It is hazardous to risk a diagnosis of the state of the world, especially if it claims to be philosophically informed and grounded. What does philosophy have to do with the empirical state of the world, anyway? On the other hand, what is an analysis of today's global state of affairs worth if it derives exclusively from empiricist political scientists, political analysts, sociologists, historians, diplomats, journalists, etc. without philosophical grounding? without the most elementary questions being asked? The empiricist retort is that empirical analysis gets along quite fine without the assistance of abstract philosophical thinking. Sociology has long since slipped into the role of truth-provider, eschewing any taint by what it calls essentialism. (And yet empricist thinking operates unquestioningly — and therefore dogmatically — with an essential determination of the human being as a species of animal.)
The so-called liberal world order was established at the end of the Second World War under the hegemony of the U.S., together with its Western allies who were victorious against Fascism. The defect in this victory was the existence of the Soviet Union that stood for quite another kind of society under heavy-handed state domination by a 'People's Party'. Hence the Cold War.
The liberal social value of fairness and its bankruptcy
At the core of this liberal world order was and remains the social value of fairness, both within the liberal democracies and in the power plays among nation states, the latter ideally managed by international organizations to maintain a state of affairs resembling an international rule of law. Despite major blemishes in this picture, including savage wars engaged in by the U.S. to defend what it calls the Free World, the world order held up pretty well, its imperialist underbelly well camouflaged, especially by the seductive ideology of the free individual. (But does the freedom of the Free World truly consist in individual freedom or in the freedom of movement of something else entirely, something sinister, non-human and inhumane?)
Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc, and the assertion of an aggressive laissez-faire capitalism labelled neo-liberalism, however, this world order has become unstuck. Neo-liberalism was directed against the social-democratic state that aimed at smoothing out some of the frictions and brutal excesses of a 'free market economy'. In the ideology of neo-liberalism, fairness as a social value was and is given only lip-service, and was reduced to the notion of a level playing field for competing players. These developments can be explained in various ways, more or less cogently and convincingly, by empirically analyzing the struggles that have been ongoing since ca. 1990, without ever posing the questions: What is fairness? What is freedom? What is power? The phenomena these three questions point to are all multifaceted.
The sad truth of liberalism
Here, however, I am not interested in such explanations, but rather in understanding the Achilles' heel of the liberal world order considered as an idea and ideal, or rather as a set of ideas constituting an ideology. As I said, the core value of liberal ideology is that of fairness of the interplay both within societies and internationally. Infringements of fair play in the interplay with one another amount to injustice. The players may be individuals, groups thereof, companies, institutions, states. Each of these has powers that are mutually estimated and evaluated in the interplay that is accordingly always also a power play (which raises the invariably skipped-over questions: What is interplay as a kind of movement? What is the kind of power at play in such interplay?). Each player strives to realize its self-interests whilst respecting fair rules of play on a supposedly 'level playing field'. Superior, judicial instances have the role of supervising and correcting the interplay to ensure it is in some sense fair and therefore just under the rule of law. The liberal ideal is that the national and international institutions are sufficient to maintain a semblance of fair play in the interplay of powers, a major part of which is economic.*
Where's the flaw in this liberal way of thinking in terms of fair interplay and fairness? At this point, to go deeper, it is helpful to draw on political philosophy, namely, Hegel's, who writes in the Preface to his Philosophy of Right:
Was vernünftig ist, das ist wirklich;
und was wirklich ist, das ist vernünftig.(RPh:24)
What is in accord with reason is true;
and what is true is in accord with reason.
What does this quotation mean in the present context, with respect to the truth of the idea and ideology of a liberal society? A liberal society is conceived (hermeneutically) as composed of free individuals and collectivities thereof, including political collectivities constituting all kinds of associations, institutions and the organs of the state. The sociation (Vergesellschaftung) of such a society is ideally accomplished through free and fair mutual estimation in the interplay among the individuals enjoying their "Life, Liberty and Estate" with "Government [having] no other end but the preservation of Property” (Locke, Treatise of Government). The individuals' freedom is realized first and foremost in the exercise of their property rights in free and fair exchanges on all conceivable sorts of markets, deviations from which are to be corrected by the superior instance of power, the state, whose primary role is to uphold the rule of (above all, property) law.
Is the truth of the human being as social being to be a free individual as the elementary unit of a free society? Is this in "accord with reason"? Reason is here to be understood as the ontological cast of an historical epoch that shapes both the historical world and its corresponding mind that interprets and understands that world. (For Hegel's Philosophy of Right, the liberal truth corresponds to the idea of civil society and is therefore only a partial truth.) Is the socio-ontological cast of liberal society, i.e. its very idea, true to the elementary phenomena? The conception of the free individual in connection with the idea of a liberal society already includes its preconceptions, namely, that the human being is primordially a dissociated individual who is first sociated with other individuals through the interplay of exercising their various property rights (cf. social contract theory). The property rights are private property rights that presuppose a privation of association; the dissociated individuals, together with their private property of various kinds, starting with their individual labour powers, are first sociated through the interplay in which their individual property is evaluated with regard to earning an income, of whatever kind it may be (basically four value-thingly kinds: wages, interest, ground-rent, net profit). This is complemented by the right to spend one's income on anyting offered on the various markets, which is an important aspect of the enjoyment of one's property. Incoming-earning is thus complemented by income-consuming.
All the individuals are engaged as players in the gainful game that presupposes that they are dissociated individuals only associated through the gainful interplay itself by evaluating their respective private-property income-sources in their corresponding thingly value-forms. The value-forms themselves are the thingly 'looks' or forms of appearance of liquid value going through a valorizing movement of transformation from one value-form to another to finally complete a circuit of value-augmentation. This is the underlying — today: global — law of movement of the Medium of thingified value (gen. subj.) to which the individuals — and all their institutions, political, social and economic** — are subjugated 'behind their backs'. The individuals' freedom is therefore in truth relativized by the limitlessly valorizing Medium, and individuals are only individuated as such by the Medium that both dissociates them on the surface of society as private property owners and also associates them in the gainful game via the thingly value-forms in contracts of many different kinds.
The ideal of justice in a liberal society based on the idea of fair interplay among free individuals is therefore untrue. It is undermined and hollowed out by the limitless valorizing movement of thingified value that asserts itself silently and inexorably against any conception of fairness in interplay. Its coercion cannot be captured by a notion of unfairness. In particular, the exercise of property rights in the gainful game cannot be free and fair in view of the law of movement of valorizing thingified value which dictates that advanced thingified value, in the value-form of capital, must generate a profit through its circling that can only be achieved as a positive residue remaining after costs are deducted from the gross sales revenues realized by the circuit. The costs comprise what is paid for labour-power, land and loan capital. This circumstance necessarily pits the principle of valorization against the lenders of labour-power and land, i.e. against living labour and the Earth. The enhancement of valorization dictates, via the competition among capitals, constant pressure to lower costs and accelerate the turnover time of capital and therefore to maximally exploit living labour-power and the Earth. In short, the principle of limitless valorization of the Medium is antithetical to life and asserts itself only through incessant struggle with its antagonists.
Under the guise of 'free market' neo-liberalism in recent decades, the capital side in the gainful game has gained the upper hand by successfully degrading resistance by workers and civil society to its ruthless valorization. Discrepancies in income and accumulated wealth have reached unprecedented, obscene levels. Super-wealth and dire poverty hit new extremes. The discrepancies are self-reinforcing in a feedback loop, because accumulated income and wealth can be reinvested to generate even more income and wealth. Moreover, the rules of play for earning income imposed by the state (especially taxation law) have shifted (not least of all through media-ownership and political lobbying by big money) more and more in favour of ever-valorizing capital and, correspondingly, more and more to the detriment of wage-earners.
The ideal of fair interplay is increasingly seen through as a sham by the many less successful players in the gainful game. Liberal society, liberal democracy and the liberal world order are in crisis, but the truth of this epochal socio-ontological cast has yet to come to light. This would require, as an initial prerequisite, once again opening and passing through the ontological difference to the realm of ideas first explored by Plato. In other words, it would require a revival of truly philosophical thinking to lead the way in revising and recasting ideas through which elementary phenomena show themselves and the world is interpreted. Any kind of ethics is not up to thei task. As the search for truth, philosophy's endeavour is a "leading around of the entire soul" (περιαγωγὴ ὅλης τῆς ψυχῆς) and hence a recasting of who we are.. In the present case, the reorientation of soul and mind requires deconstructing the ideology of the free individual covering up the ugly truth of what is called capitalism. But the task of deconstructing and recasting does not stop there, as I endeavour to show in extenso in my writings.
* In this post I do not speak of the full range of mutually estimative interplay in all its subtlety and nuances from love-making through to war through which one's standing as somewho comes about, but rather only of the mutual estimation of human powers and abilities as well as those of thingified value-forms (e.g. fertility of a stretch of land) through their thingly evaluation in the gainful game.
** Government economic policy and especially central banks have the indispensable role of (unknowingly) massaging the Medium, for its valorization movement is by no means smooth being subject to dislocations. The Medium itself is prone to both inflating and deflating, i.e. to getting out of kilter with the valuation of the sum total of what is actually produced and consumed. Hence the trial-and-error management of interest rates to alter how gross profit is split between entrepreneurial capital and finance (loan) capital. High interest rates hinder or discourage entrepreneurial capital from investing when the material side of the economy is already producing at a maximum.
Further reading: G.W.F. Hegel Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts Band 7 Werke Suhrkamp, Frankfurt/M. 1970.
John Locke, Treatise of Government various editions.
Social Ontology of Whoness: Rethinking Core Phenomena of Political Philosophy De Gruyter, Berlin 2018.
On Human Temporality: Recasting Whoness Da Capo De Gruyter, Berlin 2024.
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