Culture, Institutions, and Markets: Insights from the Experience of Ordo-Liberalism

National Populism and Immediate Democracy

The Age of Enlightenment: Revolution in Thought and Politics, and European Thinkers

This research explores the fundamental transition of European civilization from the theocentric constraints of the Middle Ages to the intellectual liberation of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. It examines how the shift toward humanism, rationalism, and empirical science dismantled the "Dark Ages" and established...

Populism, Counter-Liberalism and Charisma

This paper attempts to deploy - and adapt - the classical concept of charisma in the context of contemporary populism. The current wave of populisms of various kinds in Western representative democracies throws up challenges for political sociology in understanding how leaders seek to legitimize themselves; for ins...

The Origins of Neoliberal Authoritarianism

This essay intervenes in contemporary debates around neoliberalism and its relationship to both authoritarianism and social democracy. It does so by reconstructing the debate on Thatcherism that took place between Stuart Hall and Bob Jessop in the 1980s. Both authors provide materialist analyses of Thatcherism that p...

Jacques Maritain and the Democratic Project of the American Founding

Attacks on liberalism and liberal democracy are seemingly legion in the present day, with these attacks often culminating in condemnation of the American Founding. As a leading proponent of the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas in the twentieth century, Jacques Maritain’s approach of combining the Scholastic tradition w...

How to build inclusive institutions: collective governance in global history

Abstract The 18th century regime of electoral republicanism within nation-states, later rebranded as ‘democracy’, appears to be threatened around the world. To rebuild democracy on sounder bases, theorists and practitioners alike emphasize the value of inclusive and participatory institutions. But how should these inst...