Translated from German with the help of AI. The original is the authoritative version.
In the living room of one of the authors hangs a print of the motif "Paris-Bruxelles" by the Belgian comic artist François Schuiten. The drawing shows a retrofuturist vision of Paris, in which the Eiffel Tower and the Bâtiments Haussmanniens disappear among viaducts carrying express trains, gliders whir through the air, and modern Art Deco towers rise into the sky. The idea of a future that triggers nostalgia: futuristic, aesthetic, sustainable, European, progressive.
But when that author looks out the window, he sees the Frankfurt Bahnhofsviertel, the approach into Frankfurt’s main station, and the flight path to Germany’s busiest airport. The view is, let’s say, okay. Yet beneath the surface things are simmering. Deutsche Bahn has become the symbol of the state’s incapacity to manage large projects, the airplane now stands for a fossil-fuelled model on its way out, and the Bankenviertel taking shape behind the Bahnhofsviertel shows that in Germany in 2026, just 400 meters can make the difference between the next Golden Milk at the Pilates studio and the next goldener Schuss — the golden shot, German for a fatal overdose. Everywhere there is movement, but where is the progress?
Anyone who wants to identify the missing direction of all this movement with Schuiten’s vision, who claims that the ideas for a new, better future are in fact already there, may be right, but should ask himself why the artist, in 2021, thought it the best choice to design his version of progress in the visual language of the last century’s futurism. Nothing about this picture exposes it as a work of our century, it could just as well have come from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.
The picture thus sheds light on why the 2020s strike us as less golden than rusty. The promise of permanent progress in liberal modernity seems lost. Desirable images of the future can barely be imagined, still less communicated, let alone realized. At the same time, social and political discourses oscillate somewhere between identity politics and an endless distributional struggle over ongoing stagnation. How did we arrive at this point, and are there alternatives?
The answer is usually sought in the technical details of statecraft or the complex mechanisms of the market. We claim, however, that at the center of every analysis must stand the role of the citizen as the agent of progress.
Today, after the (supposed) victory of liberalism, this citizen is trapped in a double conservatism. On one side, a (market-)liberal orthodoxy has established itself. There the state is denied the legitimacy to actively steer social processes. The pursuit of specific futures is eyed with suspicion. The market thus becomes engine and steering wheel alike: politics is not to set any fundamental decisions about direction. On the other side, there is no willingness to accept the results of decentralized economic processes. They demand constant correction. Lacking any steering ex ante, the state degenerates into a clean-up crew after the fact. After all, living conditions must not be allowed to change; the fuel rebate has to come.
The point here is not a market-vs.-state debate, but to show two dead ends of the economic-policy debate. The double conservatism results in a retreat of the state from the provision of public goods, paired with the inability to make and carry out decisions about direction between incommensurable futures. This severely weakens the capacities of market actors to generate growth. Between cyclical crisis and environmental crisis, the calls for regulation and redistribution grow louder. The state is strongest where it constrains market and society, and weak where it is meant to enable them.
In an intact democratic discourse this would herald a break with the said consensus, but here the insidious effect of this dogma on the citizen himself becomes clear: responsibility for progress has simply been wrested from him and handed over to anonymous, decentralized mechanisms; by the other side he is granted the legitimacy to stand in the way of every change. He degenerates into a mere consumer of the latest consumer goods, and of politics too. He picks out what sounds best to him; as someone whose action is the seed of imagining, negotiating, and realizing a better future for all, he has long ceased to see himself. Only as a consequence does economic competition turn entirely into ruthless money-making and the state into a mere supplier of symbolic politics. What are they supposed to do, after all, when people no longer want anything?
To realign the relationship between market and state, then, requires a recentering of the citizen as the agent of social progress. The guiding figure here is Joseph Schumpeter’s entrepreneur: this figure is interesting because Schumpeter ties economic development to an image of man and describes progress as an entrepreneurial practice. Out of the freedom of his own thinking and acting, the entrepreneur becomes the driver of innovation, which ideally benefits both himself and society at large. He embodies the ability to critically question existing products, modes of production, and markets, yet combines this critique with creativity and the power to put a new order in place of the old. Schumpeter understands creative destruction, a process of permanent change, as the basic nature of economic development and the central driving force behind the growth boom of his time. Critical analysis, creativity, and a readiness to push things through make up the ingredients of a progress cocktail. But above all the readiness and the will to change (because one is able to grasp it as improvement) appear as the basic condition of a liberal renewal.
This demand on the liberal citizen as bourgeois remains incomplete, however, for the ambivalence of entrepreneurial success lies in the fact that, in the form of the “entrepreneurial rent,” it acts as an incentive for innovation, but, once achieved, wants to be protected (rent-seeking behaviour, e.g. through lobbying), so that all too often established economic interests suddenly turn against creative destruction. The economics Nobel laureates Joel Mokyr, Philippe Aghion, and Peter Howitt develop Schumpeter’s ideas further. Mokyr stresses the historical anomaly of a society of progress. The starting point, on his account, is to create conditions in which knowledge and ideas can flow from grey theory into sweaty implementation. An innovation pipeline, as it were. Aghion and Howitt stress how much growth depends on the details of institutional conditions (patent protection, competition law, and so on) and also how delicately these conditions must be calibrated: too much or too little can distort incentives and bring innovation to a standstill, all the more so when environmental conditions are constantly changing. To maneuver within this, ever-new collectively binding decisions and their implementation by the state are required. In doing so, Mokyr and his co-authors voice a truth that market-liberal orthodoxy least wants to hear: there is no innovation and progress without the state, and certainly none without a society. A very far-reaching conception of how this can look is offered by Mariana Mazzucato’s “entrepreneurial state”. And as if Xi Jinping wanted to stamp this idea with a great Q.E.D., Western states observe with astonishment the success of Chinese industrial policy. The spectrum from the Schumpeterian entrepreneur to authoritarian state capitalism is, of course, wide. Still: what matters is that extreme solutions (“only state”/“only market”) have proven problematic. What is called for is a very capable state with a very capable market.
With a view to the necessary ability to bring about collectively binding decisions, liberalism, as a political platform of nuance, is suited like no other to sustain the unbelievably complex and fragile equilibrium that brings forth progress. In this respect, the image of the progressive citizen completes itself in the synthesis of Schumpeter’s entrepreneur in the economy with Hannah Arendt’s rediscovery of the zoon politikon in the political: politics is needed not only where collective action problems paralyze the processes, but above all where contingent futures must be negotiated. Not (only) firms decide whether the future belongs to the car or the railway. Nor can the individual vote for or against smart meters, the development of European gas reserves, and so on. Progress is decided politically, and the liberal citizen must again grasp himself as the one who makes this decision and shapes the formation of the collective will.
Sven Gerst’s text on Dark Liberalism offers a perspective worth building on here. There the liberalism of the 20th century is criticized above all as a “process philosophy” of the political. Against this, an Arendtian understanding of the active political life offers a perspective that grasps the political as the place where inclusion, conflict, and decision come together and where decisions are made that actually make a difference. The will to shape and to act, which we saw in the economic sphere, now gains a further capacity: to negotiate and to bear results. The creative force of Prometheus is set against the patience of Sisyphus, of accepting even those results that are not one’s own. One could also speak of the “Anti-NIMBY-Gen.”
The diagnosis that with “NIMBYism” and the overemphasis on deliberation processes à la Rawls and Habermas the liberal revolution devours its children is also one of the diagnoses of Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. They allow us to translate some of our thoughts into a concrete program. Klein and Thompson’s illustrative example is building, drawn from the center of their “Abundance” agenda. Building is exciting because it stands in contrast to liberalism’s great immaterial achievements. Scientific progress, civil rights, or international treaties do not look as good on postcards as the Manhattan skyline, and one gets used to them too quickly. Wind turbines or modern residential quarters are meant to show that liberal societies, too, are capable of deciding and implementing without authoritarianism. Finally, these projects might create the courage to show that progress can be shaped. As impressive as the Pyramid of Cheops may be: next to projects like the moon landing or the development and global distribution of a COVID vaccine, it ultimately appears as nothing more than a geometrically arranged heap of highly visible limestone blocks.
A society of progress needs the active citizen (not only in economy and politics) as its Movens Agens, as much as he needs society. In the end, our text is also a call to take up this challenge. To give preference to an active life between observing, negotiating (and acting), and enduring, and to resist the sedating mix of nostalgia, ressentiment, and authoritarian tendencies. This perhaps even has an existentialist note. In the Paris of the future there is surely still room for a Camus lecture. And maybe one day the Europeans will think of it and smoke a Gauloise — on a bicycle, in an express train, or in a moon rocket — They decide.
