Introduction 

I was re-reading Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man again recently, inspired after reading Zhang Yongle’s article, Reconfiguring Hegemony in the New Left Review (NLR 153, June/July 2025). What struck me about Fukuyama’s account of the political personality (so to speak), was the thinness of his anthropology. That is, the human being as a unified subject animated by a single, static drive: the desire to be recognized. Missing from this picture (owing to a reading of Hegel through Kojeve) is a more plastic and processual account of the subject itself – its modes of internalization, projection, and reflexive transformation. This got me thinking of what William James could offer with his model of the subject structured by material, social, and spiritual selves. 

Using this Jamesian framework of the self as a political personality, I want to explore how political systems generate and sustain forms of subjectivity through reflexive alignment. That is, between material life, social perception, and moral belief. Liberal democracy, in this view, produced not just institutions but a livable self-form, one now strung out like an anesthetised body upon a table. The self it once anchored (autonomous, upwardly mobile, morally coherent, etc.) has become unstable. This essay is an attempt to understand that collapse, to chart the reflexive structures now emerging in its place, and to consider whether liberalism can be revived and renewed. 

Reflexive Selfhood and the Conditions of Political Personality 

Put briefly (and hopefully without doing his argument a disservice), in The End of History and the Last Man, Fukuyama posited that liberal democracy had achieved the final reconciliation of thymotic impulses. Isothymia, the desire to be recognized as equal, was fulfilled by juridical equality and political enfranchisement. Megalothymia, the desire to be seen as superior, found expression in market competition, electoral prominence, and public achievement. This he takes from Plato. 

Political systems succeed, in this framework, when they institutionalize recognition. That is, when the individual’s demand for dignity is met by the structures of law, representation, and symbolic esteem. Liberal institutions were thus not merely instrumental; they were anthropologically complete. The subject’s desire was met, and history, in the dialectical sense, has reached its terminal beach. 

This construction rests on a thin theory of the self. Recognition is treated as a discrete act – a symbolic moment in which the subject is either affirmed or denied. Desire is taken as given, constant across history, and fulfilled through correct institutional design. In such a framework, the subject is not composed through ongoing experience or internal complexity; it is treated as pre-formed and stable, defined by a single axis of desire – to be seen and affirmed. Once recognition is granted, the subject is presumed complete, its development concluded. 

But subjectivity is not a static nexus for desire. It is a temporally reflexive process that requires not only recognition but continuous coherence across experience, affect, and interpretation. In the work and thinking of William James a more adequate model of the self can be found, one that accounts for the construction and maintenance of selfhood as an iterative phenomenon. The Jamesian self is not a fixed unit but a dynamic formation, constituted through ongoing feedback between empirical reality, self-feeling, and self-directed action. 

Applying this model, political systems cannot be understood merely as structures of recognition. They are reflexive systems of self-enactment. Their durability depends on their capacity to sustain alignment between material experience, social identity, and moral belief. When this alignment fails and the subject’s perception of their life ceases to generate stable self-feeling, coherence dissolves. What emerges is not unfulfilled desire but reflexive breakdown. 

The Jamesian Psychological Trichotomy and its Political Analogues 

William James’s conception of the self, as developed in The Principles of Psychology (V1, Ch.10), rejects any monolithic account of identity. For James, the self is always a composite, not a substance. It comprises distinct yet interrelated domains of experience, each with its own referents, vulnerabilities, and affective valences. These domains are not ordered by hierarchy but by simultaneity: each is always in operation, and the coherence of the self depends on the reflexive integration of all three. 

James identifies three primary components: 

1. The Material Self: This includes the body, clothes, possessions, home, and other objects of identification. It also encompasses one’s economic situation, physical health, and general control over space. The material self provides the concrete field through which agency is enacted and boundaries are maintained. It forms the most empirical register of selfhood, tied directly to labour, capital, and physical stability. 

2. The Social Self: This dimension reflects the individual as perceived by others. It includes reputation, social status, role, and prestige. Because one occupies different roles in different contexts (family, work, public, etc.) there are multiple social selves. This domain is inherently mediated; it is constructed through interaction, visibility, and esteem. It anchors the subject in systems of recognition, but not in the abstract sense of legal dignity. Rather, it pertains to felt legibility in one’s milieu. 

3. The Spiritual Self: The most interior of the three, this includes one’s moral beliefs, religious convictions, philosophical commitments, and affective depth. It constitutes the field of introspection, value-formation, and continuity. The spiritual self provides the subject with orientation – not in relation to others, but to time, meaning, and death. It is here that aspiration, guilt, redemption, and self-transcendence reside. 

Each of these components is affectively charged. James does not treat them as ontological layers, but as practical sites of investment and anxiety. The self exists not simply as a structure but as a project of maintenance. The subject must continually harmonize these three domains across time. Misalignment, between, say, material degradation and moral aspiration, or between social invisibility and spiritual conviction – produces affective crisis. Pride, shame, despair, resentment: these are signals of reflexive malfunction. 

This framework, while developed in the domain of psychology, lends itself to political analysis through analogical extension. Just as individuals maintain selfhood through the reflexive stabilization of material, social, and spiritual conditions, so too do political systems. A functioning order requires not only procedural legitimacy or economic growth, but the reproduction of a stable collective self-form. That being, one in which the governed experience material security, social coherence, and moral continuity as mutually reinforcing. 

Political systems generate subjects through institutions, discourse, and affective investments. When these operations align across the three Jamesian dimensions, the regime is not simply legitimate; it is livable. It produces subjects who feel themselves to be integrated within a world that reflects their own coherence back to them. When the loop fails (when growth no longer yields esteem, when public identity is fractured, when moral narratives collapse, for example) the subject produced by the regime begins to disintegrate. 

Liberal democracy functioned for much of the twentieth century as such a reflexive self-form. Its present crisis, accordingly, cannot be fully understood without attending to the failure of this feedback structure. The self it once produced, the liberal individual, autonomous and upwardly mobile, has ceased to be reproducible. 

Liberalism as a Mode of Reflexive Integration 

The liberal-democratic order that emerged in the North Atlantic world after 1945 did not succeed through institutional design alone. Its endurance rested on its capacity to organize a coherent political subjectivity. That is, a collective self-form whose internal components aligned reflexively across material life, social structure, and moral imagination. This reflexive synthesis was not articulated as such by liberal theorists, but it operated in practice as the affective infrastructure of hegemony. 

At the level of the material self, liberalism offered expanding economic participation, consumer sovereignty, and a modulated form of class mobility. The institutional frameworks of Keynesian demand management, welfare expansion, and industrial corporatism generated relative stability for large segments of the population. Property, income, healthcare, and retirement were organized not as entitlements alone but as components of personhood. To possess a stable life under liberalism was to occupy a stable place within its material world. 

The social self of liberalism was constructed through formal equality, professional status, and the diffusion of mass culture. Citizens were encouraged to see themselves as bearers of rights, participants in democratic governance, and contributors to national narratives of progress. The mid-century subject was mirrored back through legal codification, educational structures, and the expanding apparatus of media representation. Even amid deep racial, sex, gender, and colonial exclusions, the liberal social imaginary retained the form of universality. To be recognized within liberalism was to be legible as a participant, a voice, a voter, a worker, a consumer, and so forth. 

As for the spiritual self, liberal democracy presented itself as the culmination of historical progress – not only institutionally, but morally. It promised freedom, not as license, but as a mode of ethical self-direction. Its civic religion, particularly in the American case, fused Enlightenment ideals with Butterfieldian providential teleology. The subject was not merely a rights-bearer, but a moral agent within a larger narrative of emancipation, rationality, and peace. 

These three components: economic integration, social recognition, moral teleology – did not function in isolation. Their power lay in their reflexive interdependence. Material security reinforced social participation; social recognition stabilized moral belief; moral belief legitimated economic sacrifice or ambition. This reflexive structure produced what might be termed the liberal personality: autonomous, upwardly mobile, meritocratic, plural, future-oriented. 

For several decades, this reflexive self-form functioned with remarkable durability. Its crises (civil rights struggles, anti-war movements, labour unrest, etc.) were partially contained within the promise of eventual expansion and reform. The system appeared capacious enough to adapt. Where contradictions became visible, they were often perceived as correctable deviations rather than structural failures. 

What held this structure together was not merely power, but coherence. The subject of liberalism could, within certain bounds, believe in the world reflected back to them. The feedback loop between life, self-image, and moral purpose remained unbroken. This reflexive harmony was the affective core of liberal hegemony. 

That structure has now dissolved. Its dissolution cannot be reduced to any single causal factor: neoliberal deregulation, globalization, digital fragmentation, the waning of American primacy – though each has contributed. What matters is that the feedback loop itself no longer functions. The self that liberalism once produced has become unstable. Its material foundations are insecure, its social status symbols discredited or polarized, its moral narratives threadbare or mocked. The reflexive alignment has fractured. 

The crisis of liberalism, therefore, is not simply the crisis of a state form. It is the crisis of a historical personality type: a reflexive self-form that can no longer reproduce itself under contemporary conditions. Its failure is anthropological before it is political. 

The Symptoms of Reflexive Collapse 

The failure of liberalism in the early twenty-first century has been widely described in terms of institutional breakdown, elite capture, cultural polarization, and economic precarity. Each diagnosis captures elements of the present malaise, yet none fully accounts for the affective disorientation that accompanies it: the widespread sense that the political world is no longer credible, that one’s role within it is opaque, and that the future holds no intelligible promise. These are not simply crises of representation or policy. They are symptoms of reflexive collapse. 

When the feedback loop that sustains selfhood disintegrates, the subject does not vanish. It persists in distorted form, as fragmented, anxious, and incoherent. Affective signals lose their anchoring function; pride, shame, resentment, and hope cease to map onto stable courses of action. The Jamesian self, unable to integrate its material, social, and spiritual dimensions, begins to implode, repeat, or fracture. In the political sphere, this manifests as volatility, disidentification, and the search for new loops of coherence – however unstable or reactionary. 

At the level of the material self, liberal capitalism has ceased to deliver. Precarity has replaced stability; ownership has given way to debt; work no longer guarantees recognition or progress. The body, once sustained by welfare guarantees or collective bargaining, is increasingly exposed: physically vulnerable, chronically surveilled, yet economically abandoned. This breakdown severs the base of the self’s feedback loop. The empirical substrate no longer furnishes experiences capable of generating pride or control. 

The social self, mediated through public life and symbolic exchange, has likewise eroded. Digital fragmentation, status competition, and the collapse of consensus culture have unmoored the subject from recognizability. The older symbols of achievement (employment, education, citizenship, family, and so on) no longer reliably confer esteem. In their place are new hierarchies, rapidly shifting and often hollow, shaped by algorithmic visibility and online aggression. The social mirror no longer reflects a coherent image, but one distorted by exposure, irony, and repetition. 

The spiritual self, once anchored in narratives of liberal progress and moral advancement, has been evacuated. Teleologies of emancipation, reason, or democratic peace no longer command belief, except in procedural form. The language remains, but the moral force is inert. In its place emerge fragmented forms of spiritual investment (conspiracy, nostalgia, moral purity, technocratic faith, and the like) none of which can reconstruct the full reflexive loop of a livable self-form. 

What results is not apathy but reactivity. The subject, unanchored yet affectively saturated, seeks new coherence. The rise of populism, nationalism, identitarianism, and moral authoritarianism must be read not only as ideological shifts but as reflexive attempts at reintegration. They offer simplified material identities (worker, patriot, ethno-national subject), legible social positions (us vs. them), and resacralized narratives (decline and restoration, betrayal and rebirth). These formations do not solve the reflexive crisis, but exploit it. 

Liberalism, for its part, continues to speak in the language of norms and rules. It appeals to rights, procedures, and universal values. But it no longer produces subjects who believe that these forms will return them to coherence. The feedback loop has broken. While the political regime may persist, the self it once relied upon does not. 

Competing Reflexive Forms: Populism, Authoritarianism, Technocracy 

When a political regime fails to reproduce a coherent personality type (that is, when the feedback loops that stabilize the self break down) new forms of reflexive integration inevitably emerge. These alternatives do not necessarily offer institutional novelty. What they offer is affective re-alignment: an opportunity to feel coherent again, to locate one’s self in a world that seems legible, actionable, and morally structured. In Jamesian terms, they are not ideological choices but reflexive solutions to disintegration. 

I have identified three emergent formations: populism, authoritarianism, technocracy. Each presents a distinct way of recomposing the material, social, and spiritual domains of selfhood. Their function is not to restore the liberal subject, but to offer alternative modes of reflexive coherence, each with its own structure of affect and temporality. 

We will consider each in turn: populism, authoritarianism, and technocracy. 

1. Populism: Populism offers a reflexive loop structured around grievance, restoration, and moral clarity. It begins with the failure of the material self: economic dispossession, deindustrialization, or the erosion of class status. This dispossession is then translated into a social logic: a narrative of betrayal, in which a corrupt elite and undeserving others have undermined the rightful order. The spiritual self is restored not through abstract values but through moral combat – redemptive anger, anti-elite truth-telling, and identification with the real people. 
   This structure is affectively potent. It produces reflexive closure by aligning hardship with legibility (we are poor because they betrayed us” and legibility with virtue (we are the only ones who see clearly). The self is reassembled not through upward mobility or rational deliberation, but through moral revaluation. Populism does not heal the fractured self; it renders the fracture meaningful. 
2. 
   Authoritarianism: Where populism is reactive, authoritarianism is projective. It does not merely respond to loss; it constructs a forward-facing form of reflexive integration through order, hierarchy, and historical destiny. The material self is secured through development and protectionism – employment, infrastructure, consumption. The social self is stabilized through national unity, depoliticized culture, and the repression of dissenting identities. The spiritual self is reanimated through civilizational narratives, the sacralization of tradition, and selective modernism.  
   Authoritarian recursion functions through coherence, not complexity. It aligns all domains around a single figure or mission, such as leader, party, homeland, future, and so on. Individual dislocation is absorbed into collective personality. The self is recovered not by reclaiming autonomy, but by merging with the historical body of the nation. This reflexive form is durable so long as its material promises hold and its narrative of destiny remains credible. 
   
3. Technocracy: Technocracy offers a different mode of recursion: not moral restoration or collective mission, but managed survival. The material self is reduced to optimization: data, access, consumption, minimal stability. The social self is rendered neutral, stripped of moral content and reframed in terms of utility, competence, or productivity. The spiritual self is evacuated, replaced by risk management, governance-by-algorithm, and procedural minimalism. 
   This model does not produce affective intensity. It offers low-stakes coherence. The reflexive loop closes by shrinking the self: expectations are lowered, friction is minimized, life is made administrable. Technocratic recursion is the self as quiet maintenance. It appeals most in moments of exhaustion, when political desire has burned out and the risk of rupture seems worse than the flatness of control. 

Each of these formations should be understood not merely as regime types or ideological orientations but as reflexive strategies: ways of restoring felt coherence to subjects destabilized by liberal collapse. They function by realigning the Jamesian domains (material, social, spiritual) into new affective orders. They do not emerge from preference but from necessity: they fill the vacuum left by a failed self-form. 

Toward a General Theory of Political Personality 

What emerges from the foregoing analysis is not a typology of ideologies, nor a theory of legitimacy in the conventional sense, but a broader anthropological model of how political systems are sustained and reproduced: not simply through institutions, laws, or discursive hegemony, but through their capacity to generate and stabilize reflexive forms of selfhood. The central claim is that every durable political formation (as liberal, authoritarian, populist, technocratic, etc.) depends upon the composition of a historical personality: a socially distributed and temporally reproduced self-form capable of integrating the material, social, and spiritual domains of human experience into a coherent loop. 

This theory is grounded in James’s psychology, but its implications extend beyond the individual. Just as the self in James is reflexive (emerging through a feedback loop between empirical conditions and affective self-feeling) so too are political personalities reflexive at scale. They require the ongoing synchronization of three interdependent domains: 

• Material Reality: This refers to the experiential ground of life—economic security, physical autonomy, infrastructural stability. Without a sense of control over one’s environment and access to resources, no reflexive loop can stabilize. 

• Social Legibility: This refers to recognition in the broader sense—status, esteem, identity, and cultural belonging. It is not reducible to rights or visibility. It concerns whether one’s social image confirms or disorients one’s self-perception. 

• Spiritual Orientation: This domain includes value, meaning, purpose, and time. It links the subject to history, morality, and imagined futures. Without it, life becomes technical, reactive, or nihilistic. 

A political regime becomes hegemonic when it is able to integrate these three domains into a reflexive structure that reproduces subjects who experience their own coherence. This coherence does not imply contentment, but stability. The self feels real, actionable, and legible; its conditions make sense; its aspirations seem grounded. In such systems, grievance and conflict persist, but the reflexive structure remains intact. The regime provides a template of personhood in which its subjects can find themselves. 

Conversely, crisis occurs when this reflexive structure begins to unravel. The self becomes dislocated: materially insecure, socially illegible, spiritually unanchored. The result is not a vacuum of desire, but a proliferation of reflexive attempts (some pathological, others regenerative) to restore affective coherence. These attempts may coalesce into new regime forms or into chronic instability. Either way, the crisis is not first a failure of governance but a failure of personality reproduction. 

The liberal-democratic subject (the rational individual, autonomous and self-improving, recognized and recognizably equal, moving toward moral progress) was one such historical personality. It functioned reflexively through growth, participation, and belief. Its disintegration has left a structural void. New formations (whether authoritarian, populist, or technocratic) succeed not because they resolve prior contradictions, but because they propose new reflexive alignments that feel, however briefly, coherent. 

This model reframes political theory around the production of subjectivity. It insists that systems must be understood not only through structures and norms, but through the kinds of selves they require, sustain, and eventually exhaust. The key question is not whether institutions survive, but whether they can still generate livable personalities. That is, as selves who feel aligned, enacted, and intelligible within the conditions the regime produces. 

Liberalism as a Failed Personality Type 

Liberalism has not collapsed. But is critically enervated. Its institutions remain intact, its discourse persists in the idiom of rights and norms, and its defenders still appeal to procedural integrity and legal consistency. But beneath these surfaces, the anthropological foundation that sustained the liberal-democratic subject has eroded. The reflexive feedback loops that once reproduced the liberal self no longer hold. Liberalism has ceased to function as a generator of personality. 

In its historical form, the liberal self was premised on a coherent alignment between economic participation, social visibility, and moral belief. One worked, consumed, earned; one was seen and respected; one believed in the arc of progress, the rationality of institutions, and the virtue of democratic citizenship. The reflexive loop was both personal and political. One’s experience of daily life reinforced a larger social identity, which in turn confirmed the legitimacy of the order. That self was never universal. Class, sex, gender, and race differences persisted – and it was limited to particular zones of global power (Global South, Communist Block, Non-Aligned, being exceptions). But it worked – temporarily, for some, with consequences for all. 

That structure no longer functions. Material precarity, stagnant mobility, and asset inflation have undermined the foundational promises of liberal capitalism. The social realm has fragmented under the pressures of hypermediation, status anxiety, and epistemic fracture. The spiritual domain (the belief in history, progress, and the public good) has become abstract, ironic, or exhausted. The self liberalism once produced now finds itself disoriented: unable to locate affirmation in work, community, or vision. What remains is procedural form without reflexive function. 

This failure is not merely ideological, but is affective, experiential, anthropological. The liberal subject has not been overturned by a rival ideology; it has simply ceased to be livable. It no longer corresponds to the experiences people have or the selves they can coherently inhabit. The political implications of this breakdown are profound. Where liberalism no longer generates a viable personality type, it cannot reproduce legitimacy, even if its institutions remain nominally intact. 

What emerges in the wake of this collapse are not merely new politics, but new reflexive personalities: populist, authoritarian, technocratic, and others still inchoate. Each proposes a new alignment between life, self-perception, and meaning. Some are dangerous, others hollow, and a few perhaps contain the seeds of a future self-form not yet fully imagined. But what is clear is this: no political regime can endure without anchoring itself in a viable mode of reflexive selfhood. Liberalism has failed not only as governance, but as anthropology. Its subject has dissolved. 

If a new political form is to arise, it must first grapple with the kind of self it seeks to produce – not as an ideal, but as a reflexive project. It must ask not only what justice requires or what institutions enable, but what form of life it can coherently sustain. The self is not external to politics. It is the medium through which politics lives or dies. 

CONCLUSION 

Towards a Radical Civic Liberalism 

If liberal democracy is to survive as a viable political form and not merely a procedural shell or a holding pattern between crises, it must reconstitute itself as a builder of selfhood and subjectivity. That means recovering the capacity to align material life, social belonging, and moral meaning into a livable whole. The reflexive coherence that once sustained liberal subjectivity has broken. What is now required is not nostalgia for institutional continuity, but a renewal of liberalism as a political anthropology: a system capable of generating the kinds of selves who can act, belong, and believe within it.  

Personally (and given my political allegiance to the UK Liberal Democrats), I think former Liberal Party leader Jo Grimond offers a programme for liberal renewal and revival. He understood liberalism not just as a defence of moderation, but as a radical civic project. 

Grimond’s liberalism was pluralist and constitutional, but it was also moral and reconstructive. It valued liberty not as absence of interference but as the space in which character could be cultivated. He advocated for decentralization not out of anti-statism, but from a belief that the self is formed in association, through work, locality, and shared responsibility. His vision was not merely one of markets and rights, but of a society in which individuals could become agents of their own moral and civic development. This is precisely the kind of reflexive subjectivity that must now be reassembled. He laid this vision out in books including The Liberal Future (1959), The Liberal Challenge (1963), and The Future of Our Society (1978).

A renewed civic liberalism, drawn from Grimond’s tradition and adapted to contemporary breakdown, would aim at three converging goals: 

1. Material Security as Dignity: not just redistribution, but economic structures that enable people to act with control and continuity. Cooperatives, community wealth-building, basic services guaranteed not as charity but as the infrastructural conditions of moral agency. 
   
2. Civic Recognition through Institutions: a rebuilding of the associational life Grimond championed: local government, mutuals, guilds, universities, public forums. These are the mediating forms through which the social self becomes legible and respected without being reduced to spectacle or demographic tokenism. 
   
3. Imagination not Dogma: a liberalism that does not fear meaning. Civic life must once again be tied to historical imagination, ecological purpose, intergenerational responsibility. Grimond understood that liberalism needed roots (cultural, moral, and imaginative) to resist both state authoritarianism and consumer triviality. 

None of this implies a liberalism of consensus. The tradition Grimond defended (often alone) was rooted not in institutional compromise, but in conflict: between property and power, privilege and participation, abstraction and lived experience. His liberalism was not conciliatory but agonistic. This is to say he understood politics as an arena of ongoing struggle, where the task was not to eliminate division but to organize it productively so that competing interests and ideas could be mediated through structures that preserved both liberty and pluralism. Consensus liberalism, by contrast, treats disagreement as a problem to be managed – flattened into procedure, outsourced to expert bodies, or depoliticized altogether. This is the cosmopolitan fingering of the last men Nietzsche despised. 

What matters in a radical civic liberalism is not harmony, but recursion: the capacity to sustain a structure in which material conditions, social belonging, and moral orientation feed back into a self that can act with coherence and purpose. That self does not need to be unified by agreement but held together by institutions capable of absorbing tension without disintegrating. Liberalism can survive, but not as a doctrine of risk aversion. To use Grimond’s phrase, it must once again be marching towards the sound of gunfire – toward the contested centre of political life, not away from it.