Network pragmatism: Towards an open social economy

Democratic market society is facing a crisis. For forty years, the nation state has eroded as the central organizing principle of economy, identity, and institutions, losing its centrality to competing sources both externally and internally. Externally, globalization, cosmopolitanism and universal human rights, and internationalism shifted economy, identity, and polity from the state to the regional and global. Internally, the role of the national public fragmented and shrank along the same three dimensions. Deregulation and privatization (economy), pluralism, civil rights, and individualism (identity), and private ordering through contracts and property (delegating to private actors the domain of polity–use of coercion to achieve social order) mirrored the internationalizing effects. The economic nationalism embodied by the Trump and Brexit victories, as well as by the ascendance of more explicit majoritarian authoritarianism as in Russia, Turkey, or Hungary, offers an internally coherent alternative by inverting all three dimensions of markets, identity, and polity. The newly emerging economic nationalism is a fundamental rejection of the Davos Consensus: an intellectual congruence and political détente between neoliberalism, rights pluralism, and postmodernism that typified the United States and Britain since the 1970s, with clear echoes in other economically advanced democracies. Neoliberalism emphasized the free movement of goods, capital, and labor, freed from the fetters of social and national commitment, promising economic dynamism in exchange for economic security and enhanced consumer sovereignty and entrepreneurial freedom in exchange …