Special Edition: Pilkington Launches "The Collapse Of Global Liberalism"
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We have before us the opportunity to forge for ourselves and for future generations a new world order. This is Multipolarity, charting the rise of the new multipolar world order.

So in the last 10 years or so, we've seen Brexit, the rise of Donald Trump, Viktor Orban, the breakout of the Ukraine war, the rise of China as a global power, the closure of the Red Sea, one of the world's great maritime shipping routes, the rise of populism in Europe with parties like IFD, Reform, Marine Le Pen.

We've seen the reintroduction of tariffs for the first time in very many years. We appear to be in a process of de-dollarization. Are these events linked? And if they are linked, are they simply a response to incompetence, to poor governance, to the failure of the technocrats? Or is it something much more fundamental? Is the connection itself more fundamental?

And are we seeing something more than just a shift in geopolitics, more than just a shift in trade relations, but a transformation in the fundamental political systems through which Western civilization is run and the way in which governments govern the people? I believe Philip Pilkington thinks so. Philip is a macroeconomist, a former investment professional.

and is my co-host on the Multipolarity podcast. And most importantly of all, he has recently written a book, The Collapse of Global Liberalism and the Emergence of the Post-Liberal World Order. Now, I believe it was just published this weekend or late last week. So it's all very new, Philip. But at

I think what we ought to do is we ought to start with some definitions.

I'd really like to ask, what is liberalism? What is a liberal? What is the liberal order? Because we hear a lot of this, but I think people get confused between terms like, you know, he is a liberal, the sort of person who might vote for the Labour Party or the Democrat Party in America. And we also hear the, you know, the concept of liberalism. And we also hear terms like liberal democracy as well.

And my impression is that these are very different things. So what is liberalism? What is a liberal and what is the liberal global order? Yeah, when it comes to kind of political definitions of liberalism, I'm kind of reminded of that scene in Monty Python's Life of Brian, where they have the kind of People's Judea front and the Judean People's Front or whatever.

I think that was a mockery of various like tangents of Marxism. Like I'm a Trotskyist Leninist or I'm a non-Leninist or whatever. But, um, and of course you could apply the same parody to the Protestant sects in the Protestant reformation. Also very true. Um, these kind of revolutionary movements tend to splinter into various different subgroups, but I think we all know that a Protestant is, uh,

somebody who rejects the centrality of teaching of the Holy See. And I think we all recognize that a Marxist is somebody who wants to remake society in terms of socialism or communism at a very base level.

Similar thing with liberalism. Many different flavors. So on one side, they call themselves right wing, but whether these terms mean anything anyway, it's even a little dubious in the standard right-left definition. But on the right wing, you have kind of libertarians, classical liberals, they sometimes build themselves. And they're kind of laissez-faire, free market people, right?

And then on the other side, you have, uh, what's commonly referred to as liberals in, in, in the, in the terminal political terminology of the day, which you might call progressive liberals. Um, meanings changed over time, probably started with kind of new deal Democrat types or Fabian society, labor types evolved into, um,

I'd say postmodern cultural politics, that kind of thing. I think everyone knows what we're talking about, open borders, et cetera, et cetera. But they have a lot in common. You actually see that libertarians and progressive liberals have a lot in common. They disagree on certain aspects of economic management, but I think these are basically secondary. The reality is, though...

All the little offshoots, all the little people's Judea fronts and the Judean people's fronts aren't actually that interesting. The people's front of Judea will tell you that the differences between them and the Judean people's front is very, very important. And they always have, the Anabaptists and the Baptists and the Trotskyists and the Leninists. They'll always tell you this, the Eurocommunists and the Tankies or whatever. They'll always tell you this. But the reality is the really interesting question is the ideology itself.

And the ideology of liberalism, it's very clear where it comes from. And restating it is not actually controversial. If you go and you take a class on political philosophy of liberalism, you will not hear anything fundamentally different from what I say in the book. But restating it

has opened a kind of can of worms. Where does liberalism come from? Very simple. John Locke's two treaties on government. Those are the initial tome of liberalism. Those are the Communist Manifesto and the Das Kapital of liberalism. Those are the Martin Luther's 10 PCs, whatever, or Calvin's, I can't remember Calvin's first book. John Locke's two treaties on government are the beginning

of liberal ideology. The first political movement of liberalism precedes John Locke. It's the English Civil War. It's the establishment of a major republic. There were more minor city-state republics, but to overthrow a monarch and establish a republic was unique in England in the 16th century. I hope I got it right. It's not the 17th century. I'll say I'm like an idiot. I think it's 16th century.

Those are the two. That's the political movement and then the ideology of the political movement. You could kind of read John Locke's Two Treaties of Government as being the theoretical articulation of what happened in the English Civil War. That came to be liberalism. Just as Marxist...

Marxist work in the mid-19th century were reactions to the 1848 revolutions. This is always the case. The intellectuals catch up with the political movement. So what is it? What is this liberal thing? Well, it's a couple of things. First of all, it's a secularization of the notion of progress. So progress is there in the Christian tradition, but it's a theological idea.

The idea of progress in the Christian tradition is theological. You're eventually going to arrive at heaven and then the resurrection and so on. And here's how you should behave in the interim. It's not really a secular vision of progress. There's nothing to do with technology in the New Testament, but the New Testament does introduce notions of progress into the West. Liberalism secularizes the idea of progress. So it tells you that year to year, everything's getting better. Now, why is everything getting better?

You're not really clear. Sometimes it means technological innovation, because the liberals tend to be, especially in the early phase, very kind of science-y, pro-enlightenment, into kind of Baconian science and all these things. And then over time, it becomes kind of a self-licking ice cream cone, in that progress is just the spreading of liberal ideas themselves.

So the technology one, debatable whether that's actually a liberal idea or not. You can go back to like Albert Magnus in the medieval times and find ideas about progress, technological progress. But okay, for the sake of argument, they became associated with enlightenment. The really interesting point is the progress begins to be self-defined in a sense. Progress is the march of the liberal ideas.

And so that's a very important component. The other important component to it is that liberal is an anti-hierarchical intellectual system. So who's being attacked in the English Civil War? The king, okay? They kill him. They kill the king, and then they say that they're going to establish this quasi-democratic republic. They end up getting a dictator in the form of Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell. So they replace the king with a dictator, effectively.

And then eventually it cycles back or whatever. But the promise before Cromwell's friend, quote unquote, is that you're going to get some sort of a kind of democracy of the oligarchs in a sense. I think that's basically what the English Civil War is.

aiming at. And in addition to that, the English Civil War is very much a movement of the Puritan, the Puritan religious against the Anglicanism

That's then and now the centerpiece of the British state. And we won't go too far into it, but Anglicanism is effectively a form of Protestantism that tries to keep the hierarchies of the Catholic Church intact. Bishops, episcopate, they don't have a pope, but they have like a chief bishop, they have the Archbishop of Canterbury and so on. And they also have a king at the top or a queen at the top. So it's a hierarchical system. And the Puritans under Cromwell and so on said, we don't like that.

Why aren't we just all equal in the face of God, they'd say. And so they tried to demolish that system. They tried to demolish the system of Anglican church leadership. And Locke theorizes both of these tendencies in the two treaties of some government. One of the two treaties of some government is against Robert Filmer. He's a Protestant, an Anglican theorist of the divine rights of kings.

And that's the component of anti-hierarchy in Locke's Two Treatises. He explains that we don't like those hierarchies. We want to get rid of all them. Everyone's exactly the same. And then the other aspect is the political contract system that he brings in in, I think, the second book of the Two Treatises. And that's basically a machinery to manage equal people. Now, that all sounds really nice. Everyone wants to be equal and everything like that. But what liberalism tends to do

and this is the key argument of the book, what liberalism tends to do is it tends to promote, to push this notion of equality to absolute extremes. As in, it's not just about equality before the law, for example. That's a pre-liberal concept. You can find that in Rome, for example, at least if you're a Roman citizen, you get equality in front of the law, etc. You can find that in medieval courts. You can find that in Magna Carta, for example. Totally pre-liberal document.

But it's not just about equality in front of the law. What liberalism always morphs into is absolute equality. That everything is actually just interchangeable. That people are just interchangeable. And what this actually leads to is a tendency for liberal societies to promote extreme atomization of everything. If everything's absolutely equivalent,

nobody's really different from each other. And it's kind of former communism applied to social structures, not to the economy, although progressive liberals do sometimes take it in that direction. But it's not really about that. It's about applying this kind of leveling to the entire social foundations. And so you'll eventually come to question, for example, you know, you'll start by questioning why should the Lord and the serf have those relationships?

Why should the king lead the Church of England and write the King James Bible that I read? Why can't I write my own Bible? You start with those questions and you end up, why should the parents have sovereignty over their children? Why shouldn't I be allowed to change my gender with the state if I want to? So that's where it inevitably goes because those are the basic structural components of liberalism. So a little bit long-winded, but I hope that kind of helps.

Well, I mean, I think it probably is very helpful, but it's certainly contradictory to the story that we're told about liberalism, Philip. The story that we tend to be told is not, you know, fanatical Puritans like Oliver Cromwell, this kind of iron fist and its ruthlessness. The story that we're told is the emergence of a

of a political system, of a way of interacting with each other that comes out of the extreme violence of the Reformation, the extreme violence of the religious wars in Europe and also in Britain. And this idea that liberalism provided a foundation where we would live in something more like civilized toleration, where we might not agree with the Catholics or the Protestants on the other side,

but we are able to live with them peaceably. And the concept of liberalism that we're told about is drawn from this idea of civilized toleration and also drawn from a concept of individual freedoms and rights. This idea that human beings have inalienable rights to, as the Americans would have it, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But

you know, these days in European countries, a far greater suite of rights. But we're told that that's where liberalism comes from, this concept that we're able to live with each other

Despite the fact that our next door neighbor might have a different religion or a different sexuality or a different culture. And although we don't have to agree with that culture, we can tolerate it and we can tolerate each other. And by doing that, live peacefully while at the same time respecting each other's rights as individuals.

Whereas your description is very different to that. I mean, what causes that contradiction? Like what causes that misunderstanding? Yeah, so I think there's what liberalism is and what it advertises itself as. So the history I gave you of the start of liberalism, like I don't think anyone would actually contest it.

The two treaties that's on government, the first book is an attack on Robert Filmer. So Robert Filmer, who's defending the divine rights of kings. He's a royalist. He's against what happened in the Civil War, and he wants to ensure that King Charles doesn't get beheaded a second time or whatever.

Those attacks on King Charles by the Puritans are religious attacks in nature, actually. There is a political component, sure, but in that period, you can't entangle the two things. That drives me crazy about kind of Enlightenment people who say, oh, the wars of religion were all just stupid people arguing over interpretations of the Bible. No, there was a massive political component to this. There was a class divide often between the aristocrats and the king. That's often what you found.

And the aristocrats didn't like the fact that the church had special rights and so on. So it was always a kind of a structural political issue. But it's not actually controversial that John Locke is attacking Anglicanism in a sense. And Anglicanism, if you have the king or the queen as the head of the church, you are therefore –

arguing for a divine right of kings, otherwise it doesn't mean anything because they've replaced the Pope or whatever. Again, not to get too much into the weeds on this, that is the origin of liberalism.

So where does this notion of toleration come from? When you say what you just said about toleration, we're all human beings, we should all get on, et cetera, et cetera, these are basically New Testament ideas. That's where those ideas actually come from. Now you can say, okay, but then they're perverted into religious struggles. And if you're a Catholic, you're told not to like the Protestant. And if you're the Protestant, you're told that, you know,

The Pope is bad and all this. Yeah, sure. I understand all that. But the fundamental underlying of ideas of toleration and recognizing people on some sort of an equal basis and not having kind of a, you know, a structured hierarchy where some people are treated better and worse. It's pretty much from the Christian tradition.

It can get mixed around, it can get perverted into one side of the Christian tradition attacking the other or whatever, but that's ultimately where it comes from. Those ideas are much, much longer standing in Western civilization than liberalism.

What I claim in the book is what liberalism does is it tends to come about throughout history in fits and starts. It tells you that there's a linear progress to history. You might think of the work of someone like Francis Fukuyama, who says, like, we're at the end of history in 1991 or whatever. And that implies a linear vision of history. But if you actually examine how liberalism behaves throughout history,

It tends to go into periods of radicalization and then into remission. It's sort of like a cancer. I know that's pejorative, but it's sort of like a cancer. You keep beating it back with radiation therapy and it comes back. It flares up. It's like I know using an illness metaphor is inherently pejorative, but I can't think of anything else. And I'm probably revealing my true feelings, but sorry. But that's what it is. Like, take the example, OK?

Of the French Revolution. I give this example in the book. The French Revolution is 100% a liberal revolution. Anyone who tells you the French Revolution is communist doesn't know what they're talking about. The French Revolution is built on liberal principles. It's attacking the hierarchies, mainly of the church and the monarchy, not dissimilar to what's being talked about in the English Civil War or in the 222s government or anything like that.

It attacks these very vigorously to the point where the revolutionaries try and come up with their own alternative public religion. That's the worship of divine reason. And they come up with alternative calendars and even a metric clock. They try and rationalize society by imposing a metric clock. Really, really radical ideas.

Yet then you turn around and you look at late 19th century England, which we call liberal. I don't know if we're right about that. I don't think we are right about that. But we say that's a liberal society. What do these two things have in common, really? The French Revolution and the late 19th century Britain. And if you go to history lecture in a university, people will get very awkward about this.

And they'll say things like, well, the French Revolution wasn't really liberal. It wasn't really based on liberal ideas. What was it based on then? Marxism doesn't come into being for another half century. So what are you telling me? That Rousseau is not a liberal? Rousseau is clearly a liberal. He's a terrorist of the social contract. He's a liberal. So my argument is that basically liberalism is the more radical version of

It is this attempt to level all relationships. It is a revolutionary ideology. It aims at fundamentally restructuring the social fabric of societies, just as communism does. In fact, communism is just an offshoot of liberalism.

And that any time it kind of goes into remission and it says, well, it's really just a political ideology of toleration. No, no, no. That's just liberalism when it's in a kind of what I call in the book a soft liberal phase. And that's basically when it retreats back.

And it's not really clear what it is, but it props up a society that has some aspects of liberalism ingrained in it, but which is basically run on the basis of non-liberal principles. So take, for example, you could say late 19th century Britain. You could say post Second World War, the United States.

Most people day to day in those societies are living broadly Christian or post-Christian lives, right? Their basic morality is founded by that. Their family structure is founded by that, et cetera, et cetera. They may not go to church every day or whatever, but their basic moral principles are Western moral principles. Some mix a classical tradition and Christian. But we say these societies are liberal. Why? Because there's around the edges of those societies,

you see a bit of kind of like pretty hardcore liberal economic development going on. They have contracts, entering into contracts, free labor, all these kind of things. Anything with a contractual, where you're turning a social relationship into a contractual relationship, especially a contractual economic relationship. And we say, oh, well, those societies are liberal. I don't think they're very liberal. But in those periods when liberalism goes into remission,

What the proponents of liberalism start to say is that it's a touchy-feely ideology about all these really common sense things like don't go and bash your neighbor's head in with a pot because he doesn't agree with your interpretation of the Trinity. And so they revert back to this propaganda almost, like without us, you'd have the wars of religion forever.

And that's kind of what they say. And then you go, well, actually, before the wars of religion, there were no wars of religion. So it's a bit more complicated than that. So I think that idea of toleration and so on is kind of taking advantage of some of the way pre-liberal ideas of toleration that are inbuilt into Western civilization, mainly through the Christian tradition. Through the classical tradition, too, you can find this in Greek philosophy and Roman law and so on.

Taking advantage of that and repackaging it. And they do this over and over again. Equality before the law is another example, as if equality before the law didn't exist in other societies. And it was invented by liberals in the Enlightenment era. That's completely preposterous. Equality before the law is a norm, actually, in human civilization, as far as I can tell. So you've got to distinguish between what makes liberalism different from what came before it and what the liberal propaganda is.

So you talk there about the French Revolution being a very much a liberal revolution. And certainly those of us on this side of the Atlantic have, or some of us on this side of the channel, I should say, have really very strong views on the kind of the violence and the terror of the French Revolution. You also said that communism is an offshoot of liberalism.

And we certainly, or certainly I do, I'm not sure about anybody else, have also very strong views about the terror and oppression that comes with communism. And I think all of us probably listening to this space are concerned about the increasingly radical and hysterical nature of the progressive liberalism

That's taken root within the establishment and has gripped the levers of power within Britain. And I think it's fair to say much of the Western world. Like, how do we get from figures like Thomas Jefferson and William Gladstone, right?

to figures like Robespierre and Joseph Stalin and, I don't know, Ken Day Andrews, for example? How does liberalism go from that to this? I think this is the same for any ideology. It's just how far you're willing as a person or as a movement to carry that ideology.

The welfare states in Europe, people may not like to hear this, who are very anti-communist. I'm not a huge fan, don't get me wrong. The welfare states in Europe, whether you like them or not, they exist. They're not totalitarian or anything. They may be dysfunctional and everything. We can have that discussion, but they're not totalitarian. You can trace the welfare system roots, the current ones. I know there were ones under Bismarck and so on, but the current ones that exist, you can trace back to the social democratic debates of

in Central Europe in the early 20th,

20th century and it was social Democrats having those discussions putting those prospects together that were Marxist They were fully Marxist now. They weren't revolutionary communists They weren't Leninist, but they were Marxist and they were putting these ideas together and those ideas are now pretty much ingrained in most Western societies and some non-western societies, too It's the same with liberalism. You can pick and choose little bits of liberalism and inject them into society you can say well I

In England, for example, in the 19th century, you could be kind of a Gladstone and liberal or something and you could say, well, I really want free trade. You don't actually a free trade. You have an imperial system of trade. So it's kind of a copy. But OK, in theory, you guys are advertising that under free trade. OK, I got it. And you can oppose the corn laws or you can say that the Irish famine will actually be saved with more free trade or whatever. And some of these things are probably good ideas and some of them are terrible ideas.

but whatever, but you can, you can hold those positions and then you can go and like attend a salon in London and the, the, the, the radicals show up like Godwin and John Stuart Mill. And they start talking about these crazy to your mind, because you're pretty much kind of a Christian. I mean, it's your basic morality and they can start espousing ideas about kind of like why the family is oppressive and so on. This sort of thing you find in, in,

in Rousseau and elsewhere, and Godwin too, obviously. And you can be kind of horrified by these, and you can say, well, I like my free trade very much, and I kind of agree with not imposing conditions on wages and factories in London, because I'm making money out of it, maybe. I agree with all those liberal principles, but these liberal principles, Mr. John Stuart Mill, that you're introducing about how

family structures are inherently oppressive and so on. That is poppycock, sir, right? And you can imagine that, those exact discussions taking place in mid-19th century British salons. But both ideas are liberal. And the only reason that the Gladstonian liberal isn't willing to embrace the really extreme cultural liberalism espoused, it

Pretty much not dissimilar to what John Stuart Mill is saying from the 1960s baby boomer revolutionaries. You can reject that, certainly Godwin and so on, and Lord Byron. You can reject that only because you're not willing to go that far. There's no logical reason you should reject that. You just don't want to. You just want to. You just want to reject it. It's a matter of temperament.

And it's the same matter of temperament that drives some people who are Marxist to say, well, I'm a social democrat. I don't want to establish the dictatorship of the proletariat in order to arrive at socialism. I think that there's another way of doing that through social democracy, right? Or even I might agree that it's not desirable to reach a socialist standpoint and we'll have some mixed economy or something. It's a question of temperament. But...

When we discuss ideas like Marxism, for example, we always focus on the fact that purified Marxism is the real Marxism. And any move away from that is a blending of Marxism with other ideas. And for some reason, we don't do that with liberalism. And I think it's just a mistake. And when we're looking at the developments that you're talking about, the radical progressive liberalism and so on, and we could talk about other aspects too, 1990s free trade,

various other things. When we look at those phenomena, we can't understand them unless we realize that liberalism has a purified strain. I'm not saying it's the strain that exists throughout most of history. It's not. We have 500 years of liberalism. It's the exception rather than the rule. But it's when it shows its true face and the people who won't embrace the John Stuart Mill lifestyle liberalism and only want the free trade for their factory, they're kind of just being hypocrites.

Right. So, you know, it seems that what we've had since the Cold War certainly is an increasingly strong and increasingly pure version of liberalism within the West. And that's had really massive effects on certainly on society. And like, I mean,

you know, I'm in my mid forties now, Philip. And I, you know, I was an adult in the, in the very late 1990s and like 99, 2000. And just between, you know, like the turn of the millennium, like, so when I was a kind of young adult in my, in my kind of late teens and early twenties to now, like I've seen like incredible changes in society, both in terms of

uh caused by migration but also caused by um you know the the changing ways in which we deal with each other what's acceptable and what isn't you know like i i thought we were you know pretty much uh not racist and not sexist in the late 90s and early 2000s you know we were pretty fair the way we dealt with other races and women but no no it's like it's far more intense now

And, you know, we've also seen massive changes in international relations, you know, both in terms of trade and the advent of the WTO and increasing levels of free trade and the deepening of free trade zones and free trade agreements, whether it be the, you know, the Trans-Pacific Trade Partnership or the European Union Single Market or NAFTA or whatever. And also, you

international relations in terms of war and interventionism and since then the rise of... I mean this kind of liberalism given free reign, which I think it increasingly has done since the end of the Cold War, and the increasingly pure strain of liberalism as you would have it, has had really dramatic effects on

our society, you know, and the world in general. I mean, how would you quantify or how would you describe those effects? Yeah, in the book, I call it hyper-liberalism. I don't really describe it in the book, but the way I describe it at a fundamental level is, as I've said, liberalism every now and again goes through like a violent period where it'll just...

Bubble up and the principles that are being applied by the factory owner to the workers and the free trade will suddenly be applied at every level. Family life, migration flows all the way to like gender or whatever, like everything. Again, remember, the key here is homogenization and equality.

absolute equality as in and by equality it doesn't mean you and me are kind of like we have the same rights no we're the same you know like we're fundamentally the same it's like robot pod ideology or something like that that's the fundamental premise of liberalism when you kind of understand it properly in the 1990s what happened or when the soviet union collapsed something really interesting happened which was that liberalism was given the global stage

Because liberalism was basically the operating principle of the American empire. If you want to put it that way, you can put it less dramatically if you want. It doesn't really matter. But it was basically the operating principle of the United States. And it had been so not since the beginning of the United States. The history of the United States is much more complicated in the 18th and 19th centuries.

But by the time World War II is finished, the elite in America are pretty much all liberals. They're bought into Wilsonian liberalism of some stripes and some of them more radical forms, actually. Even in the post-46 period, you can find that. And what they basically did was the collapse of the Soviet Union opened up the rest of the world.

And the liberalism, as you said, got increasingly aggressive. And for a very long time, we didn't recognize that. That was the trick, that if you grew up, we're relatively the same age. If you grew up in the 90s and early 2000s, you did see some of the stuff going on on the global stage. And it was pretty weird, right?

And it was odd and you didn't fully understand it and you didn't really know why the Serbs had to be liberals and the Iraqis had to be like, kind of weird. But I suppose, okay, someone's got an idea, must have something to do with complex geopolitics or whatever. But your society, at least it seemed, was pretty normal, right? This was kind of like the Brit pop era or whatever. People probably remember it like Blink-182 or whatever.

That generation, it was like you can actually have a really free atomized lifestyle and party a lot and have a great time and not consider too much about like societal duties or social hierarchies or whatever. And everything's fine. And the two things kind of marry together. Like pay no attention to the man behind the curtain of like we're trying to make the Iraqis liberals.

really weird, or the Serbs, for that matter, or the Russians in the 90s, pay no attention to that, but don't worry, you can kind of live this slightly loose lifestyle. We're democratizing the liberal lifestyle that only the elite have enjoyed until now, which was actually the case, the Bohemian elite, only they have enjoyed this, and we're democratizing that. And that actually seemed credible for a while, right?

But then we started to see the results of it. And what you're describing in the past 15 or 20 years are the results of that period, the hyper-liberal period.

And what it's metamorphosed into is the real hard liberalism of today. No, we don't have a perpetual French Revolution, although there are some indications that we're in a revolutionary moment of some sort and have been since about 2010. But we don't have that kind of overthrowing of governments and so on. But we do kind of have this, as you said, eviscerating of all social norms,

increasing chaos and it seems to be building over time but any of the issues that and this is what i do in the book any of the issues that you pull the thread on and you're like oh that's kind of dysfunctional where does it come from and you can kind of always trace it back to the liberalism so i think what happened basically in the post-cold war period is we unleashed the liberal

the liberal demon again, and probably for the last time we can talk about why I think it's the end of it, but we unleashed the liberal demon again all over the world. A good portion of the world rejected it, right? From Iraq to Russia in the 90s to China, huge story that's not talked about. There were massive attempts to liberalize China, especially in the 1980s, totally rejected by Chinese society.

That was happening on the world stage, and at home we were kind of boiling the frog, as it were, saying, "Don't worry, just go to the party, man, and everything will be okay." And then suddenly this really dysfunctional social trend started to set in, in only about 20 years. It doesn't take long for them to set in.

And we say, oh, what could possibly be going on? And the conservative reaction to this, I'd say the right liberal conservative reaction, is to say, oh, it must be we're importing some sort of crazy Marxian ideas or crazy French post-structuralist ideas. Now, I'd say all these are offshoots of liberalism. But even...

Even if you don't want to get into that debate, that's not where all this political force comes from. There is a connection between the kind of Bill Clinton playing the saxophone moment and the more radical moments that you see taking place in the 2010s and early 2020s in the cultural sphere. There's very direct links between these two things. And to ignore them is just, I kind of think, deluded. So we're seeing a very clear backlash against this now, I think.

At home, there is a huge backlash against the excesses of liberalism, the kind of like the excesses of the LGBTQ plus movement, the excesses of the anti-racist movement, excesses in immigration, you know, excesses in, you know, in terms of what children are taught at school and anti-nationalist ideas.

All of these areas are facing really severe backlashes, both socially and in the political sphere as well. And a lot of these ideas are fueling the rise of the populist parties, whether it's Nigel Farage in Britain or Marine Le Pen in France or elsewhere.

Any number of IFD politicians in Germany that, you know, the oxygen for their rise is being provided by these excesses. I think we're also starting to see pushback in the economic sphere. Free trade is no longer an untouchable sacred cow. I think industrial policy more broadly is making a comeback.

There are ideas about how social welfare might change, how the structure of economies internally might change. And I think part of that might be under the influence of countries like China and perhaps even Vietnam these days, who have had remarkable successes with a slightly different economic model. Internationally as well, of course, there's been a huge pushback. I'm not sure if that's a pushback against liberalism,

or simply what geopolitics 101 would have said was a pushback against an overweening global power through the emergence of blocking powers. But certainly the U.S. has run a liberal foreign policy since at least the mid-'90s.

And now there are a range of blocking powers against that, whether it be the Russian Federation, whether it be the People's Republic of China, but also some other smaller countries as well, you know, acting as blocks, you know, against the overweening liberal interventionism in a more subtle way than perhaps Russia is, for example, or China is. So we're seeing this kind of multi-front pushback now, Philip. I mean,

Where is this going? Is this a pre-revolutionary moment? Is this going to be successful? Or is liberalism's hold too deep and is its grip too strong? So the thing is that prior to you and I starting the podcast or prior to a lot of this geopolitical stuff even kicking off, the

The post-liberal movement was already underway. It basically started, as far as I can tell, around under Obama. Now, you can find the intellectual roots way back in the work of Alistair MacIntyre and so on in the early 1980s. This is a long time coming, this critique of liberal ideology.

And in the U.S. right now, I really don't think I'm exaggerating to say it is the most live intellectual force in the United States today. Liberalism feels really plopped out, feels like it's in a complete dead end.

Marxism has kind of lost its élan vital. I think there's still some juice in the lemon to be squeezed out of Marx and so on, but only to kind of take over aspects of the theory. I don't think that there's going to be a revival of Marxism. The one country that's trying a revival of Marxism right now is China under Xi Jinping.

And my sense, I was there recently, is that that's not going that well. And actually, the Chinese ideas are moving in a more Confucian direction, shall we say. No one else is really trying to revive Marxism.

The idea that fascism is being revived, fascism is not even a unitary concept. It's complete rubbish. What happened in Europe in the interwar period were a variety of authoritarian right-wing political movements cropped up that were basically organic to their local circumstances.

So there's very little relationship actually between the fascism of Benito Mussolini and the National Socialism of Hitler. They end up allying. They're both authoritarian structures. There's very little commonality between them. And that's true of a lot of the right-wing movements that cropped up.

in Europe at the time. And if you don't believe that, just go and look at the conflicts between them. The so-called Austro-fascism in Austria was actually Catholic. It was a Catholic authoritarian movement, was ruthlessly crushed by the Nazis as a major threat. So there was lots of infighting with these right-wing movements. Anyway...

Anyway, long way of saying there is no other really nascent set of ideas at the moment in the United States, but also really in the West. The post-liberal ideas have been bubbling up now for a while and they're becoming increasingly credible. They were called Nazis and fascists at first. Most of that has melted away and they've become influential in practical ways as well.

Highlighting, for example, the demographic issues, which will fundamentally change our economic structure, our prosperity and so on, are fundamentally linked to changing family dynamics, which you can't separate from debates around liberalism, from liberalization of the family and so on. So a lot of the liberal ideas are discredited.

there's very few serious liberal intellectuals around these days. I'm not saying there's none still alive. I don't know if John Rawls is still alive. Maybe he is. Fukuyama is still alive, but he seems a bit frayed, shall we say. Fukuyama's not looking his best these days. So the serious ones are kind of a little out of place, and there are no younger generation coming up.

And the younger generation, the series younger generation are embracing post-liberalism. Now, why does that matter? Because liberalism, as I've said, throughout history, it's gone through fits and starts.

It's never been allowed to fully colonize a society before. The French Revolution was the best attempt it had prior to recent developments. It was too quick. The society at the time was just not ready for it at all. The revolutionaries went in extremely odd directions, altering calendars, clocks, strange things. They were kind of wedded to their time.

But in the past 15 years or so, we really have got a full penetration of liberal ideas into society. And I think everyone knows what I mean by that. Like at every level, the liberal ideas are applied in your social life. All moral arguments are made through liberal, like a pretty hard liberal framing and so on. So we're experiencing that. And over the past 15 or 20 years, the main intellectual force has been a rising critique of that trend.

That to me signals that liberalism domestically is on its last legs. And then you add in the geopolitical framework, which as I said, is related. You're quite right about that, but it's not necessary. It doesn't have to be there, but it is there. And you add that in. And as you say, there's all these different models. There was attempts to inject liberal cultural norms into China in the 1980s. Did not take at all. I explained it. I describe it in the book. It's a fascinating story.

There's attempts to liberalize Russia entirely, both culturally and economically in the 90s. Total disaster. Doesn't take. Not as much attempts to liberalize India. Didn't really happen, but wouldn't have worked anyway. It hasn't worked. It's not a liberal state. Iran, you probably all know the story. Liberalization under the Shah. Very violent reaction in the form of the Islamic Revolution in 1979.

And let's be frank, the idea that Iran's actually going to go back to bikinis on the beach, it's not happening. We've been told that for like 30 years or something. It seems like a foreign fantasy at this point. So societies globally have rejected the liberal principles. Domestically, the serious nascent intellectual trends are criticizing them at the same time as they've penetrated as deeply as they ever, ever, ever have into a society that

And so what do you infer from that? They're not good ideas. They're terrible ideas. They're not...

that the society can actually be organized on. The notion of total equality, like I mean total equality, not equality before the law, total equality, leveling everything, absolute relativism, everyone's just a widget, an immigrant's no different from somebody born domestically, you can destroy family life while having no impact on the demography or the economy. All these principles have been tried.

And they have massively failed. And people are starting to put the pieces together in various spheres, whether it be theology and philosophy, which is where the post-liberal movement came from, or like you're looking at demographic trends and you're going, what happened to the birth rate? Or you go and you look at the failed foreign policy ventures and you say, how did Ukraine happen? Why did we think we should continue to expand Ukraine?

NATO liberalism, let's call it what it is, eastward, like how did we think that would work out well? You just go down the list and you see ideas that are fundamentally associated with the hyper-liberals of the post-1990s period just being utterly discredited. Well, I mean, I think this is a great point to perhaps take some questions.

Just a quick question. Just thinking that, okay, the liberalism sort of, it's exhausted, you might say. But, you know, insofar as the business schools and the MBA programs are proponents of liberalism, I wonder if Philip would be long or short on the perspectives of the business school model and of the MBA programs in particular going forward.

That's a great question. Philip Pilkington. I'm going to be killed by Harvard Business School for answering this question. I think that, okay, so there's a chapter in the book on, it's called Deindustrialization and the Rise of Funny Money. And it's basically about how the hyper-liberal economic model played into the...

into the developments that happened since the end of the Cold War. I think the roots in the article and so on that are shown are pretty interesting, but I don't think anyone will be surprised with the results. You've got a deindustrialized economy, not fully in America, especially not fully, but you've got a partially deindustrialized economy and you've got a heavily financialized economy. I'll just give an example I saw on Twitter today. It was on my account, I think, that people are complaining about campgrounds in the United States having their prices raised.

And they're saying that if you go to a campground now, it's the same price as paying for a local hotel. And obviously that makes no economic sense. You're bringing your own trailer down or your own tent down. You have your own access of water. There's no maid to come in and clean up your trailer, your tent or whatever. Makes no sense from a business point of view.

And so it turns out that the reason for this is private equity companies are going all around the United States getting a monopoly. They're cornering the campground market and they're raising prices. And their bet, I guess, is the people who like going camping just like going camping. And so they're testing how much they can charge them. That's real rent extraction at that point. And it speaks to this broader problem that.

That pre-MBA model, as you said, you'd go and you'd become maybe an engineer or, you know, a chemical study chemistry or something like that. And you go in and you'd eventually go and you'd manage a firm. And actually, that's actually the path to management in a lot of these manufacturing firms. You start as an engineer or as a technical specialist or something like that.

The NBA model does seem to have become very entwined with the financialization model. That's the rise of funny money, as I call it in the book. And I wonder how much juice that has left in it. I mean, when you're going around, if the financial model is now to go around and buy up campgrounds to try and price gauge guys who love camping or families that love camping. Like, okay, first of all, that's kind of evil. Sorry.

like I'm not anti-capitalist but like that's kind of that's kind of bad okay like that's little Jimmy's there trying to go fishing and you're like no little Jimmy you're not like it's bad you're the villain you're the villain at that point

And it also makes no economic sense. Like you'll drive the campground industry into the ground once you kind of wash out the, the enthusiasts and so on. So there's that also the wild camping, whatever we could go into the, the economy of campgrounds. I've been thinking about this since I saw this thing, but the point is,

That model increasingly seems like it's reaching those same extremes that the social model is reaching. Andrew and I were just talking about how some of the liberal aspects have crept into immigration policy or into cultural policy, and we can recognizably see, wow, that's got too extreme. There's going to have to be a correction. I think you're seeing something similar in the MBA school model. I don't mean that everybody with an MBA is going to be unemployed or whatever, but

A lot of instability in financial markets. When you're poaching the campgrounds, I'm wondering if you're kind of running out of runway. Thanks. Yeah. I think this is actually a very nice opportunity to explain why the commoditization and efforts to

milk campgrounds for all the value that they're worth. Like, why is that a liberal concept? Because I think this might be a nice example to explain some kind of runaway liberalism from an economic point of view.

Because think of what a campground economy is. It's actually a great example. It literally came up today. It's totally random. But these principles are so general that you can apply them to daily tweets. So that's how brilliant the book is. Buy the book. I'm kidding. But no, seriously, like campgrounds are a perfect example. Like it's a small family business, right? You go and you start a campground in probably a place where the economy is mainly like a

hospitality or something like that. And you kind of run it probably as a family or as a small business or something like that. If you're in the campground industry, you're probably not like chasing massive profits. You're probably kind of a campground enthusiast.

Like you're probably like somebody who likes camping. Like, would you believe if you go down to your local fishing club, it's run by people who like really like fishing. Right. And they may try and make a profit out of it. That's fine. But like, they're just people who like fishing. And I think campgrounds are kind of the same thing.

And so the organic nature of it is that there's no desire to try and take the campground, mush it into like big campground ink and then try and extract as much money as possible out of that. Like that's a completely alien concept to what campgrounds are actually about.

Campgrounds are actually about like going and having fun on the campground and meeting people who are also enthusiastic about camping and having a few drinks and doing a barbecue and so on. And actually very familiar in American culture. Obviously, I don't live in America. I lived there once upon a time. But this kind of like grilling and so on is a fundamental component of America.

culture and the campground mafia who come in and try and like utilize it to extract rent which is like a liberal economic relationship it's like well nothing else matters and the way they justified it well nothing else matters if we have put the price up to equivalent with the hotel then they can just go into the hotel it's their free choice as a free agent

You're like, well, some people like going camping and they can't afford hotel prices and the hotel prices make no sense. It doesn't matter. This is the free market. That's always the kind of liberal get out of jail free card. They'll say abstract principles to overcome obvious intuitive realities.

And usually we associate this with communism. If you say, hey, a centrally planned economy doesn't work. We have lots of evidence. And here's why it doesn't work. Because the toilet paper goes over there instead of going over there. You can make all those explanations. And then...

Then the communist will just say, well, in real communism, it will work. Or they'll say, well, even if it doesn't work, we have to try because we have to achieve these abstract principles. How is that that different from me going to like the campground mafia and saying, hey, guys, campgrounds are actually about camping and like.

People are enthusiastic about that and like little mom and pop shops and they go, no, you don't understand. We are achieving maximum efficiency. Those little mom and pop shops are not efficient. And if we can price gauge up to the hotel level and make a profit and the campground doesn't shut down, then the market has just told you that you're wrong. Those are the, those are the kind of abstract principles that they're putting on it. And that's kind of what liberalism is all about at the end of the day. It's, it's,

steamrolling over differences, you know, enthusiasms, things that you can't rationalize, and then saying, here's a rationalization of them. And what you end up with is just as you end up with like centrally planned farms or whatever, you actually end up with just social chaos. And you don't end up with economic prosperity. You end up with some sort of rent extraction oligarchy. So like, and that kind of tells us that the economy itself is

Again, I'm not particularly against like broadly capitalist developments, free markets where they make sense, but not in an ideological way. The economy itself has to be understood as kind of an organic entity. And by the way, if you go back and read Adam Smith, he kind of describes it that way. But I think that's the kind of that's the kind of.

That's how that mindset colonizes stuff like campgrounds or like OnlyFans or whatever. Any of these freakish economic relationships, free market pushed Uber Alice to the point where like they're defending monopoly as well, but it never makes any sense is because they're prioritizing abstract principles over practical common sense realities, which is what we were always told as kind of like liberal conservatives or whatever was the hallmark of like communist ideology. Yeah.

Yes, I think that's a little taste of the way that post-liberals as a political movement would view certain sections of the economy, certain economic relations. But could you give us a broader view of some of the intellectual movement and some of the practical applications of the post-liberal political movement?

Like, where does that come from? From where are its ideas drawn? And where is it going? Like, what does this mean for society moving forward? So basically, post-liberal movement comes out of kind of philosophy and theology. I know that sounds strange, but the initial post-liberal thinker, it's debatable. There are some in the 19th century, 20th century. But recently is Alistair MacIntyre, a

I think his book is called Virtue Ethics in the 1980s. I think it's 82. And he's like Marxist Catholic, I guess, more so Catholic than Marxist. Very interesting book, still worth reading. But so the intellectual seeds have been there for a long time. You can name other people like Christopher Lash, the cultural critic, author of Culture of Narcissism. Probably have to think a little harder off the top of my head to think of others. But the tradition's always kind of been there. But I think the modern...

The tradition actually getting traction in recent years is philosophical, political philosophy and theology. I think the big book was probably Patrick Deneen's Why Liberalism Failed, which if you pick up a copy today, the blurb on the back is written by Barack Obama. Just let that sink in. So it clearly made a massive impact. Barack Obama is slightly critical on the blurb, but he's like, well, Patrick Deneen raises some good points. I should do an Obama voice for that. I won't try.

But so that's the intellectual roots. Now, the issue with that is I think the critique of liberalism has become quite sophisticated.

The one I put forward in the book is slightly different. It's not conflicting or anything, but it may be of interest even to people who are only interested in the political philosophy. But basically it was quite abstract. It reminded me of the early post-liberal developments, reminded me very much of the early developments in Marxism. I know that's a weird analogy, but hear me out.

The first generation of Marxists, including Karl Marx himself, outlined only critiques of capitalism. And they actually refused to lay out, I think Marx calls it cook shops for the future or something like that. They say we're fully based on critique. I'm not saying that the post-liberals did it as consciously as the Marxists, because the Marxists were trying to provoke a social revolution and so on. But they ended up in basically the same place.

And I think that's because they were mainly sociologists, theologians, et cetera, et cetera. So it hasn't actually been made clear until now, I hope, what the post-liberal moment will actually look like.

We won't go down policy by policy. The book addresses, I think, eight or seven or something major topics from environment, energy policy to industrial policy to drug policy and asylum policy. There's tons of stuff in there. But I think the so we won't go into that now.

Although I alluded to some of the stuff around industrialization and funny money and MBAs just there. It should be of interest. But at a more essential point, and I actually don't really say this in the book because I try and go through the things point by point. But I think what's going to happen in the post-liberal world is basically the reemergence of whatever underlying civilizational norms were there in a given society.

So on Multipolarity, the podcast, we're always keeping an eye on like the rise of neo-Ottomanism, the Turkish spread into Syria and into the Middle East. And that will probably give rise to a new kind of Turkic post-Ottoman identity.

That's post-liberal, like 100%. China are, as I said earlier in this Faces, Xi Jinping is actively trying to resuscitate Marxism. But my sense of the Chinese intellectual scene is that they're gravitating toward Confucianism. That's just Chinese civilization. You're seeing something similar in India with Hindu nationalism. That's basically what currently governs India. They're revering back to their Hindu state.

So I think what's going to happen in the West, it's inevitable actually, is that the West will revert to its civilizational norm, its pre-liberal civilizational norm. By that, do I mean medieval Catholicism, like real medieval Catholicism? Probably not. Probably not. Although stranger things have happened. But I definitely think they'll have to revert back and the intellectual discussion will revert back

to basically the cornerstones of Western civilization, which are classical and Christian. So that's Greek philosophy, Roman law, Christian ethics. I mean, that's a very broad brush. But I think that's basically what the West will end up reverting to. So this ties into the idea of a multipolar world as well, because it's obvious that the blocks that will form will be civilizational blocks.

The map that we're going to go back to is probably the pre-liberal map, which is basically the pre-1914 map. I mean, basically, there's a few modifications to be made about that. You have to take into the 19th century, century of humiliation in China and so on. But basically, that's probably what you're going to look like. So I think we're just going to revert back to these civilizational norms and these civilizational blocks. Yeah, I mean, that sounds very Huntington.

its outlook this idea that the world won't be geopolitical so much as it will be civilizational and the you know it will form blocks of civilizational cultures I you know I just wonder whether that is more difficult for Europe and perhaps the West in general because

Russia is a huge continental country. It's one country. China is one country. India is one country. The Middle East is several different countries, but they really are bound together by Islam in a way that the West is simply not bound together by Christianity. And the West is many different countries. I mean, I see a very big difference between

uh lutheran um lutheran kind of central and scandinavian europe um you know anglo-saxon europe and uh southern latin catholic europe there that there are very market differences there and we could also talk about slavic europe as well places like poland and the czech republic and bulgaria and serbia there are very market differences there you know i think that it's

It's underestimated sometimes by people in Britain just how different American culture is to British culture. And furthermore, all of those countries now have undergone, you know, 30 years of hyper-rapid immigration and before that another 30 or 40 years of quick, high-speed immigration. And then, as I say, accelerated to kind of

really kind of hyperspeak, kind of warp drive immigration over the last 20, 25 years. And that's left, you know, significant minorities quite often collected in individual towns and neighborhoods of foreigners and foreigners, not just, you know, we're not talking about the Irish coming across here. We're not talking about, you know,

Swedes migrating to the US or anything like that. We're talking about people from the Levant. We're talking about people from rural Pakistan, rural Bangladesh, from sub-Saharan Africa. Can such countries revert back to something like a civilizational state? I understand that the counter-argument there would be that

India is a multicultural society very much. And of course, the Russian Federation is massively multicultural and seems to have had no issue whatsoever with returning to more of a kind of an Orthodox Christian Russian civilizational outlook. It's found it very easy to do that while accommodating its Muslim and Buddhist citizens.

or peoples, in fact, I think we should say. But I have serious doubts whether that's possible in the West, given the really dramatic ethnic and demographic changes over the last 25 years. I question whether a return to Western civilizational baselines is possible in the modern world.

Well, I mean, you're making a very good case for why the West shouldn't have embraced liberalism to begin with, but they did embrace liberalism. And just like France looked like a dog's dinner after the French Revolution, Europe kind of looks like a dog's dinner today. And so to a certain extent does America. I mean, that's, you know, the wages of sin, as it were. There's nothing really you can do about that. Yeah.

As you point out, some of these civilizational states have been able to incorporate minorities, that those minorities are there due to previous immigration flows or battles or whatever, but it's all the same, just migration flows.

And I suppose that will be the hope. I think definitely what you've seen is that the societies that have successfully done that, you've mentioned Russia, you can mention China, although people will kill me about the Uyghurs and so on. But I think the story there is actually different from what's told in the West. The countries that have succeeded in doing that.

have not been liberal multicultural countries. It's not without strife. You said that it was seamless and so on. I'd raise you, Chechnya, on that, but, you know, details. But the fact of the matter is that, for example, the Chechnyans in the Russian Federation are very comfortable in the Russian Federation. They're given a kind of a national identity there.

quasi-national identity. They're proud of being Chechnyan. You see this in the wars and so on, proud warriors and so on. So they've been given a place there and, you know, they seem pretty happy with it. And I don't, I've never met a Chechnyan in my life, but I'd imagine if I said, you know, well, the Russian Federation is ultimately an Orthodox Christian based country.

based society or at least culture, how can you as a proud Muslim live in the Chechnyan region or whatever? Why don't you want Sharia law? I don't know what they'd respond to, but I'm assuming they have an answer for that. And I'm assuming it aligns with the Chechnyan quasi-state, right? So I think your best bet on integrating new population flows is not the liberal one.

We've tried the multiculturalism thing in Europe and it's not good. It's not going anywhere. It's not going anywhere fast. Like that's really clear. So the respect of other beliefs or cultures or whatever, it seems like a better way forward.

Are the flows so large that you can't reconstruct Western civilization? Maybe, maybe. I don't know. But, you know, Europe's been through a lot before. The Ottomans, I'm in Hungary right now. I'm studying in Budapest.

The Ottomans were here a few centuries ago, and I'm sure if you were standing around there, you'd say, well, it's going to turn into a Turkic Muslim society. It didn't. There's crosses on the minarets all around here. It's very interesting to see. But, you know, I don't know. I don't know the answer to that question. But definitely the attempt, if we want to kind of all get along, remember that toleration thing? If we want the toleration and so on, I think like different cultures, let's say Muslims living in Europe,

are going to respect someone who respects themselves and their culture a lot more than these kind of multiculturalist like, like foot worshipers or so, you know what I mean? Like I, this is not, that's not the way to deal with that because that kind of weakness only breeds contempt. It doesn't breed respect at all.

The first part of your question is really fundamental to European civilization itself. And what you're talking about there is the splitting of the European and the Western civilizational project due to the Reformation. Of course, there was a split previous to that, the Great Schism, which separated Eastern Orthodox and Western Orthodox.

Christianity. Now, that could be overcome eventually, I guess. That cultural gap could be overcome in theory. I don't know. Above my pay grade. But the Protestant Reformation was a fundamentally different movement. It was much more about internal social changes and so on in Europe. And what you're referring to is like, well, Europe's a bunch of nations and America is now one of them, too. And Australia is one of them, too, and so on.

Those are a bunch of nations that are fundamentally different cultures and so on. And you're right, you said Lutheran Sweden, I think you said, or Lutheran somewhere. You're right to trace it back to that. A lot of those nation states are born out of the wars of religion, which are born out of the Reformation in Europe.

that's a unique feature to Europe. And that's actually what ended up giving rise to liberalism. That's the real deep underlying story that it was the wars of religion and the rise of nation states that eventually led to the, to the bubbling up of liberal ideas. The English civil war was a continuation on, uh, in a more radical direction of the British reformation, for example. So that's a fundamental, uh, that's like a family squabble. That's the way I put it. Like Western civilization, uh,

is faced and has been faced since the Reformation with disagreements on its own civilizational basis. And this gave rise to first the rise of Protestantism and then the rise of nation-states.

And that's something we've never really come to terms with. We keep trying to come to terms with it. Just to give an example, the original model of the European Union, really deep down, and this was theorized by Christian democratic theorists, was basically modeled on Charlemagne's Europe, the Holy Roman Empire. That's what it was modeled on. And so when we tried to model a European Union model,

Not saying it's good, not saying it's bad. I'm just saying when we tried to model that, we went back pre-Reformation to do so. And that raises the interesting question. I really do fundamentally believe that

that in the coming years in the West, we will rediscover, quote unquote, our civilizational roots. Pre-liberal, although they've been here the whole time. Liberalism is just this kind of minor blip, kind of an annoyance. I think we will fundamentally go back to them. But which ones? Will we go back to the post-Reformation ones? Or will we, like when the Europeans tried to set up the EU, model it on the Holy Roman Empire and Charlemagne?

Those are really deep questions, but they go way beyond the book. But those are the questions that like if PhD students are listening, like this is the stuff you should be studying moving forward. Well, I think that's a good place to end it. I, you know, I think that people should buy your book. It's, it's concise. I hope people listening to this have got a, you know, an idea that, you know, Philip is not just a,

a quite serious thinker but a really interesting one as well i mean this is not um you know this is not dry academic academia and it's but it's also not the kind of vacuous kind of surface level inanity that we get from a lot of so-called public intellectuals now um in my experience philip's always been as well from the long form essays um

And articles that I've written, you know, are very clear and concise and easy to access writer. So I recommend everyone buy his book, which is on sale now. Is that right, Philip?

Yes, and your check for the prize is in the prize. We agree, £2,000? I always become cheap these days in that case. And on that note, folks, have a lovely Monday evening, and we shall surely speak soon. Take care. Thanks so much, everybody.