ABSTRACT
This chapter lays out the theoretical foundations for the rest of the book. It identifies elements of liberty and heterarchy in how premodern civilisations chastened political authority, before modern states’ expansive ideas of sovereignty encroached on societies. The leviathan's erosion of social pluralism has been complemented by a peculiarly modern, atomistic understanding of liberty. In both its rightist and its leftist versions, it empties much of human fulfilment. The chapter then traces alternative, pluralist currents of thinking and pulls them together into the core idea of the book: virtue-centred sphere pluralism. This framework links a micro-level understanding of virtuous engagement with multiple spheres of life, on the one hand, to a macro-level metaconstitutional principle of plural sovereignty, on the other hand. Virtue-centred sphere pluralism differs from liberal accounts of virtue, as well as from other nonliberal schools of thought such as integralism, communitarianism, and republicanism. It is especially well suited to designing a cosmopolitan global order that takes both liberty and tradition seriously.
