The article looks at divisive forces in contemporary societies and links them to the unfulfilled hopes of the revolutions at the beginning of modernity: the hopes for equality, freedom, and fraternity/solidarity. There are, first, in the twenty-first century situation, persistent inequalities that emerge in all the function systems of society and that become divisive as soon as a discontinuous split arises in the distribution of rewards, a split that makes it improbable that someone might switch from one to the other side of a distribution. There are, second, strong asymmetrical dependencies that are connected to an escalation of controls by which persons and groups control resources wanted by others and furthermore build up controls regarding the actions, communications, exit options, and ways of perceiving the world available to these other ones. The more control dimensions are implied in a specific social relation, the stronger and more pervasive asymmetrical dependencies become and then definitely separate in society those who exercise controls from those who are objects of control. There is, third, as a structure of division, the rise of sociocultural polarization that creates a split between significant subcommunities of a society, on the basis of which communities perceive the members of other communities as strangers and as dangerous for the values and ways of life one regards as essential for one’s own community. The article finally explains these societal divisions by studying them as forms of inclusion and exclusion. Inequalities come from cumulations in the inclusion dynamics of function systems; asymmetrical dependencies emerge in institutions and groups that absorb persons that are being excluded from relevant participations; polarizations are based on reciprocal and totalizing exclusions by which communities define the members of other communities as radical “others.”

Liberal democracy is in decline across the globe. Why? The literature provides many answers, i.e., a decline in the power and gatekeeping role of political parties (Lavinsky and Ziblatt), the role of intellectuals (Applebaum), changes in political campaign financing (Balkin), the anti-liberal influence of Donald Trump (Kendzior), the flaws of “democracy” itself (Mounk), to name just a few. Most scholars, however, neglect the underlying causes of these proximate phenomena. In this essay I take a sociological and social-psychological approach to explore the underlying causes. I focus on liberal democracy’s decline in the Industrial West, particularly the United States. I argue that this decline can be partly attributed to the inherent weaknesses/limitations of liberalism, exacerbated in the 21st century by neo-liberal economic forces and digital technology. I contend that liberal values of equality, tolerance, the rule of law, and rational debate chafe against the sacrosanct entrenchment of the neo-liberal free market and its laissez-faire ideology, as well as the inherent liberal neglect of the human need for status, community, heroes, and the impulse to unleash passionate grievances. This chafing has now opened lesions in liberal institutions, exacerbated by widespread disinformation and obscene inequality, I offer three suggestions to strengthen 21st century liberalism: government regulation of social media to censure hate speech and disinformation, new taxes on wealth to reduce economic inequality, and an expansion of the public realm—parks, libraries, beaches, public schools, etc., where “money doesn’t matter.” This last suggestion is crucial. Because economic inequality and precarity will persist in a liberal democratic society even when taxation is more equitable, expansion of the public realm is needed to reduce the impact of inequality in liberal democratic society.

In an article recently published in this journal, Steven Klein revised Karl Polanyi’s conceptualization of the relation between economy and society, and adapted it to the post-crisis European context. Klein’s reconstruction emphasized the redemocratization potential of trade unions and central banks against the pernicious effects of the commodification of labor and money on the European level. While Klein’s approach is without doubt very insightful and original, we think that some of his claims either deserve discussion or require closer elaboration. This reservation concerns the conceptual approach of setting Polanyi against Habermas as well as the critique of the role of law in the integration process. As for the latter, we think that further contextualization is needed to appreciate changing historical contexts and layers of European integration. With the objective of enriching Klein’s analysis, we first propose a way to reconcile, against what Klein suggests, Polanyian and Habermasian understandings of law and money. This theoretical background will help us, second, to explore in detail the differences between market integration and monetary integration, and in particular the role that law plays in each of these politico-economic constellations. Based on this, we will, thirdly and finally, explain how the interaction of public and private law in the context of post-crisis European integration further promotes the process of commodification, and how the configuration of law in market and monetary integration currently prevents trade unions and central banks from exerting the redemocratizing potential that Klein assigns to them.

This article outlines a new approach to the law of political economy as a form of transformative law, a new approach that combines a focus on the function of law with a concept of law encapsulating the triangular dialectics between the form-giving prestation of law, the material substance the law is oriented against, and the transcendence of legal forms—that is, the rendering of compatibility between forms. Transformative law thereby serves as an alternative to both law and economics and recently emerging culturalist and neo-Marxist approaches. The timing of this publication is not coincidental. The era of neoliberalism—that is, of structural liberalism, which started in the 1970s and experienced its breakthrough in the 1980s and 1990s after the collapse of structural Marxism—is ending. This makes the question of what will succeed the neoliberal episteme pertinent.

In this essay, I interrogate the racialized roots of the early neoliberal conception of (Western) civilization. I do so by placing that conception in a broader genealogy of early Austrian economic theory, focusing in particular on the writings of Carl Menger, Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, Friedrich von Wieser, and Ludwig von Mises. Rather than directly analyzing their understanding of civilization, however, I approach this topic by centering the way they construct the figure of the “savage.” This figure, as historians of racial discourse have shown, has long played an important role in European thought, often serving as the constitutive racial other to the “civilized” European. I proceed by asking what role the figure of the “savage” plays in the writings of the early Austrian economists. In doing so, I argue that while Menger and Böhm-Bawerk utilize deeply racialized tropes about “savage” peoples to establish the limits of their own theory of subjective valuation, Wieser not only adopts these tropes but also folds them into a broader racialized philosophy of history that sees historical development as a function of racial endowment. In the final section, I explore Mises’s writings in more detail, arguing that his understanding of race partially overlaps with Wieser’s but also departs from it in several crucial ways. In particular, Mises sees racial hierarchy as a historical rather than a natural phenomenon, prompting him to articulate a mode of “racial historicism” that sees racial hierarchy as a precarious system that could be overturned. In closing, I argue that Mises’s position on racial hierarchy anticipated several key elements of later neoliberal approaches to the question of race.

Martin Beddeleem, member of the Global Perspectives Emerging Scholars Forum, talk about Thomas Biebricher’s book on the political theory of neoliberalism as well as Biebricher’s article in Global Perspectives, teasing out links between neoliberal thought and forms of authoritarianism.

The article is written in the form of an essay (for Dahrendorf Symposium), speculative in essence, yet based on the new selected evidence concerning peoples’ opinions and attitudes disclosed during the pandemic. It starts with remarks about predictions in social sciences and the complex problems in studying the shocks created by the Covid-19 pandemic. Second part is devoted to major challenges and trade-offs states, governments and citizens have to face currently, focusing on one particular which is crucial for the future quality of liberal democracies, that is a trade-off between democratic norms and values and surveillance practices. The article concludes with a discussion of several issues, which have become more salient during the pandemic, challenging our previous knowledge about them.

This article argues that one of the key questions—or even the key question—of our times is how to foster enhanced compatibility between national policy-making sovereignty and effective multilateral cooperation. There are multiple reasons for this. First, given the growing importance of global public good-type policy challenges and the rising trend toward multipolarity, the relationships among countries are now de facto marked by universal multilateralism. International cooperation is no longer only an option, as it conventionally was (especially for the major powers), but a compulsion. This new, binding type of multilateralism is called here “multilateralism 2.0” to distinguish it from the conventional, more optional type of multilateralism. Second, necessary systematic reforms to make global governance fit for the new reality of multilateralism 2.0 are still lacking, because states value their sovereignty. However, a persuasive reform vision and reform leadership have not yet emerged; currently, uncertainty exists about how to have both sovereignty and effective cooperation. The world is experiencing a “Kindleberger moment”: crisis and no leadership. Accordingly, this article offers concrete suggestions on possible ways forward. It suggests that the most important and urgent reform is to forge consensus on a new principle: the “dual-compatibility principle” calling for a commitment of states to (i) more sovereignty-compatible multilateral cooperation and (ii) an exercise of national policy-making sovereignty that is more compatible with multilateral cooperation. To clearly see the critical importance of this principle, a prior, eminently doable reform step is needed: widening the analytical lens of multilateralism to capture both the “real” and the “political” sides of this phenomenon and to recognize that the former is, in effect, the independent variable and the latter the dependent one.

The outbreak of Covid-19 prompted the greatest political intervention in our lifetime. Governments around the world introduced measures that shattered our private life, brought economic life to a virtual standstill, and threw into question the value of international organizations. The article first shows how the political interventions undertaken throughout 2020 have crushed long standing equilibria on such fundamental issues as the notion of a common good, the limits of individual freedom, or the relationship between the state and markets. It then analyses the battle of power and minds between the main political protagonists. The following section scrutinizes the policies applied by these actors, and their implications for democracy. The final section tries to envisage a democratic politics suitable for the world of viruses, super-bugs, climate change, poverty and hyper-connectivity.

The deepening economic crisis triggered by the coronavirus pandemic has elicited extensive policy responses, but also raises daunting challenges for global governance. This policy-oriented article explores the new challenges for multilateralism, assesses efforts to coordinate these policy responses, and considers likely outcomes.

Neoliberalism was a global spectrum of ideas on how to create and preserve free markets in an age of popular sovereignty. A notion of a powerful state to create the institutions and mentalities needed for a liberal market society, and—if need be—to fend off potentially antiliberal democratic majorities characterized neoliberal ideas far more than antistate laissez-faire economics or apolitical technocratic visions. The article presents historical evidence from Chile and Russia from the 1960s to the 1990s to make the case that global varieties of neoliberal ideas were created in different local contexts. These ideas were not imposed or imported from without; they emerged from domestic intellectual trajectories and in engagement with local political and economic conditions before their carriers connected to other, both Western and “peripheral,” varieties of neoliberalism. Actual economic reforms undertaken in these countries were not a wholesale implementation of a neoliberal agenda or manifestations of a globally hegemonic “governmentality”; rather, they were the outcome of multiple ideational influences and, more crucially, the result of domestic political power play.

The immediate effects of the Euro crisis have been tamed but the crisis has soured the relations between Southern and Northern Member states for many years to come. Comparative political economy explains the frictions between North and South as a result of different institutional configurations of national economies (Varieties of Capitalism), different interests of capital and labor coalitions (growth model perspective) or ideational traditions (ordoliberal vs dirigisme). We argue that the exclusive focus of these approaches on either, rational institutionalism, interest coalitions or economic ideas obscures that these three factors come together in a long-term evolutionary trajectory that has formed national economic cultures within the Eurozone since the 1950s. We examplify our cultural political economy approach showing empircally how the German and Italian political economies developed in different ways since the end of WWII. In the second part of our contribution we develop a conflicts law perspective offering it as a third way that can mediate between the two extreme positions of Wolfgang Streeck (back to the nation state) and Juergen Habermas (federation) in the debate on the future of the European Union. We show how the culturally grounded diversities of European capitalisms can be accommodated through a conflicts law.

Karl Polanyi’s critique of the ideal of the self-adjusting market is increasingly invoked to challenge the negative effects of European integration on national social welfare systems. However, these debates have been caught in an unhelpful opposition between European market openness and national social closure. Challenging common interpretations of Polanyi, this article shows that he develops a theory of the relationship between democratic reciprocity and what the article calls “nonmarket modes of economic coordination.” The problem is not reconciling openness with closure but navigating the dilemmas of democratic capitalism. The article then uses this framework to critique the one-sided nature of European law as well as recent calls for a “social Europe.” The article criticizes these efforts, arguing that the fate of social Europe is bound to the economic and political dynamics unleashed by the project of monetary integration.

Among the remarkable results of globalization are economic constitutions, which have emerged independently from the political constitutions of the nation-states. Against ordoliberal as well as critical theorists, who expected a uniform economic world-constitution, a fragmented meta-constitution dealing with massive constitutional conflicts has emerged. Moreover, the conflicting economic constitutions are no longer delineated by the boundaries of nation-states but by different boundaries of various transnational production regimes. The constitutional alternative for the national economies—ordoliberal economic constitution versus social-democratic economic democracy—which had been formulated by the classics of economic constitutionalism, Franz Böhm and Hugo Sinzheimer, has been replaced by the opposition in the Western Hemisphere between neocorporatist production regimes in Northern Europe and the financial-capitalist production regimes of the Anglo-American world. Against all predictions of their failure, the neocorporatist constitutions of European economies, after the financial crisis, have undergone a reorganization that resulted in their remarkable resilience. Moreover, they have developed a potential for strengthening economic democracy. In particular, public good–oriented corporate codes of conduct, which emerged in large numbers in the sweep of globalization, have contributed considerably to this potential. The codes opened, beyond the protection of workers’ rights, a new opportunity for societal actors. The oppositional power of civil society—the media, public debate, spontaneous protest, protest movements, NGOs, labor unions, intellectuals, and the professions—as well as the legal norms created by state intervention exercise such massive pressure on corporations that the latter are compelled to enact binding self-restrictions oriented to the public interest: environmental protection, antidiscrimination, human rights, product quality, consumer protection, data protection, freedom of the internet, and fair trade.