For more than half a century, Western democracies trusted in a rules-based, technocratic machine to deliver stability and fairness. But the Great Financial Crisis revealed the limits of government by algorithm and exposed a deeper crisis of legitimacy at the heart of the liberal state. Drawing on Carl Schmitt’s unsettling account of sovereignty, author of After the Leviathan, Andreas Wesemann argues that Britain’s malaise lies not in weak leaders but in an over-centralized State-as-Computer, and that its renewal requires a radical redistribution of power rather than the search for a new strongman.

After the Second World War, the European members of the Allied coalition embarked on a project of cooperation and integration to ensure that no single nation could again dominate the continent. This would yield economic benefits, but it also required a far greater codification of the “rules of the game”—a dense web of laws, regulations, and guidelines designed to insulate states and their citizens from the whims of political personalities. The unconstrained powers of the European dictators were never to be possible again; they would be replaced by the quasi-automatons of the legislative and administrative state. In parallel, governments expanded their control over economic life. The logic was simple: if centralized coordination had worked in war, why not in peace? Britain joined this wider project of codification and control, though with characteristic ambivalence when it came to European integration. Out of this architecture of rules and institutions emerged what might be called the State-as-Computer: a machine designed to replace human judgment with coded procedures.

Meanwhile, the United States followed a similar path, even though it emerged from the Second World War as the largest, richest, and most powerful nation on earth. Its pre-eminence made it indispensable to the network of international agreements and institutions born of this new cooperative spirit. While that allowed America to leave a deep imprint on how the rules were written and enforced, it nevertheless subscribed to the same rules-based order embraced by Europe and the United Kingdom. After all, the United States shared the same conviction: cooperation requires rules. Laws and institutions were to replace individuals as the leading protagonists on both the national and international stage. After the slaughter of millions at the hands of a few deranged but effective dictators, the semi-automatic, if somewhat legalistic, computer of governance may well have seemed a welcome substitute for the uncontrollable explosions of emotional strongmen. That these law- and rule-making institutions often operated out of sight was, perhaps, part of their virtue.

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The State as Computer, it was thought, could make everyone rich and happy.

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In the first decades after 1945, with the memory of carnage still fresh, the new order performed admirably. Economic growth was strong, internal peace held, and international cooperation flourished. Gradually, however, dissenting voices emerged: students at the Sorbonne, civil rights activists in San Francisco, and a new generation in Berlin angered by the persistence of former Nazis in government and industry. Economic growth, too, began to slow as the command-and-control model of post-war management reached diminishing returns—just as a handful of oil-rich nations imposed their own rules on their European and American customers.