R.I.P. anarchy

The liberal order is over. Date of death: February 24, 2022. So argues Philip Pilkington in his provocative new book, The Collapse of Global Liberalism: And the Emergence of the Post Liberal Order (Polity, 240 pp.). What we are living through now, he contends, are the final cadaveric spasms of the system created after the Second World War. Its end was ushered in with the Russo-Ukraine war and the acceleration of anti-liberal forces across the globe. The West sought to extend liberalism eastward, but China never acceded, and when the West tried to penalize Russia into submission, Moscow simply aligned with Beijing. Neither country has collapsed because of its rejection of liberalism. On the contrary, a new world order seems to be emerging, complicating Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” mythology.

So what does Pilkington mean by liberalism? Why did it die? And what comes next?

Liberalism, according to Pilkington, is defined by its opposition to hierarchy. It is a leveling, flattening force. Economically, it reduces human relations to contractual exchanges that replace natural, heterogeneous hierarchies. “The commercial society,” Pilkington insists, “is the liberal society par excellence.”

He is somewhat vague on liberalism’s origins. At points he seems to suggest that it began with the Protestant Reformation, dating it at roughly five centuries old. But he highlights one pivotal moment: the English Civil War. Pilkington sees Cromwell’s war as a revolutionary moment, a symbolic flattening (including the literal beheading of the king). Then with John Locke’s Second Treatise, which explicitly opposed Robert Filmer’s Patriarcha, liberalism received its first self-conscious exposition.

In the postwar era, especially after the end of the Cold War, the West assumed that the rest of the world would willingly embrace liberal ideology and economic liberalism. But many nations haven’t. And as Western nations themselves continue to crumble under liberalism’s logic, this myth is being dispelled, though many are late to wake up to reality.

That reality is both that the liberal moment is over and that it was destined to collapse. Liberalism, he contends, is a “dark and uncivilized philosophy of life,” inherently “unstable” because it is “unnatural” and irrational. By eroding the preliberal, mostly Christian, sources on which it depends, it ensures the destruction of any civilization it touches. He points to evidence of Western decivilization—social unraveling that portends a slide back to barbarism. This is not Pilkington’s hope, but his warning. His constructive aim is to help postliberal societies retrieve classical sources capable of recivilizing the West.

At root, liberalism’s error is denying the human need for hierarchy. Hence its antagonism toward religion, which testifies to the hierarchies in creation and creation’s relation to the Creator. Reality is hierarchical, and societies will always generate hierarchies. Suppress them, and new ones emerge—often more arbitrary, hidden under liberal euphemisms, or reasserted violently in fascism. If we wish to avoid such outcomes, Pilkington urges, we must return to preliberal frameworks fit for a postliberal world.

What comes next is murky. Pilkington’s final note is ambiguous and ominous: “We live in interesting times—and we can only hope that they do not get too interesting.” Certainly, we need to recognize the facts of a multipolar world of nations and blocs of nations that are unwilling to embrace liberalism. And we in the West need to wake up to the civilizational decay at our doors and get serious about the hard work of recivilizing—and doing so not relying primarily on liberal resources.

He offers some practical proposals—on military defense, family policy, mental health, drugs, homelessness, immigration, international diplomacy, energy policy—but his chief medicine is diagnosis. And for readers willing to face it, the prognosis is bracing: Liberalism is not coming back, and what replaces it will depend on how prepared we are to live without its illusions.