Adrian Pabst
Biographic Data
| ID | 1600564 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Adrian Pabst |
| GIVEN NAMES | Adrian |
| FAMILY NAME | Pabst |
| SIGNATURE | PABST A |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Kent |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3153-1598 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 43 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 26 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 42 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2007 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
The New Era: What Comes After the Self-Erosion of Liberalism
The Constitution of Political Economy: Polity, Society and the Commonweal
The two dominant conceptions of political economy are based on either reducing political decisions to rational-choice reasoning or, conversely, reducing economic structures and phenomena to the realm of politics. In this book, Adrian Pabst and Roberto Scazzieri contend that neither conception is convincing and argue for a fundamental rethinking of political economy. Developing a new approach at the interface of economic theory and political thoug…
Renewing the West’s Unique Universalism
Civilization is the new pivot of geopolitics. Brexit, Trump’s victory and the resurgence of Russia, China, and India have put culture and civilizational identity at the heart of both domestic politics and foreign policy. From identity politics that is sweeping much of the West to the pushback against Western universalism in much of the non-Western world, civilizational norms are as important as military might and economic prosperity. \n \nWith NA…
The Politics of Belonging: How “Save the Parish” Is Challenging Church and State
When in the late 1960s and 1970s secularism seemed triumphant, Telos was one of the few loci publishing contributions from skeptical voices. The contradictions of modern rationalism diagnosed by Adorno and Horkheimer threatened rational thinking by reducing reason to scientistic fanaticism in hock to a secular metaphysics of infinite progress. As the reality of “actually existing socialism” unfolded in the East, the moral bankruptcy of the secula…
Dereliction of Duty: How the Retreat from Afghanistan Accelerates the Self-Erosion of the West
The Western defeat in Afghanistan is profound. Comparisons with the fall of Saigon in 1975 miss the point that America and its allies were not defeated on the battlefield but lost their moral resolve and surrendered to the enemy that took the country and Kabul without much of a fight. Such was the incompetence and negligence involved in pulling out that warnings about fleeing Afghanistan went unheeded, intelligence was inadequate or ignored, plan…
The Post-Liberal Moment
Brexit, Trump, the Gilets Jaunes, and now Boris Johnson's victory: the last four years have seen a popular revolt against the economic and social liberalism that dominated Western politics for the past forty years. In the United Kingdom, the upheaval has opened up a post-liberal space in which to renew the country's democracy and economy. The EU referendum result revealed deep divisions of geography, age, class, and culture that developed for dec…
Death of Utopia
Death of Utopia The outbreak of the COVID-19 crisis has exposed the limits of the dominant ideologies. Western liberals champion global solutions to unlock ever-more individual liberty, whereas communities want greater state protection and social solidarity. National populists or authoritarians—from the United States to Brazil, Eastern Europe, India, and China—offer simplistic slogans and blame foreign forces, whereas countries need real leadersh…
The Resurgence of Great Power Politics and the Rise of the Civilizational State
The twentieth century marked the downfall of empire and the triumph of the nation-state. National self-determination, rather than dynastic inheritance or imperial rule, became the prime test of state legitimacy. After the end of the Cold War, the dominant elites in the West believed that the Western model of the nation-state had defeated all rival forms of political organization. The worldwide spread of liberal values would entrench an era of Wes…
Demons of Liberal Democracy
Virtue, Production, and the Politics of Commerce: Genovesi's "Civil Economy" Revisited
Antonio Genovesi's economic-political treatise on civil economy was a major contribution to debates in the mid-and late eighteenth century on the nature of political economy. At that time, Genovesi's book was extensively translated and discussed across continental Europe and Latin America, where it was read as a foundational text of political economy similar to Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations. The aim of this article is to contribute to the analys…
Liberal World Order and Its Critics: Civilisational States and Cultural Commonwealths
Liberals blame the retreat of the liberal world order on populists at home and authoritarian leaders abroad. Only liberalism, so they claim, can defend the rules-based international system against demagogy, corruption and nationalism. This provocative book contends that the liberal world order is illiberal and undemocratic – intolerant about the cultural values of ordinary people in the West and elsewhere while concentrating power in the hands of…
Obligations written in the heart’: The primacy of association and the renewal of political theology
Fellowship of Love: Martin Luther King's Legacy and the Renewal of the Labor Tradition
In his other speeches and writings, King invokes some of America’s best traditions to articulate a vision of national renewal that has universal significance precisely because it emerges from a particular place with people bound together by a shared purpose: Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy [...] We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline [...] Again and again we must rise to the majesti…
War of Position”: Liberal Interregnum and the Emergent Ideologies
What are the leading forces and ideas that are shaping our age? In the West, a decade of financial disruption, austerity, and stagnant wages has produced a popular rejection of market fundamentalism that prevailed for over forty years. Mass immigration and multiculturalism have contributed to rapid changes in both family and community life that leave many people feeling dispossessed or even humiliated. Unresponsive government is exacerbating peop…
On the Convergence of Liberalism and Populism
That liberals can be populist and authoritarian is not new. What might be novel is the collusive convergence of liberal ideology with the politics of sophistry and even neo-fascist ideas. The reason is that liberalism's anthropological pessimism and techno-scientific optimism are disconnected from reality in ways that require an ever-greater voluntarist pursuit of power combined with wealth and social status. As a result we are now seeing an ultr…
Liberal World Order and Its Critics: Civilisational States and Cultural Commonwealths
Encounter Between Eastern Orthodoxy and Radical Orthodoxy: Transfiguring the World Through the Word
Criminalising the Client: Institutional Change, Gendered Ideas and Feminist Strategies
In 1998, Sweden was the first country in the world to criminalise the purchase of sexual services, but not the sale of sex. The law represented a new prostitution regime that problematised power re
Common Good Politics and the Renewal of the Left
British Prime Minister Theresa May's decision to call a snap election for June 8, 2017, is not primarily about “preparing for Brexit” and “strengthening the government's negotiating position” vis-à-vis the rest of the European Union, as she claimed when making the surprise announcement on April 18. Rather, the over-riding rationale seems to be about achieving a solid parliamentary majority that will give her a democratic mandate, so that she is n…
On the Retreat of Liberalism and the Renewal of Politics
The Center Has Not Held Across the West, the old liberal center is coming apart and the extremes are resurgent. A decade of financial disruption, austerity, and stagnant wages has produced a popular rejection of market fundamentalism. Mass immigration, multiculturalism, and weaker civic ties have left many people feeling dispossessed and humiliated. Part of the revolt against the elite consensus comes from economic and cultural insecurity, and it…
Fall and Redemption: The Romantic Alternative to Liberal Pessimism
From Machiavelli via Hobbes, Locke and Grotius to J.S. Mill and John Rawls, the liberal (and republican) tradition pivots about the primacy of the individual over all forms of human association and allied to this primacy is the replacing of notions of substan¬tive goodness or truth with the ultimate foundation of society upon subjective rights secured by the power of the central state. Those rights are grounded in the human will and the artifice …
Postliberalism: The New Centre Ground of British Politics
Brexit and support for anti‐establishment insurgencies suggest that British politics is moving away from the old left–right opposition towards a new divide between the defenders and detractors of progressive liberalism. As this article suggests, progressive liberalism differs significantly from both classical and new liberalism. It fuses free‐market economics with social egalitarianism and identity politics. Both the hard left and the radical rig…
Politics of Virtue: Post-Liberalism and the Human Future
Contemporary politics is dominated by a liberal creed that champions ‘negative liberty’ and individual happiness. This creed undergirds positions on both the right and the left – free-market capitalism, state bureaucracy and individualism in social life. The triumph of liberalism has had the effect of subordinating human association and the common good to narrow self-interest and short-term utility. By contrast, post-liberalism promotes individua…
The Political Economy of Constitution
The distinction between constitution, as the set of fundamental normative premises ensuring the cohesion of any given polity, and contract, as the formal covenant agreed upon by the relevant stakeholders in that polity, is central to political economy. This paper outlines a conceptual framework for the political economy of constitution based on the above distinction. Our argument is that constitution in the material sense, that is, as a relativel…
Brexit, Post-liberalism, and the Politics of Paradox
Brexit is part of a tectonic shift in Western politics. An alliance of socialists and conservatives rejected the status quo of remote bureaucracy, mass immigration, and multiculturalism in favor of more self-government and the protection of settled ways of life. A similar realignment is underway in Western countries where the establishment is threatened either by old nationalist parties or by new, insurgent movements that are often far-right on q…
The secularism of post-secularity: Religion, realism, and the revival of grand theory in IR
How to theorise religion in International Relations (IR)? Does the concept of post-secularity advance the debate on religion beyond the 'return of religion' and the crisis of secular reason? This article argues that the post-secular remains trapped in the logic of secularism. First, a new account is provided of the 'secularist bias' that characterises mainstream IR theory: (a) defining religion in either essentialist or epiphenomenal terms; (b) p…
Is Liberal Democracy Sliding into ‘Democratic Despotism’
Post‐democracy and cognate concepts suggest that the postwar period of democratisation has given way to a concentration of power in the hands of small groups that are unrepresentative and unaccountable, as exemplified by the rise of multinational corporations and their influence on democratic politics. This article goes further to argue that this does not fully capture the triple threat facing liberal democracy: first, the rise of a new oligarchy…
Postliberalism: The New Centre Ground of British Politics
Brexit and support for anti‐establishment insurgencies suggest that British politics is moving away from the old left–right opposition towards a new divide between the defenders and detractors of progressive liberalism. As this article suggests, progressive liberalism differs significantly from both classical and new liberalism. It fuses free‐market economics with social egalitarianism and identity politics. Both the hard left and the radical rig…
The political economy of civil society
The Resurgence of Great Power Politics and the Rise of the Civilizational State
The twentieth century marked the downfall of empire and the triumph of the nation-state. National self-determination, rather than dynastic inheritance or imperial rule, became the prime test of state legitimacy. After the end of the Cold War, the dominant elites in the West believed that the Western model of the nation-state had defeated all rival forms of political organization. The worldwide spread of liberal values would entrench an era of Wes…
War of Position”: Liberal Interregnum and the Emergent Ideologies
What are the leading forces and ideas that are shaping our age? In the West, a decade of financial disruption, austerity, and stagnant wages has produced a popular rejection of market fundamentalism that prevailed for over forty years. Mass immigration and multiculturalism have contributed to rapid changes in both family and community life that leave many people feeling dispossessed or even humiliated. Unresponsive government is exacerbating peop…
Athens, Jerusalem, and Rome: A Reply to Luciano Pellicani
According to Luciano Pellicani, the US culture wars are grounded in a perpetual struggle between the enlightening forces of reason and democracy, on the one hand, and the dark forces of faith and theocracy, on the other hand. Accordingly, he claims that the Puritans sought to establish a medieval collectivist theocracy, not a modern market democracy, and that the US ‘culture war’ between enlightened secular liberalism and reactionary religious co…
The Primacy of Relation over Substance and the Recovery of a Theological Metaphysics
This essay concerns the problem of individuation in metaphysics in relation to the question of individuality in politics. It rejects the assumption in much of ancient, modern, and contemporary philosophy and theology that unity and diversity are opposed and that this opposition produces conflict and violence. The proposed alternative is a metaphysics and politics of relationality. This alternative is not so much indebted to Aristotle, but instead…
Encounter Between Eastern Orthodoxy and Radical Orthodoxy: Transfiguring the World Through the Word
Contents: Foreword, David Bentley Hart Introduction: transfiguring the world through the word, Adrian Pabst and Christoph Schneider Part I Sophia, Theology and Philosophy: Glorification of the Name and the grammar of wisdom (Sergii Bulgakov and Jean-Marc Ferry), Antoine Arjakovsky Commentary, Rowan Williams Sophiology and theurgy: the new theological horizon, John Milbank Commentary, Antoine Ajakovsky. Part II Sophia, Politics and Ecclesiology: T…
Modern Sovereignty in Question: Theology, Democracy and Capitalism
This essay argues that modern sovereignty is not simply a legal or political concept that is coterminous with the modern nation‐state. Rather, at the theoretical level modern sovereign power is inscribed into a wider theological dialectic between “the one” and “the many”. Modernity fuses juridical‐constitutional models of supreme state authority with a new, “biopolitical” account of power whereby natural life and the living body of the individual…
The Crisis of Capitalist Democracy
Since the onset of Great Recession that was triggered by the credit crunch in August 2007, both academic and public debate in the West has centered on the failure of free-market capitalism and the return of democratic statehood. This essay argues that such and similar accounts of the current crisis ignore the collusion of state and market and the convergence of democracy and capitalism. The real issue is neither the capture of states by corporati…
Freedom Not Yet: Liberation and the Next World Order – By Kenneth Surin
The Crisis of Global Capitalism: Pope Benedict XVI's Social Encyclical and the Future of Political Economy
The political economy of civil society
Hitchens's Crusade
Five years after its publication, the late Christopher Hitchens's polemic against religion reads like a desperate call-to-arms against believers by a liberal who promises perpetual peace but in reality advocates endless war. The attacks on faith by contemporary militant atheists—Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Stephen Jay Gould, or Sam Harris—are becoming ever more shrill and hysterical, a clear sign of atheist anxiety about their absolute certa…
The secularism of post-secularity: Religion, realism, and the revival of grand theory in IR
How to theorise religion in International Relations (IR)? Does the concept of post-secularity advance the debate on religion beyond the 'return of religion' and the crisis of secular reason? This article argues that the post-secular remains trapped in the logic of secularism. First, a new account is provided of the 'secularist bias' that characterises mainstream IR theory: (a) defining religion in either essentialist or epiphenomenal terms; (b) p…
The Politics of Paradox: "Metaphysics Beyond "Political Ontology
Introduction Much of nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophy proclaimed the end the metaphysics and the death of God. The German, French, and English strands of the Enlightenment were united in their suspicion of metaphysical theism. Figures as diverse as Comte, Marx, Spencer, Nietzsche, and Russell defended the absolute autonomy of atheist reason against religious faith. Following the rise of partisan ideologies that terrorized the West fro…
Athens, Jerusalem, and Rome: A Reply to Luciano Pellicani
According to Luciano Pellicani, the US culture wars are grounded in a perpetual struggle between the enlightening forces of reason and democracy, on the one hand, and the dark forces of faith and theocracy, on the other hand. Accordingly, he claims that the Puritans sought to establish a medieval collectivist theocracy, not a modern market democracy, and that the US ‘culture war’ between enlightened secular liberalism and reactionary religious co…
The New Evangelicals and the Future of the United States of America
The United States remains the only global superpower but domestic division linked to partisan politics and the ‘culture wars’ opposing secular liberals to religious conservatives is undermining the strength upon which US supremacy ultimately rests. Recent decades have witnessed the failure of mainstream political traditions to craft a common vision around which the country can rally in order to flourish at home and act as a force for good abroad.…
After the Scottish No: "The Crisis of Liberal Democracy and the Case for "Mixed Government
Introduction: Dilemmas of Democracy The referendum on Scotland's independence has highlighted a number of tensions and contradictions that characterize contemporary Western liberal democracy. On the one hand, the two-year campaign re-energized politics and re-engaged the citizenry after decades of popular alienation and anger. A public debate unfolded that revealed not only a surprisingly knowledgeable electorate and an unprecedented mobilization…
Commonwealth and Covenant: The West in a Neo-Medieval Era of International Affairs
Introduction We live in troubled times. U.S. military might and European economic expansion can scarcely hide the absence of any substantive accord among Western powers that have dominated the globe for several centuries. As America shifts its geo-strategic focus away from the Euro-Atlantic region, the West seems increasingly split between European and Pacific powers—with Russia stuck in a Eurasian gray zone. Without a shared ideology or overarch…
A habitual disposition to the good’: On reason, virtue and realism
Amidst the crisis of instrumental reason, a number of contemporary political philosophers including Jürgen Habermas have sought to rescue the project of a reasonable humanism from the twin threats of religious fundamentalism and secular naturalism. In his recent work, Habermas defends a post-metaphysical politics that aims to protect rationality against encroachment while also accommodating religious faith within the public sphere. This paper con…
Is Liberal Democracy Sliding into ‘Democratic Despotism’
Post‐democracy and cognate concepts suggest that the postwar period of democratisation has given way to a concentration of power in the hands of small groups that are unrepresentative and unaccountable, as exemplified by the rise of multinational corporations and their influence on democratic politics. This article goes further to argue that this does not fully capture the triple threat facing liberal democracy: first, the rise of a new oligarchy…
Politics of Virtue: Post-Liberalism and the Human Future
Contemporary politics is dominated by a liberal creed that champions ‘negative liberty’ and individual happiness. This creed undergirds positions on both the right and the left – free-market capitalism, state bureaucracy and individualism in social life. The triumph of liberalism has had the effect of subordinating human association and the common good to narrow self-interest and short-term utility. By contrast, post-liberalism promotes individua…
The Political Economy of Constitution
The distinction between constitution, as the set of fundamental normative premises ensuring the cohesion of any given polity, and contract, as the formal covenant agreed upon by the relevant stakeholders in that polity, is central to political economy. This paper outlines a conceptual framework for the political economy of constitution based on the above distinction. Our argument is that constitution in the material sense, that is, as a relativel…
Brexit, Post-liberalism, and the Politics of Paradox
Brexit is part of a tectonic shift in Western politics. An alliance of socialists and conservatives rejected the status quo of remote bureaucracy, mass immigration, and multiculturalism in favor of more self-government and the protection of settled ways of life. A similar realignment is underway in Western countries where the establishment is threatened either by old nationalist parties or by new, insurgent movements that are often far-right on q…
Trump's Triumph: The Failure of Clinton's Progressive Politics and the Demise of Liberal World Order
Trump’s election represents primarily the failure of Clinton’s brand of progressive politics. Her courting of Wall St, Silicon Valley, and Hollywood celebrities alienated the forgotten men and women (the one memorable phrase in Trump’s victory speech) of America’s industrial working class. Whereas Obama carried places such as Wyoming River Valley in northeastern Pennsylvania and Youngstown in Ohio, Clinton’s neglect of the Democrats’ working-clas…
Politics of Virtue: Post-Liberalism and the Human Future
Encounter Between Eastern Orthodoxy and Radical Orthodoxy: Transfiguring the World Through the Word
Criminalising the Client: Institutional Change, Gendered Ideas and Feminist Strategies
In 1998, Sweden was the first country in the world to criminalise the purchase of sexual services, but not the sale of sex. The law represented a new prostitution regime that problematised power re
Common Good Politics and the Renewal of the Left
British Prime Minister Theresa May's decision to call a snap election for June 8, 2017, is not primarily about “preparing for Brexit” and “strengthening the government's negotiating position” vis-à-vis the rest of the European Union, as she claimed when making the surprise announcement on April 18. Rather, the over-riding rationale seems to be about achieving a solid parliamentary majority that will give her a democratic mandate, so that she is n…
On the Retreat of Liberalism and the Renewal of Politics
The Center Has Not Held Across the West, the old liberal center is coming apart and the extremes are resurgent. A decade of financial disruption, austerity, and stagnant wages has produced a popular rejection of market fundamentalism. Mass immigration, multiculturalism, and weaker civic ties have left many people feeling dispossessed and humiliated. Part of the revolt against the elite consensus comes from economic and cultural insecurity, and it…
Political science (35 works) · Law (34 works) · Politics (33 works) · Sociology (29 works) · Law (27 works) · Political economy (23 works) · Economics (17 works) · Philosophy (13 works) · Political Economy and Marxism (13 works) · Democracy (11 works)