Sublime

But left unchecked, state sovereignty tends to slide into authoritarianism at home and anarchy abroad – as is prefigured in the works of Jean Bodin and Thomas Hobbes. That is why a postliberal politics seeks to hold in balance not just the central state and intermediary institutions but also patriotism and internationalism.

politische Polarisierung

Stiglitz employs Isaiah Berlin’s positive and negative freedoms, and later threads the needle: neoliberalism believes only in ‘freedom to do’, and disparages the need of government to constrain corporations and the wealthy for the good of the rest:

The 80s were the period when capitalist realism was fought for and established, when Margaret Thatcher’s doctrine that ‘there is no alternative’ – as succinct a slogan of capitalist realism as you could hope for – became a brutally self-fulfilling prophecy.

Constitutionally guaranteed freedom of association is key in pluralizing the state and balancing the three branches of government, so that neither dominates the others.

it in effect changes the Constitution by means of reinterpretation. Political and social liberals tend to favor broad constructionism.

The German sociologist Karl Mannheim argued that utopia was a necessary antidote to what he considered the normative role of “ideology,” a term he specifically defined as the unseen but omnipresent social, cultural, and philosophical structure that upholds a particular “order of things” and protects those who wield political and economic power.