen Gentium].”

With this in mind, Gaudium et Spes condemns the division of the world into religious and irreligious spheres:

[They are] wide of the mark who think that religion consists in acts of worship alone and in the discharge of certain moral obligations, and who imagine they can plunge themselves into earthly affairs in such a way as to imply that these are altogether divorced from the religious life. This split between the faith which many profess and their daily lives deserves to be counted among the more serious errors of our age. Long since, the Prophets of the Old Testament fought vehemently against this scandal and even more so did Jesus Christ Himself in the New Testament threaten it with grave punishments. Therefore, let there be no false opposition between professional and social activities on the one part, and religious life on the other.

Based on this foundation, the remainder of the document—and the other documents of the council—expand on the implications of such an anthropology for social, political, economic, and religious order.

The avenues of thought opened by the council have lasted to the modern day. The optimism, arguably, has not. The final arc of development takes place after the council and in the context of a Western culture increasingly hostile to religious life and values. The reason for this was simple: like Christianity, the liberal view of man in fact possessed a telos, a goal which it pursued for human societies. While the Christian anthropology called on humans to embrace God and neighbor, the liberal one oriented them towards liberation of the individual. The former required people and societies to embrace both religious commandments and social obligations. The latter increasingly saw these as coercive, even in the form of cultural norms rather than legal ones.

The liberal telos advanced across the political spectrum, eroding both institutions and values shaped by traditional social norms on the on hand and the economic left on the other. Those parties associated with the left abandoned the causes of labor and embraced those of social progressivism. Meanwhile, the right’s social traditionalism increasingly became merely a tool of coalition-building. Its real contributions to government and society became economic neoliberalism and internationalist neoconservatism. Decade by decade, more of the perceived shackles of social morality and economic solidarity were torn off. Yet the prediction of Pope Pius IX still held: behind the ideology of the free individual lay the reality of unbounded power.

Nevertheless, the Church now possessed well over a century of meditation on liberalism as a doctrine. Moreover, it had increasingly developed an anthropology which perceived the fundamental divide between the Catholic and the liberal telos. Armed with these tools, it became possible for the magisterium to perceive a particular mode of being into which humanity was increasingly socialized. Moreover, it could explain why this mode of being subjected the human person to both spiritual and social violence, subverting the telos both of communion with God and with neighbor. This brings us to the encyclicals of three Popes: John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and Francis.

Technocratic Humanity: The Strange Fruits Of Freedom

Pope John Paul II was renowned for his theological and philosophical reflection on the human person. This current of thought characterized his pontificate in encyclicals such as Redemptor Hominis. His personalist philosophy, founded on the idea of the human person as a moral end, made him aware that human life was becoming increasingly mechanistic. He was hardly the first to make this observation. In 1954, Heidegger had written about a technological mode of being, in which not only nature but even humanity became a “standing reserve” of production. During the 1970s, Michel Foucault studied power and discipline as shaping forces operating on the human person. But unlike these counterparts, John Paul II operated within the framework of his papal predecessors. This allowed him to connect the technocratic mode of being with the erasure of a higher, non-economic human telos. As the Pope stated in the encyclical Laborem Exercens:

In all cases of this sort, in every social situation of this type, there is a confusion or even a reversal of the order laid down from the beginning by the words of the Book of Genesis: man is treated as an instrument of production, whereas he…ought to be treated as the effective subject of work and its true maker and creator. Precisely this reversal of order, whatever the programme or name under which it occurs, should rightly be called “capitalism”…[I]n the light of the analysis of the fundamental reality of the whole economic process—first and foremost of the production structure that work is—it should be recognized that the error of early capitalism can be repeated wherever man is in a way treated on the same level as the whole complex of the material means of production, as an instrument and not in accordance with the true dignity of his work-that is to say, where he is not treated as subject and maker, and for this very reason as the true purpose of the whole process of production.

In contrast to Rerum Novarum, this encyclical perceives that “property,” as with the whole host of “rights” imagined by social and economic liberalism, has transformed into a moral concept entirely different from that understood by the Church. The Pope directly attacks the capitalist notion of property understood in this sense:

Christian tradition has never upheld this right as absolute and untouchable. On the contrary, it has always understood this right within the broader context of the right common to all to use the goods of the whole of creation: the right to private property is subordinated to the right to common use, to the fact that goods are meant for everyone…As mentioned above, property is acquired first of all through work in order that it may serve work. This concerns in a special way ownership of the means of production. Isolating these means as a separate property in order to set it up in the form of “capital” in opposition to “labour”—and even to practise exploitation of labour—is contrary to the very nature of these means and their possession. They cannot be possessed against labour, they cannot even be possessed for possession’s sake, because the only legitimate title to their possession—whether in the form of private ownership or in the form of public or collective ownership—is that they should serve labour, and thus, by serving labour, that they should make possible the achievement of the first principle of this order, namely, the universal destination of goods and the right to common use of them. From this point of view, therefore, in consideration of human labour and of common access to the goods meant for man, one cannot exclude the socialization, in suitable conditions, of certain means of production.

Nor does Laborem Exercens shrink back from naming the cause:

This state of affairs was favoured by the liberal socio-political system, which, in accordance with its “economistic” premises, strengthened and safeguarded economic initiative by the possessors of capital alone, but did not pay sufficient attention to the rights of the workers, on the grounds that human work is solely an instrument of production, and that capital is the basis, efficient factor and purpose of production.

Writing in 1981, Pope John Paul II could not have then predicted the ways in which neoliberal policy and the coming digital service economy would transform the nature of work. The freezing of eggs by tech companies and mass migration’s transformation of human populations into production inputs were still to come. Nevertheless, the radical individualization of morality and gutting of organized labor already proved his words prophetic.

This explicit confrontation with humanity’s increasingly mechanistic mode of being and its causes was further developed by Pope Benedict XVI a generation later. In 2009, he published the encyclical Caritas in veritate. Written in the wake of the economic crisis of 2008-9, it sought to provide a moral framework to the forces of economic development. A lengthy and deeply reflective encyclical, it targets the rise of a destructive form of global political and economic development. It sees this rise as a key contributor to the erosion of human communal bonds and of non-economic modes of being: social, political, moral, religious.

However, it takes a further step and advocates for a competing and alternative form of development. This concept was far from original to Pope Benedict XVI, and the encyclical in fact draws strongly on the earlier Populorum Progessio, written by Pope Paul VI. However, Caritas in veritate confronts both its immediate context in the economic crisis and the broader reduction of human life to the economic sphere. In place of this, it advocates for an alternative form of development centered on the full and integral spectrum of human nature. At the foundation of this form of development lies the concept of charity in truth. Charity unbound from truth becomes a merely relativistic sentimentalism, while truth without charity would unbind the communal bonds which people are meant to forge. The implications are not only personal or religious, but political:

If…man did not possess a nature destined to transcend itself in a supernatural life, then one could speak of growth, or evolution, but not development. When the State promotes, teaches, or actually imposes forms of practical atheism, it deprives its citizens of the moral and spiritual strength that is indispensable for attaining integral human development…the conviction that the economy must be autonomous, that it must be shielded from “influences” of a moral character, has led man to abuse the economic process in a thoroughly destructive way…Truth — which is itself gift, in the same way as charity — is greater than we are, as Saint Augustine teaches. Likewise the truth of ourselves, of our personal conscience, is first of all given to us. In every cognitive process, truth is not something that we produce, it is always found, or better, received. Truth, like love, “is neither planned nor willed, but somehow imposes itself upon human beings.”

The identification of this form of life with a “practical atheism” strikes at the heart of the conflict. The liberal individualization of life has increasingly negated the possibilities for speaking about goals and obligations which can unite human action. First, it has ever more dissolved the social bonds which permit caritas to develop. Second, it has continually abolished the categories of truth which “impose themselves” on human beings and which private reason has no right to reject. By the end of the 19th century, respectable people sought to remove the dominance of specific religious confessions. Throughout the 20th century, an increasing variety of moral norms was rejected both legally and culturally. In the 21st century, the body and human nature itself have become oppressive shackles to be removed.

In response, there is Pope Pius IX’s prediction that what was presented as liberation of the average person would instead permit material power to follow “no other law in its actions, except the unchastened desire of ministering to its own pleasure and interests.” This seems to have been realized. Rather than a great adventure of self-discovery, the average person’s experience is at the mercy of the mechanistic mode of being. Economic necessity rewrites human priorities, even undermining the formation of families. The power of markets to produce wealth is no longer a means, but an end.

In repudiation of this form of life, Caritas in veritate targets the modern conception of technology itself. Pope Benedict XVI draws on Paul VI and John Paul II to advance a different conception of technology. It is a technology brought back under the control of human reason and human ends:

In technology we express and confirm the hegemony of the spirit over matter…It touches the heart of the vocation of human labour: in technology, seen as the product of his genius, man recognizes himself and forges his own humanity. Technology is the objective side of human action whose origin and raison d’etre is found in the subjective element: the worker himself. For this reason, technology is never merely technology. It reveals man and his aspirations towards development, it expresses the inner tension that impels him gradually to overcome material limitations.

In that case, why is it that modern life has ceded its control over the power of technology? The encyclical explicitly targets the question of who and what the human being is. Discussing a variety of technological developments of concern to the Church, from eugenic abortion to euthanasia, Pope Benedict declares:

Following [Pope Paul VI’s] lead, we need to affirm today that the social question has become a radically anthropological question, in the sense that it concerns not just how life is conceived but also how it is manipulated…These practices in turn foster a materialistic and mechanistic understanding of human life.

Recounting the papal magisterium’s trajectory of thought is useful at this point in the discussion. As we saw, the popes of the 19th century were concerned with doctrines of truth, religion, and human life which they saw as incompatible with the Christian faith. They further saw the development of social conditions which accelerated conflict and allowed such views to flourish. The history of the early 20th century saw a period of rapprochement, but also an increasingly sophisticated understanding at the core of the magisterium that human nature was a key battleground. In the decades following Vatican II, a destructive view of human nature began to eclipse the possible grounds for cooperation. A mechanistic mode of being and the reduction of human life to a materialist and economic state was not reconcilable with the Church’s firm belief in the human being’s destiny for communion with both God and neighbor. The polarization increased, decade by decade.

The election of Pope Francis is fascinating for a number of reasons. From the beginning, the establishment and popular media appeared to see him as one of their own and a possibility for the Church to align with the broader culture’s moral views. His tendency to emphasize mercy and outreach, as well as off-the-cuff answers in exchanges, made this an easy narrative to promote. His position as the first pope from the global south meant that he promoted issues of globalization, wealth inequality, and climate change, none of which are out of place in Western establishment media. However, this narrative fails to take into account that the Church’s own pronouncements in these issues from a radically different basis.

Thus, the publication in 2015 of the encyclical Laudato si’ attracted positive attention from much of the secular press, particularly for its lengthy engagement with the issues of climate change. Little if any of this publicity read the encyclical in its broader theological context.

In fact, those with the best understanding of Laudato si’ may have been its critics. Business-friendly politicians fulminated against papal interference in an economic sphere which should be independent and autonomous. First Things editor R. R. Reno may have come closest to the mark when he declared the encyclical to be hauntingly familiar to the papal rhetoric of the combative 19th century, rather than the optimistic 20th. His critical reading perceived that “[i]n fact, this is perhaps the most anti-modern encyclical since the Syllabus of Errors, Pius IX’s haughty 1864 dismissal of the conceits of the modern era.”

This suggests a very different reading of Laudato si’: an encyclical of Pope Francis the exorcist, who declared that infernal enemies work against human family, who advocates renewed and ongoing spiritual warfare. The Pope himself hinted that the encyclical should not be understood as a mere discussion of ecological issues. When asked by a journalist whether this was a “green” encyclical, he replied: “No, it’s a social encyclical.” Nor was it meant as mere pronouncement from the center of authority. The Catholic Church on earth has always been understood as the “church militant.” His extensive inclusion of statements from bishops conferences around the world implies a sense of mobilization. If Reno’s reading was near the mark, then the implications for the global Catholic Church are significant.

The encyclical begins with a discussion of various forms of ecological crisis, including pollution, water crisis, loss of biodiversity, and the weak responses and controversy about proper responses. It then moves into a deeper meditation, regarding the ecological crisis as the symptoms of a distorted view of man and his world. Pope Francis opposes the idea of nature as a purely utilitarian entity to be studied and controlled—though this encyclical does not use the term, we can again consider Heidegger’s “standing reserve”—with the Christian notion of creation as non-arbitrary, freely gifted, and a common home requiring a communion among its inhabitants. This requires recognizing the value and distinctiveness of each part through the lens of their cooperation in a greater whole.

However, the most dramatic confrontation with the modern world order occurs in Pope Francis’ investigation into the human roots of the ecological crisis. He locates its driving impulse in the “technocratic paradigm” shaped by the phenomenon of technological progress undisciplined by social, moral or transcendent direction.

This paradigm exalts the concept of a subject who, using logical and rational procedures, progressively approaches and gains control over an external object. This subject makes every effort to establish the scientific and experimental method, which in itself is already a technique of possession, mastery and transformation. It is as if the subject were to find itself in the presence of something formless, completely open to manipulation…The effects of imposing this model on reality as a whole, human and social, are seen in the deterioration of the environment, but this is just one sign of a reductionism which affects every aspect of human and social life. We have to accept that technological products are not neutral, for they create a framework which ends up conditioning lifestyles and shaping social possibilities along the lines dictated by the interests of certain powerful groups. Decisions which may seem purely instrumental are in reality decisions about the kind of society we want to build.

The encyclical further targets the notion that this paradigm has done nothing more than expand out choices. Contrary to the rhetoric of liberation, the lack of higher direction and dissolved social bonds of the technocratic paradigm have removed the possibility for alternatives:

The technological paradigm has become so dominant that it would be difficult to do without its resources and even more difficult to utilize them without being dominated by their internal logic. It has become countercultural to choose a lifestyle whose goals are even partly independent of technology, of its costs and its power to globalize and make us all the same. Technology tends to absorb everything into its ironclad logic…The technocratic paradigm also tends to dominate economic and political life. The economy accepts every advance in technology with a view to profit, without concern for its potentially negative impact on human beings. Finance overwhelms the real economy. The lessons of the global financial crisis have not been assimilated, and we are learning all too slowly the lessons of environmental deterioration…Yet by itself the market cannot guarantee integral human development and social inclusion.

Pope Francis also addresses the question of Christian anthropology. He locates part of the problem in a misunderstood and misrepresented version of that anthropology in previous times, when the theology of human dominion of the earth was understood only in an exploitative way. This allowed ways of thinking and working to arise which the modern world has been able to accelerate. He thus calls for a renewal of this anthropology in a way which correctly understands the communion between persons and stewardship of the world. Mirroring Pope Benedict XVI’s call for an integral alternative path of human development, Pope Francis presents an integral ecology which restores both humans and the earth into a context of ongoing intercommunion. Able to shape political, social and economic action, such an ecology would take as a starting point the fact that man depends on those around him, on the world about him, and on the transcendent orientation beyond and within him. Such an ecology is far-reaching, even entering discussions about the politics of space:

[Historic, cultural, and artistic] patrimony is a part of the shared identity of each place and a foundation upon which to build a habitable city…There is a need to respect the rights of peoples and cultures, and to appreciate that the development of a social group presupposes an historical process which takes place within a cultural context and demands the constant and active involvement of local people from within their proper culture. Nor can the notion of the quality of life be imposed from without, for quality of life must be understood within the world of symbols and customs proper to each human group.

What Laudato si’ represents is a radical confrontation with the technocratic world and all its works. With each successive encyclical we have examined—in addition to a number which couldn’t be covered here, such as Quas Primas, Quadragesimo Anno, and Populorum Progressio—the varying developments were undergirded by a deepening understanding on the part of papal teaching about the nature of what it was confronting. The substantive worldview which had shaped human development spoke of individual liberation, but instead cemented a mode of being which did violence to the human person. In Laudato si’, we encounter a warning against severe and worsening crisis, as well as an exhortation to rebuke the paradigm behind it and restore the power of technology and production to human ends.

The integral ecology called for by Pope Francis and the alternative path of development advocated by Pope Benedict XVI are the consequence of taking Pope Pius IX’s old warning seriously. If power is to be united with real authority—one informed by higher truth and the natural law—then it must discipline itself. The anthropology developed by the Catholic magisterium in response to the liberal one does not permit that the human being divorce themselves from either higher truth or from those around them. Both popes see the disappearance of bonds with neighbor and with God as resulting in the fragmentation of human life. Furthermore, this phenomenon undermines the ends for which the human person actually exists. This is the meaning of Pope Benedict XVI’s choice of title: Caritas in veritate—charity in truth. The technocratic paradigm, which has abandoned this foundation, is summed up succinctly by Italian-German priest and theologian Romano Guardini, cited in the later part of Laudato si’:

The gadgets and technics forced upon him by the patterns of machine production and of abstract planning, mass man accepts quite simply; they are the forms of life itself.

Many Roads From Rome: Papal Teaching And The Broader Church

While this breadth of papal teaching is intellectually fascinating, its mere pronouncement does not force the broader mass of Catholic believers to receive it. So the question must be asked: is the direction of radical confrontation which has been developed by the magisterial authority one which will shape the Catholic Church as a political force?

In fact, the strength of this long development—beyond the formal religious authority of the papal office—is that it has been consistently developed by popes from many backgrounds within the Church. Nowhere is this testified to more greatly than in the final three. Pope John Paul II came from what was then a bloc under Soviet domination and was keenly aware of geopolitics. As the first pope elected after the close of Vatican II, his approach to developing its theology was viewed as too conservative by some and too compromising with heterodoxy by others. Pope Benedict XVI was a son of western Europe, a deeply theological man. He was both one of the great minds of the Vatican II council and later a supporter of causes associated with traditionally-minded Catholics, such as endorsement of the traditional Latin form of the mass and the integration of many Anglicans into the Church. Finally, Pope Francis has come from the “periphery,” from a world which often found itself far away from the halls of power. His Jesuit order has often been associated with more radically reformist currents within the Church. His approach has led to conflict with more conservative factions, but he has also taken steps toward normalizing relations with the staunchly traditionalist Society of St. Pius X.

Likewise, confrontation with the liberal order has been reflected across various political currents within the Church. One of the most dynamic manifestations of this trend is in the realm of political theology. The collapse of “fusionist” Catholic politics as a rallying point in the culture wars has led to a reinvigorated questioning of how Catholic life relates to the political world. In particular, the intellectual life of Catholic integralism has seen revitalization at the highest levels. Originating in the battles about how to respond to events like the French revolution, the integralist school of thought maintains a substantive approach to moral and political order. It upholds that social and political life must be formally and explicitly oriented toward the sphere of religious truth. As a result, its chief political principle is the Gelasian dyarchy: that the temporal political power is sovereign and autonomous within its proper sphere, but must submit to the spiritual power in the sphere of faith and morals. The reasoning for this is laid out succinctly by the integralist blog The Josias:

Catholic Integralism is a tradition of thought that rejects the liberal separation of politics from concern with the end of human life, holding that political rule must order man to his final goal. Since, however, man has both a temporal and an eternal end, integralism holds that there are two powers that rule him: a temporal power and a spiritual power. And since man’s temporal end is subordinated to his eternal end the temporal power must be subordinated to the spiritual power.

Integralism has arisen in a number of countries and is by no means a new doctrine. An intellectual emphasis on religion’s power to shape life from the political to the personal level was articulated by many responding to earlier liberal revolutions. Among the first luminaries in the modern context was Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges’ influential 1864 work The Ancient City, which argued for religion as the driving force in ancient Greek and Roman society. French Catholicism in particular has always seen integralist anti-liberalism maintain a coherent and organized force among its traditionalist elements.

Its American advocates come in the context of renewed criticism of liberalism’s effect on religious life. Works such as journalist Rod Dreher’s The Benedict Option and Notre Dame professor Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed have made influential contributions to this discussion. Integralism represents perhaps the most confrontational approach to this crisis. In contrast to Dreher and Deneen’s localist retreats, it seeks to enter the world of polarized liberal disintegration and offer a superior vision. Though its active intellectual numbers are small in the United States, they have influence. A graduate course on the topic is even available for Harvard law students. It is co-taught by constitutional law professor Adrian Vermeule, who has written and lectured extensively on liberalism and the modern administrative state, as well as their effects on the possibility of a substantive common good in the social order.

Younger integralists are also distinctive in their relationship to Pope Francis. While the French founder of the traditionalist Society of St. Pius X, Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, wrote extensively on the questions of liberalism and religious liberty, he was at odds with the papacy regarding his doubts on many aspects of Vatican II. Conversely, prominent modern integralists, such as Austrian Cistercian monk and editor of The Josias Edmund Waldstein, emphasize a continuity with Vatican II viewed through a lens of continuity with prior teaching. Integralism’s substantial intellectual online presence has also translated into institutional engagement with its own critics, liberal and otherwise. In 2018, the Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture hosted discussions on the topic of liberalism and the common good. Its closing discussion included integralist voices through Vermeule, as well as University of Dallas professor and American Affairs editor Gladden Pappin, alongside skeptic Patrick Deneen, and liberal defender V. Phillip Muñoz.

This current has also seized upon the connection between liberalism and the technocratic mindset. In his comments on Carl Schmitt’s Roman Catholicism and Political Form, Vermeule draws out the difference between technical rationality and Catholic rationality. In particular, technical rationality applies logic to efficient means but has no ordering principle for its ends. Conversely, Catholic rationality maintains principles of natural law to which it must order changing circumstances of life, a task requiring changing means but consistent ends. He quotes Schmitt on technology as a political force:

Intelligence and rationalism are not in themselves revolutionary. But technical thinking is foreign to all social traditions: the machine has no tradition. One of Karl Marx’s seminal sociological discoveries is that technology is the true revolutionary principle, beside which all revolutions based on natural law are antiquated forms of recreation. A society built exclusively on progressive technology would thus be nothing but revolutionary; but it would soon destroy itself and its technology.

Vermeule elaborates further on the precise mechanisms on this destruction:

The state becomes overrun by rent-seeking interests and a depoliticized managerial politics, while citizens relapse into a kind of apathetic and hedonistic privacy, dominated by consumerism and a consumerist approach to political life. At a certain point, however, the thinness of the regime’s claim to loyalty, and the accelerating pace and increasing burdens of relentless creative destruction, jointly become intolerable. The sheer plasticity and restless liberationism of the regime exceed the populace’s appetite for freedom, and a kind of rebellion against the principles of the regime itself will occur. The populace craves the return of “strong gods” (in R. R. Reno’s phrase) and summons them. It is not impossible to discern the beginnings of such a process in our own era, as Reno indeed does. The economic-technical state ultimately turns out to be self-undermining, because it rests upon a defective psychology and anthropology.

Despite the strong alignment of American integralists with Vatican II continuity and Pope Francis, the world of Catholic traditionalism has also taken note. These communities are generally characterized by favoring the traditional Latin mass and an approach to theology and prayer which emphasizes continuity with the Church as it existed before Vatican II.

Since Pope Benedict XVI’s affirmation of the traditional form’s legitimacy, participation in its worship has rapidly increased among young Catholics. This current has even had some influence on popular culture, particularly in the plot and aesthetic of HBO series The Young Pope. However, insofar as traditional Catholic life is defined by an embrace of contradiction to the broader culture, its numbers would be even larger. This definition would include many young Catholics who attend the ordinary form of the Roman mass, as well as those who may be in other communities such as the eastern Catholic Churches (which stem from eastern theological and liturgical traditions) or the personal ordinariates (communities mainly across North America, the UK, and Australia which originated with Anglican parishes which joined the Catholic Church).

The diversity of traditional Catholic communities makes it difficult to define a general motivation. But many working with young traditional Catholics have noted that they often embrace a cohesive and substantive rejection of liberal modernity. Even before the current surge in traditional Catholic engagement online, Archbishop DiNoia, O.P. noted in 2010 comments:

I have noticed it over the past few years, but it seems more pronounced or at least more evident to me in the people born in the mid- to late 80s and early 90s. My sense is that these 20- and 30-somethings have been radicalized by their experience…these 20- to 30- somethings have experienced the moral relativism and eclectic religiosity of the ambient culture-and possibly of their own personal experience- and recognized it as a chaotic but radical alternative to Christianity with which no compromise is possible.

It is likely no coincidence that young people are finding traditional Catholic life at the same time that they are encountering theologically-influenced pop culture voices such as Jordan Peterson. Both are driven by a desire for meaning which is not only tolerant of radical divergence from the dominant culture but attracted to it. However, the polarization between many traditional communities and Pope Francis is likely to prove a stumbling block to explicitly embracing the framework of Laudato si’. Nevertheless, their embrace of the same currents within earlier writings—be it Pope Benedict XVI or Pope Pius IX—certainly places these communities on a convergent trajectory. Whether a full reconciliation will occur remains to be seen.

The existence of such communities also provides Catholic intellectual life with a sphere of praxis. Catholic philosophers such as renowned virtue ethicist Alasdair MacIntyre have addressed such issues as the communal basis for virtue and Christian objections against the liberal capitalist form of property. Traditional Catholic communities, such as that around the Benedictine monastery of Clear Creek Abbey in eastern Oklahoma, have been upheld as examples by students of MacIntyre’s communitarian approach, including Rod Dreher.

However, MacIntyre has proven to be an intellectual force beyond these quarters. A third political force in American Catholicism in particular is that of the Catholic left. MacIntyre’s substantive critique of capitalist modes of production and life builds on his own Marxist past, which makes it quite distinctive from general right-populist suspicion of centralism or foreign influence. The Catholic left is not a unified group so much as a tendency which can be found among a number of individuals and groups. In general, this group is defined by greater involvement in politically leftist groups such as the Democratic Socialists of America and is animated by opposition to both the Trump administration and the neoliberal establishment of the Democratic Party. It received attention following the release of the Tradinista Manifesto, which called for a socialism compatible with Catholic social teaching. Figures such as The Washington Post’s Elizabeth Bruenig and writer Kevin Gallagher, who authored the American Affairs piece on Catholic fusionism, remain influential on social media.

Additionally, the rise of a populist left more focused on issues of economic and racial inequality could perhaps open a window for more diverse views on social issues. While the white middle-class center-left could afford to hold a party line on such matters, the same may not be true of an Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez coalition which includes more socially conservative but economically left minority and immigrant populations.

Ultimately, these debates may prove influential for Catholic communities attempting to steer a course through technocratic liberal modernity. However, they largely apply to Catholics who find themselves in the Western sphere of influence. The numerically strongest populations are made up of those Catholics who live, work, and pray in communities outside of this sphere. A prominent African Catholic voice has been that of Guinean Cardinal Robert Sarah, who is known for his damning criticisms of the Western mode of life. Though often associated with the more traditional current within the Church, his 2018 homily condemning consumerism and “frenzied individualism” at the widely-attended Chartres pilgrimage might well have come from Laudato si’.

African Catholicism seems likely to take many courses, dependent on region, and reflecting broader geopolitics. Parts of the global Church already find themselves in cities and regions increasingly under Chinese influence. The political theology of Catholic communities in Addis Ababa or Lagos, not to mention Lusosphere African nations like Angola, will ultimately be responding to this influence. This is reinforced by increasing interaction between the Chinese and African churches. A parish of Chinese and African Catholics worshiping side by side at a Latin mass in Beijing paints a striking image of Catholic political theology’s future. It will have to respond not only to the technocratic paradigm of the Western liberal order, but to that of an increasingly wealthy and interconnected global south. Whatever the outcome, it is unlikely to embrace the answers of an ailing and less influential Western liberalism.

The controversial agreement reached between the Vatican and the Chinese government itself came in the context of Rome’s push to unify the Chinese church and normalize relationships with its hierarchy. This has long been a complex situation, with strong overlap between the state-sanctioned body and underground organizations. While it is unlikely that Chinese Catholics will live entirely free of persecution in the near future, the trajectory from all sides is to reach a settlement that includes the Chinese state.

The retreat of Western influence is not global in scale. Countries like France and Italy play ongoing roles in Africa, particularly driven by responses to the migrant crisis. African and South American Catholics traveling to Europe for clerical, monastic or academic roles are entering a continent which is progressively under the sway of populist and post-liberal movements. While Italy’s current Lega-M5S coalition government is most relevant to the Vatican itself, such movements have influenced politics in Austria, Germany, France, Italy, the U.K., and Spain, among others. While there is far less migratory movement to eastern Europe, the influence of Catholic and sovereigntist governments like those in Hungary and Poland is significant in the realm of ideas. Just as Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro took political inspiration from global north populism, it will not be surprising to see Catholic political theologians do the same. While the concerns of development, climate, and economic exploitation may well make them distinct from and even in confrontation with their northern counterparts, they seem unlikely to be forces shaping a new secular and capitalist liberalism.

The reshaping of the Catholic Church which has birthed both Pope Francis and Cardinal Sarah will not only continue, but accelerate. In this extensive overview, we have seen Catholics in Western power centers face exclusion and disenchantment with their various coalitions. Furthermore, we’ve seen decisive steps being taken towards political projects which are substantively and unapologetically Catholic, deeply influenced by magisterial teaching and combative on cultural flashpoints. In the wide world of Catholicism’s growing adherents and future centers of influence, historical experiences at the hands of the liberal world order leave many less enchanted by its promises than scarred by its realities. Moreover, the rise of new paths of development are already exercising influence over the societies in which many live. It is these Catholics who will provide the priests, theologians, social theorists and political actors of coming generations.

Most vitally of all, this reshaping is not occurring despite the center of religious authority, but is being actively informed by it. While individual memories are short, institutional ones are long. Nearly 200 years of papal teaching has occurred in the midst of variously militant and accommodating liberalism. But having observed its fruits, the Catholic magisterium has begun to directly confront what it long warned against: a technocratic mode of being created by the reduction of human life to the materialist and economic sphere, and the incompatible anthropology beneath it. What occurs at this center echoes out and religiously informs the lives of nearly a seventh of the world’s population, and through them impacts the world as a whole.

The pontificate of Francis is another step on a trajectory which is unlikely to alter itself. In a 2018 homily, the man whom Catholics adhere to as the vicar of Christ on earth spoke uncompromisingly:

The paganization of life can occur, in our case the Christian life. Do we live as Christians? It seems like we do. But really our life is pagan, when these things happen: when we are seduced by Babylon and Jerusalem lives like Babylon. The two seek a synthesis which cannot be effected. And both are condemned.

The country is often perceived—and desires to be perceived—as tolerant, liberal, multicultural, cosmopolitan, and free of the ethnic and religious strife of so many nations. Republican electoral victories in the United States result in traditional Democratic murmurings about a move north. British and European liberal politicians see Canada as a demonstration that their principles work.

For both its advocates and opponents, the Canadian liberal system is tied to the figure of Pierre Elliott Trudeau. Prime Minister more than once, for a total of over 15 years, his public image made him the face of the liberal program. However, he was also one of its great intellectual architects. Throughout the 1950s-60s, he edited the liberal journal Cité Libre, which promoted a federalist vision of civic liberalism. Many of the positions it advocated later became embedded in Canadian political and constitutional life.

Trudeau’s work reveals a deep and abiding belief in the notion of social progress. But these same writings show a much different account of how liberalism is actually established in a country: by political power and ideological will. This is not the story we are told. Liberalism is supposed to be about progress toward the liberal end-state via the objective forward movement of history, not power manipulating procedural outcomes to achieve liberal ends. Nevertheless, the story of Pierre Trudeau is the story of exactly such a project.

Trudeau’s own words and actions paint a picture in which the liberal order resulted from the power of particular classes and the actions of particular people, and in which neither its advent nor its survival is inevitable.

In particular, Trudeau’s political conflicts in Quebec shaped his view that the Anglo-French relationship was the core conflict which had to be resolved. Many of his political battles can be interpreted as a move to isolate Quebec’s political power. This comes through both in his early years writing about Canadian and global politics, and in his constitutional policies once in government. Much of Trudeau’s work attempted to create a political order in which the Anglo-French conflict could be favorably resolved. The entrenchment of this conflict in and of itself meant that such a political order would take imagination and force of will to construct, and was by no means guaranteed.

Much of early Trudeau and Cité Libre writing took place during the last years of Quebec before it entered the period of secularization and liberalization known as the Quiet Revolution. Politically, those years were defined by the premiership of Maurice Duplessis and his Union Nationale. Under his establishment, Quebec’s government was devoutly Catholic and staunchly anti-Communist, and stood for rural relief, education, and economic development. Supported by the clergy and rural communities, the party had tense relations with labor unions. The cultural shifts in 1960-70s Quebec often painted Duplessis as a dark and reactionary figure, dubbing his era the “grande noirceur” (great darkness). Duplessis lost favor among liberals for his social traditionalism and among separatists for his federalist policies.

Pierre Trudeau stood out in this era among the Quebec government’s leading opponents, accusing it of authoritarianism and corruption. Writing in response to the Union Nationale’s 1952 election win, he detailed a theory of what drove this state of affairs in the pages of Cité Libre, in a piece entitled “Reflections on Politics in French Canada.” Trudeau saw the problem as not being tied to particular parties so much as to Quebec’s entire relationship with the Canadian system since the British conquest in 1760:

We had one sole passion: survival. And when viewed from this perspective, universal suffrage could very well prove to be a useful instrument. Moreover, by importing the English parliamentary system one piece at a time, our secret goal was not only to use it, but also to abuse it.

 

[…]

 

Unfortunately, cheating is habit-forming. A subtle game of casuistry allowed us to break the rules of the political game, until ultimately the game itself slipped out of the whole realm of morality. We had done so well at subordinating the Canadian public weal to the French-Canadian public weal that we lost any sense of obligation to the former. Apart from times of strife…everyone pursued his own interest, to the detriment of the community. In other words, our sense of civic responsibility was perverted.

This trajectory of thought grew to identify key Quebec institutions as enforcers of an illiberal and anti-civic politics. In his 1958 essay “Some Obstacles to Democracy in Quebec,” Trudeau went so far as to call Quebec’s governors “political immoralists” and targeted the Catholic Church as a hindrance to the development of Quebec civic life:

When Canada passed into British hands, the Church naturally concerned herself with safeguarding the faith by protecting her authority. And, as it turned out, she discovered that her position had in a sense improved…So, after difficult beginnings, both powers found it advantageous to work out a modus vivendi. Loyalty was bartered for religious freedom, and the Church was as good as her word. During the wars of 1775, 1812, 1914, and 1939, the Catholic hierarchy preached submission to His Majesty’s government…

 

[…]

 

A conquered people therefore not only faced a state which they feared as a creature of a foreign nation, but also belonged to a church which distrusted that state as a rival power and as a child of the Revolution…

Trudeau concluded that not only French-Canadian political culture but the very civic institutions of Quebec itself had been built to win ethnic political conflicts. He ended pessimistically:

If my hypothesis is right, the current vogue for preaching political morality in Quebec will by itself be of little avail. For so long as people do not believe in democracy there is no reason why they should accept its ethics. Political behaviour in Quebec can be described as immoral, objectively speaking; but subjectively the people are not conscious of wrongdoing, and consequently they see no reason to change that behaviour.

Trudeau used his experiences to identify obstacles to the liberal vision in terms of entrenched political interests. But this in itself could not create a political program. For that, Trudeau turned his analysis to the questions of nationhood and sovereignty themselves, ultimately critiquing both concepts. Trudeau framed cultural issues as something which should be protected within the framework of a civic polity focused on the individual rights of citizens. By the 1960s, Trudeau was articulating a broader theory of nationalism. It is articulated in the well-known essay “New Treason of the Intellectuals,” first published in 1962:

Democracy indeed opened the way…by which all could participate in the exercise of political power. The state then appeared to be the instrument by which eventually all classes—that is to say, the entire nation—could assure peace and prosperity for themselves. And quite naturally all wished to make that instrument as strong as possible in relation to other states. Thus nationalism was born, the child of liberal democracy and the mystique of equality.

In Trudeau’s reading, the result of this desire for sovereignty was a shift toward the will for national power. Anglo-Canadian nationalism began with the fear of the Loyalists in the face of the French majority of the time. It ultimately became cloaked in democratic language as they became a popular majority with institutions of responsible government. French-Canadian nationalism, as we have seen already, began as a survival mission after the British conquest and became a quest to exploit federal institutions for French benefit. Even the left-leaning French separatists of the time were labelled “politically reactionary” by Trudeau. His own view of social progress was bound instead to internationalism and what he saw as the growing cooperation of populations.

So, could the principle of nations be reconciled with the principle of progress? Trudeau saw hope in political federalism. With the existence of various groups in a polity, there is pressure to reconcile differences so that each has some threshold of investment in the overall regime. Trudeau saw this as the triumph of reason over untamed mass passion in political life. However, his theoretical views proved to contradict the actual policies used to cement the federalist liberal political order in power. Passages such as the following, from his 1964 paper “Federalism, Nationalism, and Reason,” starkly contrast with his actual strategies once in power:

[T]he exercise of sovereignty will not only be divided within federal states; it will have to be further divided between states and the communities of states. If this tendency is accentuated the very idea of national sovereignty will recede and, with it, the need for an emotional justification such as nationalism. International law will no longer be explained away as so much “positive international morality”, it will be recognized as true law, a “coercive order…for the promotion of peace”. Thus there is some hope that in advanced societies, the glue of nationalism will become as obsolete as the divine right of kings…

Trudeau’s political work is underpinned by this fascinating contradiction. Seeing political sovereignty as less important in theory, at least in the long run, he made it a vital tool in practice. This was most evident in the constitutional battles in which Trudeau pursued legal recognition of a federal sovereignty and the promotion of rights such as bilingualism through federal power.

Despite the uncertain origins of Trudeau’s project, it has had staying power in large part due to a strategy which presented itself at the start of Trudeau’s second period in office. Rather than pursuing a series of laws which could simply be repealed by future governments, much of the project was written into the Canadian constitution itself. Before 1982, Canada’s highest law was the British North America Act, which was under the authority of the British parliament and enacted in 1867 with the birth of modern Canada. After decades of attempts frustrated by political and ethnic tension, Pierre Trudeau patriated that law to Canadian parliamentary authority, and seized the opportunity to update it.

Trudeau had often emphasized the necessity of federal backing so that provincial separatisms (either the French of Quebec or the English of the western provinces) couldn’t undermine a new constitutional order. However, the reliance on federal power to outmaneuver provincial obstruction to this goal became most evident during the ensuing negotiations of 1980-81. With the stakes high, Trudeau had been correct in his assessments. Quebec Premier René Lévesque leaked during early negotiations and formed an alliance with a number of opposed Anglophone provinces, including much of the west. This situation culminated in one of the most controversial uses of federal power by the Trudeau government to ensure the passage of the constitution despite provincial opposition.

In September of 1981, the Supreme Court of Canada gave its decision on the federal government’s power to patriate the constitution without provincial consent. By a vote of 6-3, the court found that despite a convention of provincial consent, they could not enforce such a custom as law. This granted the Trudeau government legal power which diminished the bargaining positions of dissident provinces. In particular, the Quebec premier’s decision to even cede a direct provincial veto suddenly placed that province in a particularly bad position. Trudeau, dismissive of the sovereignty principle in theory, had been aptly aware of its consequences in fact. Ten years later, he stated the following in an address later published as the piece “Fatal Tilt”:

The federal government took the position…that the right of Canadians to have a constitution of their own should not be subordinated to the open-ended process of satisfying any premier’s insatiable desire for increased provincial powers….

There were only two ways to solve the conundrum. The government could recognize the “compact theory”, recognizing that our country was nothing more than a community of communities…Or the government of Canada, as the sole governing body empowered to act in the name of all Canadians, could reject the compact theory, hold that Canada was something more than and different from the sum of its parts, and proceed to patriate the constitution unilaterally. We chose the latter course…

The ultimate fate of federal-provincial negotiations following the Supreme Court decision shaped the constitutional problem even past its patriation. The intense discussions reached their climax in a brutal overnight hammering-out of a final agreement. However, the Quebec delegation had chosen to stay in a hotel across the Ottawa river—and was not notified until the next morning. The perceived betrayal would become known as the “night of the long knives” and led to Quebec’s refusal to sign the final deal. But Trudeau had already won the key battle of sovereignty. Despite this refusal, he used the federal rights to patriate Canada’s new constitution. It was a major victory for anchoring Canadian institutions in the liberal project.

It is evident in Trudeau’s own reflections that the obstacles of provincial interests were front and center in his mind while making this decision. Just as he had charged Quebec’s political masters with reaction and insular thinking years before, he continued to attack what he viewed as their efforts to undermine the constitutional order after his time as Prime Minister. In 1987, then-Prime Minister Brian Mulroney tried to gain Quebec’s assent to the constitution via agreements to decentralization.

Trudeau used his still-considerable influence to attack the attempted deal. He condemned the negotiations as a craven affair and Quebec’s role as particularly corrupt. Ideologically, it was the civic liberal nature of the constitution which Trudeau saw as under threat. The desire of Quebec to be recognized as a “distinct society” in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms was for Trudeau a veiled opportunity to give ethnic politics backing from the highest law of the country. In a 1992 article published in the popular Canadian magazine Maclean’s, he laid out the terms of Canada’s liberal settlement:

The charter, whose essential purpose was to recognize the fundamental and inalienable rights of all Canadians equally, would recognize thenceforth that in the province of Quebec these rights could be overridden or modified by provincial laws whose purpose is to promote a distinct society and more specifically to favour the “French-speaking majority” that has a “unique culture” and “a civic law tradition.” There is a very good chance, then, that Quebecers of Irish, Jewish, or Vietnamese origin—even if they speak perfect French—would have trouble claiming to belong to this “distinct society”…And even an “old stock” Quebecer would risk losing his fundamental rights if he were rash enough to pit them against Quebec laws passed for the promotion of “collective rights”.

Nevertheless, even this civic identity which Trudeau cedes to Quebec in terms of language and territory ultimately has an implicit conflict with the civic identity of Canada as a whole. He stated in a 1996 Montreal Gazette article:

With the Quiet Revolution, Quebec became an adult and its inhabitants have no need of favors or privileges to face life’s challenges and to take their rightful place within Canada and in the world at large…In the era of the global village, the very notion of sovereignty is becoming obsolete, and it is to protect what is left of it that large-scale amalgamations are being formed.

Although Quebec has pursued more particularist laws around language and culture than Trudeau might have desired, there is no doubt as to whose vision has dominated Canada as a whole in the decades since. Multiculturalism is viewed as one of Canada’s defining traits and part of its core identity. Trudeau’s vision of Canada shapes not only the domestic, but also the international image of the country. Yet as we have seen, Canada’s liberal political order was by no means inevitable or even certain. It was Trudeau’s political acumen and formidable will—and that of his allies—which were able to translate his theory into action.

Yet this same will exposed contradiction between the theory and practice of the liberal idea. Nowhere is this more evident than Trudeau’s thought regarding the idea of sovereignty, which is the concrete expression of state power. Rather than a fading idea of past centuries, it became a vital tool to overcome the interests which he saw as forces of reaction. Trudeau’s recognition of this was obvious during and after his time in government, especially when that legacy was under threat. Yet there never seems to be any recognition in Trudeau’s work or that of his political successors that sovereignty and state power were not to fade away quietly, but instead to be the mechanisms used to establish, institutionalize, and provide continuity to the liberal regime.

There are consequences to this recognition, namely that the narrative of progress and liberal inevitability is undermined. Liberalism is not a political project of unfolding history, but of will, intention, and power by particular political interests. While Trudeau often questions the means and motivations of his opponents in Quebec and elsewhere, he does not devote much writing to those of liberalism itself.

If Trudeau’s liberal project is in fact a capture and restructuring of sovereignty, this implies that the international society he imagines does not leave those facts behind either. Even within the theoretical global society, there are still legislators, enforcers, and governors. But in a society from which there is by definition no emigration, the question as to what interests drive these governors is more vital than ever. Populist movements in North America and Europe have arisen in response to the fact that democracy is seen to exist at the level of the nation-state, but not in the international institutions which have been established to supersede them. In that case, the legislators are not only exercising power, but power gained outside of any kind of liberal civic polity.

Moreover, in an age where religious and cultural conflict are as present as they have ever been, one must ask whether liberalism’s demands are in fact as reasonable as Trudeau presents. If cultural and religious questions are absent from the public sphere, what does this leave? Is politics in fact merely the realm of individual rights and economic treaties? Trudeau devotes too much thought to culture to attribute that position to him, but it is difficult to see what the purpose of individualism itself is.

The fact that Quebec’s youth embraced separatist, socialist, and nationalist ideals even as their wealth had increased implies that economic stability did not put politics to rest. Indeed, the observation that nationalist sentiments arose with the bourgeoisie and the post-Enlightenment idea of the nation-state should cause us to question whether individual security is a sufficient political principle. While Trudeau may favor reason over sentiment, the social, cultural, and religious nature of human beings does not make it a rational position to exempt most of human life from the political sphere.

The project of Trudeau has lasted for several decades and remains one of the great examples of liberal politics. It is unlikely that a man without Trudeau’s willpower and ability would have been able to achieve the successes of Canadian liberalism. As one of liberalism’s great advocates and implementers, Trudeau’s work continues to merit reading from fellow-travelers and critics alike. But the contradictions between Trudeau’s theory and the mechanisms of that achievement demonstrate that neither power, nor sovereignty can be so neatly relegated to the past. Nor can we assume that its banishment of religious, ethnic, and national concerns from the political sphere will be lasting in a time when these issues are as prominent as they have ever been.

The strength of Trudeau’s political will is captured in a moment that has become iconic in modern Canadian history. During the October Crisis of 1970, Trudeau sent in federal tanks and soldiers without hesitation to crush violent FLQ Quebec separatists on the streets of several cities in the province, mocking the “bleeding hearts” who didn’t like to see “helmets and guns.” A CBC reporter caught up with him to complain of the threat that troops occupying Quebec under the War Measures Act posed to democracy.

“At any cost? How far would you go with that? How far would you extend that?” the CBC reporter interrupted.

“Well, just watch me,” Trudeau replied.

However, that world order is now gripped by a crisis of contradictions. Since the financial crisis of 2008-9, returning growth has accrued mainly to a small portion of the population in both the United States and other countries. Real wages appear stagnant, institutions are unable to deal with growing population flows, and populist movements are overturning prior certainties. Not coincidentally, this has coincided with growing interest in an alternative path of development.

It is China which has done more than any other country to formally promote such an alternative. This vision is based on China’s own experience of economic growth decoupled from political liberalism. In response, Western observers tried to apply familiar categories to this new situation, especially the discourse of “state-capitalism.”

As China has become more globally influential, developing economies have courted its investment, and examined its policies as an alternative model. But without a doubt, the appearance of the Belt and Road Initiative in 2013 and its subsequent promotion have increased the competitive edge of the Chinese development brand. If successful, the project will develop economies across Asia, Europe, and Africa, and accelerate the integration of a Eurasian supercontinental economy. The “belts” will be a number of land-based infrastructure corridors, while the “roads” refer to sea routes. Around 70 countries were involved at the start of 2018, representing over a third of global GDP and the majority of the world’s population.

For the first time since the Soviet dissolution, the liberal order is faced with an external power offering both a competing vision, and the geopolitical clout to gain cooperation. Several questions arise from this situation: what is China’s idea of a successful Belt and Road, and what are its implications? How likely is this new model to out-compete the liberal order and its norms? How can we measure such a thing in an interconnected world?

Much of Western China-watching has been done through the lens of Western concepts. For example, Chinese development is characterized as being the result of “state capitalism” — in other words, by China’s tacit acceptance of a distorted liberal capitalism. But this method has serious pitfalls. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) places great store in maintaining and demonstrating continuity in its thinking; the role of theory has always been central. Both Deng Xiaoping and Xi Jinping presented their official contributions to CCP theory as developments of prior stages of thought, ultimately linked to Mao’s adaptation of Marxism-Leninism. It is difficult to understand the CCP worldview without this underlying framework of theory and development.

Critics will question the extent to which official ideology, as taught in universities and used in slogans, actually reflects the CCP inner doctrine. That distinction is important; public expressions of ideology are not necessarily the whole story. But China has demonstrated a deep and continuing commitment to crafting its own vision of how economic and political development should work. The West should not forget that the CCP took Chinese political and ideological sovereignty seriously enough to spurn their own Soviet allies. It would be a mistake to infer from convergence on policies like the use of markets that China has abandoned these commitments. Though Chinese thinking changes and updates, it should not be assumed that all ideological roads lead to Washington and Brussels. The Chinese vision should be examined on its own terms in order to understand the political foundations of Belt and Road.

It cannot be overstated how intensely aware China is of the Western narratives surrounding its rise. As a result, its public relations approach with Western countries has traditionally been to emphasize cooperation and downplay its power. However, the shift from Deng-era cooperation to Xi-era self-assertion has led to more public criticism of Western narratives as well. A good example of attacks on the “state-capitalism” narrative appeared in 2018 via the state-run China Daily. Speaking in the context of the U.S.-China trade war, the paper accused the U.S. of using the term to cloak its use of free trade ideology as a tool of power on the international stage. Meanwhile, it pointed out that the West benefited from protectionist policies during its own development, and from use of state intervention in times of crisis. Given this apparent hypocrisy, it cast Western narratives about unfair Chinese state-capitalism as weapons in a geopolitical struggle to subvert China’s rise. The understanding of economic power as the basis of political power is a foundational Marxist concept, perhaps giving some weight to Xi’s comments that China has not abandoned Marx.

By the same Marxist principle, however, the economic power which Belt and Road is intended to create also has political consequences. A system where China is the center of economic gravity is one where China is the center of political gravity. By making itself the driver of a large development region, its strength in economic conflicts (such as the current one between Beijing and the Trump administration) would increase.

Most observers have made this same link, a fact of which the Chinese leadership is well aware. While it has emphasized the economic benefits of Belt and Road, it hasn’t overlooked the fact that an adjacent political language is needed. Particularly important is the “community of common destiny” idea, which has become central to the Belt and Road political brand as well as official Xi Jinping Thought. The idea combines notions of a peaceful Chinese rise, mutually beneficial cooperation, and common stakes in the future. It has been promoted mainly in developing countries where China has established relationships. In the context of Belt and Road, it represents China’s preference to emphasize a shared, cooperative political order rather than a confrontational one which could undermine its  international ties.

Western media has similarly discussed the political goals of the project. In spite of massive development potential, worries abound when it comes to increasing Chinese influence. Predatory debt relationships and strategic interests are on observers’ minds. In a worst-case scenario, Chinese control over land routes would be to its military benefit. Nor will the interconnected nature of a globalized world allow for isolationism. Global norms influence all countries and will do so even if increasingly shaped by non-Western influences. This is one aspect of what out-competing the liberal international order looks like: rules increasingly influenced and even set by a power which wholly rejects its ideological underpinnings. In this case, by a country simultaneously ruled by a communist party, yet linked to a long history via the concept of the “civilization-state.”

This raises the key question: will Belt and Road come through? Political goals are all well and good, but amount to nothing unless the project can actually fulfill its promise to be an engine of economic development.

One of the major analyses of the project’s overall economic logic has come from Portuguese politician and business strategist Bruno Maçães. Basing his work on personal experience in the region and feedback from Chinese experts, he identifies Belt and Road’s key economic component as its impact on global value chains. Maçães has emphasized China’s focus on cheaper production prices in regions like central Asia, as well as the advantage it would gain by being the first to establish facilities there. China will be able to offshore parts of the development chain in the same way Western powers once did. This will allow it to focus domestic resources on areas where it has a comparative advantage. Such a policy couples well with the Chinese focus on developing its service industries and high technology sector.

With Belt and Road, the opportunity arises for China to both increase the resource base it has access to and the profit margins derived from its use. In a country where the economic and political orders are intertwined via both state-owned enterprises and more indirect controls, this stock of net wealth will increase the strategic resources of the state. Maçães points out in his analysis that the focus on land routes makes more economic sense than a first glance suggests. Despite higher transport costs compared to sea routes, the scale of the Belt and Road project will provide value to land-based value chains, as well. China envisions expanded transportation and routes connecting a number of growing economies in the region. Of course, the creation of new economies will also benefit China politically. This demonstrates another aspect of what it means to out-compete the liberal order: yet-undeveloped regions in the world building wealth in a Sinocentric infrastructure and trade network rather than a Western-centric one.

The access to great spaces across which production can be ordered and re-ordered is key to development. Both Europe and the United States were able to build up such spaces during the 19th and 20th centuries—including territories within China itself. It is vital to recognize that beyond Belt and Road’s initial projects also lies all the potential opportunity and innovation which accompanies rising economic spaces. As the steward of the Belt and Road infrastructure, China would be in a strong position to benefit. While the breadth of the project often makes it appear ad hoc, its major components follow a sound economic logic.

In all this, China is no different from its Western rivals, who have benefited from access to economies across the globe. While the age of empire and trade backed by colonial arms gave way to the liberal era of free enterprise, the fact remains that such large-scale access has been essential to building Western wealth and power. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and realpolitik alliances with deeply illiberal countries like Saudi Arabia represent that interest at its most undisguised. However, the rhetoric of liberalism did allow the West to present its great space as being founded on voluntary cooperation. Similarly, the rhetoric of “common destiny” demonstrates that China wants to minimize the political tensions generated by its new economic sphere. Moreover, the investments and debts that countries are taking on to be part of the project mean that they will have political incentive to remain committed, even if some particular projects fall through. This means that the relationships involved are intended for the long-term.

Maçães also emphasizes the link between economic power, political clout, and the re-ordering of the liberal international order’s norms. Writing in 2016 for Carnegie Europe, he noted the following:

The main question is what set of rules will govern the way these chains are organized. The Chinese model is to conduct this organizing process as much as possible at the political level, through agreements reached directly between national governments. Most large Chinese multinationals are not simply state owned but are effectively managed with a view to goals and strategies defined outside the company and through political channels.

[…]

When the EU reduces its reaction to the initiative to the technical issue of linking European and Chinese projects in a connectivity platform designed to enhance economic synergies, it is ignoring the deeply political question of what model of Eurasian integration should prevail, or what combination of different models can be agreed on. For example, while Chinese authorities often speak of a principle of noninterference, they mean noninterference in the state’s ability to pursue collective goals, rather than the liberal notion of noninterference in individual life plans.

Separation between the economic and political realms, while often nominal, defines much of Western politics and therefore the developmental assumptions of the liberal international order. From 1945 onwards, the liberalism of Western countries was founded on the rights-bearing individual as citizen of a civic state. Social democratic governments focused on providing economic support; meanwhile, conservatism after Thatcher and Reagan was prone to seeing government as an obstacle and wealth-building as the job of the private sphere. Despite these internal disputes, the overarching vision has been one which minimizes ideas such as collective identity and the state. While its advocates have seen this as essential to protecting liberty and equality, these tendencies have also prevented governments from properly addressing issues such as growing class inequality and cultural tensions resulting from mass immigration.

With populist movements rocking the West itself, it should not be surprising that other countries are questioning whether the liberal ideological foundation is necessary for development. Of course, different regions have different motivations for considering the Chinese alternative. For African countries such as Nigeria and Ethiopia, rapid large-scale investment is appreciated, and special economic zones have provided spaces where local institutional failures will not undermine growth. For Eastern European countries involved in the 16+1 Initiative, which includes Austria plus a number of post-Soviet sphere countries, a Chinese relationship will help to balance pressures from Brussels and Moscow.

China’s lack of ideological demands for membership in its projects also give it greater flexibility in negotiating with potential partners, which demonstrates yet another aspect of what it looks like for China to out-compete the liberal order. If China is better able to match the political desires of developing states, the West will have to either relax its political demands or increase economic benefits in its own agreements. In other words, it will be engaged in increasingly direct competition in a way it has not been since the Cold War.

However, it is clearly not enough for the West to make window-dressing adjustments to existing norms. The logic of Belt and Road itself makes clear that there is only one guaranteed way to ensure a fair balance of political power. Countries partnering in the project will have to maximize influence by leveraging their economic clout to the highest possible degree. The goal should be a Belt and Road reality in which participants are in a position to ensure that the project’s political values and norms are not a Chinese monopoly. In this light, it is vital to understand which rivalries Belt and Road has the potential to reinforce.

Without a doubt, the major Chinese rivalry is with the United States. While U.S.-Russia relations have been more heated and perhaps more openly adversarial, the U.S.-China relationship is that of two economic superpowers. The trade war begun by the Trump administration has brought this into the open. China hawks in the U.S. point to the large American trade deficit with China, and heavy U.S. strategic dependence on Chinese supply chains.

However, the U.S. is not the only player in this economic game. The EU has generally been viewed as a quieter observer focused on maintaining diplomacy. But despite continuing talks about strengthening trade relations, Europe is simultaneously working on its own plans to expand transit and investment in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. However, this is balanced out with European interest in Belt and Road involvement, particularly in the European east. China has an opportunity to gain influence in the eastern region, but likewise Brussels has an opportunity to add its clout into negotiations. This will depend on how continuing west-east disputes in the EU itself play out.

For the West to retain advantages, grand strategy would be necessary. Two questions immediately arise. First, how would countries get involved in such a strategy? And second, what about areas where rivalry is growing, such as the African continent? Regarding the first question, Maçães recommends that Europe make the balance of power a key part of negotiating positions. In particular, he points out that European and other foreign companies are often locked out of Chinese markets in a way that Chinese firms are not in the West. Furthermore, he states that Western governments would have to ensure some degree of autonomy between the economic and political powers. In this, Maçães is in fact fairly well aligned with the Trump administration’s goals, if not with its means.

In addition, Western countries will have to counteract foreign influence within their borders, if they are to play this game. Canada’s intelligence agency has previously warned that Chinese influence has compromised politicians in Canada and New Zealand. Politico recently ran a feature showing the extent to which Chinese intelligence has penetrated Silicon Valley. On the other hand, China has quickly identified and killed CIA informants operating in its territory, crippling U.S espionage operations.

Regarding the second question, about growing rivalries, especially in Africa, the U.S. and Europe would have to ensure a diversity of trade relationships in order to maintain independence from China. However, this also requires the Western countries to rethink their mental maps of the world. Maçães points out that the African continent must be understood as containing many regions with differing interests:

[A]s European colonialism recedes into the past, that identifying trait of not being European disappears as well and perhaps we will see Africa fracture a bit. I can imagine many different Africas—five, six different Africas, that, by the way, have very little in common with one another already, and may have even less common with each other a few decades from now—that’s one possibility. It’s entirely possible—and let me speculate a little bit—that Africa will come under the influence of different superpowers, it may already be true to some extent that East Africa is under deep Chinese influence—very obviously in Ethiopia—and then West Africa is more under the American influence, simply because of the facts of geography and even history.

Western countries may be able to ensure an economically beneficial Belt and Road, while exerting influence on its political norms, by taking the above sorts of measures. We will see.

A failure scenario would be one where Western influence is insignificant to the Belt and Road outcome. In this case, the West may find itself out-competed in three different areas: First, it may find itself displaced in terms of the norms of international relations and development. Second, the economic infrastructure of development itself may be increasingly under Chinese political control. Finally, the sorts of deals offered by China may become more desirable by virtue of their adaptability to different cultures, regions, and political regimes, as compared with Western ideological demands. The reality is this: in a time when the Western model has become further delegitimized by its internal crises and foreign policy troubles, extensive rethinking is necessary in order for it to compete in these fronts.

Involvement in projects like Belt and Road, as well as alternatives for countries which see the benefits of diverse investment, will help to maximize the Western role in setting norms. However, the reality is that a world with many advanced powers is one in which a monopoly on norm-setting is gone. The new global landscape is one where Western countries must learn from their neighbors, just as those neighbors have historically learned from them. This means that it must work all the harder on the second and third fronts. The Western approach as of now has still been to focus on free trade agreements. This set of policy tools will need to be expanded. While Western companies have benefited from special economic zones, there is a lack of comprehensive strategy from Western governments. Increased diplomatic and institutional assistance in the creation of special economic zones will help to accelerate wealth creation in countries where overall institutions are fragile.

Moreover, a rethink of what is demanded ideologically from international partners is in order. Demands that such partners ensure security, rule of law, and common dignity are obvious, but the nominal presence of liberal democracy is no guarantee for those provisions, as we see in countries like Iraq and Haiti. Meanwhile, the governments of the United Arab Emirates and Hong Kong attract Westerners, despite its absence. While the liberal idea has shortfalls, it also has also provided insights. Trustworthy institutions and a set of norms where individuals have the freedom to innovate, as well as the expectation to benefit from that innovation, are valuable. In a future where the West no longer enjoys a monopoly over global norms, institutional experience in creating these environments will contribute to Western comparative advantage.

Nevertheless, there is no guarantee that governments will pursue this path. Deep divisions persist across the Western world, such as in relations between Brussels and the countries of Eastern Europe. Where populist governments have gained power, the long-term agreements and norms they will create are still in flux and uncertain. As things stand at present, China enjoys a strong advantage in implementing Belt and Road on its own terms. If this occurs, then the results will expand Chinese power and amplify its voice in the establishment of global norms. The economic foundations will allow China to create strategically useful value chains and have the dominant voice in a regional sphere attractive to both investors and countries with developing economies. Its model will have greater proofs to point to and an increasing legitimacy.

If the Western bloc is still bogged down in crisis, the contrast will be stark. In this scenario, we will indeed have to confront the reality of being out-competed in key strategic spheres. Only a West which has resolved the strife of class and cultural conflict will be able to coordinate effectively. The new rulebook which arises as a result of these resolutions may well aid its future competitive position. This makes it ever more vital that we find a path which can lead the Western world out of its current strife.

Proponents of charter cities promote SARs and SEZs for more general use. In addition to testing policies, governments are even able to bring in foreign expertise. They can import institutional structures and personnel or potentially outsource certain parts of government to private actors or foreign states. One example is Hong Kong’s final court of appeal, which uses judges who have served in several Commonwealth countries. Voices in the libertarian community, as well as those more broadly interested in liberal free market policies and decentralizing government, have been prominent in advocating for this concept.

In recent years, this area of conversation has shifted from a focus on the charter city concept to the broader one of “innovative governance.” The Center for Innovative Governance Research (CIGR), an organization promoting this updated concept, has ties to libertarian and free market oriented scholars and institutions. It is directed by Mark Lutter, an economist who has researched the charter cities concept at George Mason University, and includes a variety of collaborators such as fellow George Mason economist Tyler Cowen. The organization’s site lists several development concepts in addition to charter cities, including refugee cities, special economic zones, and technology zones.

On its face, the libertarian connection and the rhetoric of decentralization and autonomy all make sense. The projects proposed are unfailingly geared toward spurring investment and creating business-friendly environments. Some even see the opportunity for ostensibly de-politicized government providing administration as a profitable service. Small-scale experimental government based on voluntary association has been a project of several groups, such as the Seasteading Institute. One commission previously set up by the Honduran government to advise on such a project included former Cato Institute senior fellow Richard Rahn, anti-tax activist Grover Norquist, and former Reagan speechwriter Mark Klugmann. The Cato Unbound project hosted several essays on the topic in 2018.

However, this interest is counter-intuitive when considering the inspirations for charter cities. The strategic roles of Hong Kong, Macau, and the SEZs for testing reforms are ultimately directed by the Chinese Communist Party. The United Arab Emirates is a federation of Islamic monarchies. In this light, the tie between the charter city idea and decentralized market liberalism is not at all obvious. A major feature in the success of each of these projects is the backing by a single established host government, able to guarantee institutions and reap the strategic benefits of the project.

This should be significant for anyone thinking about global development. What if the control of these projects by strong host governments is an essential feature of their success, not just a historical accident that can be abstracted out in the future? If so, this would present a contradiction between the libertarian ideals of many charter city advocates and the state power actually driving this wave of city and economic zone construction. Charter cities would not weaken and decentralize nation-state governments, but in fact secure and strengthen them. Charter cities and similar projects provide platforms for policy and economic innovation with low political risk, among other benefits. This being so, it seems likely that these projects will only be undertaken in cases where the controlling state interest expects the project to strengthen its position.

But if such a contradiction presents an ideological problem, it doesn’t undermine the logic of the projects themselves. There are much more concrete pressures than idealism driving the surge of interest in building cities and special economic zones. A major trend cited by Romer and others is the world’s rapid urbanization. A recent Forbes article reported on numerous city building projects across Asia, the Middle East, and Sub-Saharan Africa. UN projections see urbanization spiking as the global population increases, with 68% of the population potentially living in cities by 2050. This means that countries must deal with a population movement involving hundreds of millions at the global level. With developed countries already challenged by migration issues, governments will face demand to decrease pressure on their borders. One strategy for diminishing this pressure is through investments abroad. Countries with less developed economies and growing populations will likely have to deal with overwhelmed institutions and a young, mobile demographic. If best practices for quickly creating new cities can be honed in the coming years, the consequences of this population shift can be mitigated and its opportunities better pursued.

On a more immediate level, many countries are aware that reputations for bad institutions have effectively blocked off opportunities for wealth creation. Companies are unwilling to enter countries where they have no guarantees of law or norms of doing business. This impacts not only the broader population but also local political elites. Since Romer popularized the idea, Honduras has received by far the most attention of any country explicitly pursuing charter city-inspired projects. As a country, Honduras has historically experienced high rates of violence and corruption. Thousands of Hondurans attempt to leave the country each year for the United States.

The government of Honduras has developed a constitutional outline for “employment and economic development zones” (ZEDE). This framework has been fleshed out into a more detailed theoretical structure, involving an administrative secretary, required to be a Honduran citizen who reports to an independent commission, as well as a court system which allows for involvement from foreign jurisdictions. With a number of projects under consideration, the proposal has continued to be at the fore of Honduran electoral politics, thanks to advocacy by President Juan Orlando Hernández.

Despite enthusiasm, many aspects of the project have stalled. Paul Romer, who had been asked to chair a transparency committee, ended his relationship with the project when the committee never met. In a Hong Kong interview in 2015, he stated concerns that the commissions would be captured by elite stakeholders and used to thwart independent electoral safeguards of the project’s integrity. A 2018 feature in The Economist reported concerns from local officials in the areas to be developed that the ZEDEs may become a vehicle for expanding territorial control by the central Honduran elite, rather than institution-building. In addition, locals have been worried about the fact that only a few sections of the constitutions are explicitly required to apply in ZEDE areas.

The Honduras project has to date been the project most widely associated with involvement from charter cities advocates. Why has it progressed so slowly? Mark Klugmann, a member of the original independent commission, has explicitly tied the slow implementation of the project to resistance among current members of the Honduran status quo who are not themselves project stakeholders. A BBC report on the project included his comments that the slow implementation would be inexplicable if Honduran decision-makers were unified in the initiative. This implies that it may in fact be viewed as a threat by at least some of the Honduran elite. For those benefiting from corruption and fragile institutions, there is little reason to support reforms when they have no personal stake in their success.

If Klugmann’s observations are correct, this implies a vicious cycle. The unreliable institutions in the country are themselves undermining the possibilities for improvement. Nor is the influence of Western partners enough to counteract this. This observation in and of itself is consistent with the observations of charter city advocates. But we can draw a further conclusion from the possibility of internal opposition or suspicion. The mere existence of political opposition doesn’t explain why reforms desired by the leadership aren’t occurring. Opposition is present in the face of nearly all reform projects. Nevertheless, some governments are able to move forward in spite of opposition and with confidence that they can reap the potential rewards of success, while others aren’t.

If those officials supporting the project are unable to move forward, this implies that either there is significant obstruction in the government itself or else the government feels it may lose power to political opponents. The possibility of corruption is also a factor. If different parts of the political leadership are unable to trust each other because of conflicting private commitments, then they will be less able to cooperate. This threatens to undermine the goal of these zones as a whole from the point of view of Romer and others, because they depend on rule-based institutions which investors trust will not be open to abuse.

With no reason to assume that those officials promoting the idea are being dishonest in their support, Klugmann’s observation implies that they are not confident enough in their ability to both move forward and retain their position. The political leadership is unable to actually exercise governing power over some proportion of the stakeholders involved. Securing that position is a prerequisite to moving forward.

The challenges faced by the Honduras project imply that more unified and secure governments may face fewer internal obstacles to establishing charter cities and other politically risky projects. This helps to explain our earlier observation that autonomous cities like Hong Kong and Dubai, Romer’s inspirations for the Honduras project, tend to be products of strong governments. In this light, it’s unsurprising that Hong Kong and Dubai are functional, whereas the Honduras project is not.

Secure governments have more ability to reap the long-term rewards of politically risky development, can better transfer wealth and resources to the rest of the country, have a better negotiating position to motivate stakeholders to cooperate with the project, and have fewer worries about the project threatening the security of their position.

Charter city advocates seem to be recognizing this in their discourse, as well. The CIGR discussion blog has noted the growing economic literature on state capacity as a prerequisite to economic success, as well as the phenomenon of city establishment occurring in “autocratic” countries.

However, there seems to be little discussion as yet relating these facts to the core assumptions of Western liberalism or free market ideology. Economic policy convergence is now much less associated with political convergence than in the 20th century, as we’ve seen with the Chinese use of markets to develop a state-oriented economy. If this growth is occurring without either the logistical expertise of charter city consultants or their ideological foundations, it raises the question as to what value the charter city concept provides apart from popular discussion of a global trend. 

It helps to consider the major roles any country or partnering corporation would play in a charter city or equivalent project. The first role is that of providing territory for the project, a role which can currently only be fulfilled by a state. The second role is that of providing institutional investment in terms of codes of law and government, and the personnel to carry them out. In practice, this has been mostly done by states, but theoretically a corporation could supply some of these services. The third role is economic and business investment, which can be accomplished by states and businesses alike and requires that partners have confidence in those who have filled the first two roles.

In the case of China’s special economic zones like Shenzhen, the host country provided the territory and also created the institutional framework, while in the SARs of Hong Kong and Macau the framework was inherited from a different state. Once a territorial and institutional framework exists, international participation in economic and business development can occur.

But would the project have moved forward had the Chinese Communist Party leadership felt less secure in its position, say, because the second role was being filled solely by foreign powers? At best, it would have been more hesitant and faced more internal opposition. The established nature of the central government also allowed them to bypass the mid-level governors whose failings the projects were ultimately intended to reform. Similarly, projects pursued by the UAE have evidently not affected their political structures or Western relationships, and have even given them autonomy from the nearer rival of Saudi Arabia.

The tie between state capacity and successful city and development zone projects seems to hold for other examples. The Forbes article by Wade Shepard mentions projects in Indonesia, Morocco, Kuwait, Oman, and South Korea, among others. The main exception is the Rawabi project in Palestine, which is being built with Qatari backing. However, this project is still under construction and depends on cooperation from the IDF forces, whose actions impact its access to water and other utilities. Nearly all the projects mentioned are occurring under the patronage of established states with positions secure enough that returns on investment are likely.

A particularly prominent example is a Saudi initiative to create a new 26,500 square-kilometer industrial zone called NEOM. The $500 billion dollar investment project is intended to include Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Jordan. Although the project has not seen public involvement by the professional advocates of charter cities, it matches the description in important ways. The zone is designed to spur investment, with the project’s leadership receiving direction from the Saudi crown prince Mohammad bin Salman.

There are many factors motivating the Saudi state to take such a risk. In addition to the general incentives described above, Saudi Arabia has faced pressure to diversify its economy away from oil and integrate its young population into a productive labor force, rather than funding more public sector make-work jobs. With bin Salman having used his position to remove rivals and crack down on corruption (often at the same time), it appears that the power structure feels secure and stable enough to implement controlled reform. Rather than decentralizing government, a successful NEOM will allow the Saudi power structure to deepen its long-term resilience, both increasing legitimacy via economic growth and creating spaces to test reforms with minimal country-wide disruption.

The major exception to the rule of host countries needing secure states seems to be occurring under the Chinese strategy on the African continent. Unlike Western countries, the Chinese approach toward city building and development is based on a broad, state-driven strategy in which the business community plays an important role. An example from a more stable country is the Chinese role in building up Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa. But particularly interesting is China’s approach in less secure regions. China has shown a willingness to invest heavily in special economic zones in areas many consider risky, such as the area surrounding the Nigerian capital of Lagos. These zones allow Chinese investors to build up an economy and infrastructure which can serve as a base for the broader city and region. The walled-off zone near Lagos has a massive level of autonomy from the city proper, with plans for a separate harbor, grid, and police force. The housing and infrastructure projects which China has promoted across Africa provide a valuable negotiating chip in establishing such zones.

While charter city initiatives have been plagued by accusations of neocolonialism, the Chinese approach openly promotes soft power. Chinese media sources are becoming more widely available across Africa due to its economic projects. The ability of the Chinese state to guarantee investment and security in development projects contrasts with the Western role, where this has largely been left to the private and NGO sectors.

In countries where the state is weak and lacks governing capacity, the implication is that stronger states and developed countries will gain influence. However, the direct ties on which these relationships are built on may incentivize longer-term planning and investment. A similar dynamic played out during the Western colonial period itself. As with modern states, the secure position of colonial powers at the time of their dominance led them to see their territories as assets and develop them to varying extents. While some territories suffered under destructive policies, others experienced growing populations and immigration from within their region.

By way of contrast, much of Western involvement in these regions today takes the form of expensive but ineffective aid programs. What exists of grand strategy or long-term thinking is often at the mercy of entrenched special interests or think-tanks focused on election cycles. However, accusations of neocolonialism undermine attempts by Western countries to develop a better-planned and comprehensive approach. Ironically, this prevents Western investment from producing real results and addressing the needs of people in developing economies. The consequence of this has been the displacement of Western influence by that of China and other growing powers.

This displacement is not limited to governments. It also impacts charter city advocates and other development strategists, who tend to operate via think-tanks, NGOs, and consulting practices. A striking feature of the global wave of urbanization and development is its independence from Western political narratives. Almost none of the projects which have met success engage in the discourse of decentralization, reform, or political liberalization. Instead, projects tap into the brand of development and opportunity. The NEOM website features images of renewable energy, beautiful vistas, and cities springing up from the desert. Given that the project’s whole point is the development and economic security of the Saudi state, rhetoric about removing tired, inefficient government from the economic prosperity of free people would be counterproductive at best.

China goes even further, since its political leaders are intensely aware that their policy innovations have fed a Western narrative that it is now “state-capitalist.” Their media devotes resources to attacking this narrative and placing market-oriented policy innovation squarely within Chinese socialism and the “Chinese path of development.” Given these trends, the Western role seems increasingly restricted only to corporate involvement. Mere corporate involvement is insufficient for any Western grand strategy.

Nevertheless, the innovation and activity of this city-building wave should be seen as a positive opportunity. The crises which charter cities and their equivalents are designed to tackle are real ones. If carried out correctly, they will allow hundreds of millions to avoid the displacement and poverty which can dissolve regions into conflict. As we have seen, it is such positions of security which seem to best motivate the negotiations and investments needed to make the projects work. Success will breed success, while initial failures could compound into greater crisis. Moreover, the actual spaces being created have the potential to be engines of innovation and development. If strategic, transferable blueprints for economic zones and startup cities can be created, they will become vital tools in dealing with the root causes of the global migration crisis and future urbanization.

If the strong association between successful projects and secure governments with state capacity continues, a reborn and decentralizing market liberalism is unlikely to spring up. The ideological commitment which distinguishes many Western charter city advocates from their pragmatic Chinese or Middle Eastern counterparts makes them a liability. If Western countries are to maintain influence in these regions, it will instead be on the basis of their comparative advantage in logistics, investment capital, and human capital. It would also require more long-term strategic planning on the parts of Western governments and explicit attention to geopolitical concerns in development.

Some governments are already thinking in this direction. In mid-2018, Italy’s populist coalition government announced plans to promote Chinese-Italian economic partnerships. In particular, the announcement referred to both the Belt and Road initiative and partnerships in Africa specifically intended to decrease migration pressures. Likewise, France’s government has taken a more active role in the North Africa region in recent years, including political assistance to Libya and Mali.

The opportunities of this development strategy are massive. Countries which manage to successfully contribute to initial schemes could become partners of choice later on, gaining a first-mover advantage. This is particularly true for countries with the resources to train personnel in institutional development, in addition to the obvious economic investments. As such, it is important that the political impact of such projects is accurately assessed. Past years of charter city excitement have been guided by the ideological agendas of tech sector visionaries and libertarian policy advocates, but future successful projects seem more likely to be guided by hard-nosed, state-oriented geopolitical and developmental concerns.

The state-oriented political realities of the charter city type projects that actually happen contradict a discourse of decentralization where market power is replacing state power. Charter cities are not the engines of decentralization that libertarians hoped them to be. Instead, these projects will strengthen the legitimacy and resiliency of those states able to provide a secure platform and the will to carry them out. Governments launch charter cities projects in cases where those cities will be subordinate to state objectives and will achieve economic or policy innovation gains that further strengthen the state. Likewise, foreign partner states will approach these projects as a way to project influence and strengthen their global position. A more diverse environment of markets and governance structures will likely occur, as regimes take the opportunity to experiment with policy and reform. However, this has to be understood as powerful states finding ways to innovate and be more nimble, rather than the market finding ways to route around slow legacy governments.

The exciting question here is not how Western liberal governments can export their successful legal and economic systems with charter city type projects. Rather, once this trend of innovative new city development gets going and best practices are established, the question is whether liberal governments, known for their gridlocked lack of agility, will even be able to keep up at all.

Rather than an overarching force for unity, Brussels has seen its role in the region become one of opposition; the eastern bloc increasingly views Brussels as favoring particular interests like market integration and open borders at the expense of cultural distinction and state sovereignty. On the other hand, the Visegrad countries see Washington under the Trump administration as an ally to counterbalance European pressure. This is mirrored to the east as well. The bloc is divided on Russia—Hungary being friendlier, Poland adamantly opposed—but Chinese partnership is increasingly visible and able to counterbalance Moscow. While the media tends to focus on immediate disputes, the rise of this bloc at a time of mounting pressure on liberal political institutions and Western European capitals may force the western bloc to rethink its ideological commitments and inflexible diplomatic approach.

In order to keep the “illiberal” bloc within the Western partnership, the “liberal” bloc will have to resort to treatment previously saved for allies like Ukraine or Saudi Arabia. Specifically, we can expect that the liberal bloc will be forced to actively develop principled and/or pragmatic ideological exceptions for the European east. Both American and European precedents allow for at least some ideologically consistent exceptions to be made. However, the explicitly Christian and sovereigntist politics being embraced by Visegrad could force much greater concessions, though at the cost of more bitter fights, as both Brussels and the U.S. State Department view themselves as having a sense of ownership over Visegrad countries that they do not feel for recalcitrant, ideologically distinct countries like Saudi Arabia. Whether this results in a long-term ideological shift in the West will depend on several factors, particularly on the ability of liberal factions to regain control of the White House and maintain or expand their political power across Western Europe.

The political project of Visegrad and the Three Seas Initiative is not yet clearly defined in any single charter, aside from some joint statements and communiques. However, detailed statements exist in the forms of statements and speeches from many prominent figures, particularly Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban. One good example was a 2018 speech at the Bálványos Summer Open University and Student Camp. Orban outlined his government’s vision of  “a new constitutional order based on national and Christian foundations.” Having viewed the 2010 and 2014 victories as a mandate to establish and “consolidate” this system, the 2018 two-thirds victory was described as “nothing short of a mandate to build a new era.” He re-affirmed that this political order is of an “illiberal” nature and outlined sovereignty, defense of the family, state control of strategic sectors, national culture and representation of all nations in the European project as among its core aims. He later outlined the meaning of the term “Christian democracy,” which he places in opposition to “liberal democracy.”

Our duty is not to defend the articles of faith, but the forms of being that have grown from them. These include human dignity, the family and the nation – because Christianity does not seek to attain universality through the abolition of nations, but through the preservation of nations.

The content of these statements isn’t new. Nationalisms across Eastern Europe are informed by Christian heritage and maintain a suspicion of foreign influence from their eras of resistance against both German National Socialism and Soviet Communism. However, a particularly interesting theme appeared when Orban discussed the ability of that vision to drive economic life and development via a vision of cooperation between Hungary and Romania, as well as other countries, in the building up of the Carpathian basin, a region covering much of Central-Eastern Europe. Specific projects included investment in high-speed rail and road between countries, coordinated military and defense policies and increased cross-national investment. More broadly, Orban envisioned this as a stepping stone to the development of central Europe as a whole. Putting this vision behind projects like Three Seas will both increase the incentive of aligned governments to invest and reduce the leverage of the Western European establishment.

Visegrad governments have already overseen two important kinds of growth: economic and demographic. The OECD tracks Poland’s real GDP growth at over 4% for 2017 and 2018 and Hungary’s only slightly lower for the same period. While this is to be expected for less developed economies, such growth will translate into economic clout. Orban’s speech reveals a focus on the improving opportunities for Hungarians and stability for family life, even citing statistics on entertainment spending. While Orban cites an increased birth rate now at 1.5 children per woman, the government’s plan is to reach 2.1, which is needed for a stable, rather than declining population, by 2030. This highlights the demographic element of Visegrad member state ideology.

Poland’s government has invoked Catholic social teaching to expand benefits to large families. While the country suffered decreasing births after the Soviet collapse, economic growth has spurred some recovery. A First Things analysis of the government’s “500+” program noted a rise from 1.29 children to 1.42 since 2015, though prior economic growth likely played the major role in that growth. While these numbers are below the replacement rate, the natalist tendencies of these governments are something to watch, as many Western European societies are even further below replacement, with no sign of improving, while also facing increasing political pressure to restrict immigration. If the Eastern bloc is able to offer alternative labor pools for Western European governments, then in the event that the west enacts more restrictionist policies, Eastern European countries would not only gain economically, but also be able to project cultural and political influence via increased diasporas. Current cosmopolitan tendencies leave Western European countries quite open to such diasporas exerting influence on political institutions.

The European project as envisioned by Brussels is one of comprehensive integration rather than one of cooperation between politically and culturally distinct states. The populist wave in the West has already created domestic challenges to that vision. But even if the Eastern challenge is on the periphery, it is also stronger because there it has achieved power at the state level. Orban’s vision for the region would have the effect of increasing its economic might. This undermines the political carrots of development and increased living standards which Brussels has used to counterbalance the sticks of harmonization and integration.

Scholarship has existed for some years on the differences between these visions and what drives them. Stefan Auer of the University of Hong Kong describes in a 2010 paper from the Journal of Common Market Studies how the post-national ideas of the German establishment were challenged not only by the European project but even by the reunification of the German nation-state.

The outlook of the Bonn Republic was meant to be post-national and European, rather than German. The new challenge that followed after unification was to redefine the relationship between the Federal Republic and its people…The prospect of the re-emergence of Germany as a nation-state dismayed leading public intellectuals in both East and West Germany.

Auer recounts the development of a “constitutional patriotism” which was popularized by thinkers like the German sociologist Jürgen Habermas. This patriotism was intended to replace specific cultural loyalties with democratic values and was intended to become a European vision to orient the continent’s integration. However, this project was itself based on the specific histories and experience of the major Western European nations. For Eastern European countries which had struggled for their independence since before World War II, the sacrifice of sovereignty and distinctiveness for integration and harmonization was by no means obvious. However, Western elites saw this deviation not as the result of legitimate debates, but as merely the result of unfinished political development. Auer sees the matter differently, concluding that the Eastern position is intended to counter the Western one:

Cosmopolitan elites in Europe tend to overlook social problems in their societies because they have developed the ‘class consciousness of frequent travellers’ (Calhoun, 2002). Populism and ethnocentric nationalism have emerged in Europe not despite the cosmopolitan agendas of its elites, but, to a large extent, in response to them.

If the Brussels establishment still holds firm to “constitutional patriotism,” the events of Brexit, Trump, and other populist victories have shaken its confidence in Inevitable Europe. Confronted with so many challenges, the question is whether it will prioritize Europe’s values or its structures. Put differently, the choice facing Brussels is whether to engage in the ideological renegotiation necessary to guarantee cooperation from Europe’s newer members, or face escalating conflict, unless it manages to reduce the leverage of the Eastern bloc by getting a handle on Brexit and the migration crisis. The staying power of the Trump administration will also be a key factor in play.

However, the details of this ideological negotiation aren’t certain. One possibility is for Brussels to simply grant a pragmatic exception to Visegrad countries in return for cooperation on the level of policy. This would mean scaling back criticisms and condemnations of the sort which have been given in the past. There is also the alternative of a more far-reaching adjustment: a principled exception. Such an exception requires an actual negotiation and restructuring of the European ideology which takes the competing visions of Eastern Europe into account. Unlike the rhetoric of Brexit, the Visegrad bloc—as well as populist movements in Germany, Italy and Austria—have not taken a blanket anti-EU stance.

A settlement of principled exceptions may be possible by distinguishing the project’s federalism versus its liberalism. If what matters is a cooperative and more-or-less united Europe, then the “class consciousness of frequent travellers” may find itself in retreat, along with the types of liberalism which emphasize individualism and internationalism over concrete polities. Significantly, French President Emmanuel Macron has pushed for such talks and even won support from the Polish government. His proposal consists of national-level dialogues followed by a European-level restructuring aimed at the next 10-15 years of European governance. In fact, Macron himself has not shied away from embracing notions of culture and even religious life as part of political life. In a controversial 2018 speech to clerical officials, Macron—who received baptism at age 12 by his own request—called for a renewed role for the church in French politics. Noting that ardent secularism had created a schism between France’s Catholic heritage and its political life, Macron stated that “the time has come for us, both you and me, to mend it.”

Does this mean that a long-term European order which has moved on from late-20th century ideas could occur? While not impossible, this depends on a number of factors. First, those interests which prize European cooperation more than Brussels liberalism would need incentives to cooperate with the Visegrad bloc, and vice-versa. The nature of Visegrad means that this requires several governments to work in alignment. Further populist growth in Western Europe could incentivize this cooperation, particularly if the Italian coalition has staying power and if Germany’s AfD (aided by its sympathizers in establishment parties like the CDU and CSU) increases its clout. A successful alliance between a new generation of Western leaders and a developing Eastern bloc may achieve a threshold of institutional momentum which could anchor Europe in a post-liberal political vision. Such a vision would better reflect what unites the diverse continent and would thus anchor itself more in its shared interests and heritage. If Macron proves able to give his approach continuity, France may begin to displace Germany as the major national power behind the European project.

The most powerful challenge to such an alliance would undoubtedly be the return of a committed neoliberal government in the United States. This would occur if either establishment Democrats or anti-Trump Republicans recaptured control of the executive and legislative branches. Currently, the Visegrad bloc has sought to court the Trump administration as a way to balance a much less sympathetic Brussels. Some successes have come, in particular to Hungary: the Obama policy of rejecting bilateral contacts ended with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s meeting with his Hungarian counterpart. A planned funding grant viewed as U.S. backing of anti-Orban media did not go through. However, Poland suffered a recent blow when the U.S. administration rebuffed its new law criminalizing accusations of Polish complicity in Nazi war crimes. Still, the country has continued to make diplomatic moves toward its ultimate goal of a permanently stationed U.S. Army armored division on Polish soil. In this, its hopes seem to be in the sentiments of Trump’s 2017 speech in Warsaw, which praised the Three Seas Initiative and declared Poland “an example for others who seek freedom and who wish to summon the courage and the will to defend our civilization.”

The key factor making this diplomacy possible has been the Trump administration’s focus on bilateral relationships rather than multilateral institutions. On an international scale, the United States is unquestionably the center of the Western liberal coalition. However, long-time allies such as Germany, Japan, and the United Kingdom have had far more influence in establishing its norms in contrast to newer ones in Eastern Europe. Bypassing multilateral institutions and agreements to shape deals directly with the American center allows these newer members to exercise more direct influence. This is a game of playing the far against the near. If America sees the Eastern bloc’s economic and military development as being priorities above its ideological liberalization, then this will exert further pressure on the European establishment to cooperate.

Like Brussels, the American establishment will be faced with questions of how to deal with the Visegrad project ideologically. In this case, however, a history of pragmatic exceptions already exists. Illiberal and even undemocratic states have been able to maintain relationships with the United States in return for cooperating within its alliance. Saudi Arabia is a modern example, but the list includes pre-revolutionary Iran, Park Chung-hee’s South Korea, and others. However, the pragmatic nature of this exception also leaves the door open to strained or broken relationships if rival factions within the U.S. establishment attempt to build legitimacy through a more principled approach to the alliance. Shake-ups have thrown several former alliances and treaties into disarray, leading to the overthrow of Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak and Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi, as well as the undermining of deals like the Obama administration’s nuclear deal on Iran. Unless the Trump administration’s focus on bilateral realpolitik over institutional conservatism and liberal democratic ideology becomes a deeply ingrained component of U.S. diplomacy overall, it is much less likely that formal American liberalism will be open to the sort of shifts that Europe may undergo.

Still, things are uncertain. Even if the Trump administration becomes an eight-year affair, there is the question of what happens after. For this reason, the Chinese role in Eastern Europe will also be a major factor in the region’s future. Chinese involvement somewhat mirrors the Visegrad relationship with Washington and Brussels in its far-near dynamic. Although Orban has established a tone of moderation and diplomacy towards Russia, this is by no means universal. Poland remains strongly anti-Russian, as do the Baltic states. The relationship with the Ukrainian government in Kiev is also a factor.

By establishing stronger ties with China, the Eastern bloc not only balances Moscow’s influence but can also pursue a more unified trade policy to its east. These eastern ties will help to give it clout against the possible post-Trump return of a powerful neoliberal establishment. For China’s part, Eastern Europe is a key piece in plans such as the Belt and Road Initiative. In 2018, Chinese Prime Minister Li Keqiang personally visited Bulgaria for the seventh 16+1 summit, a forum for Chinese and regional business interests. Although China’s stance is that such investments are not intended to undermine European integration, the development plans of leaders such as Orban are clearly linked to the political vision of Visegrad.

What will be the ultimate impact of this vision? In both its organization and geopolitical clout, Visegrad and broader projects in Eastern Europe will continue to contest what European liberalism once considered inevitable. With the momentum achieved by Hungary, Poland, and other governments, pro-European leaders will be forced to parley with their newest partners in the continental project. While we may continue to see particular disputes or condemnations, the collective pressures on Brussels and its allies do not allow for total disintegration. Fortunately, we’ve seen that the ideological structures of the European idea have potential for transformation. In any dispute between international liberalism and European cooperation, there is much interest in seeing the latter prevail.

Nevertheless, the coming years in the United States will also impact what is possible for the Eastern bloc. As long as the Trump administration pursues the bilateral approach to international relations, Visegrad and company will be able to balance out pressures from Brussels. But if that power center shifts, it will find itself under increased pressure to capitulate to Brussels’ demands. The increased engagement with China and other eastern neighbors can be viewed as one form of preparation by increasing economic power and political clout. Should the worst happen from the Visegrad perspective, it isn’t unreasonable to predict that China’s influence could increase further. Bellicose rhetoric from Russia will only reinforce the desire for a strategy of playing far against near. In either scenario, European and American liberalism will be forced to respond.

For these reasons, Visegrad represents a significant challenge to global liberalism. Both principled and pragmatic exceptions to accommodate Eastern Europe open the door to ideological evolution. Ideology and culture have historically changed as a result of shifts in power: countries, classes, religions and other interests express their influence in competing visions for the future. If political ability and fortune align, the Christian and sovereigntist challenge may ultimately open one door to a post-liberal future in the West.