Introduction

This chapter introduces the book's animating questions. Despite a widespread assumption that global problems demand global solutions, there is a shortage of serious thought about metaconstitutional design for world order. Enthusiasts of technocratic globalisation treat governance as a merely functional matter. Traditionalists and libertarians prefer to ignore the issue or to thwart the arrival of global institutions, rather than designing them in accordance with their own values. The stakes are high, with a risk of replicating the drawbacks of the modern nation-state. Three troubling trends converge: ever more state intrusion into society, a concentration of social power in the educated new class, and a mismatch between the political honeycomb of statehood and cross-border world society. The solution will not lie in a conventional liberal focus on rights, international law, and governance by experts in supranational institutions. Rather, this book seeks inspiration in forgotten traditions of pluralist political thought. Counterintuitively, a scaling up into global order may hold out the best prospect of rearranging ideas about state power, and restoring liberty after modernity. Liberty, tradition, and cosmopolitanism can be reconciled in a new settlement beyond the nation-state.