Introduction

In the heady days of 1989, with communism collapsing and the Cold War seemingly over, the political theorist Francis Fukuyama declared that we were witnessing the ‘end of history’, which had culminated in the triumph of liberal democracy and the free market, aided by a succession of powerful technologies. Fukuyama was drawing on the ideas of Hegel, but of course history didn't come to an end, and the Cold War was just sleeping, not dead.

Now we’re at a very different turning point, which many are trying to make sense of. I want to suggest that we can again usefully turn to Hegel, but this time to his idea that history evolves in dialectical ways, with successive phases of thesis, antithesis and synthesis. He (and Marx after him) implied that we should see history, and progress, not as a straight line but, rather, as a zigzag, shaped by the ways in which people bump into barriers or face disappointments and then readjust their course.

This framework helps to make sense of where we stand today. The ‘thesis’ that has dominated mainstream politics for the last generation – and continues to be articulated shrilly by many proponents – is the claim that the combination of globalisation, technological progress and liberalisation empowers the great majority. Some parts of the social innovation field allied with this claim, advocating the application of markets and managerial principles to ever more fields, confident that for every social problem there was a ready-made solution that needed only to be found and scaled.

The antithesis, which, in part, fuelled the votes for Brexit and Trump, as well as the rise of populist parties and populist authoritarian leaders in Europe and beyond, is the argument that this technocratic combination merely empowers a minority and disempowers the majority of citizens. The job of governments is therefore to take us back to a safer world, with secure boundaries, a strong sense of nationhood and an economy providing wellpaid jobs, predominantly in manufacturing.

A more progressive synthesis, which I outline, addresses the flaws of the thesis and the grievances of the antithesis in fields ranging from education and health to democracy and migration, dealing head on with questions of power and its distribution: questions both about who has power and about who feels powerful.