We have previously argued that the 2008 global financial and economic crisis was a clear manifestation of an unstable and contradictory world characterized by a disjunction between (1) massive economic growth and unprecedented advances in science, technology, and medical care and (2) the widening of disparities in wealth and health within and between nations. We also argued that the global financial crisis was much more than a crisis of capitalist accumulation or a necessary self-correction aided by macroeconomic intervention and bailouts.

In Chapter 18, we outlined a reading of the present global conjuncture that we characterized as one of organic crisis. The term was meant to invoke a paradoxical situation, one pregnant with possibilities for alternative ways in which global health might be improved, yet nevertheless a situation in which new alternatives have yet to emerge or indeed to be born.

Spectacular progress, both intellectual and material, has been achieved through the Enlightenment notion of the centrality of the individual and the supremacy of science and technology in advancing health and healthcare practices. The modern Western belief system and its frames for global thinking that have now become powerful worldwide are succinctly characterized by an individualistic, self-determining, and rights-bearing concept of being; an epistemological framework that centers on abstract thinking, objectivity in observation, logical reasoning processes, verifiable knowledge, and a positivist version of the scientific method; and moral and political values of autonomy supportive of individual rights. Scientific and technological progress and diverse socioeconomic systems contributed to fostering great “accelerations” in the scale of production, consumption, communication, and transportation that in particular since 1945 have improved the duration and quality of life for many people.

Genealogy, origins and world order

Part II of the volume outlines some of the origins, purposes and forms of authority and power associated with liberal constitutions and world orders. The two chapters help illuminate what is ‘old’ and ‘new’ in the emerging new constitutional world order. They illustrate how historical struggles have forged dominant patterns of political authority and are now restructuring the global order. The main themes of Part II involve:

1. The genealogy of liberal constitutionalism, particularly that of the United States.

2. How liberal constitutionalism can be understood as a form of insurance on the part of dominant forces against threats to their power, privilege and property, stemming from popular and democratic forces.

3. The recent global convergence toward constitutional supremacy in light of the rapid spread of democratic politics.

Chapter 5 by Tim Di Muzio suggests that a deeper appreciation of historical struggles over the constitution of liberal political authority helps us to identify the links between what is ‘old’ and what is ‘new’ in the new constitutionalism. In mainstream political science, liberal constitutionalism is often deemed the most desirable framework for promoting material advancement and human freedom while circumscribing arbitrary, unjust and absolute rule. Di Muzio argues, however, that this conventional wisdom disregards how US constitutionalism was developed by a class-based political project that attempted to safeguard and legitimate an empire of liberty for an afl uent minority and forms of domination for the rest. Di Muzio’s genealogical enquiry focuses on key concepts in the political order of the West since at least the seventeenth century, and specifically how US colonial elites understood liberty, property and security during the American Revolutionary War and the subsequent constitutional settlement.

Trade, investment and taxation

Part IV seeks to explore how the new constitutionalism of disciplinary neo-liberalism has reshaped the global regimes on investment, trade and taxation. It outlines how neo-liberal restructuring of these regimes – despite contradictions and crises – is intensifying in ways that are driven by, and that tend to reinforce, the direct and structural power of capital. The five main themes in Part IV are:

1. The globalization of capital-exporting legal norms.

2. The expansion of market-based investment disciplines and agreements.

3. Challenges for public service provision and environmental regulation in light of these neo-liberal arrangements.

4. Prospects for the post-global economic crisis political economy of taxation.

5. Prospects for alternative forms of governance of the investment, trade and tax regimes.

Social reproduction, welfare and ecology

Part V addresses the general question: how far and in what ways has the emergent global extension of neo-liberal market civilization, locked in by new constitutional mechanisms, reconstituted some of our basic socioeconomic and ecological conditions of existence? The contributions explore how restructuring of these conditions amidst ongoing crises has deepened contradictions, inequalities and insecurities, and raised fundamental concerns over social reproduction and ecological sustainability, provoking new patterns of resistance and challenges to disciplinary neo-liberalism. The principal themes of Part V are:

1. How – in the context of global organic crisis and the intensification of social inequalities – the restructuring of systems of social reproduction is linked to more ‘regressive’ and unjust tax systems in ways that are generating significant constraints on expenditures for health and care, welfare and education (‘fiscal squeeze’), developments that are partly the result of the global extension of new constitutional measures.

2. How the proliferation of private debt in the United States relates to the erosion of welfare and transformations in social reproduction, and how in response the US legal apparatus has strengthened coercive governance via criminalization and incarceration of debtors.

3. How, nevertheless, new ‘constitutions’ of the social emerge in complex, variegated and uneven ways through neo-liberalization processes.

4. How the current global financial crisis impacts on social policy regimes.

5. How the tension between neo-liberal new constitutionalism and the ethical-normative principles required for sustainable and just ecological governance, especially in light of climate change, is posing urgent threats to humanity.