ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the idea of cultural commonwealths as an embodiment of human association and an alternative to the liberal focus on individuals, sovereign states, free-trade areas or some form of cosmopolitan world government. It examines that the liberal world order is grounded in a perpetual movement between the anarchy in the state of nature and the artifice of the social contract and of the international system, to which the alternative is cultural association The liberal world order builds on ideas of Niccolo Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes and Immanuel Kant. Edmund Burke accentuates the primacy of association over the sovereign power of the individual and of the collective under the aegis of an artificial social contract. The adoption of a Burkean model of cultural commonwealths would promote a plural search for the shared common good and substantive ends that can mediate between the individual and the collective will and thus help bind together members of diverse bodies and polities.
