The city of the bond, the commonwealth of the nexus — a postliberal political philosophy built by deliberately inverting the founding assumptions of the order now exhausting itself. The bond before the right; the future with a seat at the table; nature with a voice.
Begin not with the ruins but with the thing that might be built upon them. Imagine a polity organized not around the anxious defense of the private self against all others, but around the common world that the self did not create and cannot survive without. Imagine institutions conceived as living membranes rather than fortress walls — porous, exchanging, stronger for being joined. Imagine that the first political fact is not a right but a bond; that knowledge is pursued not to price the world but to make it habitable and good; and that the future is treated not as collateral to be mortgaged for present appetite but as a member of the community with a seat at the table. This is Nexuspolis: the city of the bond, the commonwealth of the nexus. It is offered here as a foundational proposal — a political philosophy constructed deliberately by inverting the founding assumptions of the order now visibly exhausting itself.
The timing is not incidental. This essay is written in 2026, the semiquincentennial year — the two-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of the American Declaration of Independence, and with it the anniversary of the most consequential experiment ever conducted in liberalism as a system of government. The mood of the jubilee is telling. Formally framed as a celebration of national unity, it arrives amid stark division and pervasive foreboding. The numbers are unambiguous: a Pew Research Center survey conducted December 8–14, 2025 found that 59 percent of U.S. adults believed the country’s “best years are behind us,” against only 40 percent who thought they lay ahead; a further Pew survey (January 20–26, 2026) found 69 percent dissatisfied with the country’s direction and only 29 percent satisfied; and Gallup (June 2–19, 2025) recorded American national pride at a twenty-five-year low, with 58 percent “extremely” or “very proud.” A country materially wealthier than at any point in its history greets its own founding anniversary convinced that it is in decline. Anniversaries are occasions for accounting, and the honest account is grim. The question posed at the founding — can a republic be kept? — has become urgent precisely because the answer now appears, on present trajectory, to be no.
That question, and its provenance, deserves to be recovered exactly. The story is that at the close of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787, a woman — Elizabeth Willing Powel of Philadelphia — asked Benjamin Franklin what kind of government the delegates had produced. “A republic,” he is said to have replied, “if you can keep it.” The line is preserved in the journal of James McHenry, a Maryland delegate, recording the events of September 18, 1787. It has passed into cliché, but the conditional clause is the whole of the matter. A republic is not a possession but a practice; not a machine that runs of itself but a shared endeavor that must be continuously re-enacted or lost. Franklin’s if is a warning that the constitutional order carried within it, from the beginning, the possibility of its own dissolution.
The wager of this essay is that the dissolution is now far advanced, that its causes are structural rather than accidental, and that keeping the res publica will require not the restoration of the old formula but its inversion. Nexuspolis is the name for what stands on the other side of that inversion.
The most precise diagnosis of the disease comes from a passage that serves as this essay’s textual anchor. In the introduction to Why Liberalism Failed (Yale University Press, 2018), the political theorist Patrick J. Deneen writes:
> “Liberalism proposed that occasional consent would suffice for the elevation of a leadership class composed of those of ‘fit characters’ — namely those, in the incomparable words of Alexander Hamilton, concerned with ‘commerce, finance, negotiation and war, all the objects which have charms for minds governed by that passion.’ The system’s architects intended to encourage a focus on private concerns among the citizenry — a res idiotica that they called a ‘republic.’ If there is difficulty ‘keeping it,’ a republic cannot survive in the absence of ‘public things.’ The belief that liberalism could achieve modus vivendi by encouraging privatism has culminated in the nearly complete disassociation of the governing class and a citizenry without a cives.”
Every term here repays examination. The Hamilton phrase comes from The Federalist No. 17, in which Hamilton, reassuring Anti-Federalists that the national government would not swallow the states, argued that the mundane business of local administration — “the mere domestic police of a State” — would “hold out slender allurements to ambition.” Ambitious men, he reasoned, would be drawn instead to the grand objects of the national stage: “Commerce, finance, negotiation, and war seem to comprehend all the objects which have charms for minds governed by that passion; and all the powers necessary to those objects ought, in the first instance, to be lodged in the national depository.” Deneen reads this — plausibly — as a candid confession of the founding design. The system would not rely on the classical cultivation of civic virtue in the citizen; it would instead harness ambition and channel private passion, trusting that the pursuit of commerce, wealth, and glory by the few, and of comfort and security by the many, would suffice to hold the whole together.
The Latin and Greek terms Deneen deploys carry the argument. Res publica — from Cicero’s De Re Publica, where Scipio defines the commonwealth as res populi, “the property of a people,” a people being “an assemblage associated in an agreement with respect to justice and a partnership for the common good” — names a politics of shared things, the public matter that citizens hold and tend in common. Its inversion is res idiotica, Deneen’s coinage from the Greek idiotes, meaning the private person: one wholly absorbed in private affairs, with no share in and no care for the public. (The English “idiot” descends from precisely this root: to the Greeks, the purely private man was a kind of deficient citizen.) Deneen had developed the theme in a widely circulated 2016 essay lamenting that the educational system produces “know-nothings” — “solipsistic, self-contained selves whose only public commitment is an absence of commitment to a public.” Where “ancient philosophy and practice heaped praise upon res publica — a devotion to public things,” modernity, he argued, “created the world’s first res idiotica.” A cives — the body of citizens, the civic person — is what such an order cannot produce. And modus vivendi, the mere arrangement for coexistence, is all that liberalism aspired to supply in place of a common good: not a shared life but a truce among strangers.
Deneen’s charge, then, is that the American order was engineered to manufacture private persons and call the result a republic — and that the long-run consequence of this engineering is the very thing we now observe: a governing class fully “disassociated” from a populace that has ceased to be a citizenry at all. This is the wound. Nexuspolis is the attempt to heal it by reversing the polarity that produced it. But to justify so radical a move, the diagnosis must be deepened and widened. Four thinkers, taken together, show that the res idiotica is not a bug in the liberal program but its deep design.
Deneen’s central and deliberately paradoxical thesis is that “liberalism has failed because liberalism has succeeded.” It is not that liberalism fell short of its ideals; it is that, having defeated its rivals and governed for centuries according to its own inner logic, it has produced exactly the world its premises entail — and that world is intolerable. Liberalism, on Deneen’s account, rests on two “revolutions” or foundational anthropological assumptions, stated at page 31 of Why Liberalism Failed: first, “anthropological individualism and the voluntarist conception of choice” — the picture of the human being as a sovereign, unencumbered chooser whose commitments are all elective and revocable; and second, “human separation from and opposition to nature” — the picture of the natural world as raw material for the projects of the liberated will.
From these premises the rest follows with grim necessity. The self conceived as prior to its attachments will experience family, faith, place, and tradition as arbitrary constraints to be shed. Liberty is redefined from the classical and Christian sense — self-mastery, the disciplined ordering of the soul that makes self-government possible — into mere absence of external constraint, the freedom to satisfy desire. The institutions that once cultivated character wither, and into the vacuum steps a double power: an expansive market that commodifies ever more of life, and an expansive state that manages the resulting disorder. Individualism and statism, far from being opposites, advance together, each dissolving the intermediate communities that stood between the lone individual and the central power. The endpoint is what Deneen calls a “liberalocracy” — a self-perpetuating elite that has mastered the machinery of expressive individualism and managerial administration, ruling a population trained to mistake consumer choice and identity-expression for self-rule. The res idiotica is not liberalism’s failure; it is liberalism’s masterpiece.
If Deneen shows what liberalism became, Helena Rosenblatt shows what it abandoned. In The Lost History of Liberalism: From Ancient Rome to the Twenty-First Century (Princeton University Press, 2018), she performs a “word history” that overturns the standard genealogy. The word “liberalism” did not exist until the early nineteenth century; but for nearly two millennia before, to be liberal meant something quite specific and quite unlike its modern sense. It derived from the Roman virtue of liberalitas — the noble and generous disposition toward one’s fellow citizens, the opposite of selfishness, which the Romans disparaged as “slavishness.” Cicero, in On Duties (44 BC), called liberalitas the very “bond of human society.” To be liberal was to demonstrate the virtues of a citizen, to show devotion to the common good, to honor mutual connectedness and the duties that accompany membership. Where rights were spoken of at all, they walked hand in hand with duties, often as their precondition.
Rosenblatt’s most pointed historical claim is that “France invented liberalism in the early years of the nineteenth century and Germany reconfigured it half a century later.” The nineteenth-century French and German liberals — heirs to the shock of the Revolution — were self-avowed moralists concerned with civic virtue, moral education, the duties of citizenship, and the cultivation of communities, not free-market fundamentalists preoccupied with the rights of atomized individuals. The narrowing of liberalism into an Anglo-American doctrine of possessive individualism and rights-against-the-common-good was a twentieth-century construction — one that Rosenblatt suggests recent liberals themselves helped author (she names Isaiah Berlin and John Rawls among those who fed the distorted image). The significance for our argument is decisive: the individualist, propertarian, rights-first liberalism that Deneen indicts is not liberalism as such but a mutilation of a far older and richer tradition in which generosity, virtue, and the common good stood at the center. What was lost was precisely the liberalitas — the ethic of the bond. Nexuspolis, in one sense, is an attempt to recover that lost substance by other means and under another name.
Domenico Losurdo, in Liberalism: A Counter-History (2005; English translation 2011), attacks the hagiographic self-image of liberalism as the steady, if halting, expansion of liberty to all. The real history, he shows, is that liberalism was from its inception built upon what he calls “exclusion clauses.” The “community of the free” — the metropolitan citizenry who enjoyed rights, property, and political voice — was constituted by and premised upon the domination of the unfree: slaves, colonized peoples, indentured servants, the laboring poor. Liberty and slavery were not antithetical accidents but a single “twin birth.” The great canonical liberals — Locke, who had a hand in the colonial slave economy; the American revolutionaries who cried “we won’t be their Negroes”; Tocqueville, who lucidly described the extermination of the Indians — did not regard the exclusions as flaws or lapses. The exclusions were essential and known.
Losurdo names the resulting structure with a term borrowed from the sociology of race: liberalism founded a Herrenvolk democracy — a master-race democracy, in which self-government for the in-group was fused with domination for those outside it. He describes a spatial and legal segregation between the “sacred space” of rights (the metropole) and the “profane space” of unfreedom (the plantation, the colony, the reservation). The boundary between the two was not a flaw in the system; it was the system. Against the Whig myth of smooth progress, Losurdo posits a dialectic of “emancipation and dis-emancipation”: liberty won by the excluded through their own struggles, and repeatedly beaten back. The lesson for the constructive project is that a politics founded on the private self and its rights has always required someone to be relegated to the outside — that the propertarian “community of the free” purchases the freedom of its members at the price of others’ unfreedom, whether human or, as we shall see, natural. Any successor philosophy must be built so that its freedom is not parasitic on exclusion.
The fourth anatomy explains Deneen’s “disassociation of the governing class” with a rigor Deneen himself does not supply. James Burnham — the American theorist who traveled from Trotskyism to the hard-headed study of power — provides two indispensable books.
In The Managerial Revolution (1941), Burnham argued that classical capitalism, organized around private ownership of the means of production, was being superseded not by socialism but by a new system he called managerialism. The decisive fact was the separation of ownership from control: in the great modern corporation and the expanding state bureaucracy alike, those who nominally owned no longer effectively controlled, and those who controlled — the managers, technicians, administrators, planners — did not need to own. “Ownership means control,” Burnham wrote; and where control has passed to the managers, effective ownership has passed with it. A new ruling class was ascending, deriving its power not from property or from democratic legitimacy but from positional authority within organizational hierarchies and the technical expertise that justifies it. This class is accountable not to the political community but to the other managers who define its qualifications. Here is the mechanism of the “disassociation”: political power detaches from the political community and migrates to an unelected stratum answerable only to itself.
In The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom (1943), Burnham generalized this into a full elite theory, drawing on Gaetano Mosca, Vilfredo Pareto, Robert Michels, and Georges Sorel — thinkers he presented as a “Machiavellian” tradition committed to a realist science of politics. From this tradition he distilled several theses that bear directly on our diagnosis. The first is the distinction between the formal meaning and the real meaning of political speech. Introducing it through Dante’s De Monarchia, Burnham wrote that “it is characteristic of De Monarchia, and of all similar treatises, that there should be this divorce between formal and real meanings, that the formal meaning should not explicitly state but only indirectly express, and to one or another extent hide and distort, the real meaning.” The rule of political analysis follows: “Words, programs, declarations, constitutions, laws, theories, philosophies, must be related to the whole complex of social facts in order to understand their real political and historical meaning.” Applied to our subject: the formal meaning of “republic” may be self-government by the people; its real meaning, in Hamilton’s candid confession, was the elevation of a leadership class and the encouragement of private absorption in the rest.
The second thesis is Mosca’s “political formula” — the myth by which every ruling class legitimizes its rule. As Burnham put it, “A ruling class expresses its role and position through what Mosca calls a political formula. This formula rationalizes and justifies its rule.” It may be the “divine right of kings,” or a racial myth, or — “the formula most familiar to us” — “a belief in the ‘will of the people.’” The formula is not necessarily a lie in the crude sense; it is the sustaining ideology that binds the social structure together. The third thesis is Michels’s “iron law of oligarchy”: in any organization, however democratic its professions, “the autocratic tendencies are… inherent in the nature of organization,” and leaders rather than the mass will exercise control. Rule by an elite minority is, for the Machiavellians, an ineradicable fact of social life; the democratic ideal of literal self-government is, taken as description, a myth.
Yet Burnham titled his book Defenders of Freedom, and the reason is the crux of his constructive contribution — and a caution to any project like this one. If elite rule is inescapable, freedom cannot mean its abolition. Freedom means, instead, the limitation of elite power by other power. “Liberty or freedom,” Burnham wrote, “means above all… the existence of a public opposition to the governing élite.” And: “Only power restrains power. That restraining power is expressed in the existence and activity of oppositions.” Liberty is “the product of conflict and difference, not of unity and harmony”; it is preserved by “those who are against the existing chief power.” When “all opposition is destroyed, there is no longer any limit to what power may do.” This is a permanent warning against the utopian temptation — including the temptation latent in any philosophy, like Nexuspolis, that speaks of harmony and the common good. A politics of the bond that suppresses opposition in the name of unity would reconstitute the very despotism it means to escape. The point must be held throughout: the common good is kept honest only by the standing right of dissent.
Two further thinkers explain how the liberal-capitalist order generates its own dissolution — one at the level of political economy, the other at the level of moral language.
Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation (1944) supplies the economic mechanism. Polanyi argued that the nineteenth-century project of the “self-regulating market” attempted something unprecedented and ultimately impossible: to “disembed” the economy from society, so that social relations became embedded in the economy rather than the reverse. The market society required treating three things as commodities that are not, in fact, produced for sale: land (which is nature), labor (which is human life itself), and money (which is a token of purchasing power). Polanyi called these the “fictitious commodities.” To subject land, labor, and money fully to the market’s logic is to “subordinate the substance of society itself to the laws of the market” — and this, he warned, could not proceed for long “without annihilating the human and natural substance of society.” Hence the “double movement”: the relentless push to expand and disembed the market provokes a spontaneous countermovement by which society acts to protect itself — through labor law, social insurance, environmental regulation, and the rest. The tension between disembedding and re-embedding, Polanyi held, defines the modern age. The res idiotica, in Polanyian terms, is what a society looks like when the disembedding movement triumphs: nature reduced to resource, labor to input, money to speculation, and the human and natural fabric torn.
Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue (1981) supplies the moral mechanism. MacIntyre’s diagnosis is that modern moral discourse is in a state of grave disorder: debates are “interminable” and shrill because the disputants wield fragments of older moral traditions detached from the contexts that gave them sense. The dominant condition he calls emotivism — the doctrine, and the lived practice, that moral judgments are ultimately nothing but expressions of preference or feeling, so that “this is good” means little more than “I approve of this; do so as well.” This condition, MacIntyre argues, is the predictable wreckage of the “Enlightenment project” — the attempt to provide a rational, secular foundation for morality after the rejection of the Aristotelian teleological framework, the conception of a human telos, a proper end or flourishing (eudaimonia) toward which the virtues direct us. Strip away the telos, and the inherited moral vocabulary loses its ground; what remains is manipulation. MacIntyre’s representative modern characters are the Manager and the Therapist — figures who treat ends as given and outside their competence, and concern themselves only with the efficient manipulation of means and of people. (Note the convergence with Burnham: the Manager is the moral face of the managerial revolution.) MacIntyre’s constructive alternative is a return to a virtue ethics grounded in three concepts: practices (cooperative human activities with goods internal to them), the narrative unity of a human life, and tradition (the historically extended argument within which practices and lives make sense). His famous closing image is that we await “a new St. Benedict” — the construction of local communities within which the moral life and the virtues can survive the new dark ages of managerial and emotivist modernity.
Taken together, Polanyi and MacIntyre reveal that the liberal formula corrodes both the material commons (by commodifying the fictitious commodities) and the moral commons (by hollowing out the teleological ground of shared judgment). The res idiotica is the joint product: a private person adrift in a disembedded economy and an emotivist culture, possessed of rights and choices but bereft of the bonds, ends, and public things that would make those rights and choices meaningful.
Now the constructive move. If the crisis is generated by a specific foundational formula, then a coherent alternative can be derived by inverting that formula axiom by axiom. This is the philosophical heart of Nexuspolis: it is liberalism turned deliberately “on its head,” not by negating freedom but by re-founding it on different ground. Three inversions define it.
First inversion: commons-first ownership. Liberalism, following Locke, treats private property as the primary and quasi-sacred fact, with whatever is held in common appearing as a mere residue — the “commons” as the un-appropriated leftover, always awaiting enclosure. Nexuspolis reverses the priority. The commons is ontologically first; private property is derivative — a grant, a stewardship, a use-right carved from and answerable to the common world. On this view we do not begin with isolated owners who might choose to pool some holdings; we begin with a shared world into which each person is born as an inheritor and trustee, and from which private holdings are apportioned for the sake of the whole. Property is real and can be extensive, but it is held from the commons and for purposes that the commons may legitimately name. The burden of justification shifts: not “why should this be shared?” but “why should this be withdrawn from the common world into private hands, and on what terms of stewardship?”
Second inversion: obligation before rights. Liberalism founds politics on rights: the individual arrives bearing rights, and obligations are secondary, contracted, or imposed. Nexuspolis holds that duties to the common world are ontologically prior, and that rights flow from membership and obligation rather than the reverse. This is not the abolition of rights — Nexuspolis affirms robust protections for persons, and, following Burnham’s warning, an especially fierce protection of the right to oppose power. It is a reordering of ground. Rights are understood as the entitlements that attach to one who stands within a web of obligations — as the claims a member may justly make because she is bound to and by the community, not as pre-social trumps she carries into it. This recovers precisely Rosenblatt’s lost sense in which rights “went hand in hand with duties, often as a prerequisite for rights,” and Cicero’s liberalitas as the “bond of human society.” The citizen of Nexuspolis is constituted by her bonds; the res idiotica’s disencumbered chooser is exactly what Nexuspolis denies is the fundamental human reality.
Third inversion: nature as member, not resource. Liberalism’s second revolution, in Deneen’s analysis, is “human separation from and opposition to nature” — the natural world as external, as standing reserve for the projects of the will. Nexuspolis includes the more-than-human world within the polity. Nature is not merely something to be protected from human use by external regulation; it has standing within the commonwealth as a member whose flourishing is part of the common good and whose interests can be represented and defended. This is not mysticism but a live juridical development. The legal theorist Christopher D. Stone asked, in his 1972 Southern California Law Review article “Should Trees Have Standing?”, whether natural objects might be granted legal standing to defend their own interests through guardians. Ecuador in 2008 became the first nation to enshrine the rights of nature in its constitution: Article 71 declares that “Nature or Pachamama, where life is reproduced and exists, has the right to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles, structure, functions and its processes in evolution,” and that “every person, people, community or nationality, will be able to demand the recognition of rights for nature before the public organisms.” New Zealand followed with the Te Awa Tupua (Whanganui River Claims Settlement) Act, enacted March 20, 2017 — the first legislation in the world to declare a river a legal person, recognizing the Whanganui as “an indivisible and living whole” possessing “all the rights, duties, and liabilities of a legal person,” accompanied by an NZ$80 million settlement. Nexuspolis generalizes the principle: the polity is a partnership that includes rivers, soils, forests, and the atmosphere as members with standing, not resources without voice.
These three inversions are not arbitrary. Each directly reverses one of the founding assumptions whose consequences Sections II–IV traced: propertarian individualism, rights-as-foundation, and nature-as-resource. And each has deep classical and cross-cultural warrant. Aristotle held that “man is by nature a political animal” (more literally, a polis animal), that the human being is constituted within and completed by the political community, and that the community exists for the sake of the good and not merely for survival or exchange. Cicero defined the commonwealth as the property of a people bound “in a partnership for the common good.” And Ibn Khaldun, in the Muqaddimah, named asabiyyah — social cohesion, group solidarity, the felt bond of collective destiny — as the force that builds civilizations, and its erosion by luxury, self-interest, and the detachment of rulers from the ruled as the cause of their decay. Ibn Khaldun’s diagnosis of dynastic decline, in which the ruling group “prioritizes individual interests over the collective good” and grows “detached from its roots,” is a fourteenth-century anticipation of Deneen’s disassociated governing class. Nexuspolis is, in this light, less an invention than a recovery: the re-grounding of politics in the bond, after the long liberal experiment in its dissolution.
From the three inversions flow three axioms — the positive doctrine of Nexuspolis, offered as its foundational principles.
The first principle concerns the substrate of social life. It holds that human social behavior is not the aggregation of pre-social individual preferences (the liberal picture) but an evolved property of our bond with the natural world and with one another. Prosperity, rightly understood, is common prosperity — a flourishing of the whole living system of which humanity is a part — and the social forms worth building are those that “live in harmony” with that system rather than in opposition to it. Here the inversion of Deneen’s “separation from and opposition to nature” becomes a positive anthropology: we are, constitutively, creatures of the bond.
The principle’s distinctive image is that of the foundry — the institution or productive structure — as porous but stronger together. Liberalism and classical capitalism conceive the strong institution as a bounded fortress: the firm with hard property lines, the sovereign self behind its rights, the nation behind its borders. Nexuspolis conceives institutional strength differently, on the model of the mycelium — the underground fungal network whose strength lies precisely in its connectivity, its capacity to exchange nutrients and information across a porous, distributed web. A foundry in Nexuspolis is strong not despite being porous but because it is porous: open to exchange, nested within larger and smaller structures, resilient through redundancy and connection rather than through walls. This is precisely the institutional form that Elinor Ostrom’s empirical work validates. Against Garrett Hardin’s “tragedy of the commons” — the claim that shared resources are inevitably destroyed absent privatization or top-down state control — Ostrom demonstrated, in Governing the Commons (1990) and a career of fieldwork that earned the 2009 Nobel Prize in economics, that communities routinely govern common-pool resources sustainably through self-organized institutions. She distilled eight design principles: clearly defined boundaries; proportional equivalence between benefits and costs; collective-choice arrangements; monitoring; graduated sanctions; fast and fair conflict resolution; recognition of local autonomy; and, above all, nested enterprises — “polycentric governance,” in which local units are embedded within larger tiers rather than absorbed by them. Polycentricity is the porous foundry made concrete: many centers of decision, overlapping and connected, “stronger together.” The first principle thus grounds social behavior in ecological bond and institutionalizes it in mycelial, polycentric, porous-but-connected structures.
The second principle concerns the telos of knowledge. Liberalism’s characteristic move, intensified under capitalism, is to sever knowledge from ends — to treat science as a value-neutral instrument and knowledge as a commodity, priced and owned. MacIntyre’s Manager treats ends as given and outside his scope; the knowledge economy treats knowledge as a fictitious commodity, in the Polanyian sense, to be enclosed by patent and paywall. Nexuspolis restores teleology to knowledge. Science and knowledge, on this principle, have aims beyond truth-for-its-own-sake or truth-for-profit: they are ordered toward the Good Life — eudaimonia, in the Aristotelian sense MacIntyre recovers — for a universal humanity and for nature in harmony. Knowledge serves flourishing, and flourishing is common and includes the more-than-human world.
This entails two commitments. First, the affirmation of “common and sacred values of a life above personal gain and profits.” Some goods are not for sale; some knowledge belongs to humanity as such; the pursuit of understanding is dignified by its orientation to the good and desecrated by its subordination to extraction. The word sacred is used advisedly — not necessarily in a confessional sense, but to mark the category of things withdrawn from the logic of price, held in common reverence, protected from commodification. (Losurdo’s analysis warns us here: liberalism, too, had its “sacred space” — but it was the space of the free reserved against the excluded. Nexuspolis inverts this: the sacred is precisely what is held in common and open to all, not what is fenced against the many.) Second, this principle finds its constructive economic complement in Mariana Mazzucato’s work on the entrepreneurial and mission-oriented state. Mazzucato has documented, in The Entrepreneurial State (2013), that the foundational technologies of the modern economy — the internet, GPS, touchscreens, the algorithms and components behind the smartphone — were funded by public, mission-driven investment, even as the returns were privately captured: “We have socialized risk-taking but privatized the rewards.” Her distinction between value creation and value extraction — developed in The Value of Everything (2018), where she argues that “when value is defined by price… makers are confused with takers” — is the political economy of knowledge that the second principle requires. Knowledge pursued for the Good Life is knowledge whose value is created in common and shared in common, not extracted.
The third principle concerns time and intergenerational justice. It begins from a Heraclitean and Khaldunian premise — that change is the constant, that struggle is perpetual, that no settlement is final. From this it draws a strict rule: the future is never mortgaged for the benefit of the present. Where liberalism’s disembedded market systematically discounts the future — pricing tomorrow cheap, externalizing costs onto generations and ecosystems that cannot bid in today’s markets — Nexuspolis treats the future as a member of the polity (recall the third inversion) whose interests cannot be sacrificed to present appetite. This is the intergenerational form of the obligation-before-rights principle: we are bound to those who come after, and our rights of use are limited by that bond.
The positive corollary is that “long-term investment in natural resources and human flourishing is fundamental to government and public policy,” which “must take center stage for the liberation of human creativity.” Here Nexuspolis makes its sharpest break with the liberal ordering. Liberalism holds that creativity is liberated by getting the state out of the way — by privatization, deregulation, the freeing of the individual chooser. Nexuspolis holds the reverse: that human creativity is liberated by strong public foundations — by the mission-oriented state as steward and setter of grand challenges (Mazzucato), by the security that comes from re-embedding the economy in social protection (Polanyi’s countermovement), by the commons that underwrite risk so that individuals may dare. The order of priority is explicitly inverted: the international layer and the framework of public provision come first, and the layer of individual rights and market activity is nested within them — “not the other way around.” This is not statism in the managerial sense Burnham warned of; it is the opposite of managerialism, because its purpose is not administration of a passive population but the liberation of a creative citizenry through the provision of common foundations. And — holding fast to Burnham’s caution — the mission-setting state of Nexuspolis is legitimate only insofar as it preserves and protects the standing opposition that alone restrains power. A steward-state without a fierce right of dissent would be a managerial despotism wearing the mask of the common good.
What would Nexuspolis imply concretely? Six domains sketch the program.
Governance. Polycentric and nested, on Ostrom’s model: many centers of decision from the local to the international, each with genuine autonomy, connected through the porous-foundry principle rather than absorbed into a single hierarchy. This directly answers Burnham’s iron law: if elite rule within any organization is inescapable, then liberty is best served by a plurality of contending centers, so that “only power restrains power.” Polycentricity institutionalizes opposition. Deneen’s disassociated governing class is countered not by installing a new elite (the trap Deneen’s own critics identify in his “aristopopulism”) but by distributing power across many accountable tiers, each porous to the citizens it serves.
Knowledge institutions. Universities, research bodies, and data infrastructures reconceived as commons oriented to the Good Life rather than as credential-factories for the managerial class or as engines of extractable intellectual property. The teleology of the second principle would reorder the university away from the res idiotica education Deneen decries — the production of skilled private persons without a public — and toward the formation of a cives: citizens made, in Rosenblatt’s Ciceronian phrase, not born.
Political economy. The re-embedding of the economy in society and in nature: treating land, labor, and money not as fictitious commodities to be fully marketized but as bearers of social and ecological meaning (Polanyi); rewarding value creation over value extraction and sharing the returns on collective, mission-driven investment (Mazzucato); and holding property as stewardship from the commons (first inversion). This is neither classical socialism (state ownership, which Burnham showed simply installs a managerial ruling class) nor market liberalism, but a commons-centered political economy of nested, porous institutions.
The standing of nature. Legal and constitutional recognition of ecological members of the polity — watersheds, forests, the atmosphere — with guardians empowered to represent their interests, on the model pioneered by Stone and enacted in Ecuador (Article 71) and New Zealand (the Te Awa Tupua Act). The third inversion made juridical fact.
Intergenerational institutions. Mechanisms that give the future standing in present decisions: long-horizon public investment vehicles, sovereign natural-resource trusts governed by the never-mortgage rule, and constitutional constraints against externalizing costs onto the unborn — the third principle made structural.
International order. Because the gravest commons — the climate, the oceans, the biosphere — are planetary, the highest tier of the polycentric order is genuinely international, and it comes first in the ordering of priorities. But following Ostrom’s own skepticism of purely top-down global solutions — her warning, with Michael McGinnis, that “the current emphasis on global solutions… may be fundamentally misguided” — the international layer is not a world-managerial state; it is the outermost nest of a polycentric system, coordinating and underwriting rather than commanding. This is how the third principle’s insistence on “the international layer” is reconciled with the first principle’s polycentric porosity: the global commons requires a global tier, but that tier governs with and through the layers beneath it, not over them.
Return, in closing, to the woman on the steps of Independence Hall and to Franklin’s conditional. A republic, if you can keep it. The two hundred and fifty years since have supplied the answer that the founding design, on its own premises, could not keep it — because a republic cannot be kept by a res idiotica. A commonwealth is, by Cicero’s definition, the property of a people bound in a partnership for the common good; where there is no cives, no public thing, no bond, there is no commonwealth to keep, whatever the formal name on the document. This was Burnham’s distinction between formal and real meaning, arriving as prophecy. The formal meaning of “republic” was self-government; the real meaning, encouraged from the start, was private absorption managed by a disassociated elite. The gap between the two is the space in which the res idiotica grew.
To keep a res publica, then, is not to conserve the liberal formula but to build the thing it forgot: the bond, the common world, the public things. This is the work of Nexuspolis. Its three inversions restore what the founding formula inverted away — the priority of the commons over private property, of obligation over rights, of nature as member over nature as resource. Its three principles re-ground social life in the ecological bond, re-orient knowledge toward the common Good Life, and refuse to mortgage the future. And its constructive program builds the porous, polycentric, commons-centered institutions in which a citizenry might once again be made.
The semiquincentennial is thus not only an occasion for mourning the disassociation of governing class from citizenry, but for beginning the long labor of re-association — the rebuilding of asabiyyah, of the bond, of the partnership for the common good. Nexuspolis does not promise the harmony of a suppressed dissent; Burnham’s warning is engraved at its foundation, that liberty lives only where power restrains power and opposition remains free. It promises, rather, the harder and more honest thing: a commonwealth in which the bond is primary, the future has standing, nature has voice, and the private person is at last completed by the public one. That is how a republic is kept — not by keeping the old one, but by founding a better commons in its place. That is the universal Nexuspolis.
Two attributions at the essay’s foundation have been verified against primary texts. The Hamilton phrase is from The Federalist No. 17 (1787): “Commerce, finance, negotiation, and war seem to comprehend all the objects which have charms for minds governed by that passion; and all the powers necessary to those objects ought, in the first instance, to be lodged in the national depository.” Deneen quotes it (slightly compressed) in the introduction to Why Liberalism Failed (2018, ~p. 8), and the surrounding “res idiotica”/“disassociation of the governing class and a citizenry without a cives” passage is reproduced above verbatim from that introduction. Franklin’s “a republic, if you can keep it” is attested in James McHenry’s convention journal entry of September 18, 1787, recording a question put to Franklin by Elizabeth Willing Powel; the anecdote is not independently corroborated and should be presented as reported rather than certain. Burnham quotations are drawn from The Machiavellians (1943); the “only power restrains power” and “liberty preserved by those against the existing chief power” formulations are corroborated in reputable secondary reviews but should be checked against a paginated edition before print, as the fullest available full-text source lacks page numbers.
Aristotle, Politics (Book I, 1252b–1253a).
James Burnham, The Managerial Revolution: What Is Happening in the World (John Day, 1941).
James Burnham, The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom (John Day, 1943).
Marcus Tullius Cicero, De Re Publica (Book I); De Officiis / On Duties (44 BC).
Constitution of the Republic of Ecuador (2008), Article 71 (“Rights of Nature / Pachamama”).
Patrick J. Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed (Yale University Press, 2018); “How a Generation Lost Its Common Culture” (2016); Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future (Sentinel, 2023).
Alexander Hamilton, The Federalist No. 17 (1787).
Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah (trans. Franz Rosenthal).
Domenico Losurdo, Liberalism: A Counter-History (Verso, 2011; orig. Italian 2005).
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (University of Notre Dame Press, 1981).
Mariana Mazzucato, The Entrepreneurial State (2013); The Value of Everything (2018); Mission Economy (2021).
James McHenry, convention journal entry, September 18, 1787 (Library of Congress).
Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (Cambridge University Press, 1990).
Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (1944).
Helena Rosenblatt, The Lost History of Liberalism: From Ancient Rome to the Twenty-First Century (Princeton University Press, 2018).
Christopher D. Stone, “Should Trees Have Standing? Toward Legal Rights for Natural Objects,” Southern California Law Review 45 (1972).
Te Awa Tupua (Whanganui River Claims Settlement) Act 2017 (New Zealand).
Survey data: Pew Research Center (Dec. 2025; Jan. 2026); Gallup (June 2025).
Sepahsalar Labs · Political Philosophy · 2026