This is one of the most serious conversations available about what has been lost and what might replace it. Raine’s diagnosis is exactly right: neoliberalism was the concerted disassembly of emancipatory subjects, and the destruction of the miners’ movement, the anti-colonial revolutionary projects, the institutional infrastructure of working-class life was a project rather than an accident. Tooze’s Keynesian response is honest about its limitations. What neither can quite reach is the institutional design question, and I want to suggest that the reason is cartographic rather than intellectual.
Every political compass available to the mainstream conversation maps two poles: democratic dispersion of power at one end, authoritarian concentration at the other. The Cartesian plane this produces can map the distance between social democracy and neoliberalism, between Corbyn and Thatcher, between Keynes and Hayek. What it cannot map is the direction in which every Western democracy is simultaneously being pulled: toward the concentration of economic power in fewer and fewer hands. The oligarchy pole has no axis on the standard compass. The pleonexia principle — the accumulation dynamic — is invisible on the standard map. It is the blind spot built into the instrument of analysis.
Add the third vertex and the map changes entirely. The triangle that results from placing the oligarchy pole alongside the democracy pole and the tyranny pole makes visible what the Cartesian plane cannot see: the simultaneous drift of every Western democracy toward the convergence of the tyranny-oligarchy base, where the interests of the economic class that has captured the political system align with the authoritarian instruments required to maintain that capture against the democratic majority’s persistent preference for something different. The defeat of the Green New Deal becomes analytically predictable on the triangle. It is the oligarchy pole exercising the political power that the convergence of economic dominance and institutional capture had given it. You cannot see this on the Cartesian compass. On the triangle it is the first thing you see.
There is an image from the sortition tradition that names the specific epistemic mechanism. A shard of glass in the eye does not blind you. It refracts. Everything you see is slightly wrong in a consistent direction, and the consistency of the distortion prevents you from noticing it as distortion, because every reference point you use to check your vision is subject to the same refraction. The standard political compass is the shard. The invisibility of the oligarchy pole is the refraction.
Raine asks the right question: in the rubble we inhabit, what kinds of possible freedom can we imagine? The answer the conversation cannot reach within its vocabulary is institutional rather than subjective. The search for the replacement emancipatory subject — who replaces the miners, who replaces the car workers — reproduces the assumption that history requires a specific social formation to carry the universal project. The institutional answer is different: the jubilee resets accumulated advantage whether or not there is a labour movement capable of demanding it. The sortition council — the random selection of citizens for governance roles that Athens practised, that contemporary citizens’ assemblies have demonstrated is workable at scale in Ireland, France, Belgium, and Scotland — produces genuinely representative deliberation whether or not the working class is organised enough to elect its representatives. The institution does not depend on the subject. The subject is produced by the institution over time. Athens did not produce the sortition citizen and then build the kleroterion. The kleroterion produced the sortition citizen.
Raine puts the sharpest challenge to Tooze: managing people only works while you can deliver the goods, and when you cannot, you have lost the thing actually worth wanting — a politics of freedom, not a politics of provision. Sortition is the institutional answer to this specific challenge. A randomly selected legislative chamber cannot be bought through campaign finance, cannot be gerrymandered, does not develop the career interests that make professional politicians systematically responsive to concentrated economic power rather than to the majority of their constituents. Gilens and Page documented in 2014 that American legislative outcomes correlate with the preferences of economic elites and are essentially uncorrelated with majority preferences. That is the structural consequence of a governance architecture in which economic power can be converted into political power without institutional limit. Sortition is the institutional design that breaks the conversion mechanism.
The vocabulary of recovery is simpler than this conversation suggests. It requires only the addition of the missing axis to the map. With the oligarchy pole visible, the direction of travel is clear, the destination is nameable, and the institutional route is documented.
Fascinating and thought provoking as ever. I think you underestimate the importance of growth though. The rising tide produced by growth eases policy choices, including on distributional issues.
Wonderful conversation; makes me so glad that I subscribe to support your work.
This: "Since it’s very hard for me to meaningfully dissociate myself from Western civilization, I think of it as an everyday project of trying not to be complicit in something bad — an everyday project of waking up and trying to be a decent human being, not a sexist, not a racist, listening to critiques when they happen and taking them seriously.",
and this: "In Gaza we’re talking about the illegitimate imposition, in the twenty-first century, of a settler-colonial project dating to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. And there I say: no. Full stop. Not in my name, not with my support, not with my tax dollars, not with my acceptance or approval — and I won’t be silent about it either."
Thank you for articulating this for me. I have struggled to do so.
Anybody into big history takes will eat this up. Way too much to digest in one go for me but great stuff.
This last question: why has the self-regulation and the restraint of Western civilization broken down? (Or why is it breaking down, again, I'd want to hasten to add.) My obvious answer would be the China shock and the colossal threats of climate change appear to me more than sufficient causes. It's reactionary elite panic in the face of an existential crisis.
Western civ, or modernization (to strip it of some of its cultural baggage), and this might be true of the whole enlightenment project going back to the 16th-17th centuries, cannot resolve its own internal conflicts and contradictions. Its ambitions to achieve self-actualizing independence, monopoly, and/or domination on the one hand and at the same time cultivate general human development, democracy, peace and prosperity. The latter promotes the former and the former is always thwarting full realization of the latter.
There are the seeds of numerous fascinating discussions in your dialogue. Thanks.
Gosh, I can’t remember the last time I read something so stimulating and challenging as this discussion. It’s completely changed how I feel about the so-called superiority of western civilisation.
This is one of the most serious conversations available about what has been lost and what might replace it. Raine’s diagnosis is exactly right: neoliberalism was the concerted disassembly of emancipatory subjects, and the destruction of the miners’ movement, the anti-colonial revolutionary projects, the institutional infrastructure of working-class life was a project rather than an accident. Tooze’s Keynesian response is honest about its limitations. What neither can quite reach is the institutional design question, and I want to suggest that the reason is cartographic rather than intellectual.
Every political compass available to the mainstream conversation maps two poles: democratic dispersion of power at one end, authoritarian concentration at the other. The Cartesian plane this produces can map the distance between social democracy and neoliberalism, between Corbyn and Thatcher, between Keynes and Hayek. What it cannot map is the direction in which every Western democracy is simultaneously being pulled: toward the concentration of economic power in fewer and fewer hands. The oligarchy pole has no axis on the standard compass. The pleonexia principle — the accumulation dynamic — is invisible on the standard map. It is the blind spot built into the instrument of analysis.
Add the third vertex and the map changes entirely. The triangle that results from placing the oligarchy pole alongside the democracy pole and the tyranny pole makes visible what the Cartesian plane cannot see: the simultaneous drift of every Western democracy toward the convergence of the tyranny-oligarchy base, where the interests of the economic class that has captured the political system align with the authoritarian instruments required to maintain that capture against the democratic majority’s persistent preference for something different. The defeat of the Green New Deal becomes analytically predictable on the triangle. It is the oligarchy pole exercising the political power that the convergence of economic dominance and institutional capture had given it. You cannot see this on the Cartesian compass. On the triangle it is the first thing you see.
There is an image from the sortition tradition that names the specific epistemic mechanism. A shard of glass in the eye does not blind you. It refracts. Everything you see is slightly wrong in a consistent direction, and the consistency of the distortion prevents you from noticing it as distortion, because every reference point you use to check your vision is subject to the same refraction. The standard political compass is the shard. The invisibility of the oligarchy pole is the refraction.
Raine asks the right question: in the rubble we inhabit, what kinds of possible freedom can we imagine? The answer the conversation cannot reach within its vocabulary is institutional rather than subjective. The search for the replacement emancipatory subject — who replaces the miners, who replaces the car workers — reproduces the assumption that history requires a specific social formation to carry the universal project. The institutional answer is different: the jubilee resets accumulated advantage whether or not there is a labour movement capable of demanding it. The sortition council — the random selection of citizens for governance roles that Athens practised, that contemporary citizens’ assemblies have demonstrated is workable at scale in Ireland, France, Belgium, and Scotland — produces genuinely representative deliberation whether or not the working class is organised enough to elect its representatives. The institution does not depend on the subject. The subject is produced by the institution over time. Athens did not produce the sortition citizen and then build the kleroterion. The kleroterion produced the sortition citizen.
Raine puts the sharpest challenge to Tooze: managing people only works while you can deliver the goods, and when you cannot, you have lost the thing actually worth wanting — a politics of freedom, not a politics of provision. Sortition is the institutional answer to this specific challenge. A randomly selected legislative chamber cannot be bought through campaign finance, cannot be gerrymandered, does not develop the career interests that make professional politicians systematically responsive to concentrated economic power rather than to the majority of their constituents. Gilens and Page documented in 2014 that American legislative outcomes correlate with the preferences of economic elites and are essentially uncorrelated with majority preferences. That is the structural consequence of a governance architecture in which economic power can be converted into political power without institutional limit. Sortition is the institutional design that breaks the conversion mechanism.
The vocabulary of recovery is simpler than this conversation suggests. It requires only the addition of the missing axis to the map. With the oligarchy pole visible, the direction of travel is clear, the destination is nameable, and the institutional route is documented.
https://squirrelbrain77.substack.com/p/the-shard-in-the-eye
Fascinating and thought provoking as ever. I think you underestimate the importance of growth though. The rising tide produced by growth eases policy choices, including on distributional issues.
Wonderful conversation; makes me so glad that I subscribe to support your work.
This: "Since it’s very hard for me to meaningfully dissociate myself from Western civilization, I think of it as an everyday project of trying not to be complicit in something bad — an everyday project of waking up and trying to be a decent human being, not a sexist, not a racist, listening to critiques when they happen and taking them seriously.",
and this: "In Gaza we’re talking about the illegitimate imposition, in the twenty-first century, of a settler-colonial project dating to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. And there I say: no. Full stop. Not in my name, not with my support, not with my tax dollars, not with my acceptance or approval — and I won’t be silent about it either."
Thank you for articulating this for me. I have struggled to do so.
Thanks a lot for posting this comprehensive talk!
Anybody into big history takes will eat this up. Way too much to digest in one go for me but great stuff.
This last question: why has the self-regulation and the restraint of Western civilization broken down? (Or why is it breaking down, again, I'd want to hasten to add.) My obvious answer would be the China shock and the colossal threats of climate change appear to me more than sufficient causes. It's reactionary elite panic in the face of an existential crisis.
Western civ, or modernization (to strip it of some of its cultural baggage), and this might be true of the whole enlightenment project going back to the 16th-17th centuries, cannot resolve its own internal conflicts and contradictions. Its ambitions to achieve self-actualizing independence, monopoly, and/or domination on the one hand and at the same time cultivate general human development, democracy, peace and prosperity. The latter promotes the former and the former is always thwarting full realization of the latter.
There are the seeds of numerous fascinating discussions in your dialogue. Thanks.
Gosh, I can’t remember the last time I read something so stimulating and challenging as this discussion. It’s completely changed how I feel about the so-called superiority of western civilisation.