The Collapse of Global Liberalism: And the Emergence of the Post Liberal World Order

by Philip Pilkington

In the 1990s, a vision emerged of a frictionless world of globalization in which the West would become ever richer on the basis of a tech-based service economy, all underpinned by a rules-based liberal international order. It became the basis for the mainstream politics of centre-left and right.

Philip Pilkington argues that this vision was always delusional and is now dying. It is based on a doctrinaire and unrealistic form of liberalism and has given rise to hollowed-out financialised economies and disintegrating societies that can barely even reproduce their population or meet their energy needs. The US and UK find themselves ill-equipped to compete with China and other non-liberal states within an emerging post-liberal order in which what really matters is industrial capacity, realpolitik and military strength. Only by abandoning our liberal delusions and advancing our own brand of hard-headed post-liberalism can the West survive.

No clear-sighted observer of contemporary geopolitics can afford to miss this bracing diagnosis of the West’s malaise and bold agenda for renewal.

Genres: Politics, Nonfiction

240 pages, Hardcover

Published June 24, 2025

About the author

Philip Pilkington is an economist, political analyst, and former macroeconomic strategist. He is the founder of Multipolarity Podcast, a columnist at UnHerd, and Senior Research Fellow at the Hungarian Institute of International Affairs.

Reviews

[Abdulbaasit Sayed · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pilkington presents a rather convincing argument against liberalism, arguing that the liberal belief system held by the West is fundamentally flawed and is now dying as we move to a 'post-liberal world order'. 

I should preface this by mentioning that Pilkington has structured the book very clearly. He often uses an almost sarcastic tone, which makes the read quite fun, even in the parts where I found myself wholeheartedly disagreeing with him.

The book's key argument is based on the author's view of liberalism's ultimate goal: the dissolution of hierarchy. Pilkington claims this process towards complete egalitarianism is never-ending in his ideas of 'hard' liberalism. He begins with examples of how liberalism has shifted from structural issues (such as the removal of monarchies) to more personal issues, such as family dynamics and gender. One example given is the rapid increase in people identifying as 'non-binary', stating that the inherent definition of something being binary is hierarchical, with 1 having a greater value than 0. 

There is a struggle to define precisely what the danger of this liberal progression is, which is consistent throughout the book. Another example is Pilkington's views on migration, or as he calls it, 'biological imperialism'. The book refuses to acknowledge any of the labour gaps filled by migrant workers, such as the 26% of NHS doctors being non-UK nationals, or how EU migrants historically filled shortages in skilled trades. Instead, it focuses on the divisive view that migrants are imported here to ultimately spread their race and take over the country. Again, similar to how Pilkington did not mention why the rise of LGBTQ+ with liberalism was a bad thing, he does not mention what the potential societal and cultural conflicts are with an increase in migration. My assumption is that he does not want to come across as a bigoted racist and avoids the questions entirely. In my view, if there is genuinely a greater danger than a benefit of sustaining the current levels of migration in the West, these should be explicitly stated rather than shied away from. 

Some of the stronger points of the book include its critique on the late liberal capitalist system and its emphasis on production and consumption, actively encouraging young people to focus on themselves, their careers, and their consumption habits. His points on the normalisation of 'commercialised sexual relations' and the decline of the family unit ring true, and the author here actually describes the danger present, being declining birth rates, rises in pornography addiction, the exposure of sexualised content to minors, and an array of sexually transmitted diseases. One of the points I found particularly enlightening was the absolute ineffectiveness of the liberal pseudo-solutions, such as attempting to 'raise awareness'; the real solutions, as the author correctly puts it, are in changing the fundamental ideologies of young people. I couldn't help but vehemently nod along with the author as he so clearly outlined the key issues of late liberalism today.

The book's explanations of geopolitics are also particularly fascinating. It highlights the reasons for the Russian ability to persist against NATO in Ukraine, and the issues with the liberal dogma of progress for the sake of progress. He argues that the innovative leaps of the military-industrial complex are nonsensical, as military actions seem to favour more and more commercialised, cheap products, such as landmines and suicide drones. Pilkington claims moving away from this highly specialised, expensive weaponry to mass-produced, cheaper weapons is again evidence of a post-liberal world order. 

An issue I had with the book was how it exhibits a persistent bias toward China, which often becomes exhausting to read. The author is obsessed with moving the West towards the route China has taken, making it a manufacturing superpower. He constantly praises the production power of China, and berates the West for its 'fetishisation' of 'brain work'. There is a consistent avoidance of the quality of the living standards within these illiberal manufacturing industries. He seems to cope hard by claiming that living standards have improved as China has shifted towards producing more technologically advanced goods, rather than simple goods such as clothing. Still, any informed reader will be able to see through this. 


Suicide nets outside Foxconn, a manufacturer used by Apple for the iPhone

The author critiques the mistreatment of people experiencing homelessness in the West. He conveniently skips over how the homeless are treated in illiberal societies. He denies claims that housing shortages and other economic problems are creating homelessness, and states that it is purely due to substance abuse and mental illnesses, and that liberalism is to blame for not being tough on drugs and not institutionalizing the mentally ill. I believe that ultimately, it is economic forces that create homelessness, and then the use of drugs ends up exacerbating this issue further. If only Pilkington would take the view of attempting to prevent people from falling into drugs in the first place, rather than punishing them all for their addictions and locking them up in mental asylums. 

Pilkington puts forward a plethora of straight-up whacky ideas in the book. One of the most outlandish examples of this is the supposed intergenerational war. It is proposed that, due to the increasing disparity of asset ownership between the older and younger generations, it will be in the younger generations' interest to abolish democracy, and that they will ultimately turn to methods such as euthanasia to kill off the older generation to reclaim resources. I found ideas like these and others, such as blatant climate change denial and comparisons between environmentalism and paganism, so absurd that I couldn't help but feel like he was weakening his central argument. 

Overall, the book has a wide array of compelling and not-so-compelling ideas. Some of the prior that I indeed found interesting included the author's idea of the metaphysics of liberalism, and a proposed reformed Keynesian bancor system. Pilkington's overall argument has many flaws; despite that, the fundamental argument is fresh and exciting, and I found my views challenged frequently. I think that it is worth a read for those wishing to understand the many weaknesses and limitations of liberalism and hoping to discern a better path forward.

[Eden · Rating 3 out of 5]

Contains quite a few wacky analyses and conclusions, and the rest could definitely have been more refined, but considering that this book was only meant to be a distillation of the most general ideas, it serves its purpose well enough. What the author gets right will be quite useful for the rest of this century and for that, I think, this book was worth it.

[Kjartan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Góð samantekt á ýmsum hugmyndastraumum á vesturlöndum í augnablikinu sem gefur manni nýja yfirsýn á ástandið. Margar góðar tillögur að viðbrögðum við vandamálum sem blasa við í nútíð eða framtíð, t.d. fæðingartíðni og hagvöxtur. Sérstaklega góður kafli um vestræna diplómasíu, sem er á miklum villigötum: "Liberal ideology has destroyed the international diplomacy of the countries it has deeply infected. Their diplomatic corps, some of which were once world-class, are now a joke. Their diplomats have given up trying to understand the perspectives of other countries and cultures. Instead, they have reverted to the crudest sort of imperial arrogance and travel the world trying to push whatever strange fad is fashionable in decadent liberal circles at the time. Abroad they are laughed at and mocked behind their back. They unwittingly perform as clowns for foreign audiences who hold them in contempt. This is incredibly damaging for the reputation of the countries that engage in it."

[Charles Haywood · Rating 4 out of 5]

We all want to know comes next, because we sense that it will be very different from what came before. This is a book not so much about our uncertain future, but about why a massive change is inevitable. The author, Philip Pilkington, aims to shake the reader from his slumber, and make him realize that liberalism—“Enlightenment” liberalism, the Left, whatever name you choose—is not only dying, but is already dead. Nor will it reanimate; as always in history, what once seemed forever will, soon enough, be thought of only in the past tense. Our mandate is therefore to cast off the burdensome corpse of liberalism and begin to mold the future, erasing the errors of the past.

This is not a book about post-liberalism, therefore, even though it, accurately enough, treats post-liberalism as inevitable. No doubt this is wise; there have been no good books on the specifics of post-liberalism, probably because, as Yogi Berra supposedly said, “predictions are hard, especially about the future.” Attempts such as Patrick Deneen’s mediocre Regime Change fail either because they pull their punches, afraid of offending those now in power who dictate for their own benefit the limits of acceptable discourse, or because they descend into lurid fantasies, which are mere fiction masquerading as analysis. The only concrete prediction that Pilkington makes is the same one I always make—whatever a post-liberal society looks like, it will be based in reality, rather than in the delusional thinking that has characterized the rulers of the West for more than a century.

Naturally, to talk about the death of liberalism, you first must precisely define it. This is somewhat of a challenge, because as liberalism’s failings have become ever more evident, those in thrall to the ideology adopt more and more slippery definitions, thereby attempting to evade responsibility for their insanities that have visibly led to catastrophe. They retreat into ever higher levels of abstraction, declaiming that liberalism is merely, for example, the rule of law, freedom of association, freedom of economic action, and personal liberty vis-à-vis the state, ignoring that all those aspirations long pre-date liberalism and are anyway, in practice, almost wholly antithetical to twenty-first-century liberalism, as it becomes completely totalitarian in an effort to maintain power, throwing overboard every principle that supposedly characterizes liberalism. This dishonesty is on full display in the (ugh) Wikipedia definition of liberalism, and is similarly unfortunately present in the new Grokipedia’s definition of liberalism, if you want to suffer through reading them.

Pilkington is having none of this, fortunately. He instead pithily and, I think largely accurately, defines liberalism as that political philosophy which has as its overriding goal the total elimination of all hierarchical relationships in a society. Liberals like to trace their origins to John Locke, who is not much associated with attacks on hierarchy in the popular mind. But as Pilkington notes, of Locke’s Two Treatises, it is often forgotten that while the second is an exposition of “contract theory, property rights, and representative government,” the first was an extended attack on Robert Filmer, author of Patriarcha, or the Natural Power of Kings, an excoriation of the leveling demands of Oliver Cromwell and the Parliamentarians in the Wars of the Three Kingdoms. That is, the original liberal’s prime concern was destroying hierarchy, and nothing has changed in four hundred years.

Liberalism views hierarchy as arbitrary and irrational, the root of all society’s ills, and in its own self-conception, believes that it is going about rationalizing the world by removing this unpleasant obstacle to the happiness of mankind. And the chief aim of liberalism, therefore, is to expand the dominance of liberalism, both within a society and in societies which are not yet wholly liberal. In its nature liberalism, based on false a priori conceptions of reality, contains no limiting factor, because some supposed irrationality can always be detected in any human institution. It is helpful to such an ideology, however, to have a yardstick, and the prime one used by the Left is perceived progress, both towards the destruction of hierarchy, as well as towards economic growth, meaning maximizing output and consumption through measurable efficiency, always driven by attempted rationalization while ignoring the actual net effects on society.

In the early years of liberalism, when as with all ideologies utopia was foreseen as possible and the costs were not only ignored, but cast as benefits, it was Locke, not Filmer, who won the day. To be sure, Cromwell’s liberal tendencies were extremely mild compared to those which proceeded to take hold in England and the West, but he cut with an axe, literally, at the primacy of hierarchy. Soon enough, the French Revolution took liberalism to its next logical stopping place, and after some retrenchment, it proceeded to the slower but more systematic destruction of all traditional hierarchy in Europe. Karl Marx and Communism were merely a further extension of this process, an attempt to destroy “the hierarchical relations established by liberal capitalism between the worker and the capitalist.” In the twentieth century liberalism’s pernicious program was expanded “to questions of a more personal nature,” by thoroughly destroying hierarchical relations in religion, the family, the sexes, and within the individual himself.

Liberalism has had a good run, to be sure, in part because the fruits of the pre-Enlightenment Scientific Revolution, combined with the high-achieving culture of Christendom, emerged when liberalism was spreading throughout the West. The fly in the ointment for liberalism, however, is that reality has a disconcerting way of reasserting itself and falsifying ideologies. Liberalism is unnatural and exists in defiance of human nature and all of human history, which always reverts to the mean. As the demands of liberalism expand, a countervailing force, reality, inevitably emerges from within every society. Thus, while Communism is in theory merely a particularly aggressive branch of liberalism, in practice (what Pilkington calls “Actually Existing Communism”) it apparently paradoxically, but entirely logically, creates societies that are more hierarchical than societies which see themselves as less liberal. Russian Communism, for example, replicated many of the elements of Tsarism, and North Korea has implemented a form of bloodline monarchy.

Contrary to liberal myth, the mirror image of liberalism is not fascism, the boogeyman liberals trot out whenever the cracks in liberalism become too obvious to ignore. It is neither, however, that fascism is a species of liberalism. Rather, fascism is a largely-artificial reaction against liberalism, “the violent reassertion of hierarchy.” Where Communism “quietly retreats to new forms of old hierarchy, the fascist state simply announces its newly fashioned hierarchies and imposes them from the top down.” Neither of these political philosophies are based in reality; fascism is a mere shadow emanation of liberalism. “The liberal history of the twentieth century, in which liberals fought against the dark forces of communism and fascism, is really nothing but an intra-liberal psychodrama.” A truly non-liberal society, which includes almost all societies in human history, is one of natural hierarchies, not new ones pulled from the ether.

All this, of course, parallels my own contentions about the Left, about which I have written many times. In my frame, its prime goals, what makes the Left what it is, are first to tear down all bonds not continuously chosen, that is, to emancipate every individual fully from any obligation, and second to impose total equality upon all members of every society. The elimination of hierarchies achieves both, because any hierarchy can be viewed as a species of oppression, limiting both a man’s choices and his supposed equality with his fellow men. The ultimate goal, as aptly phrased by the Satanist Aleister Crowley, is “do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.”

As with most ideologies, a key plank of liberalism is that its triumph is historically ordained. Progress can therefore also be measured by liberalism’s expansion, both inside a society and inside other societies where liberalism is imposed, by any means necessary. To be sure, that liberalism is inevitable is completely ahistorical and thus easily proven false, but because liberals are ideologues divorced from reality, that is no matter. Nor is there any difference among different brands of liberalism, packaged to appeal to different peoples at different times. “Soft liberalism,” often cast as different from other forms of liberalism, is merely incomplete liberalism, practiced by those who shy away from the immediate imposition of the logically consistent internal demands of liberalism, which always necessarily proceeds, if by fits and starts, to “hyperliberalism.”

Pilkington, a financier by profession and therefore most interested in economics, identifies the peak of hyperliberalism as the Western way of life in the 1990s. Liberalism, cast as mere “freedom” to which no person could rationally object, was everywhere ascendant, and managed to produce the “illusion of stability,” resulting in such epiphenomena as Francis Fukuyama’s infamous declaration of the end of history, meaning the total triumph of liberalism. But liberalism’s reach always exceeds its grasp, and it very soon became apparent that Fukuyama was a moron. This was evident to careful, objective observers even then, as illiberal societies, notably China, from the first rejected liberalism in its entirety while modernizing their economies on a rational, rather than ideological basis. At the time (and I remember this), we were all told that the inevitable future of China was liberalism, because economic success meant liberalism, which supposedly was the origin of all economic success, would overthrow all non-liberal tendencies. This was proven wholly false, and we no longer hear this claim—not because liberals admit it was wrong, but because as with any inconvenient fact, it is ignored by them (or thinking is contorted to prevent contradiction of the ideology). Instead China followed the path of Wan Huning, who famously and completely excoriated America’s liberalism as self-destructive (and is now one of the most powerful men in China).

Similarly, after Western attempts to impose liberalism by force on Russia in the 1990s, while simultaneously looting the country for the benefit of Western interests and their lackeys inside Russia, Russia vomited liberalism out of its mouth. Pilkington says, correctly, that asking whether Russia is “naturally a non-liberal country” is “a meaningless question since all countries are naturally non-liberal. Liberalism is an ideology that is imposed from the outside with the goal of flattening natural heterogeneous hierarchies within a given social structure.” However, “some countries can accommodate liberalism better than others,” and Russia is definitely not one of those. America, or rather American’s elites, are currently at war with Russia because of geopolitical competition—but the sole source of that competition is the desperate desire of our elites to impose liberalism everywhere. (Pilkington could also have correctly ascribed our misadventures, and ultimate defeats, in Iraq and Afghanistan to the same impulse.)

So far, so analytical. The point of the book, however, is that liberalism is dead, and its hollow works are collapsing. “When historians look back on this collapse, the key event they identify will almost certainly be the Russo-Ukraine War.” In 2022, all informed opinion in the West thought that Russia would not invade; and when it did invade, that it would rapidly fail and its government collapse, as America wielded the terrible swift sword of liberalism. These opinions were not based on any facts or analysis, but on wishful ideological thinking, in opposition to actual facts and logic. In reality, Russia suffered little on the world stage, and what it lost in Western goodwill and trade, it gained in goodwill and trade from China and other nations opposed to Western liberalism. Freezing Russian foreign assets was the most grievous own goal, resulting in the inevitable end of Western financial hegemony. The failure of liberalism’s response exposed the frailty of liberalism to the entire globe; Pilkington believes this process will continue and result in the total restoration of a multipolar world; the United States cannot even keep the Red Sea shipping lanes open from attacks by low-tech Houthis, and will have no luck whatsoever against any enemy more capable. Such incapacity is the future of all liberal regimes, individually and collectively; the apogee of liberalism is rapidly receding in the rear view mirror.

The second half of the book examines the axes on which liberalism is collapsing. The liberal belief in progress, leading to an unwise reliance on fragile technology, has resulted in unworkable militaries and military doctrines, dependent on complex, unreliable, and extremely expensive weapons systems, while at the same time we have destroyed the factories and skilled workers necessary to conduct actual wars. The post-liberal battlefield will be like that of the Russo-Ukraine War, and we will not do well in such a war, which is any future war against a Great Power. (In the past few weeks, I note, it has come to light that the hyped Anduril drone systems have been a total failure in the Russo-Ukraine War, reinforcing Pilkington’s claims.)

But it is not just war. GDP, that idol of liberalism, is fake and gay (something about which I wrote myself). Liberalism, chasing the false idol of progress as exemplified by supposed competitive efficiency, deindustrialized the West, shattering the foundations of real security and prosperity for the common man and the society he collectively composes, and distorted the entire world economy with fake money, resulting in permanent trade imbalances and inevitable collapse due to massive deficit spending.

Worse, liberalism, demanding individual autonomy and that all relations be reduced to breakable contracts, has completely atomized the social fabric of the West, and of much of the world, resulting in a cratering birth rate and horrible relations among the sexes. The future of the entire West is that of superbly-liberal South Korea, where I read the other day that for every one hundred Koreans alive today, they will have a total of four great-grandchildren, if they even manage to maintain their current fertility rate. There is a direct relationship between how not-liberal a society, or any subset of a society is, and how many children are produced, and this equation dictates much of the future. Post-liberalism is pro-natalism. All liberal societies will become, quite literally, unsustainable, as the unproductive but extremely demanding old become an ever-larger percentage of the population. Pilkington predicts this will lead, through encouraged euthanasia or harsher measures, to the killing of the old; one recurrent theme of his book is that barbarism in many areas of life is the certain end state of dying liberal societies, and he is probably correct.

True, even societies that courageously resist liberalism, most notably Hungary, have not had much success raising the birth rate. But they will in the long term—the author notes that Hungary has doubled the marriage rate, a completely unprecedented achievement, and one which will bear fruit in due time, because it heralds an attitudinal change, which is what matters for the goal of a society’s future. When mothers and children are honored, rather than despised, it is inevitable the birth rate will rise.

Other social ills, from drugs to mental illness to the migrant invasions to the insane “Gaia hypothesis,” also follow in the train of dying liberalism. What links these together is that they are the result of fantasy thinking that rejects reality. And when nobody can deny anymore that liberalism is dead, we will have instead post-liberal societies. As I say, Pilkington is not interested in predicting what these will look like with any great specificity, except to say that each country will be different, and all will reflect reality and contain definite hierarchies. Those which succeed will prioritize the family and its continuation and expansion above all; and will fight wars, conduct diplomacy, and organize their economies in rational, not ideological, ways.

“We cannot predict what is to come, [but] a key message of this book is that the longer we pretend global liberalism remains a robust mode of governance, the worse the outcome is likely to be.” A key specific difference between liberal and post-liberal regimes, Pilkington says, will be that the latter will not be universalist. Each will be different, and its form and actions will depend on the nature of the state and people in which the regime exists. At the same time, he optimistically sees the possibility of reworked cooperation among those societies. He spends quite a bit of time on the “bancor” proposal made by John Maynard Keynes in the 1940s, a supranational system of settling accounts that was designed to right trade imbalances in a rational fashion. In fact, he recommends it as a future system for a multipolar world, though it seems to me that world is likely to have more conflict than would make such a system possible. But perhaps removing the poison of liberalism will restore rationality, and therefore calmer relations, to the Earth.

This is, in fact, my only reservation about this book. It elides . . . . [Review completes as first comment.]

[Patrick Coast · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book seeks to argue that the worldview held by most people in the West is deeply flawed, even foolish, and increasingly unable to explain contemporary developments. It’s very convincing.

This is my first exposure to post liberal thought, an intellectual movement that seems to have started in Catholic circles and adopted explicitly by the Hungarian government; but is increasingly used for cross-cultural dialogue with China to understand their modern Confucian outlook. I wouldn’t usually find myself being bed mates here, but….

The book makes a solid case for liberalism being a flawed intellectual movement and for it being largely finished as a global movement. A contention of the book is that liberalism was envisioned by some of its founders, such as Adam Smith, as being something that should be limited to a particular commercial sphere, with serious ethical concerns being more important as a social foundation. This resulted in a soft liberalism that was more functional, but over time this has morphed into a sort of hyperliberalism; one that has unraveled much of society and is currently eating itself.

I have often had the sense that living standards are declining in the West, that Western influence is declining and that the civilisation is itself fumbling on with no grand vision or purpose. This book helped to expose why this may be the case, and how views across the political spectrum are inadequate to explain these developments, let alone remedy them.

In a related convincing article, the author makes an excellent case for why our economic metrics mask declines in living standards in Western economies, something many of us intuitively feel but are unable to articulate clearly within the current liberal framework of economics. This book makes a similar case for military spending and strategy. There is a Western tendency to reify a certain kind of technology development and measures like GDP, a tendency that results in misleading geo strategic outlooks. This, the book argues, is why Russia —a country with the same nominal military spending as the UK— has been able to defeat NATO in Ukraine. A telling statistic referenced is that Russia produced more missiles in 2024 than all of NATO, but this reality will be concealed just by looking at relative military spending / GDP measures. What you buy matters! Hearing the recent commitment of European leaders to increase spending to 5% of GDP to please Daddy Trump was a particularly depressing development after reading this chapter, one that really falls into the book’s criticisms of modern liberal thought.

I found the explanation particularly enlightening of why liberalism, despite being a philosophy that is more concerned with institutional frameworks and is almost morally agnostic, tends to be deeply intolerant and imperialistic. Indeed, I was struck in university by how liberal thinkers like John Stuart Mill would speak of the need to spread liberal values in the Orient and put this down to his own prejudices at the time. Far from it, this book makes the case that this is baked into the intellectual movement, everyone needs to be liberal and increasingly more liberal over time. One need only look at the failed states across the world caused by the bastions of liberalism: Britain, France and the US, compared with the relatively peaceful legacies of historically illiberal nations like India and China to intuit this.

This book could be well received in countries like India, that may be unable to see the intellectual imperialism of Western thought seeping into their own countries and that are seeking an alternative to Western political and social concepts. China seems to have already undergone this journey as it has drifted from Western thinking (in its case Marxism) to an older Confucian set of ideals. This book would not provide a blueprint, but would help to identify when you are swimming in water defined by historic Western philosophical traditions and their limitations.

Not everyone will agree with the book’s claims, but I think all those looking for a fresh perspective and challenge to their own world views should definitely read it.

[Elliot · Rating 5 out of 5]

Liberalism is done - we need to grow up

(voice dictated with AI, edited by human brain... as I have a broken arm..)

There is a scene in HBO's Succession that haunted me, though I couldn't work out why. The scene involves the protagonist, the patriarch of a media empire, sitting in a karaoke room with his children. The whole show has been about these infantilised adult-children trying to prove themselves as impressive people, hoping to inherit the empire their father built. However, despite all their moralising and conceptualising, and their fighting over who deserves it most, their dad sits them down in this very unserious place and tells them straightforwardly they will never inherit this empire. He tells them:

"You are not serious people."

The succession will never happen because they aren't actually working towards it; they are being spoilt children who feel their proximity to the empire sufficiently and spiritually entitles them to it.

Reading The Collapse of Global Liberalism by Philip Pilkington is like being sat in that karaoke room, head full of plans and aspirations for society, making all these mechanisations for the future... only for the wisdom of reality and realpolitik to tell us, "this is nuts, this is childish, and this is profoundly unserious."

Pilkington shows us with concise and straightforward analysis that the Liberal emperor is truly and obviously not wearing any clothes, and the overarching malaise rife within Liberal societies is evidently the fault of the highly illogical beliefs of Liberalism. He establishes the historical development of Liberalism, then takes us through key areas of policy (demography, military, energy, foreign policy, etc.) and meticulously unveils the dysfunction of each. He then suggests common-sense policies to move us forward and help us become serious people again.

He is not overly prescriptive in his suggestions, and it is apparent he believes coming up with precise solutions will require objective based, rational collaboration not only across our own societies but also globally with existing post-liberal countries.

To take this book as a blueprint for the future would be folly. Pilkington's book is a plea towards civilisational thinking, and is first and foremost an accessible and forthright diagnosis of Liberalism - we are infected with it. Though the initial blow of the immensity of the critique is psychically painful, it allows the reader to grow up and put in the work to become... a serious person. He looks at the facts as they are and helps us see that our social order has become hysterical, contradictory, and illogical, and is collapsing (or likely, has collapsed) around us. He encourages us in a straightforward tone to be involved in the post-collapse efforts. It seems that the owl of Minerva has indeed spread its wings, and we should engage in the process of rebuilding our civilisation.

Excellent and immensely thought provoking book, thanks Philip!

[DJ · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a frustrating read/listen. There were several valid and interesting ideas littered throughout, but some of it screams of the late religious conservatives that created woke liberalism in the first place. Phil seemed like he was arguing against French liberalism more than American liberalism which was frustrating. Some of the prescriptions could definitely useful and necessary in terms of potential direction, but other parts are part of a weak form Christian paternalism that we just need to leave in the past at this point. People are not going to want to trade one moral lecture for another. With a particular example being his issues with drugs like weed specifically. He'll provide valid evidence of over use or overdose of this drug, but then use it argue it should be completely banned. However, at the same time he will it compare it to tobacco or alcohol which isn't banned but heavily regulated and controlled. He'll argue it's social encouraged for people to smoke drugs while not realizing that's a reaction to the heavy moralizing drug war that's been fought and lost for decades now. It's frustrating to see someone smart look at the problem and not think it needs a nuanced solution because both banning and careless use is not the answer bared out by the results of these competiting ideas. Not to mention his mention of the government regulating the entertainment industry which just screams of annoying Christian fundamentalism trying to grab power to force people back to it instead of trying to reform in any way whatsoever. The solution to woke liberalism is not Bush conservativism from 20 years ago sans the foreign policy. Hopefully some of these thinkers realize this sooner or later.

[Ryan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is remarkable for two reasons.

First, it puts liberalism in the right context historically -- like the cliche about fish not knowing what water is, it is so pervasive in modern society that it's hard to describe. As well, many of the key elements of modern society identified as achievements of liberalism actually pre-date it --scientific revolution, among other things. Liberalism is also not a reaction to communism or fascism; it's primarily a non-hierarchical way of organizing society.

Second, it makes the argument liberalism has already collapsed -- that it was failing starting in the 1970s, that the 2008 Great Financial Crisis was a clear inescapable end, and that the 2022 Russia-Ukraine war showed it is already clearly dead.

The book makes good arguments about what will come next, and somewhat less solid arguments about how the transition will happen. Most of these arguments have been made elsewhere, using the same data, but presenting them as "the end of liberalism" vs just the end of those trends individually makes for a more cohesive argument.

(You should read Charles Haywood's review for something more in-depth -- (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...)

[Paul · Rating 3 out of 5]

well written and probably an important book to read to better understand the challenges facing liberal ideology,read western civilization in general. However, it should clearly be read as a book written not only as a factbased approach to understanding and diagnosing, but Pilkington has clear strong ideological alignment with a post-liberal world order and some of the arguments in the book and real life example seem over baring and unidimensional set to fit his worldview.

[Jess · Rating 3 out of 5]

A salutary polemic. Was mostly either bored or unconvinced by P’s talk of the “liberal metaphysic,” but otherwise a nicely accessible synthesis of several different lines of argument, all of which merit an airing before anyone hoping to fashion a reality tunnel sufficient for our present state. Sort of John Gray plus John Mearsheimer plus a chastened, thoughtful economist such as…well, Pilkington himself.

[Graham · Rating 5 out of 5]

clear and readable analysis of where we are and why liberalism has had its day. lots to digest and not obvious in what direction we go now other than back to old school normality and common sense?

[Greg Sifferman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Outstanding book! Excellent analysis and insights of the disasters of liberalism.