What Comes after Liberalism? More Liberalism!

Abstract

Liberalism will survive this crisis, as it has many others, but it will have changed. The felt need to ensure the security of the economy, and the threats posed to the social order by individuals with potentially threatening capabilities, will require more and more surveillance of our everyday lives and more and more of our participation in those processes of ‘keeping an eye out’ for anonymous parcels, suspicious behaviours, provocative speech and dangerous thoughts. We will all be enlisted in the Army of Observation, free to choose but self-regulating in our choices. Everyone will watch everyone, and the new age of opto-liberalism will have dawned.