ABSTRACT
The liberal world order is not limited to the international organisations that form the system of global governance. It rests on the ideology and philosophy of liberalism, which in the final analysis threatens to collapse back into the materialism that is one half of its dualist worldview, evacuating the ungrounded idealism that is its other half. Starting in the nineteenth century, liberalism tended towards a procedural formalism and a cultural vacuity, which were challenged by the materialist philosophies of Nazism, Fascism and Communism that sought to re-construct positive liberty on a non-religious, supposedly scientific basis. And following their eventual collapse in the twentieth century, liberalism has insisted on its own latent materialism. Not only has the soul disappeared, but also the subject and along with it the citizen and ultimately the idea of humans as social and creative beings.
