The great German philosopher/sociologist/geopolitical gadfly comments at length on the current state of our collective accounts, and the probable consequences:
The welfare state is a late and, as we are now learning, fragile accomplishment. Expanding markets and communications networks have always had an explosive force with simultaneously individualising and liberating consequences for individual citizens; but each of these breaches has been followed by a reorganisation of the old relations of solidarity within a more comprehensive institutional framework. This process began during the early modern period as the ruling estates of the High Middle Ages were progressively parliamentarised, as in England, or mediatised by absolute monarchs, as in France, within the new territorial states. The process continued in the wake of the constitutional revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the welfare state legislative programs of the twentieth century. This legal taming of the Leviathan and class antagonism within civil society was no small matter. For the same functional reasons, however, this successful constitutionalisation of state and society points today – following a further phase of economic globalisation – towards the constitutionalisation of international law and of the strife-torn world society.
Gulp.