Neoliberalism, Strong State and Democracy

The article serves to clarify the concept of the "strong state" in neoliberal thinking and its relationship to democracy. It is argued that the move away from neoclassical market theory has paved the way for the specifically neoliberal conception of the state and democracy. As a result, neoliberalism has at least a strained, sometimes even hostile, relationship with democracy when it comes to ensuring the efficiency and stability of the capitalist system. The article analyses Carl Schmitt's "authoritarian liberalism" and Friedrich A. Hayek's "dethronement of politics", the latter leading to various concepts of governance by "experts" at national, regional, and global levels who act as non-political "well-meaning dictators". The practical implications of this idea are then illustrated by the architecture of the European Union and its central bank. Finally, the neoliberal position on the state and democracy is confronted by Keynesianism, which is considered the archenemy of neoliberals.


Introduction
The aim of this article is to clarify the understanding of the state and democracy in neoliberal ideology, a topic I believe has been underestimated so far. Often used as a commonplace, the term neoliberalism is understood to mean deregulation, privatisation, and restriction of government (the restricted or minimal state) that is supposed to implement market fundamentalism. But both terms are imprecise and possibly misleadingly used. The combination of market fundamentalism with the minimal state does not establish a decisive difference from the laissez-faire liberalism and the prefix "neo" would be unnecessary. I will argue that the neoliberal conception of market fundamentalism entails a minimal democracy, not a minimal state. The neoliberal project by no means sees the self-regulation of free markets as assured if Qeios, CC-BY 4.0 · Article, June 21, 2023 Qeios ID: EEDNVQ.2 · https://doi.org/10.32388/EEDNVQ.2 1/18 our main task to explain.'.
The central idea from the early days of neoliberalism, according to which one cannot do economics like physics (Hayek 1945), was emphasised once again by Hayek in his Nobel Prize speech in 1974 (Hayek 1974): "Unlike the position that exists in the physical sciences, in economics and other disciplines that deal with essentially complex phenomena, the aspects of the events to be accounted for about which we can get quantitative data are necessarily limited and may not include the important ones. While in the physical sciences it is generally assumed, probably with good reason, that any important factor which determines the observed events will itself be directly observable and measurable, in the study of such complex phenomena as the market, which depend on the actions of many individuals, all the circumstances which will determine the outcome of a process, for reasons which … will hardly ever be fully known or measurable" (my accentuation). For him, everything else was 'scientism' that threatened the freedom of the market and man.
A milestone in the formation of the neoliberalism thought collective was the Lippmann Colloquium in 1938, which brought together several later leading neoliberals in Paris and is reported on in a book edited by Audier and Reinhoudt (2019).
Both the minutes of the participants' contributions and their interpretation by the editors of the book and the preface by Louis Rougier, one of the participants, show that the discussion was not about economic theory, but about the failure of the liberal state and its recasting. According to the participants, classical liberalism had failed because of its 'weak state', which had become the prey of social interests (mainly the labour movement and industrial associations), leading to growing public debt, market intervention and protectionism. The conceptual renewal of liberalism, therefore, had to begin with the role of the state.
The Lippmann Colloquium morphed into the Mont-Pèlerin Society, the neoliberal network founded by Hayek and Chicago economists in Switzerland in 1947 and still the most influential (for a history of the Society, see Butler, 2022). After the Second World War, the neoliberal thought collective fanned out globally, not at least facilitated by the emigration of leading neoliberals after Hitler's seizure of power in Germany in 1933 and the occupation of Austria in 1938, mostly to the United States, Great Britain, and Switzerland (Neck, 2014). The spread of neoliberal ideas encompassed universities, organisations and think tanks in a way that Mirowski (2014) not inaccurately calls the "Russian Doll": If you lift an upper figure, a smaller figure of the same sort inside is released, which has, in turn, another figure inside of it, and so on. Foucault (2008: 78) distinguishes between two interacting, main forms of neoliberalism: the German ordoliberalism of the Freiburg School (somewhat underplaying the role of the Austrians and Hayek) and the American neoliberalism. As for German ordoliberalism, Plehwe (2009:1) does note: "In Germany....most scholars will raise their eyebrows if ordoliberal inspirations of the social market economy are vilified as neoliberal." Internationally, however, this is seen differently, and German ordoliberals also saw and see themselves as part of the neoliberal thought collective. In the 1970s and 1980s, German ordoliberals investigated the extent of a possible congruence with the public choice theory of Gordon Tullock and James Buchanan to achieve a renaissance of ordoliberalism (see, among other authors: Krieger and Nientiedt 2022).
According to Foucault, the German ordoliberals were concerned with how to construct a federal state from previous nonsovereignty through the economy. The answer: through economisation -an idea we will encounter again in Hayek's "dethronement of politics" further on in section four. The emergence of American neoliberalism took place in an already given federal state with a libertarian, or better: anarcho-capitalistic founding history. From the point of view of some American economists, lawyers, and politicians, and with the help of Austrian (Hayek) and German (Röpke) neoliberals, however, the New Deal Keynesianism threatened to expand its sovereignty too much. The starting point was the Chicago School of Economics, which pursued a synthesis of neoliberal, neoclassical and legal approaches. The point of attack was first US competition policy, followed later by fiscal and monetary policy. Crouch (2011) makes clear that in contrast to German ordoliberalism, which wanted to align state competition policy with the ideal of perfect competition among many firms, in American neoliberalism this is not an indispensable precondition for the efficient market process. The market is judged in terms of its results. This establishes a link with Hayek's famous concept of the "competition as a discovery procedure" or the "process" mentioned in the quotation above. He claimed that "Nothing more could be discovered in markets' equilibrium states" (Hayek 1969(Hayek [2000).
Behind competition as a discovery procedure is the conception, more realistic than perfect competition, of markets that are characterised by constant changes on the supply and demand side, but especially by the tendency towards large firms because small firms are constantly eliminated in the competition. The impetus for this paradigm shift from the neoclassical to the neoliberal understanding of markets was the theory of the firm developed by Ronald Coase (1937), which is seen as an organisation that enters long-term contracts and can act strategically: it is able to influence the development of its markets to reduce uncertainty and transaction costs arising from imperfect competition, imperfect contracts, and moral hazard. The equilibrium models formulated and tested by the Chicago School showed that sufficient competition is possible with only three suppliers, so that up to this point intervention by competition policy should be considered unnecessary.
. The economists and legal theorists in Chicago replaced the notion of maximum consumer choice in the neoclassical model with the notion of 'welfare' (Crouch 2011): If fewer but more efficient firms increase welfare, then the consumer also has a greater choice. To put it another way: Neoliberal market fundamentalism differs from neoclassical fundamentalism in its acceptance and support of mergers and acquisitions, thus, in the words of Wren-Lewis (2017) serving the profit interests of 'big money' that exploit the idea of a unified global economic order. This creates an immanent contraction of state-centred neoliberalism. Modern corporations are becoming too big to fail simply because of their size. Increasing the amount of debt money to rescue asset and estate values ultimately endangers savings and pensions with inflation. Since the crises are almost constant, the public debt is also constantly increasing, which restricts the democratic state's room for manoeuvre.
The evolving agenda of neoliberal government, while constantly changing its objectives, ways, and methods over time, has always revolved around a core salvation narrative: Only an interdependent world economy with a universally applicable set of rules can secure freedom, prosperity, and -through both -peace. This programme applied in the interwar period, when leading neoliberals sought to attempt a reconstruction of the world economy with the gold standard, but even more so after the Second World War, when decolonisation led to a renewed fragmentation of the global economy; the 'old' adversary -the labour movement and its unions and socialism -got a new bedfellow: nationalist movements in the new nations, while market domination by transnational corporations became a non-issue. Neoliberals In 1929, Rüstow dealt at length with the position of a 'leader' whose coming he absolutely advocated as many other liberal intellectuals, albeit in close association with the 'masses' (Rüstow, 1929(Rüstow, [1959). In September 1932, in his lecture devoted to the conceptual renewal of liberalism, Rüstow called, as in 1929, for a strong state as distinct from classical liberalism. A strong state, he said, was independent and sovereign and had to stand 'above' the interests of society (Rüstow, 1932). Just over a month later in November 1932, the conservative legal theorist Carl Schmitt gave a lecture to the then most important German industrialists' association, the Langnamverein, with the telling title 'Healthy Economy and Strong State' (Schmitt, 1932). This lecture and his previous work (e.g., his political theology of 1922 (Schmitt, 1922(Schmitt, [1996) influenced the early neoliberals' understanding of the state and democracy. Factually, Schmitt was liberal with respect to the economy and civil society, and authoritarian with respect to the state order -just like most other early neoliberals.
The coincidence of the two lectures of 1932 was probably not coincidental, because since 1930, with the accession to power of the German Chancellor Brüning, that authoritarian state had prevailed in Germany which resorted to the emergency decrees by the Reich President made possible by the Constitution. Schmitt welcomed this authoritarian turn in further publications and described the constitutional role of the Reich President as a legal 'temporary dictator'. (Rüstow favoured the Reich Chancellor as a potential leader, to be overthrown only by a constructive vote of no confidence Schmitt's contribution to the emerging neoliberalism can be viewed from two theoretical perspectives: One concerns the analytical separation of liberalism and democracy, and the other the opposition of the private to the public. The starting point for the separation of liberalism and democracy in Schmitt's thought is the conviction that the state, and not the electorate, is to be considered the sovereign (Habermas, 2019: 42-46). The state appears as separate from society, and to possess as its "essence" a "secret" (which Foucault, 2008: 78-79 denies), which Schmitt sees as the inheritance of a right of its own historically created by the -divinely legitimised -monarchy. He concludes that this state, if it wanted to be sovereign, had to be strong to be able to act politically independently of society. Schmitt's famous phrase appears here, according to which only the state that rules over the state of exception is sovereign. Similarly, Rüstow argued that the state had become the prey of social interests in 19th-century liberalism, and that its capitulation to the participatory interests of labour had been responsible for the collapse of liberalism, and subsequently also for the collapse of international economic relations and the gold standard.
Schmitt argued in his lecture that the strong state should not intervene in any way in matters that genuinely belong to civil society. His conservatism was combined with the economic liberal view of leaving civil society largely free from state regulation and subjecting it to the spontaneous market mechanism. His affirmation of the duality of the strong and thus politically sovereign state and free economy summed up the goals he had defined earlier through his theory of the state and the constitution. 5 Liberalism and democracy are principles that cannot be placed on an equal footing constitutionally.
If this nevertheless happened, as in the Weimar Constitution, it was the cause of a weak state, because political liberalism 'arms' society with instruments (parties, parliaments, majority voting), which would lead to chaos and violence when the majority represented by the parties tried to enforce their specific interests. In contrast, Schmitt saw no contradiction between liberalism and autocracy. He, therefore, argued for a limitation of political liberalism, which is mainly constituted in parliamentary institutions of electoral democracy and parties. However, he did not reject certain forms of popular participation such as plebiscites and referendums, which prompted Habermas (1986Habermas ( : 1054 to call it Führerdemokratie because the 'Führer' Adolf Hitler also let the people vote from time to time, as did Mussolini in Italy, by the way. Christi (1998: 17) becomes even more metaphorical: 'Schmitt was now able to aim his attack at the democratic populace, which he would attempt to disarm by means of a democratically elected sheriff.' A concept of authoritarian liberalism appears to stabilise free markets and individual property rights, first in those exceptional situations where the appropriation of the state by mass democracy and its parties threatens this stability, and in his later writings as a permanent Führerstaat.
Schmitt's conservatism, however, reveals itself from a second perspective, the opposition of the private to the public. Like many of his time and thereafter, he drew a timeline from the Greek polis, where the private -the house economics (oikonomia)-was separated from the agora as the public space par excellence, through the Roman Republic to modern times. Both the Greek city republics and the Roman Republic also knew the person of the temporary dictator. In modernity, the private economy has long since left the narrow corset of a domestic economy with women, slaves, and animals and, as a society based on the division of labour, has become a quasi-public space that has necessarily become the object of political action as understood by Hannah Arendt (1958 [1998] Hayek's distance from Schmitt is that while the former saw the apolitical state as strong, the latter explicitly understood the strong state as a political state, because the democratic state leads to a neutralisation of the political (Schmitt 1922(Schmitt [1996).
Schmitt's change of sides after the National Socialists came to power, replacing temporary dictatorship with permanent dictatorship, later led Hayek to describe Schmitt as Adolf Hitler's 'crown lawyer' (Hayek (1967: 169 positioning the constitutional state as the protection of individual economic rights from the state. In contrast, Schmitt -until Hitler came to power -showed interest in the rule of law only on the condition that the sovereignty of state action was not impaired. As we shall see, Hayek's strong state is founded differently.

"Dethronement of Politics". Hayek's Contributions
Despite this considerable difference from Schmitt on questions of the rule of law, Hayek adopted the central ideas of Schmitt. These include the analytical separation of liberalism and democracy and the concept of an authoritarian liberalism that includes a 'liberal' transitional dictatorship, with which Schmitt initially combined the authoritarian state with a free economy, but which was also a theme of Rüstow (1929Rüstow ( [1959). This led Christi (1998: 22) to conclude 'In truth, Hayek owed much to Schmitt, more than he cared to recognise. Under the impression of the Nazi dictatorship, Hayek questioned Schmitt's concept of a politically strong state as a sufficient condition for securing free markets, without, however, ruling out a "transitional dictatorship" in principle (see above). In contrast, he saw something else as necessary, which is expressed in his well-known formulation of the Hayek's dictum of the strong because apolitical state gained great influence on neoliberal thinking after the Second World War. In the 1960s and 1970s, neoliberals saw their model in the British Crown Colony of Hong Kong, which did not have majority democracy, but did have free pricing, competition, free movement of capital and the British rule of law.
Democracy appeared in the understanding of neoliberalism as 'consumer democracy', i.e., voting with banknotes as ballots. Some neoliberals also repeatedly favoured a political vote weighted according to income and wealth where this appeared to be enforceable, for example in South Africa after the fall of apartheid and in Rhodesia. The British neoliberal William Hutt condemned the apartheid system in South Africa but considered it 'absolutely essential to renounce the principle of universal suffrage on a common roll and accept some form of weighted franchise' (Hutt, 1966: 48).

Interstate Federalism
Under the influence of Hayek and Robbins, neoliberals were generally sceptical about the possibility of an apolitical government at the national level, so that at this point the restriction of the nation-state by international arrangements or an order became the focus of their and others (e. g. Luigi Einaudi in Italy) further considerations.
Hayek saw the cause of the decline of classical liberalism, unlike Keynes (1926) in his philippic against laissez-faire liberalism, not in its social and economic devastations, but in the fact that liberal movements had allied themselves with the nationalist ones in order to seize the opportunity to implement a liberal economic programme at the national level, which had to entail protectionist interventions against other states and thus also political-military conflicts.
Hayek found in 1939: 11): '... in the national state, the submission to the will of a majority will be facilitated by the myth of nationality...' In his book "The Road to Serfdom" (Hayek 1944), he argued that there was little hope for an international order or lasting peace if each country was free to use any means it saw fit in its own immediate interest.
Hayek, but also von Mises (1943Mises ( [1990) and Robbins (1937) had -quite in the spirit of (re) establishing a global liberal order -already sketched out ideas in the 1930s and 1940s for an interstate arrangement of governing rules and institutions (Foucault's governmentality) with which the nation-state was to be kept in check or perhaps even overcome.
Robbins was convinced that only the transfer of sovereign rights -though not all -to an international state would be placemaking and economically progressive. Inspired by the American Constitution and Alexander Hamilton, he demanded (Robbins 1937: 245; author's accentuation): 'There must be neither alliance nor complete unification, but Federation; neither Staatenbund, nor Einheitsstaat, but Bundesstaat.' The questions of which competencies and which legitimacy the interstate governmentality, to use Foucault's terminology, should be endowed with, however, divided opinions (Masini 2022: 88, 90). For Robbins, federal authorities may decide whether to intervene in economics and to what extent and he did not exclude democratically legitimized decision-making.
According to Hayek (1939Hayek ( , 1944, the international authorities would only have the competencies to enforce the rule of law at the level of nation-states to protect individual activity, to abolish interventions of nation-states in the market process and not allow any for the supra-national level, as well as ensuring free trade and protecting the property rights of international investors. As Bonefeld (2015: 873) concludes, for Hayek: 'society is either governed by the liberal rule of law securing individual freedom or it is governed by the democratic principle of majority rule, leading to tyranny and planned chaos.' 9 Hayek himself (1944: 175): 'Neither an omnipotent super-state, nor a loose association of 'free nations', but a community of nations of free men must be our goal'. For both Robbins and Hayek, the resulting interdependent global order would ultimately be peace-making. Von Mises' thoughts went even further, considering a global customs union and currency necessary, and if this was not possible in the short term, then a federal union made up of a smaller group of states (Mises 1943(Mises [1990  acts technocratically and oversees the enforcement of the Treaties, the principle of subsidiarity, 10 which imposes limits on attempts at "ever closer union" but not on enlargements of the Union, a single market, and the right of a member state to reclaim sovereignty at any time. A particularly striking example of depoliticisation is the architecture of the monetary union, although it follows not Hayek, who rejected the idea of a common currency and favoured the competition of denationalized monies even of private character. Competition would stabilise prices and exchange rates. Milton Friedman, however, believed that a central bank that was super-independent in its monetary policy could achieve the same goal. The formal evidence was provided by Kydland and Prescott (1977) and Rogoff (1984) under a public choice approach. The magic word was "greater credibility" in financial markets, which a super-independent central bank would have.
Indeed, the European Central Bank (ECB) is constructed as an institution completely detached from governments and parliaments. However, national budgetary policies must be depoliticized equally, otherwise, contradictions between monetary and fiscal policies would emerge. The dethronement of fiscal policy follows Hayek's dictum of long-term rulebinding in place of discretionary policy. Examples are the Stability and Growth Pact and its tightening after the global financial crisis and the euro debt crisis. In this decoupling of high-powered money from social control, Schmitt and Hayek meet: the ECB appears as a well-meaning dictator in European monetary policy. And democracy appears as a 'marketcompliant' democracy.
On the other hand, this speaks against a neoliberal showcase project in its pure form. Plan B included democracies, and compromising is essential in democracies. Hence, the EU is a mixed system. As a regional integration community, it is fundamentally separable from the global economy, even if some sectors are excluded from it. The fact of being a regional integration group effectuated a split in the neoliberal movement: The constructivist wing around Hayek, Mises, and the German ordoliberals assumed the Treaties of Rome and the following ones could work as a gateway for imposing a purely neoliberal order inside the group of countries and separating it from the nationalism of new states after decolonisation (von Mises 1943(von Mises : 169ff [1990). The fundamentalist wing (among others, Haberler, Röpke, and influential officers in the GATTsecretariat) was against the Treaties of Rome, because in their eyes they impeded the creation of a multi-level global governance order. 11 The separation from the global economy entailed and entails further violations of neoliberal principles: structural and regional policies intervene in the market mechanisms of some sectors and their international competitive position through transfer payments (Common Agricultural Policy) and development support (Structural Funds). This is completely contrary to the basic neoliberal understanding of a free economy committed only to the signal system of free market prices. In an integration community with internal free trade, national and supranational investment promotion comes very close in its effect on infant-industry duties à la Friedrich List. And rigidly maintaining the principle of subsidiarity is no longer realistic, as Europe-wide financial crises cannot be handled by the nation-state alone -as the establishment of extra-budgetary funds at the EU level shows.

The Keynesian Understanding of State and Democracy
Neoliberal authors were always in disagreement with Keynes (Montani, 1984;Madra and Adaman, 2018;Guizzo 2019) not only with respect to the explanation of business instabilities, but also with respect to state and democracy.
Keynesianism was and is their archenemy, because its policy would assumingly undermine individual freedom and lead to serfdom. Carl Schmitt's authoritarian liberalism had still been grounded in the combination of two conservative prejudices, according to which only the restriction of party democracy combined with restrictive social programmes and budget surpluses protected free enterprise. This had turned out to be a fundamental misjudgement. Authoritarian policies do not necessarily safeguard the capitalist system. It was not party democracy but the German emergency decree policy in the Great Depression, which Schmitt had so praised, that deepened the economic depression, weakened the state through violence and chaos, led to the handover of power to the National Socialists and ultimately to the total state, which step by step imposed the liberal economic constitution with elements of direct control. Authoritarian liberalism also appeared in Hayek's convictions, who distanced himself from Schmitt's ingratiation with Adolf Hitler, but not from the bloody dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in Chile in the 1970s and 1980s. In contrast, Keynes concluded in his General Theory that in a monetary economy with fundamental uncertainty, no laissez-faire market system can ensure a stable level of aggregate demand that makes it profitable for firms to provide full employment, because economic agents hoard part of their available but necessary money stocks for full employment. Thus, in Keynesianism, a strong state can avoid major economic crises through expansionary fiscal and monetary policy measures, to stop the flight into promises of salvation and thus pacify the society. It is not certain that the authoritarian state pursues a better economic policy (the keywords here are corruption and nepotism). However, an active role of the state has been vehemently rejected by most neoliberal authors as proto-socialist, according to Hayek 1944Hayek [2017 as a step on the 'road to serfdom', as it violates the principle of spontaneous order as a limit to exogenous control. Keynes, who was always committed to the liberal democracy, or, as I would call it, democratic liberalism of his home country, attempted 'to make the private property system work better.' (Keynes 1939(Keynes [2013), while preserving the functioning of democracy (Waligorski, 1994;Panico and Piccioni, 2016). Buchanan and Wagner (1977: 23,89 and passim) accused Keynes of carelessness about budget deficits and thus of undermining democracy through permanent public debt. Politicians -a basic thesis of NPE -would always tend to spend more than they could take in in a democracy in their effort to win elections. This criticism appears surprisingly in the light of the too-big-to-fail phenomenon -a consequence of the neoliberal market theory mentioned in section two. They continue to argue that the persistent tendency to create budget deficits and national debt through excessive spending would not occur under a government led by an independent elite committed only to the public interest, or alternatively through a deficit ban.
Hayek's 'dethronement of politics' shines through in this argument.
Keynes was aware of the importance of experts in policymaking, but without adopting the neoliberal concept of depoliticisation. His attitude towards independent expert governments can be exemplified by the position of a central bank.
In a critical review of monetary policy proposals by the English Labour Party (Keynes, 1932), he argued that the central bank should act independently in terms of personnel and administration because it has expert knowledge of which a parliament would understand 'less than nothing'. He concluded (following quotations in Keynes, 1932: 131): "The less direct the democratic control and the more remote the opportunities for parliamentary interference with banking policy the better it will be." But he had also accepted the Labour Party's proposal that "The management of the Bank should be ultimately subject to the Government of the day and the higher appointments should require the approval of the Chancellor of the Exchequer." Personal, administrative, and executive independence, but not in objectives and priorities, provides the central bank's  (Rogoff 1985). He compared alternative models in which the model he favours has the highest monetary policy effectiveness in reducing the influence of 'dynamic inconsistency' in the behaviour of central bank managers and achieves the highest credibility in the financial sector. His analysis led to proposals of attributing to central banks forms of independence that were previously excluded, like that on goals and priorities (Panico and Piccioni, 2016:191). The institutional design concept has probably exerted great influence on the conceptualisation of the ECB's independence. It produced a kind of 'benevolent dictator in control of government policy' (Bibow 2010: 26), which responds to permanent budget deficits and ever-increasing public debt with lower interest rates and bond-buying programmes like in the euro debt crisis. The 'Whatever it Takes' speech of the ECB's then President Mario Draghi on 26 July 2012 was close to this role.

Summary and Concluding Remarks
For neoliberalism, the state is necessarily an active agent in socio-economic affairs in contrast to its passive role in the laissez-faire era. Moreover, neoliberalism is in tension with liberal democracy because of its authoritarian tendency to favour technocratic management of the economy to facilitate sustainable profit accumulation for corporate capital. The guiding principle of neoliberalism is not the minimal state, but the minimal democracy. As democracy is accepted, then in its market-compliant form. The economic basis of the neoliberal conceptualization of state and democracy is a theory of the market that differs from the classical and neoclassical theories: Companies are perceived as strategically acting organisations that influence the market outcome. This opens the way for transnational (financial) corporations to become too big to fail and to blackmail politics for financial support in case of crises. By sheer size or presence in different states, they are also able to subjugate the policy space of small and medium-sized states to their profit interests -the Google-Ireland case provides a good example. As partners of governments and central banks of large states as well as of international organisations, they can participate in the enforcement of a global legal framework to ensure the efficiency and political stability of the capitalist order.
Thus, a political economy approach can be identified as neoliberal, which aims at transferring formerly sovereign functions at the national level to independent expert bodies either globally ("Plan A") or, if not possible, with only several nationstates ("Plan B"). The envisaged institutional order implies a limitation of majority democracy in favour of expert bodies that, although impersonal, act as 'well-meaning dictators.
At the global level, Plan A already seemed almost realised once after the collapse of the socialist system, which Francis Fukuyama (1992) expressed with almost Hegelian force in his famous thesis of the "end of history": there are no longer any systemic contradictions in principle, but only implementation deficiencies in the only remaining system -victorious capitalism, which -as in the old Habsburg Empire -also ensures peace among nations. In Hegel's philosophy of history, it is the final synthesis to which there is no longer any antithesis and thus no regression. This, like so much in occidental modernity, is only easily identified as salvation-historical thinking with a secularised theological background. In fact, after many global crises, this idyll has proven to be less robust in the confrontation with other cultural circles and their specific Weltanschaungen, which is not only due to implementation deficiencies in the approach to the salvation-historical ideal but provokes regressive responses. An example is the return of the religious not only in the Islamist world but also in the growth of evangelicals in the USA and South America, which aims directly at the heart of liberal modernity committed to rational enlightenment. Similarly, the appeal of authoritarian over democratic liberalism is growing in the core countries of Western capitalism (USA and EU). In the EU ("Plan B"), authoritarian liberalism, coupled with a reluctance to cede sovereignty to EU bodies, is gaining renewed appeal, not only in Poland and Hungary, but also in the national movements of globalisation losers. In already authoritarian states such as Russia (Snyder 2018) and China (Weber 2017;Harvey 2021), it is noticeable that the state and constitutional theory of Carl Schmitt has gained adherents. It should be a warning to us. 5 In this paragraph, I follow Christi, 1998. 6 Schmitt as well as the philosopher Martin Heidegger were among those whose intellectual arrogance tempted them to want to lead the "Führer", which they then failed to do. Both were stripped of the functions they had initially been able to secure at about the same time -in the mid-1930s. 7 The text appeared in 1982 for the first time in an on-volume edition, which included all three parts, but was written 1978.