Philip Pilkington, The Collapse of Global Liberalism and the Emergence of the Post Liberal World Order, Polity Press (2025), 240 pages, $22.95.
When global communism collapsed a generation ago, it not only freed several hundred million people from tyranny, but also stimulated a search for the causes of the death of a system that once posed an existential threat to capitalism and liberal democracy. Academic research over the last three decades may differ on details, but a broad consensus seems to exist as to the general causes of the demise of communism as an ideologically inspired system of organizing politics, society, and the economy. In the case of the Soviet Union, the communist ideology had long been perverted to serve the interests of a corrupt elite at the expense of the masses, resulting in progressive regime decay. Economically, the pathologies of state planning wasted precious resources. Stagnant standard of living eventually delegitimized communism. On the external front, Moscow was bled dry by a costly arms race with a foe—the United States—that was far richer and technologically more advanced.
No one could have imagined that a similar autopsy would be needed to look for the causes of the collapse of global liberalism merely three decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Evidence of the end of the post-Cold War liberal order is hard to miss: the collapse of the global trading system, brutal wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, revival of an arms race, resurgent populism in established democracies, and dwindling prospects of international cooperation on climate change. Unsurprisingly, the sudden death of what was once considered a superior system for organizing humanity has led to a new round of soul searching.
In The Collapse of Global Liberalism and the Emergence of the Post Liberal World Order, Philip Pilkington provides a bold—and controversial—thesis on the fall of global liberalism.
The most provocative aspect of Pilkington’s argument is likely the parallel he draws between liberalism and two extremist ideologies: communism and fascism. As the “two basic tendencies of liberalism are to ‘rationalize’ society and demolish ‘arbitrary’ hierarchies,” according to Pilkington, communism is a logical outgrowth of liberalism. In the case of fascism, this movement was a reaction against “liberal ideas.” Political philosophers will almost certainly criticize such oversimplification, but many readers may be sympathetic with at least one key point Pilkington is trying to make. The fatal flaw of modern liberalism is its tendency to radicalization and pursuit of dominance, which inevitably leads to excess, self-defeating policies, and alienation of the majority of the people and nations that do not share radicalized liberal values.
The tragedy of liberalism is that such a fate is not inevitable. Pilkington argues that there is a “soft” strand of liberalism that is more pragmatic and limited in its objectives and means. “Soft liberalism” is not revolutionary, but neither is it harmful. Only “hard liberalism” can unleash destructive forces because it seeks to undermine hierarchy as a system ordering human affairs.
To help an average reader appreciate this highly abstract theory, Pilkington applies it to a brief but comprehensive diagnosis of the death of liberalism. The end of liberalism started, ironically, when its ideological and geopolitical dominance produced “hyper-liberalism” that in turn led to “neoliberal” economic policies in the 1980s and 1990s. Specifically, “neoliberal” policies encouraged “financialization” and “deindustrialization” that would, over time, weaken the West’s manufacturing base and increase income inequality. Pilkington cites stagnant wage growth to support his argument that economic prosperity credited to neoliberalism has not benefited average workers because a key neoliberal economic policy is the suppression of wages for the sake of competitiveness. For example, average wage growth in the US was 6.4 percent a year between 1965 and 1980; but it was only 3.4 percent a year between 1980 and 2023. As a result, the share of wages fell from 49 percent in 1965 to 43 percent of GDP in 2023, benefiting owners of capital at the expense of workers.
Besides holding down wages for workers, an even worse sin of liberalism is deindustrialization. Pilkington identifies two culprits, one ideological and the other financial. Ideologically, liberal economic thinkers fetishize so-called ‘brain-work’ or innovation. Such “fetishization” has resulted in a shift to services (including high-end service professions), and the introduction of technologies that raise productivity but at the cost of de-industrialization.
On paper, the data seems to support this thesis. In 1953, manufacturing accounted for 28.1 percent of US GDP in nominal terms. By 2015, it had fallen to 12 percent. However, using nominal data (which do not factor in inflation) to measure the share of manufacturing in an economy is problematic because price increases of services (such as healthcare, higher education, and consulting) are typically far bigger than manufacturing (due to slower productivity growth in services). In fact, prices for many manufactured goods have either fallen or risen at slower pace thanks to innovation and efficiency (prices of television sets, computers, and smartphones have fallen dramatically while their capabilities have improved immensely). Adjusted for inflation, US manufacturing as share of real GDP, according to Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, was actually stable, ranging from 11.3 percent to 13.6 percent of GDP between 1947 and 2015, even though manufacturing employment fell from 32 percent to about 9 percent in the same period.
Pilkington also blames the role of the US dollar in global finance for America’s deindustrialization. Due to its status as the world’s reserve currency, foreigners are willing to exchange their real goods for a piece of paper (in real life it means foreign countries export to the US in order to purchase US dollars or assets). Over time, booming imports would displace domestic industries.
Geopolitically, the rise of China counts as a singular folly of hyper-liberalism. In pursuing a global liberal agenda, Western leaders were confident that with globalization, both economic and political liberalism would spread to China and the country would embrace market-based capitalism and democratic politics. Unfortunately, Chinese rulers had no desire to do so. Even worse, Pilkington argues that an illiberal regime is well-positioned to exploit the naïve openness of a liberal international trading regime. Instead of being converted to liberalism, Chinese leaders have succeeded in taking advantage of globalization and building a hybrid system mixing state-capitalism with one-party rule.
Another geopolitical disaster liberalism is responsible for is the West’s conflict with Russia. After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, Western economists gave Russian leaders disastrous advice on privatization and stabilization (shock therapy), resulting in the rise of an oligarchy and mass immiseration. Ever ideologically overzealous, liberals erroneously framed the nature of the tensions between Russia and the West in terms of democracy against autocracy, even though they arise from traditional geopolitical rivalry over security or spheres of influence. Ultimately, the demonization of Russia backfired: in addition to fueling geopolitical tensions, the West’s attempts to promote liberal regimes in Georgia and Ukraine eventually would provoke Russia into attacking its neighbors. However controversial, Pilkington’s argument that the West is to blame for Russia’s attempts to restore its imperial sphere of influence, to be sure, is shared by a vocal minority, including some prominent scholars.
Less controversial may be Pilkington’s contention that a major cause of the collapse of global liberalism is a fundamental shift of balance of power between the liberal West and the rest of the world. The tragedy is that, instead of understanding or accepting this new reality, the West continues to seek to impose its will on the rest of the world. Such attempts are not only doomed (Pilkington cites the West’s failure to isolate Russia after its invasion of Ukraine), but also bound to encounter vigorous resistance.
Like most books on the end of liberalism, Pilkington’s seems strong on providing diagnosis but weak on proposing alternatives. In this specific case, the future lies in some form of “post-liberalism.” Unfortunately, what exactly constitutes “post-liberalism” is vague. Pilkington thinks a change of mindset is the first step. Specifically, this requires a return to “teleological thinking” by recognizing there are both “better and worse” ways of living and organizing society. In other words, we can free ourselves from liberalism by thinking of non-liberal alternatives.
It remains to be seen whether a change in mindset will make much difference in actual policy. Based on the specific policy proposals in Pilkington’s book, it is fair to say that they are more conventional than paradigm-shifting. A post-liberal military strategy must be based on the recognition that technological diffusion has neutralized the West’s edge and rendered obsolete the old strategy of relying on a small quantity of high-cost and high-tech weapons to win wars. The new paradigm is to mass-produce cheap weapon systems (such as drones) and favor quantity over quality (costs). This idea would have been considered ground-breaking before the Ukraine war, but today it is conventional wisdom.
Pilkington’s prescription for defusing geopolitical tensions is similarly mainstream. Instead of practicing “imperial moralism” by overemphasizing ideology, the West should revive diplomacy and avoid confrontation and over-extension. In abstract, this is a sound principle traditional realists in international affairs would heartily endorse. But readers would benefit from more specific guidance on how this principle can be translated into policies on the current or future conflicts in Ukraine, the Middle East, and East Asia.
Whether liberalism can be replaced by post-liberalism is uncertain, but Pilkington believes the stakes are high. He warns that the future will either be “post-liberalism” or “bust.” It is not hard to envision what a busted future looks like – the trends portrayed in Pilkington’s book will only get much worse. What is unclear is what a “post-liberal” world would look like and how we can get there. That perhaps should be Pilkington’s next intellectual undertaking.
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