Our Interregnum

Liberal democracy, the victor of the ideological struggles of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, increasingly fails to organize political life, economic growth, or cultural meaning. Across much of the world, liberal states grow simultaneously more intrusive and less capable. A social contract that once promised individual autonomy and protection now delivers pervasive surveillance, expanding regulation, and behavioral management.

At the same time, the continuous enlargement of the state erodes its own capacity for action: authority migrates into dense technocratic systems, policy networks, and lobbying ecosystems that diffuse responsibility and blur accountability. The result is a paradoxical polity which is heavy in presence and light in agency, struggling to act successfully in the one domain that ultimately justifies its existence: to allow and foster conditions of human flourishing.

On the cultural level liberalism and the liberal state enabled an unprecedented expansion of freedom. By loosening religious, social, and political constraints, they created the conditions for an extraordinary flowering of artistic expression. Since their emergence, liberal societies have produced some of the most ambitious literature, music, architecture, and visual art in human history.

However, what once expanded human possibility now often mirrors the same exhaustion visible in political and economic life. Therefore, the erosion of Liberalism and the liberal state is complete. The new Ancien Régime can no longer sustain the social contract; institutionally and ideologically, it proves incapable of shaping the revolutions of our time, while simultaneously lacking the vitality to produce new culture.

Consequently, we are at a threshold. The economic and social inequalities of new technologies will create new elites, new ideologies, and new polities. The old is dying and the new has not been born yet and this magazine exists for this in-between, Interregnum, moment. The idea is not to celebrate the collapse of liberalism and liberal democracy but to understand the current moment and to argue openly what will and what should replace it.

The 19th century was chaotic, unequal, and violent. However, it was also astonishingly creative, productive, and world-molding. It’s time to confront and embrace the chaos, the inequality, and violence of our contemporary era and move towards construction.