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The Collapse of Global Liberalism
And the Emergence of the Post Liberal World Order
Philip Pilkington (Author)
9781509566228, Polity Press
Paperback / softback, published 30 May 2025
224 pages
21.3 x 13.5 x 2 cm, 0.272 kg
"Philip Pilkington has written a bold, original and compelling book. It should be read by anyone wishing to understand the sources of our current political and cultural crisis, and to discern a better path forward – that is, it should be read by everyone."
Patrick J. Deneen, Professor of Political Science, University of Notre Dame
"The Collapse of Global Liberalism is a ruthless dissection of liberalism's failings, and a compelling roadmap to the post-liberal world we already inhabit."
Aris Roussinos, contributing editor at UnHerd
"Illuminating... Pilkington moves with easy confidence across levels of analysis, from geopolitics to macroeconomics to birtrates to religion, producing a succinct and largely convincing portrait of what's happened and what's ending."
Peter Leithart, First Things
"Provocative... 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."
World
"A foundation for a postliberal theory of international order... the liberals and non-liberals alike would be remiss to ignore."
Heather Penatzer, Compact
"Philip Pilkington provides a bold - and controversial - thesis on the fall of global liberalism."
Minxin Pei, Fusion
"a provocative and fast-paced chronicle of the damage that liberalism has supposedly wreaked on countries' economic, social, political, and psychological foundations."
Foreign Affairs
"Philip Pilkington really doesn't like liberals. I sympathise. [...] his perspective is interesting and somewhat unique."
Grace Blakeley
"Contains genuine insights into some of the changes we are living through"
Law & Liberty
In the 1990s, a vision emerged of a frictionless world of globalization in which the West would become ever richer on the basis of a tech-based service economy, all underpinned by a rules-based liberal international order. It became the basis for the mainstream politics of centre-left and right. Philip Pilkington argues that this vision was always delusional and is now dying. It is based on a doctrinaire and unrealistic form of liberalism and has given rise to hollowed-out financialised economies and disintegrating societies that can barely even reproduce their population or meet their energy needs. The US and UK find themselves ill-equipped to compete with China and other non-liberal states within an emerging post-liberal order in which what really matters is industrial capacity, realpolitik and military strength. Only by abandoning our liberal delusions and advancing our own brand of hard-headed post-liberalism can the West survive. No clear-sighted observer of contemporary geopolitics can afford to miss this bracing diagnosis of the West’s malaise and bold agenda for renewal.
Also available as an audiobook.
Introduction – Navigating Metahistory
Chapter 1 – What is Liberalism?
Chapter 2 – Liberalism’s Different Modes
Chapter 3 – The Rise of Hyperliberalism
Chapter 4 – The Dialectic of Liberalism and Illiberalism
Chapter 5 – Dispatches from the Traverse
Chapter 6 – Blood and Steel
Chapter 7: Demographics and Destiny
Chapter 8 – Deindustrialisation and the Rise of Funny Money
Chapter 9 – Madness: Commercial and Civilisational
Chapter 10 – Distorted Diplomatic Dreams of a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose
Chapter 11 – Neo-Pagan Ritual and the Big Green Blob
Conclusion – Our Postliberal Future: A Manifesto
Subject Areas: Economics [KC]
