Gellner/Macfarlane and 2050 - Gellnerian Inflections: 5.

Introduction 

Alan Macfarlane places Ernest Gellner in a rare company of intellectuals who consistently addressed the largest and most enduring human questions. In his view, many scholars confine themselves to resolving smaller, manageable issues, but Gellner persisted in asking the childlike yet profound questions about the meaning of liberty, wealth, and human existence that most academic training tends to suppress. 

This was, for Macfarlane, part of Gellner’s affinity with the eighteenth-century Enlightenment tradition: the capacity to engage in sweeping, unfashionable inquiries into the purpose and structure of human life. Macfarlane saw in Gellner the embodiment of Lord Acton’s dictum to study problems rather than periods. Gellner’s scholarship, like that of Marc Bloch, was led by the scent of human conflict, regardless of disciplinary boundaries. His curiosity took him across philosophy, sociology, and anthropology, and across cultures, Islam, communism, North Africa, while remaining rooted in the monotheistic West. In this, Macfarlane compared him favourably to figures such as Max Weber, noting that Gellner ranged more widely than most anthropologists. Such breadth of comparative method allowed him, Macfarlane believed, to illuminate what he called “the tides of history”: the large, structural tendencies that shape human societies over time. This Gibbon-like vantage point enabled Gellner to discern recurrent patterns, most famously the tendency for societies to become increasingly predatory as they grow wealthier, thereby providing a moving vision of historical dynamics. 

Reflecting on their conversations, Macfarlane identified two central questions he wished he could have explored further with Gellner: the origins of liberty and its contemporary trajectory. Gellner, he thought, possessed a clear sense of what liberty consisted in, namely, the separation of different spheres of life so that no single authority, whether political, religious, or familial, could dominate. Yet his explanations of how liberty emerged were, in Macfarlane’s judgment, less convincing. Gellner’s own accounts, such as the theory of conflicts between priests and rulers, did not fully address the historical mechanisms that could generate a civil society robust enough to sustain liberty. 

Macfarlane suspected that this gap stemmed from Gellner’s intellectual affinities, perhaps more with Adam Ferguson than with Adam Smith or Alexis de Tocqueville, leading to insufficient historical grounding. After Gellner’s death, Macfarlane encountered the work of F. W. Maitland, whom he came to regard as both the greatest historian of England and one of the most profound political philosophers. In a set of overlooked essays, Maitland traced the roots of English liberty to a fourteenth-century legal innovation: the Trust. Originally devised to circumvent aristocratic death duties, the trust evolved into a legally recognised but non-incorporated entity, lying between the state and the individual. This form allowed people to organise collectively around shared responsibilities and purposes without direct incorporation by the state. Though briefly abolished under Henry V1II, trusts proliferated in the sixteenth century and, according to Macfarlane, underpinned the development of English civil society. 

Trusts, he argued, provided a legal foundation for political opposition (notably among the Inns of Court in the conflict with Charles I), for religious independence (as in the Methodist, Baptist, and Quaker movements), and for economic and intellectual enterprise (from the joint-stock companies and Lloyd’s of London to the Royal Society and the British Academy). They sustained a distinctive associational culture in Britain, praised by Tocqueville in America, which relied on interpersonal trust as both a legal and a moral principle. This culture of trust, Macfarlane suggested, was instrumental in shaping not only the British Empire but also the democratic associationalism of the United States. He conceded that Gellner might have challenged the idea’s uniqueness to Britain, perhaps by pointing to analogues in Islamic or other societies, but maintained that the historical specificity of the English trust was hard to refute. 

From this foundation, Macfarlane turned to the question of liberty’s future. Here he saw Gellner’s stance as ambivalent: on the one hand, liberty was fragile and contingent, almost extinguished in the Second World War; on the other, there was a guarded confidence that once liberal civilisation was established, it would not regress. Macfarlane doubted this second assumption. Drawing on Tocqueville and Montesquieu, he noted two historical conditions that had shielded liberty in the West: geographical insulation (as with England and the United States before the First World War and 9/11) and the absence of perpetual warfare. Both conditions, he argued, had collapsed. 

The erosion began when Britain was drawn into the European land war of 1914 and when the United States was pulled into a globalised security environment after the terrorist attacks of 2001. In Macfarlane’s view, the “war on terror” represented a qualitatively new threat: a never-ending, borderless conflict against an invisible enemy, providing governments with indefinite justification to curtail civil liberties. He cited contemporary developments in Britain, the weakening of the separation of powers, the erosion of jury trials, the effective abolition of habeas corpus, as evidence that liberty was “nearly dead,” a view shared by some constitutional scholars who considered the country an elective monarchy in all but name. 

Macfarlane acknowledged that Gellner might have responded with counterarguments or a more tempered assessment, but he felt the urgency of the problem justified a more pessimistic stance. The conversation, of course, could not take place. Yet for Macfarlane, continuing to think with and against Gellner- asking the large, unfashionable questions, comparing across cultures, tracing the deep tides of history - remains both a tribute to their intellectual exchange and an ongoing task in the face of liberty’s uncertain future. 

Megalomania

Building on Macfarlane’s reflections about the origins and fragility of liberty, his argument can be extended to a broader assessment of the present global political landscape. This is what I'm going to try and do here. I'm going to speculate what these two theorists of modernity might say about the current civilisational developments and guess what they would say the state of the world would be in 2050, and in particular what they'd say about the rise of authoritarianism and the decline of liberty and democracy. 

This is, of course, a wildly megalomaniacal undertaking but here we go. Predictions are easier when made in hindsight, and I’ve no idea if anything here will land even remotely close to the truth. The gamble is doubled: I’m not just guessing the future, I’m guessing what Gellner and Macfarlane might have said about it in 2050. Macfarlane, at least, is still around to ask and I will but for now what follows is a wholly fictionalised Gellner-and-Macfarlane duet, improvised entirely in my head. Doubts duly noted; let’s see what I think they’d say.

Introducing Gellnerian and Macfarlian Themes for the Consolidation of Authoritarianism 2050

I suggest that the developments of recent decades, illiberal turns in established democracies, the consolidation of power in hybrid regimes, and the normalisation of emergency measures, would, in Macfarlane's  view, sustain his conviction that liberty is not a stable achievement but a precarious and historically contingent arrangement. The “island thesis” he drew from Tocqueville and others, namely, that liberty flourishes most securely when geopolitical insulation prevents the state from resorting to permanent militarisation, would appear ever more relevant as the United States, once the exemplar of this insulated condition, has become thoroughly “connected up” to global security entanglements. The post-9/11 national security state erased the spatial buffer that had long allowed American liberty to develop without the corrosive effects of a perpetual war footing. From this vantage point, Macfarlane would likely see the emergence of what might be called a “soft authoritarianism” across much of the democratic world: a political order retaining electoral mechanisms and a degree of legal pluralism, but operating within a security paradigm that normalises surveillance, curtails rights, and constricts public dissent. 

The danger, he would argue, is that such soft authoritarianism is structurally unstable, either giving way to the re-expansion of liberty in a moment of political reversal, or, more plausibly, hardening into overt authoritarian rule. The tendency toward the latter outcome would be reinforced by global interconnectedness, where the island advantage is gone for all major powers. Such a framework also invites a comparative analysis of non-Western modernities, particularly China and Japan. Macfarlane would contend that neither state fully fulfilled the core structural condition of modernity as it developed in the West: the separation of power/coercion, culture, and economy into semi-autonomous spheres, each with its own institutions, norms, and forms of authority. 

In the West, this separation, partly accidental, partly the outcome of protracted conflicts among church, crown, and commercial interests, created a space in which no single power could dominate all dimensions of social life. In East Asian civilisations, by contrast, political authority retained a hegemonic relationship to both culture and the economy, sustaining what Macfarlane would term “enchanted” civilisations: polities in which the cosmology of the state remained integrated with moral order and economic life. Yet these “enchanted” civilisations could, paradoxically, sustain enclaves or oases of cognitive liberty within a larger framework of centralised authority. In Japan, certain domains of scholarship, artisan production, and mercantile activity enjoyed considerable autonomy, often under the protection of localised feudal arrangements. In China, despite the deeply centralised imperial bureaucracy, merchant networks, certain academies, and even some artisanal-technological communities maintained a degree of operational freedom, protected either by geographic remoteness, bureaucratic neglect, or a strategic tolerance by the state. 

These oases allowed for bursts of scientific, technological, and commercial innovation even within a civilisation whose overall political configuration discouraged large-scale institutional pluralism. The puzzle, from Macfarlane’s perspective, is how China in particular could accommodate such enclaves without either succumbing to the liberalising pressures that in the West transformed capitalist enclaves into fully liberal civil societies, or crushing them under the centralising tendencies inherent to its imperial political culture. One speculative answer lies in the adaptive pragmatism of Chinese statecraft. The imperial state, though rhetorically committed to moral and bureaucratic centralism, often operated through a deliberately partial governance, tolerating and at times relying upon semi-autonomous social and economic orders so long as they did not threaten dynastic stability. 

This pattern, seen in the tolerance of merchant guilds, lineage trusts, and scholarly networks, permitted a compartmentalised modernisation in which certain forms of science, technology, and market exchange could flourish without requiring a wholesale reordering of the political structure. This equilibrium was maintained by several mechanisms: the absence of a politically autonomous religious sphere that might challenge the state; a deeply embedded Confucian ethic that channelled elite ambition toward service within or alongside the state rather than against it; and a flexible imperial fiscal strategy that allowed the state to benefit from commercial expansion without ceding ultimate political authority. As a result, China could remain an enchanted, centralised civilisation while still generating the technical and economic dynamism associated with modernity, albeit without the structural liberalism that in Europe and North America emerged from the prolonged and often violent disentangling of power, culture, and economy. 

From this perspective, Macfarlane sees China’s present trajectory as both a continuation and an intensification of this historical pattern. Modern science, technology, and capitalism can indeed flourish in an authoritarian framework provided they are confined within oases that do not accumulate sufficient autonomy to transform the entire political order. Extending this analysis through the lens of Gellner’s theory of modernity would highlight both areas of convergence and points of tension between his and Macfarlane’s views. Gellner’s well-known “industrial society thesis” held that modernity is driven by a structural transformation linking industrial production to a culturally standardised, centrally administered, literate education system. This, in turn, presupposes a degree of separation between political authority, cultural reproduction, and economic life, since the state’s ability to maintain a high-mobility, skill-based workforce depends on a universal culture that is not reducible to a single religious or hereditary tradition. 

From Gellner’s perspective, the creation of such a modular, literate culture is not just a technological by-product but a deep structural necessity of industrial society. The social order becomes predicated on a cultural infrastructure that enables functional specialisation, occupational mobility, and a universalistic legal-administrative framework. In this model, the autonomy of culture from both coercive power and economic monopoly is not an optional feature but a core precondition for sustained industrial modernity. Macfarlane would agree with Gellner that the Western path to modernity required, and indeed was made possible by, a historical disentanglement of power/coercion, culture, and economy, a separation achieved through centuries of conflict among monarchs, religious authorities, merchant elites, and local jurisdictions. But he would diverge sharply in assessing whether this was the only viable pathway to sustained technological and economic modernity. 

For Macfarlane, China represents a counterexample: a case in which a centralised state retained cultural hegemony yet nonetheless fostered pockets of innovation and capitalist activity. Against Gellner’s structuralist insistence on systemic separation, Macfarlane could argue that “oases” of cognitive liberty, enclaves protected either by design or neglect, can substitute for fully autonomous cultural institutions. These oases do not produce the all-encompassing civic freedoms of Western liberalism, but they can generate sufficient intellectual and technical dynamism to sustain high levels of productivity and innovation over significant historical periods. The result has been China’s economic miracle. 

Here, the divergence lies in how each thinker interprets the relationship between industrial society and political form. Gellner’s model implies that, in the long run, industrial modernity exerts pressure toward a liberal order because the cultural autonomy it requires tends to spill over into political autonomy. Macfarlane, however, would point to East Asia’s history to show that these pressures can be compartmentalised: the state can permit a measure of cognitive autonomy in certain sectors, science, engineering, commercial logistics, without allowing it to metastasise into political liberalism. 

Macfarlane’s speculation on how China managed this balancing act would turn on mechanisms alien to Gellner’s Western model. Cultural integration under Confucianism ensured that even educated elites in semi-autonomous spheres largely accepted the moral authority of the central state, limiting the tendency of cultural independence to translate into political opposition. Selective decentralisation allowed local networks (guilds, merchant associations, lineage trusts) to operate with practical independence, while remaining legally subordinate to the imperial order. Instrumental tolerance meant that the state could permit heterodoxy or experimentation in narrowly technical domains, as long as it served economic or strategic needs and did not challenge the ideological foundations of the polity. Such mechanisms explain how China could modernise technologically without crossing the threshold into systemic liberalization, a threshold that, in the West, capitalism and scientific inquiry tended to push societies toward. 

They also explain why China has been able to avoid the opposite fate: the suffocation of innovation through total over-centralisation. The state’s capacity to maintain these oases while controlling their political implications is, in Macfarlane’s terms, a distinctive feature of its “enchanted modernity.” The question, however, is whether this balance is indefinitely sustainable. Gellner would be sceptical: his model predicts that in the long run, the demands of industrial society will corrode cultural monopoly and force political liberalisation or, if resisted, will erode the innovative capacity that sustains industrial modernity. Macfarlane might counter that China’s history suggests a third possibility: that the state can continually recalibrate the size and permeability of these oases, tightening or loosening control in response to political needs while maintaining enough dynamism to prevent systemic stagnation. 

Where they would agree is on the fragility of liberty itself, whether liberal or enclave-based. Both would see the current global trend toward authoritarian consolidation, combined with the loss of geopolitical insulation for all major powers, as a profound challenge. For Gellner, this might be framed as the shrinking space for the autonomous cultural sphere industrial society needs; for Macfarlane, it would confirm his island thesis and his warning that once the geopolitical buffer is gone, the pressures toward authoritarianism become universal. In that sense, the historical paths of the West and East Asia are converging, not toward a shared liberal order, but toward a condition in which the separation of powers that underpinned Western liberty and the cognitive enclaves that underpinned East Asian modernity are both under sustained and possibly terminal pressure. 

How Things Might Look In 2050 

Projecting their frameworks forward, both Macfarlane and Gellner would read the world of 2050 as the culmination of forces already visible: security saturation, infrastructural interdependence, and the administrative ambition of large states and platforms. Each would expect authoritarian consolidation to be the default outcome once no great power enjoys the shelter of “islandhood.” For Macfarlane, the loss of insulation that once protected England and, later, the United States now applies globally: cyber-entanglement, supply-chain vulnerability, and continuous low-level conflict generate a permanent emergency logic. Liberty shrinks not through spectacular coups but by the inch , expanded surveillance justified by infrastructure protection, exceptional policing normalised by threat inflation, and procedural shortcuts ratified by public fatigue. He would call this a soft authoritarianism with hard edges, structurally predisposed to harden as crises stack: climate shocks, migration surges, commodity volatility, and episodic wars over semiconductors, data routes, and water. 

Gellner would agree that the cultural space required by industrial and now post-industrial societies is under stress. His industrial society thesis assumed the need for a literate, mobile, standardised culture that is not captive to a single orthodoxy. By 2050 the universal school is supplemented or displaced by universal platforms. The same standardisation that once unlocked mobility is now delivered by a few operating systems for work, credit, health, and identity. The question becomes whether these platforms enlarge the autonomous cultural sphere or, by integrating schooling, certification, and social life with state priorities, quietly collapse it. Gellner would worry that when credentialing, employment sorting, and political communication all run on interoperable rails that states can steer, the autonomy industrial society needs is functionally curtailed even if constitutions remain unchanged. 

Macfarlane’s comparative move adds a second axis: how “enchanted” civilisations manage innovation without liberalisation. China (and Japan), in his telling, modernised by carving oases of cognitive liberty within centralised orders rather than by separating power, culture, and economy wholesale. Extending this to 2050, he would expect China to continue an adaptive strategy of compartmentalised permissiveness. Scientific and commercial enclaves, city-regions, research corridors, sovereign data zones, would be granted wide latitude to experiment with materials, biomedicine, and automation, provided their political spillovers are contained. The state would tighten ideological control over mass culture while relaxing constraints in high-yield niches, expanding and contracting the oases with the business cycle and security needs. This is not a prelude to systemic liberalisation; it is a technique of rule. 

Gellner would counter with a structural wager: in the long run, advanced production needs a culture that cannot be fully instrumentalised. He would predict points of friction by 2050 where innovation slows unless enclaves enlarge their perimeter. If China continues to deliver growth and technical breakthroughs, he would infer either that enclave autonomy is quietly expanding toward systemic significance, or that global production has shifted in ways that reduce the need for broad cultural autonomy, more machine learning trained on synthetic data, more automation of tacit skills, and more importation of core discovery from outside. If, by contrast, productivity stalls, he would read that as confirmation that the cultural sphere cannot be permanently sequestered. 

Macfarlane’s rejoinder is to specify the mechanisms that keep the oases productive without triggering liberal spillover. Three are crucial by mid-century. First, administrative pluralism without political pluralism: multiple regulators and municipal authorities compete over methods and standards, generating variation and learning, while remaining nested within a single sovereign hierarchy. Second, elastic legality: special economic and research zones operate under bespoke contract and IP regimes that insulate collaboration and capital formation but keep contention out of general courts. Third, moral integration: a civic-national story that valorises technical excellence as service to collective flourishing, converting elite ambition into reputational capital inside the regime rather than against it. Under these conditions, the oases can refresh themselves without coalescing into a counter-power. 

In the liberal world, Macfarlane would predict convergence toward this model, not away from it. By 2050, the United States and parts of Europe sustain innovation through their own enclaves, metropolitan conglomerates with tax, data, and procurement privileges; university-industry compacts; and critical-infrastructure exceptions, while federal or supranational authorities claim expanded emergency powers. The older civil-society ecology of trusts, clubs, and voluntary associations remains, but its coordinating role is overshadowed by platform utilities and state-platform compacts. The “trust” that once grounded associational life becomes a legal instrument for public-private consortia rather than a nursery of autonomous counterweights. 

Gellner would map several equilibria. One is authoritarian high modernism: high investment, strong central coordination, and enough enclave freedom to keep the frontier moving, but with a brittle public sphere and a thin civil society. Another is a bifurcated liberal archipelago: islands of robust freedom and creativity in a sea of procedural democracy with pervasive surveillance, where liberties are geographically and professionally uneven. A third is managed stasis: stability without dynamism, in which states secure order by trading growth for control. He would look for empirical markers by the 2030s: whether curriculum control tightens or loosens in STEM and humanities; whether independent credentialing markets proliferate; whether labour markets allow mid-life retraining outside state-platform channels; whether courts preserve zones of unpredictability where power can lose. If these markers move toward uniformity and executive certainty, he would expect innovation to bend toward incrementalism. 

Macfarlane would press different diagnostics keyed to his island thesis and the Maitland-style story of civil society. Are new intermediate bodies emerging with legal teeth, data fiduciaries, civic cloud co-ops, municipal insurers of last resort, or are intermediaries mere extensions of state or platform? Do emergency measures roll off the books after shocks, or are they recursively normalised? Is local taxation and adjudication thickening relative to central transfers and administrative tribunals? His forecast is sombre: unless geopolitical de-linking restores some version of insulation through redundancy in supply chains, federated data governance, and credible strategic restraint soft authoritarianism will tighten. The most likely Western outcome by 2050, in his view, is a patchwork of high-autonomy regions embedded in a security-first constitutional order, with liberty surviving where intermediate institutions retain independent endowments, charters, and publics. 

On China and Japan, the two converge on a contingent verdict. If China’s enclave strategy continues to deliver frontier advances while political integration deepens, Macfarlane’s thesis of enchanted modernity looks vindicated; if performance falters or coercion bleeds into technical governance, Gellner’s skepticism reasserts itself. Japan’s quieter case, stable democracy with dense coordination among state, business, and bureaucracy, remains a hybrid: sufficient pluralism to satisfy Gellner’s cultural-autonomy criterion, yet enough administrative steering to illustrate Macfarlane’s enclave logic. Neither expects a return to the liberal expansion of the late twentieth century. Both expect liberty, where it persists, to be institutionally specific and spatially uneven. 

The avenues for resilience are correspondingly concrete. Re-empower intermediate bodies with genuine legal personhood and endowments rather than programmatic grants; constitutionalise sunset clauses with burdens of renewal that shift costs back onto executives; diversify certification and research funding away from single gatekeepers; and domesticate platforms as fiduciaries rather than deputised ministries. These are not grand reversals but incremental architectures capable of reopening civic oxygen in a world with no islands. If 2050 offers grounds for hope in either framework, it will be because such coarse, decentralising carpentry has been done in time to preserve the spaces, either systemic or enclave, where free thought and dissent can still do their work. 

Islam in 2050 

Gellner’s account of Islam in modernity begins from a simple but powerful claim: in the Islamic world, unlike in the Christian West, secularisation never really took hold. There was no equivalent to the long European disentanglement of religious and political authority, no Reformation - Counter-Reformation cycle, no state-church bargain that subordinated the clerical hierarchy, no Enlightenment relegation of religion to a private sphere. In Gellner’s view, this made Islamic states in modernity a unique case: their governing legitimacy, social order, and cultural authority remained tied to a religious idiom that was not merely symbolic but normatively binding. This pattern stretched from the Arab Middle East to large parts of Africa and South Asia, including Pakistan, producing states where legal and educational systems remained anchored, directly or indirectly, in Islamic jurisprudence. 

Gellner saw this as structurally significant for industrial society. In his industrial modernity thesis, the cultural sphere had to be sufficiently autonomous to standardise literacy and skills on a basis other than purely religious authority. Islam, however, had already created a highly literate, standardised culture rooted in Arabic, Qur’anic schooling, and a shared law without detaching it from the sacred. In his eyes, this was both a source of resilience and a constraint. It meant that Islamic societies could industrialise without fully secularising, but it also meant they would face acute tensions when modern economic and political forms demanded a degree of cultural autonomy incompatible with a fully sacred public sphere. 

By 2050, Gellner would expect three broad trajectories for Islamic states: Secular Drift under Pressure, Sacral Modernism and Authoritarian Religious Nationalism. Let's start with Secular Drift. In some cases, sustained integration into global markets and security alliances might gradually erode the public role of religion, even without formal secularisation. The cultural infrastructure could remain Islamic in identity but become functionally pluralised: technical education, commercial law, and governance conducted in a hybrid register. He would see parts of the Gulf, especially UAE-style models, as emblematic with Islamic legitimacy maintained, but day-to-day industrial life running on a technocratic rather than juristic logic. 

Then there's Sacral Modernism. In this, other states might double down on sacred authority while adopting select industrial and digital technologies. Here, the Gellnerian “high Islam” tradition, the ulema, the scriptural law, the standardised ritual, would remain central, but the state would selectively appropriate technical capacity, running STEM sectors as insulated enclaves under tight ideological supervision. He might point to Iran’s blend of clerical oversight with advanced nuclear, aerospace, and biotech capacities as a model. The third alternative is Authoritarian Religious Nationalism. In this path, the religious sphere would be fused not just with the state but with ethnic or nationalist projects, producing a more militant, inward-looking industrial modernity. Gellner would expect this in regions where regime legitimacy depends on mobilising religious identity as a bulwark against external and internal pluralism, Pakistan in certain trajectories, or some North African states under prolonged instability. For Gellner, the constraints on Islamic states’ long-term industrial dynamism would remain: the difficulty of sustaining a high-mobility, high-skill workforce if educational and legal codes are rigidly tied to religious authority; the fragility of innovation in the absence of an autonomous cultural sphere; and the danger of factionalism if religious authority is co-opted or discredited. 

Macfarlane would come at the question differently. He would not start from Gellner’s functionalist model of industrial society but from his own comparative-historical method, looking at the structural separations (or their absence) that define different civilisations. From this perspective, Islamic states resemble, in some respects, China’s “enchanted” civilisation: religion, politics, and economy remain tightly coupled, without the deep historical separation of spheres that underpinned Western liberty. However, unlike China, Islam’s sacred law is textually fixed and transnational, limiting the state’s capacity to monopolise cultural authority entirely. The religious sphere is not a sub-department of the state but an autonomous source of legitimacy with its own institutional base. Macfarlane might therefore predict a more volatile development path toward 2050. The key issue would be whether these states can construct oases of cognitive liberty within an Islamic moral framework, spaces where science, commerce, and technical education can operate semi-independently without triggering a wholesale liberalisation of society. 

His prognosis would vary by sub-region. Gulf monarchies could maintain a compartmentalised model like China’s, allowing high-tech zones, financial hubs, and elite universities to operate in relative freedom under the umbrella of dynastic–religious legitimacy. North Africa might oscillate between secularising pushes tied to tourism and European markets and resurgent religious-nationalist reactions, producing instability that undermines the sustained oases needed for innovation. Pakistan could be pulled between military–technocratic modernism and clerical populism, with enclave autonomy repeatedly expanded and contracted by political crises. Where Gellner might stress the incompatibility of fully sacred public authority with sustained industrial modernity, Macfarlane would point to the adaptive capacity of states to manage partial separation without systemic liberalisation so long as elites can keep the oases insulated from ideological capture. 

Yet he would also warn that in Islamic contexts, unlike China, the religious sphere has a transnational base that can resist state compartmentalisation. This makes the balancing act more precarious: over-centralisation risks alienating the ulema and provoking unrest; excessive autonomy risks erosion of the state’s religious legitimacy. Both would agree that by 2050, Islamic states will not converge neatly on a Western secular model. Some will hybridise, adopting enclave modernisation under an Islamic canopy; others will embrace sacral nationalism; a few may edge toward functional secularism without renouncing Islamic identity. 

The Establishment of Authoritarian Modernity By 2050 

A unified map of authoritarian modernity toward 2050 can be drawn by tracking how different civilisational logics manage the same structural pressures: permanent security entanglement, infrastructural interdependence, and the organisational demands of high technology. In Macfarlane’s terms, the disappearance of “islandhood” removes a historical shelter for liberty; in Gellner’s terms, the cultural autonomy industrial society needs is squeezed by states and platforms that can now standardise education, identity, and coordination at scale. The result is convergence not on liberalism but on a family of enclosure strategies: each tradition narrows the political space while keeping enough cognitive oxygen to sustain innovation. In the Western path, the nineteenth- and twentieth-century separation of power, culture, and economy persists formally but is hollowed out functionally. Emergency governance, platform intermediation of work and speech, and critical-infrastructure exceptionalism compress liberties “by the inch.” Innovation concentrates in privileged archipelagos, metro regions, research corridors, public–private consortia, where legal carve-outs, procurement streams, and reputational insulation backstop risk-taking. Civil society survives, but the Maitlandian counterweights that once stood between citizen and state - trusts, clubs, learned societies- are overshadowed by securitised utilities and platform governance. Macfarlane would see this as soft authoritarianism that readily hardens with each stacked crisis; Gellner would treat it as the implosion of the autonomous cultural sphere on which industrial dynamism historically depended. 

The Western question by 2050 is whether archipelago freedom can compensate for systemic narrowing: if these islands can refresh talent, diversify certification, and keep courts unpredictable enough for power to lose, innovation may persist; if not, incrementalism and rent extraction dominate. East Asia’s “enchanted modernity” proceeds by partition rather than separation. China exemplifies a centralised order that expands and contracts oases of cognitive liberty - special zones, sectoral exemptions, elite universities - without licensing a generalised pluralism. Administrative pluralism without political pluralism, elastic legality in designated zones, and moral integration that converts elite ambition into regime service allow technical frontiers to advance while ideological control deepens. Japan’s version is tamer: dense coordination among state, firms, and bureaucracy, with sufficient legal pluralism to satisfy Gellner’s cultural-autonomy criterion but enough administrative steering to illustrate Macfarlane’s enclave logic. 

The fork by 2050 is clear. If enclave autonomy silently grows (wider IP commons, more independent standards bodies, diverse funding channels), the system can deliver frontier gains without liberal spillover; if coercion bleeds into technical governance, productivity stalls and the oases wither. Islamic polities face a distinct equilibrium problem because the sacred is an independent, transnational source of authority. Three trajectories recur across the Middle East, North and sub-Saharan Africa, and Pakistan. Some adopt functional secularisation without renouncing Islamic identity: technocratic schooling and commercial law operate in a hybrid register while Islam secures legitimacy. Others practise sacral modernism: clerical authority remains explicit while STEM enclaves are insulated and instrumentally empowered. A third fuses religion with national projects, producing authoritarian religious nationalism that mobilises against internal pluralism and external dependence. Gellner expects long-run strain: industrial modernity needs cultural autonomy that a fully sacred public sphere resists. Macfarlane allows for durable compartmentalisation, but notes its precariousness: unlike China, the religious field cannot be fully internalised by the state, so oases are exposed both to clerical retrenchment and popular mobilisation. 

The decisive test by 2050 is whether elite compacts can institutionalise enclave freedom, chartered universities, technopoles under bespoke law, quasi-independent professional bodies, without severing the regime’s Islamic legitimacy. Across these regions, the convergence is substantive. Each constructs enclave modernity to balance innovation and control; each normalises permanent exception; each relies on datafied coordination to standardise behaviour. What differs are the veto points. In the West, courts, municipalities, and endowed intermediaries can still generate losses for the executive; in China, intra-bureaucratic competition and zone governance tune the frontier; in Islamic polities, the ulema, transnational religious publics, and military establishments set outer bounds. Liberty therefore persists as a geography of exceptions: where intermediate institutions have real assets, independent charters, and publics, freedoms endure; elsewhere, they decay. Gellner and Macfarlane would offer complementary diagnostics and levers. Gellner’s indicators of cultural autonomy include the diversity of credentialing authorities, the independence of research agendas from executive procurement cycles, the permeability of labour markets to mid-life retraining outside state-platform channels, and legal unpredictability sufficient for power to lose. Macfarlane’s focus falls on the thickness of intermediate bodies: the share of civic budgets routed through endowed associations rather than ministries; the proportion of dispute resolution handled by ordinary courts rather than administrative tribunals; the rate at which emergency statutes sunset without renewal; and the autonomy of local taxation. Where these measures move in the wrong direction, enclave dynamism becomes performative, not productive. Their prescriptions are similarly granular. Re-endow intermediaries so they do not live grant-to-grant; constitutionalise hard sunset rules with renewal supermajorities; diversify certification and research funding through federated consortia that platforms cannot monopolise; insulate certain communications and educational layers as fiduciary commons; and proliferate zone governance that expands, rather than cannibalises, the general law. 

In Islamic settings, add charters that bind state and clerical elites to protect technical curricula and professional self-regulation; in East Asia, widen the remit of standards bodies and municipal regulators to generate lawful variability; in the West, domesticate platforms as public fiduciaries rather than deputised ministries. By 2050, the most plausible global settlement is a patchwork of authoritarian-leaning modernities differentiated by where they place their oxygen valves. Western systems preserve liberty unevenly through legally armed archipelagos; China sustains frontier sectors through state-tuned oases; Islamic polities maintain hybrid zones under sacred canopies. None of these arrangements restores the systemic liberty of the late twentieth century. But all can sustain significant scientific and economic creativity if their enclaves remain genuinely capacitated and if veto points retain teeth. On this, Macfarlane and Gellner align: liberty’s fate will be decided less by constitutions in the abstract than by the concrete institutional carpentry that keeps rooms however bounded well ventilated. If we take that diagnosis of American “soft authoritarianism” and run it through both a Gellnerian and a Macfarlanean lens, the likely trajectory is not simply continued muddling in a semi-free, semi-closed condition, but an eventual hardening of the authoritarian core everywhere not just in the U.S. unless specific and historically rare conditions reverse the direction. 

From Gellner’s point of view, the critical danger is that the autonomous cultural sphere industrial society needs is now structurally eroded in the U.S. and across much of the West. The corrosion is not coming in the twentieth-century mode of Mussolini-style centralisation, but through the twenty-first century’s “soft authoritarian” toolkit: the steady politicisation of the courts, administrative apparatus, and civil service; the intimidation or financial capture of independent institutions; the repurposing of media ecosystems into instruments of loyalty and disinformation. These mechanisms, pioneered in Hungary and Poland, make it possible to run a competitive electoral system that nonetheless produces, election after election, executives unchecked by either law or countervailing institutions. Gellner would warn that once the educational, informational, and legal systems are subordinated to a partisan executive, the culture required for sustained industrial or post-industrial dynamism becomes a branch of state power. Without independent cultural reproduction, schools, press, professional bodies, the skills, dispositions, and self-confidence that keep societies innovative atrophy. At that point, the move from “soft” to “hard” authoritarianism becomes not only easier but, paradoxically, less visible to the population: there is no cultural mainstream outside the regime to articulate the difference. The only real constraint left is the executive’s own calculation of costs and benefits. 

Macfarlane, looking at the same American picture, would treat it as confirmation of his “island thesis” and his belief in liberty’s fragility. The U.S., once insulated by geography from the pressures that eroded liberties in Europe, is now “joined up” through global security, economic interdependence, and informational systems. That insulation had been the structural condition allowing national liberty to expand in the twentieth century; without it, the normal historical pattern reasserts itself, central power, especially in a permanent emergency, expands until counterbalanced by strong intermediate institutions. In the U.S., those counterweights, federal courts, states, professional associations, independent media are now being neutralised, bought, or threatened into compliance. For Macfarlane, the specific American twist is that federalism and scale still preserve pockets of liberty, much as Maitland’s civil society structures once did in England. But he would emphasise that this “archipelago liberty” is vulnerable. Once the executive learns to use central powers, immigration police, federal law enforcement, emergency orders, to selectively target hostile jurisdictions, even federalism ceases to protect the enclaves. His reading of U.S. history would remind us that the “soft” becomes “hard” quickly: political killings, the stripping of voting rights, and the open deployment of security forces against dissent were regular features of the American apartheid order from the 1870s to the 1960s. That such measures have precedent makes them easier to normalise again. In both frameworks, the path to hard authoritarianism is the same: institutional capture where courts, electoral bodies, police, and the civil service become partisan tools, civil society neutralisation where NGOs, unions, universities, and independent media are harassed, defunded, or incorporated into the regime’s messaging network, perpetual emergency where war on terror, migration crises, pandemics, and infrastructure threats are used to justify indefinite emergency powers and public sphere closure where cultural and informational channels are narrowed to those aligned with the executive, strangling the autonomous cultural production that both Gellner and Macfarlane would see as vital to liberty. 

By 2050, this could grip not just the U.S. but most of the global system West, East Asia, and the Islamic world alike because the mechanisms of “soft” authoritarianism travel well. They are adaptable to liberal traditions (by hollowing them out procedurally), to centralised “enchanted” civilisations (by tightening the oases), and to religious polities (by fusing clerical legitimacy with executive command). Once embedded, they tend to ratchet: every new crisis expands the precedent for executive dominance. Gellner would see in this a new global convergence, but a dystopian one: a world of post-industrial societies that still produce and trade but lack the free cultural base that once drove them. He would worry that without that base, innovation slows and political sclerosis sets in, making the eventual crises sharper when they come. Macfarlane would interpret it as the natural historical arc once insulation is lost: unless strong, well-endowed, legally protected intermediate institutions survive to check power, liberty becomes an interlude, not an equilibrium. And both would stress that if “hard” authoritarianism takes hold everywhere, it will not look like a sudden jackboot moment. It will arrive as the cumulative effect of incremental encroachment each justified, each seemingly temporary until the condition is irreversible. By then, the institutional carpentry needed to reverse it will be gone, and the only route back will be the sort of systemic collapse that neither framework treats as a desirable path to liberty. By 2050 the global map that Macfarlane and Gellner would sketch is no longer a landscape of different constitutional types but a single authoritarian terrain with regional variations in style, lineage, and institutional texture. 

The American case, with its incremental drift from democratic liberalism to soft authoritarianism, becomes a paradigm rather than an anomaly. The erosion is not abrupt but accumulative, taking the form of court-packing, partisan capture of the civil service, the intimidation of professional bodies, the defunding or co-option of independent media, and the routine invocation of emergencies to bypass legislative constraint. In the West this produces a condition where the forms of separation between power, culture, and economy remain on paper, but the substance is hollowed out. Archipelagos of high autonomy, elite universities, metropolitan research clusters, private-public consortia, continue to operate, yet their dependence on state licensing, procurement, and regulatory indulgence makes them politically pliable. Federalism or municipal autonomy can slow the encroachment but not prevent it; over time the executive learns how to use central powers selectively to discipline resistant enclaves. The transition from soft to hard authoritarianism does not announce itself with a coup or abolition of elections, but with the normalisation of politically motivated prosecutions, the suppression of dissenting jurisdictions, and the steady alignment of all major institutions with executive priorities. 

In East Asia, China’s enchanted modernity offers a different starting point but converges on the same endpoint. The regime’s long-practised technique of managing cognitive oases, granting and withdrawing freedoms to high-tech zones, elite universities, and specialist bureaucracies, remains intact, but the pressures of global insecurity and technological competition tighten the circle. Where in earlier decades zone governance allowed for limited policy experimentation and local variation, by mid-century these spaces are increasingly harmonised with central security imperatives. The mechanisms of administrative pluralism survive formally, but the scope for lawful variation shrinks as the leadership treats every strategic sector as a national security asset. The effect is that the oases remain but are politically sterilised, useful for meeting industrial and military goals but stripped of any potential to incubate independent cultural or political projects. Japan, with its quieter blend of legal pluralism and administrative steering, finds its own space narrowing under pressure from regional security crises, platform monopolies, and global supply chain fragility. Its version of the enclave model becomes more coercive, with state-business coordination less about developmental strategy and more about compliance with security imperatives. 

In the Islamic world, where the sacred remains an independent source of legitimacy, hard authoritarianism takes a hybrid form. Gulf monarchies continue to combine high-technology enclaves with strict social control, but the line between enclave autonomy and ideological oversight narrows, especially where geopolitical rivalry demands tighter surveillance of expatriate and domestic talent. States like Iran preserve sacral modernism but integrate it more fully into national security policy, limiting the scope for clerical-independent negotiation over enclave governance. In states where religion is fused with nationalism, the authoritarian turn deepens the mobilisation of religious identity against pluralism, while technical modernisation becomes a military-led project rather than a civilian-led developmental one. The difficulty here is that the religious field cannot be fully internalised by the state; its transnational nature introduces the possibility of challenges to executive control, which are increasingly met with coercion rather than negotiation. As in other regions, the cultural space necessary for long-term industrial or post-industrial innovation becomes narrower, and what remains is concentrated in tightly monitored, purpose-built institutions whose funding, recruitment, and output are tied to executive-defined objectives. 

From Gellner’s perspective this is a world in which the cultural autonomy that industrial society once required has been absorbed almost entirely into the political sphere. The public space for independent meaning-making, education, and debate is reduced to decorative or commercial forms, unable to generate systemic challenge. Innovation persists but as an instrumental activity serving the regime’s military, economic, or prestige goals, not as a self-renewing cultural process. He would see the hardening of authoritarianism not as a sudden rupture but as the endpoint of a long curve where industrial society’s initial pluralism has been eroded by the technological capacity of states and their corporate partners to standardise, monitor, and discipline at scale. Macfarlane would interpret the same outcome through his island thesis and his historical sense of liberty’s exceptionalism. Once no society can stand apart from global security and economic interdependence, the pressures that historically drove centralisation in landlocked powers become universal. The Western constitutional separations that once underpinned liberty weaken without insulation; China’s compartmentalised modernity loses its capacity to generate autonomous innovation; Islamic polities are forced to choose between subjugating the religious field or letting it become a locus of opposition. The tendency is toward a universal condition in which political authority subsumes cultural and economic life, with only tightly managed enclaves remaining as spaces of partial autonomy. By this point, whether the authoritarianism is draped in liberal procedure, Confucian paternalism, or Islamic legitimacy matters less than the fact that the structural room for liberty is gone. The surviving freedoms are local, provisional, and contingent on executive tolerance, and the institutional carpentry that could make them systemic again has been dismantled everywhere. In this sense, the global 2050 settlement is not merely a convergence toward authoritarian modernity but toward a single civilisation-scale fact: the enclosure of liberty within walls that cannot be breached without risking the collapse of the entire edifice. 

Conflict in 2025 

If the 2050 world unfolds along the authoritarian-convergence lines imagined here, Gellner and Macfarlane would both see the coming decades as fertile ground for new forms of conflict though they would diagnose their roots and predict their trajectories differently, reflecting their divergent emphases on cultural structure and historical contingency. Gellner, with his functionalist-industrial lens, would look first at the contradictions between the technological needs of advanced production and the cultural arrangements of fully securitised states. He would note that authoritarian convergence does not remove the deep structural diversity between Western post-liberal states, East Asian “enchanted” modernities, and Islamic sacred polities. The common erosion of cultural autonomy does not make their modes of legitimacy compatible, it simply constrains their internal flexibility. This, he would argue, makes conflict more likely in three domains: over resource corridors (especially water and rare-earths), over control of migration flows triggered by climate shocks, and over the global allocation of cognitive capacity, talent, research, and educational infrastructure, when innovation is a matter of strategic survival. He would anticipate that wars in such a system may be less about ideology than about securing functional monopolies in energy, fresh water, agricultural stability, and AI platforms. 

Macfarlane, focusing on the loss of insulation and the fragility of liberty, would see conflict as emerging from the interplay between collapsing buffers and the persistence of historically rooted cleavages. Climate change, mass migration, and demographic shifts especially aging populations in the global North and East Asia create political stresses that authoritarian regimes will manage by deflecting grievances outward. He would predict increased “pressure-valve conflicts” at the peripheries: border militarisations not only to repel migrants but to turn the act of repulsion into a performative demonstration of sovereignty; proxy wars in resource-rich regions, particularly in Africa and Central Asia, where younger populations and remaining unexploited reserves become the object of long-term enclosure strategies. For Macfarlane, the new conflicts would be shaped by the political geography of the enclaves, zones of relative openness or economic vitality targeted either for capture by rival powers or for sabotage to prevent them becoming autonomous nodes. On political structures, Gellner might speculate about a revival of something akin to “first, second, and third worldism” but stripped of Cold War ideology and grounded instead in civilisational-authoritarian blocs. 

The new “First World” would not be liberal democracies but the high-capacity, high-surveillance states, Western post-liberal systems, China, advanced Gulf monarchies, that control global production nodes. The “Second World” might be the mid-tier authoritarian states with some industrial capacity but dependent on technological and security guarantees from the first bloc, states like Turkey, mid-income Latin American polities, or parts of Southeast Asia. The “Third World” would be those regions left structurally subordinate: climate-fragile states in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and parts of the Middle East whose youthful populations become labour and migration reservoirs, and whose resources are managed through semi-formal protectorate arrangements. He would emphasise that, unlike in the Cold War, alignment here would be transactional and flexible, driven by resource flows and supply chain security rather than ideological solidarity. 

Macfarlane might reframe the same development less in terms of three worlds than of three degrees of political insulation from systemic shocks. The “core-insulated” states are those with strong internal food, water, and energy security and the administrative capacity to manage demographic aging without political breakdown, here climate change is a challenge but not an existential crisis. The “permeable” states are those whose security rests on vulnerable trade corridors or fragile resource access; their politics will be shaped by dependency management, oscillating between submission to stronger patrons and opportunistic balancing. The “exposed” states are those whose combination of climate stress, youthful demographics, and weak institutions make them permanent sources of outward migration and conflict spillover. For him, this framing would make clear that the new global order is not just authoritarian but stratified by the degree to which states can defend their populations from environmental and demographic shocks without losing control. Both would agree that climate change reintroduces scarcity as the primary driver of global politics. 

Gellner would underline the way such scarcity compels even post-industrial societies to behave more like agrarian empires, with strategic depth measured in food basins, river control, and secure hinterlands. He might foresee alliances not unlike medieval trade leagues, consortia of high-surveillance states pooling resources and policing trade routes, perhaps even jointly managing climate migration flows as a security function. Macfarlane would stress that the island thesis is inverted here: there are no true islands, so all powers behave as if they are continental states under siege, fortifying borders, projecting force forward, and treating every migration flow as a potential political destabiliser. The aging of populations in the high-capacity authoritarian core would produce another axis of conflict. 

Gellner would expect talent wars: active recruitment and coercive retention of high-skill migrants, coupled with efforts to sabotage rivals’ ability to attract or educate them. Macfarlane would warn that the legitimacy of the core states will depend on how they manage the political optics of importing labour while suppressing broader migration. This creates openings for middle-tier states to play labour-broker roles, gaining leverage by controlling access to their human capital, echoes of Cold War-era alignment games, but centred on demography and skills rather than ideology. In the end, neither would see these as stable equilibria. Gellner would predict that the authoritarian convergence masks deep incompatibilities between the legitimating orders - Confucian technocracy, post-Christian secularism, Islamic sacralism - and that as climate and demographic pressures intensify, the blocs will fracture along those lines. 

Macfarlane would be less certain of fracture, but more certain that liberty in any systemic sense would not re-emerge from these conflicts. At most, new political spaces might open within the cracks, revived enclaves of autonomy in a few cities, new transnational associations bound by mutual trust and resource pooling but these would remain exceptions in a world where hard power and environmental survival dictate the primary forms of political order. From the 2050 vantage point, the first decade would be defined by the consolidation of the authoritarian convergence rather than its fracture. Western post-liberal states refine their archipelago model, with metro-regions and research corridors still productive but increasingly tied to national security frameworks. China tightens the integration of its oases into central planning without shutting them entirely, preserving enough frontier research to maintain parity in strategic technologies. Islamic states settle into their chosen modes: Gulf monarchies continue high-tech enclave building under dynastic-clerical legitimacy, Iran refines its sacral modernist template, and nationalist religious regimes fuse ideological mobilisation with military-led industrialisation. 

Climate change moves from an abstract driver to a material political constant, with recurrent droughts, water shortages, and crop failures in Africa, South Asia, and parts of the Middle East creating permanent migration flows toward Europe, East Asia, and the Americas. These flows are met not only with militarised borders but with forward deployments into transit regions, where great powers fund security regimes to manage and redirect population movements. By the early 2060s, these arrangements generate the first sustained conflicts. Water basin control becomes the main trigger in Central Asia and East Africa, with upstream states backed by core powers diverting flows, and downstream states facing famine and internal revolt. Climate-induced displacement now moves millions annually, not episodically, forcing receiving states to negotiate formalised labour-migration exchanges with origin countries in return for aid and security guarantees. The demographic imbalance between aging core states and youthful peripheries drives a new form of geopolitical competition: rather than ideological bloc alignment, states are classified by their ability to supply or absorb human capital. Middle-tier “labour broker” states in North Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America play patrons off against each other, using migration policy as leverage. Through the 2070s, the authoritarian convergence begins to strain. 

Gellner would read the strain as the inevitable result of cultural incompatibilities: Confucian technocracies, Islamic sacral states, and post-Christian secular orders can cooperate on resource extraction, migration control, and climate engineering, but each resists deeper integration that would undermine its legitimating narrative. Joint climate adaptation projects, geoengineering, ocean desalination, polar ice management become sites of rivalry, with disputes over intellectual property, environmental side-effects, and control of the new infrastructures. Macfarlane would see the same tensions through the lens of insulation and its absence: with no buffers anywhere, each crisis ricochets across the system, forcing all powers to treat each other less as long-term partners than as provisional collaborators in a permanent emergency. 

In this decade, political violence shifts form. State-on-state warfare remains limited because of the cost to tightly interwoven supply chains, but proxy wars over water, food corridors, and mineral deposits intensify, fought largely in “exposed” states unable to defend their own resource sovereignty. Urban uprisings occur in labour-importing cities when managed migration systems falter under economic downturns; in response, authoritarian regimes experiment with new urban governance models, sealed districts, biometric rationing, predictive policing, that lock dissent into controlled zones. These become exportable products: cities in different blocs purchase each other’s control architectures, further converging governance styles. By the late 2070s, the convergence has produced a recognisable planetary political order. The “first world” is no longer an ideological category but a functional one, comprising high-capacity authoritarian states with secured water, energy, and food systems, advanced climate adaptation infrastructure, and monopolies over certain critical technologies. The “second world” consists of dependent but stable regimes trading strategic resources or demographic surplus for protection, technology access, and enclave development funds. The “third world” is a patchwork of zones under climate triage managed by external powers through aid-security packages, acting as population buffers and extraction sites. This is not a Cold War revival: alignment is fluid, and states may shift categories as climate shocks, demographic swings, or technological breakthroughs alter their value to the system. 

Conflict in this world is no longer framed in the language of democracy or revolution but in the register of allocation: who controls rivers, desalination plants, food synthesis facilities, climate stabilisation platforms, and migration corridors. Gellner would note that even without ideological cleavages, these struggles remain existential because they determine the ability of regimes to maintain their legitimacy and survival in the absence of cultural autonomy. Macfarlane would observe that liberty has not re-emerged anywhere in systemic form; what survives are localised, conditional freedoms in well-protected enclaves whose autonomy is tolerated because they produce outputs, scientific, technical, or financial, that the central power cannot replace. Neither would mistake this for stability. The system is self-maintaining only while climate engineering and migration management work as designed. A failure in either whether through ecological feedback loops, a technological collapse, or a coordinated uprising in a broker state could trigger rapid de-alignment, as powers revert to unilateral control over life-support resources. In that sense, the 2080 world carries within it the seeds of its own fragmentation, but both would stress that such a collapse would be more likely to usher in new authoritarian consolidations than a revival of open, systemic liberty. 

India and Russia as Authoritarian Hinges 

By the midpoint of the century, Gellner and Macfarlane would place India and Russia in the authoritarian convergence but with different logics and vulnerabilities. Gellner would look at Russia first as a state that has never truly completed the transition to his model of industrial modernity with an autonomous cultural sphere. In his eyes, it is a post-imperial polity whose cultural infrastructure, education, media, historical narrative, remains a direct arm of the political order. He would see Russia in 2050 as a “first–second world hinge” power: militarily formidable, resource-rich, capable of maintaining strategic technologies, but culturally brittle because its political legitimacy rests on a narrow historical mythos and a centralised elite network rather than on plural cultural reproduction. This leaves it perpetually defensive, seeking buffers through territorial influence or satellite arrangements in its near abroad. Climate change amplifies its paradox: warming opens new agricultural zones and shipping routes, but also destabilises permafrost infrastructure and threatens key population centres. Gellner would expect Russia to maintain a hard-authoritarian structure, export energy and water security in exchange for technology and manufactured goods, and play a broker role between blocs without ever fully aligning, less because of ideological difference than because of its deep-seated suspicion of dependency. 

Macfarlane would treat Russia as a textbook case of a non-island power in a permanent siege mentality, its liberty historically fragile because of geography and its weak tradition of counterbalancing civil society. He would see its 2050 position as structurally insecure despite territorial size: shrinking and aging population, resource dependency vulnerable to technological shifts (such as synthetic fuels), and a political system that relies on central coercion more than institutional trust. For him, Russia’s capacity to operate as a major pole in the authoritarian world depends entirely on whether it can manage new forms of intermediate authority, regional technocratic hubs, cross-border resource compacts, that spread risk without diluting central control. Without this, he would expect Russia to remain a spoiler power, capable of short-term disruption but less able to shape the architecture of the global convergence. 

India, for Gellner, would be the more complex case. It has industrial modernity’s scale and technological base, but its cultural sphere is not autonomous in the Western sense; rather, it is fragmented and increasingly politicised under a civilisational-nationalist framework. Gellner would see India’s trajectory as moving toward a hybrid model: pockets of genuine cultural pluralism and independent education coexisting with a state-led attempt to homogenise national identity. In his schema, India could qualify as a “first world” state in certain sectors - IT, pharmaceuticals, space - but remains “second world” in systemic capacity because its cultural infrastructure is uneven and its governance often reactive to populist pressures. Climate change and water scarcity across the Indo-Gangetic plain would, he would argue, be India’s central strategic challenge, forcing it into both competition and cooperation with neighbours. Migration, both internal from climate-hit rural areas and external from South Asia more broadly, would test its ability to sustain industrial productivity without authoritarian hardening. 

Macfarlane would view India through the prism of its partial insulation - ocean borders on three sides give it more strategic flexibility than continental powers, but it is still “joined up” through economic dependence, security rivalry with China and Pakistan, and vulnerability to climate-driven migration from Bangladesh and the Himalayan watershed. He would see India as a state whose liberty is already under pressure from nationalist consolidation, with civil society structures - press, judiciary, universities - being reined in. By 2050 he would expect India to operate as a regional hegemon within the authoritarian convergence, using enclaves like Bangalore, Hyderabad, and Mumbai as high-capacity nodes in the global economy, while tightening control over the peripheries and borderlands. He would be sceptical of India maintaining systemic liberty but would note that its scale, diversity, and federal structure give it more internal variation than China or Russia, allowing for some zones of local autonomy even as the national order hardens. For both thinkers, Russia and India are not peripheral actors in this world - they are structurally significant middle poles. Russia’s strategic leverage comes from its resource and security role; India’s from its demographic weight, technology sectors, and position in climate and migration corridors. Yet in both cases, their positions are precarious. 

Gellner would stress that neither has the fully autonomous cultural sphere his theory associates with long-run industrial vitality, making them vulnerable to stagnation under prolonged authoritarian convergence. Macfarlane would stress that neither has the insulation his island thesis associates with liberty’s survival, meaning their political systems will face constant centralising pressure as global shocks multiply. Both, in different ways, are locked into the same dynamic: important enough to matter in the converged order, but structurally incapable of setting its terms. In the decades after 2050, perhaps both India and Russia become central to the functioning and instability of the authoritarian convergence, but in different ways. 

Russia’s role is shaped by its geographic expanse, resource abundance, and ability to project hard power into multiple theatres without directly confronting the main blocs. Melting Arctic ice opens new shipping lanes and resource fields, making Russia the primary gatekeeper of northern maritime routes. It uses this leverage to bargain alternately with China and the Western post-liberal powers, trading passage rights, energy exports, and Arctic mineral access in exchange for technology transfers and climate engineering support. Its political system remains hard authoritarian, internally brittle but externally useful, capable of disrupting adversary supply lines or stabilising friendly regimes in Central Asia, the Caucasus, and parts of Eastern Europe. In climate-stressed years, Russia’s grain and fresh water become bargaining chips in the global resource economy. 

Gellner would see this as a high-stakes brokerage role that prolongs Russia’s strategic relevance despite its aging population and stagnant innovation capacity. Macfarlane would note that the lack of any true insulation means Russia’s central power must remain permanently mobilised, unable to relax its siege mentality, with the result that liberty is absent in every systemic sense and political legitimacy depends on continuous displays of control. India’s path is more dynamic and volatile. Its demographic weight makes it the largest labour pool in the authoritarian core, but also a focal point for migration pressures from the surrounding region as climate impacts intensify in Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and the Maldives. 

By the early 2060s, India might have built fortified border systems along its most vulnerable frontiers, while simultaneously creating managed migration corridors to import high-skill labour and export surplus populations to allied states in the Gulf and Southeast Asia. Its major cities - Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Chennai - may have become heavily securitised hubs, combining enclave economic dynamism with surveillance and crowd management systems as sophisticated as anything in China or the West. India may by then use its IT and AI sectors to sell governance platforms to “second world” states, turning political technology into a core export alongside pharmaceuticals and space services. 

Gellner would identify this as a partial convergence toward his industrial model, but one with a politically subordinated cultural sphere, meaning innovation remains dependent on enclave conditions rather than systemic openness. Macfarlane would see it as another example of liberty being reduced to archipelagos within a hardened national shell, with the country’s federal structure allowing variation in local governance styles but no real protection from centralising trends. By the 2070s, Russia and India might increasingly act as conflict brokers. Russia mediates disputes over water rights in Central Asia and over Arctic mineral extraction, often turning mediation into a form of controlled destabilisation, ensuring no bloc gains uncontested dominance. India plays a similar role in the Indo-Pacific, positioning itself as the indispensable intermediary in South Asian water-sharing agreements and Indian Ocean shipping disputes. Both countries profit from these roles, but they also become flashpoints. 

Russia’s Arctic position invites low-intensity naval confrontations, cyber sabotage of port facilities, and covert competition over seabed mining rights. India faces repeated border crises with China and Pakistan as climate-driven water deficits and glacier melt in the Himalayas destabilise river systems. In each case, the conflicts are managed to avoid full-scale war, but they provide continual justification for the domestic hardening of authority and the suspension of any remaining civil liberties. By the late 2070s, perhaps both have settled into positions as indispensable but distrusted partners within the convergence. Neither can be excluded from major resource or migration negotiations; both are too strategically valuable to be isolated; yet neither is trusted enough to be fully integrated into the governance architectures of the leading blocs. 

Gellner would see this as a symptom of their structural incompleteness in his model, industrial societies without autonomous cultural spheres inevitably end up as transactional powers, always vital but never setting the normative terms of the system. Macfarlane would regard it as the predictable outcome of their geographic and historical conditions: non-island powers, perpetually exposed, forced to balance between centralising at home and manoeuvring abroad, with liberty long since reduced to isolated enclaves whose survival depends entirely on their usefulness to the regime’s immediate strategic needs. By 2080, their futures may depend on the same fragile equilibrium that governs the rest of the system: the stability of climate engineering, the manageability of mass migration, and the resilience of enclave innovation under sustained political control. A failure in any of these domains could tip either Russia or India into crisis, potentially destabilising entire regions and altering the authoritarian balance globally. In that sense, they are both pillars and potential fracture points of the order they help sustain, each embodying the tensions of a converged authoritarian modernity that still contains multiple, incompatible civilisational logics. 

Technologies 2025   

By 2050, the authoritarian convergence is overlaid with a planetary layer of AI-driven infrastructure. The largest cities, some with populations exceeding 80 million, are not only economic hubs but operational control centres, each running on integrated AI systems that coordinate power grids, water supply, waste management, public transport, healthcare, food distribution, policing, and even personalised social services. The infrastructure is so deeply embedded that the city cannot function for more than hours without it. In all major blocs, this AI layer is fused with security and governance systems, producing a level of behavioural monitoring and predictive intervention that makes older forms of surveillance seem primitive. Employment is heavily automated, especially in logistics, manufacturing, administration, and much of service provision, leaving human labour concentrated in design, oversight, interpersonal care, cultural production, niche artisanal work, and security-related roles. This dramatically changes the problem of population management: instead of employment being the primary mechanism for social inclusion, regimes must find new ways to distribute income, status, and purpose without destabilising political control. 

Gellner would see in this the final transformation of the cultural sphere. Where in industrial modernity the educational system existed to produce a literate, mobile workforce, in 2050 the role of education is primarily to integrate citizens into the AI-governed infrastructure as compliant, competent users. The autonomous cultural institutions he saw as essential for industrial vitality are now fully embedded in AI platforms, subject to continuous monitoring, algorithmic moderation, and adaptive propaganda. In his analysis, this risks hollowing out the creative dynamism needed to refresh the system’s technological edge. He would predict that true innovation will be concentrated in secure, politically loyal enclaves, corporate-state research combines in the Western post-liberal zone, state-planned innovation hubs in China, and security-cleared tech corridors in Gulf or East Asian city-states, while the rest of society functions as a managed population, provided with entertainment, curated information, and a guaranteed subsistence level in exchange for political quiescence. Employment as a civic integrating force disappears, and with it the kind of public sphere industrial modernity relied upon. For him, the danger is that without broad-based cultural autonomy, the innovation pipeline becomes brittle, overdependent on a small number of highly controlled sites that can stagnate or be disrupted. 

Macfarlane would approach it through his long-standing concern with the fragility of liberty and the role of intermediate institutions. He would note that in this AI-urban order, most traditional counterweights to the state are either digitised into platform functions or bypassed entirely. Cities once formed by layers of guilds, clubs, voluntary associations, and local governments are now run by integrated AI systems contracted to state-linked corporations. The trust-based social fabric he associates with the development of modern civil society is replaced by an algorithmic allocation of benefits and sanctions. For population management, this means regimes can fine-tune the flow of resources- universal stipends, targeted subsidies, access to premium zones - on a real-time, individualised basis, effectively eliminating the collective bargaining leverage of large groups. 

Macfarlane would see this as the logical culmination of losing “islandhood”: once all major powers are “joined up” through planetary data infrastructures, the local autonomy that once sustained liberty is technologically unnecessary and politically undesirable. In the Western post-liberal zone, the mega-cities operate as semi-autonomous corporate-governed territories, with AI systems optimised for efficiency, stability, and competitive positioning in global networks. Here, high-skill employment remains significant within the archipelagos, but the majority of the population receives automated basic provision tied to compliance with civic algorithms, maintaining clean behaviour scores, following health directives, consuming within prescribed patterns. 

In China and allied East Asian states, the mega-cities are fully integrated into the state’s central AI command structure, with enclave innovation zones embedded but closely monitored. Population management is framed as harmonisation, with AI balancing work allocation, leisure, consumption, and political loyalty metrics to maintain social stability. In Islamic states, particularly the Gulf, mega-cities become both showcases and control systems, offering lavish, AI-coordinated living for citizens and high-skill migrants while tightly managing the large underclass of foreign labourers through biometric tracking, movement restrictions, and automated contract enforcement. 

Gellner would emphasise that in all zones the absence of a genuinely autonomous cultural sphere means that political dissent is almost impossible to organise in physical or virtual spaces outside the AI infrastructure. The same networks that deliver food, water, and energy can be throttled for individuals or districts without visible force, making non-compliance a private, unphotogenic collapse rather than a public act of repression. He would view this as a kind of perfected Weberian bureaucracy merged with high-tech authoritarianism: total rationalisation without the counterbalancing institutions that once gave industrial societies resilience. 

Macfarlane would stress the disappearance of what he calls countervailing institutions. The AI-administered mega-city integrates governance so thoroughly that functions once spread across courts, councils, professional bodies, and voluntary organisations now reside in one programmable system. Civil society no longer mediates between state and individual; the platform does. Population management becomes a matter of maintaining system legitimacy not through shared institutions but through constant personal calibration of benefits and constraints. For him, the most significant consequence is that liberty ceases to exist as a structural condition and survives only as a curated experience, conditional freedoms in entertainment, consumer choice, or subcultural affiliation, all within algorithmically tolerated limits. 

Both would agree that the new AI-urban order makes hard authoritarianism vastly easier to sustain across the different blocs. In the West, the corporate-state partnership delivers stability without overt coercion; in China, the fusion of political ideology and AI coordination produces a high-efficiency command system; in Islamic states, the religious legitimacy of the regime merges with technological management to produce a highly stratified but stable order. The main vulnerabilities they would see are not political but technical: systemic failures in the AI infrastructure, cyber sabotage of critical city systems, or ecological shocks that overwhelm even the best predictive models. Such events could reintroduce visible political instability, but in the absence of strong autonomous institutions, neither would expect these crises to produce a sustained re-emergence of liberty. Instead, they would anticipate recalibration within the same authoritarian frameworks, with new layers of control added under the pretext of preventing future breakdowns. 

Ideology 2025 

Gellner would begin by rejecting the idea that the end of ideology necessarily means the end of ideological forms. In his framework, nationalism is not an anachronism but a functional tool of modern states, especially in the authoritarian convergence described for 2050. His classic argument that nationalism is the political principle which holds that the political and the cultural unit should be congruent remains relevant, but in the converged authoritarian order it works in a more instrumentalised way. Nationalism, Hindu revivalism, or other ideological idioms serve as binding agents for loyalty in systems where the cultural sphere is no longer autonomous but entirely state-embedded. They supply the emotional legitimacy and moral narrative that pure technocratic management cannot provide. 

In a world where AI infrastructures and mega-cities run daily life, the core of governance is technical, administrative, and resource-driven, but Gellner would say that the “software” of legitimacy still has to be cultural. In his analysis, modern industrial and post-industrial societies can be run without open ideological contestation, there’s no real space for competing doctrines, but they cannot be run without a unifying symbolic idiom. Nationalism and religious revivalism become performance layers: curated narratives that provide citizens with a sense of belonging and historical continuity, even though the underlying governance logic is the same technocratic authoritarianism across zones. Hindu nationalism in India, Orthodox nationalism in Russia, and civilisational patriotism in China would thus be less about shaping economic or administrative policy than about giving state control an affective and historical register that is legible to the population. 

Macfarlane would see this persistence of ideological forms as perfectly consistent with the historical patterns he studies. He would argue that liberty’s fragility means that in the absence of strong counterbalancing institutions, rulers revert to tried and tested legitimating frameworks, religion, nation, dynasty, because they have deep historical resonance and can be adapted to centralising power. In his “island thesis” terms, when there is no insulation from global pressures, the political order becomes defensive and needs rallying symbols to unify the population against perceived threats. Ideologies like Hindu nationalism in India, or nationalist religio-political narratives elsewhere, become tools for converting central authority’s security agenda into popular identity. 

For Macfarlane, these ideological languages function as the cultural veneer on a structural convergence toward the same kind of integrated AI-administered authoritarianism. In the West, this might be framed in terms of national security and constitutional patriotism; in East Asia, in terms of civilisational revival; in Islamic states, in terms of defending the ummah. The key point for him is that these narratives are no longer open ideological battlegrounds in the nineteenth- or twentieth-century sense, they are controlled mythologies, broadcast and adapted by the same state-platform infrastructures that deliver food, water, and policing. 

Both would agree that ideology in this future is less about policy content and more about symbolic legitimacy. Gellner would stress that in earlier industrial modernity, competing ideologies could genuinely influence governance because the cultural sphere had autonomy. Once that autonomy is gone, ideology becomes a monopoly product: the state manufactures the single authorised narrative, tweaks it for regional or religious sensibilities, and uses it to mobilise, integrate, or pacify. Macfarlane would add that, historically, this kind of monopoly ideology is a symptom of liberty’s absence; it survives because it is useful to power, not because it is open to genuine contestation. This helps explain why the 2050 authoritarian world can be “post-ideological” in structure while still being saturated with ideological imagery. The machinery of governance, AI management, enclave economies, resource allocation, does not require ideological pluralism. But the human need for meaning, belonging, and identity is still politically exploitable. Nationalism, Hindu revivalism, or Islamic solidarity thus become what both would likely call mobilising myths: emotionally potent, centrally curated, and endlessly adaptable to the needs of a regime that in reality shares far more with its authoritarian peers than it admits in its own story about itself. 

Gellner would argue that even in a converged authoritarian world, regimes will still use ideological difference externally because it offers a convenient and low-cost way to frame geopolitical rivalry in terms that mobilise their populations. He would see this as a continuation of the pattern in which nationalism is outward-facing as much as inward-facing: while domestically it legitimises central authority by binding culture and politics together, internationally it serves to distinguish “us” from “them” even when both sides run on the same structural model of AI-administered technocratic authoritarianism. 

For him, the content of these external ideologies - Hindu nationalism in India, Orthodox Christian revivalism in Russia, Islamic solidarity in the Gulf, Confucian civilisational rhetoric in China - would matter less than the fact that they are functionally equivalent instruments, deployed to make competition over resources, migration corridors, or strategic technologies appear as civilisational struggles rather than as contests between similarly structured states. He would note that this externalised ideological competition can be useful for maintaining domestic legitimacy. A nationalist government can explain resource shortages, AI-infrastructure breakdowns, or unpopular population-management measures as necessary sacrifices in the defence of “our” way of life against hostile civilisations. Even if the real conflict is over desalination plant control, rare-earth mining rights, or AI patents, the framing in nationalist or religious terms keeps public opinion aligned with the regime. Gellner would stress that this is not genuine ideological pluralism but competitive myth-making between regimes whose underlying governance logic is the same. 

Macfarlane would approach it from his historical-comparative vantage, arguing that such ideological posturing between structurally similar regimes is entirely in keeping with the long history of “family quarrels” between polities of the same basic political form. In his terms, the loss of insulation means that every regime is exposed to the same global pressures - climate migration, water scarcity, demographic imbalance but each needs to maintain a unique narrative to avoid appearing interchangeable with rivals. This necessity drives the cultivation of “civilisational brands” that can be turned outward in rivalry. 

Hindu nationalism can be projected as a bulwark against Islamic expansion or Chinese encroachment; Islamic solidarity can be mobilised against Western decadence or Hindu chauvinism; Chinese civilisational rhetoric can frame competition with the West as a 21st-century version of resisting colonialism. He would also point out that in such a world, these ideological distinctions can harden at the level of public perception even while elites privately recognise their shared technocratic-authoritarian structures. Citizens may genuinely come to see their own bloc as ideologically and morally distinct from others, because every cultural signal they receive is filtered through the state-platform infrastructure. This, in his view, makes the ideological competition more stable than it might seem: since liberty is absent, there are no independent domestic spaces to interrogate the gap between the external rhetoric and the internal reality. 

Both would see the practical function of this external ideological competition as twofold: it mobilises the home population for sacrifice and loyalty, and it creates negotiating space in resource and migration politics by allowing concessions to be framed as victories over ideological adversaries. For example, an Indian water-sharing deal with China could be sold domestically as a triumph of Hindu civilisational resilience over Chinese overreach, even if in reality it is a straightforward allocation of glacial meltwater rights between two technocratic megastates. Gellner would caution that while this external ideological signalling can be stabilising in the short term, it also carries the risk of hardening into genuinely irreconcilable identity conflicts if propaganda outpaces elite control. 

Macfarlane would agree but would place more emphasis on the historical precedent: many long-lasting empires and states maintained stable rivalry narratives for centuries, only occasionally tipping into open war when external shocks - famines, migrations, technological disruptions forced a recalibration of the balance. In the 2050-2080 authoritarian convergence, both would expect ideological competition to be an ongoing, managed performance that shapes the theatre of global politics without changing its backstage architecture. In South Asia, the India-China-Pakistan triangle becomes the archetype of managed ideological rivalry masking resource politics. New glacier-management accords over Indus–Ganges–Brahmaputra meltwater are negotiated under security umbrellas while each capital frames outcomes as civilisational victories. India sells concessions as Hindu civilisational resilience and border guardianship; China presents them as responsible Confucian stewardship of “Asian modernity”; Pakistan wraps its stance in Islamic justice and downstream rights. Gellner would say the ideological packaging is a mobilising veneer over highly technocratic bargains about flow schedules, desalination capacity, and geoengineering risk. 

Macfarlane would stress that the absence of insulation means every drought or flood ricochets through these narratives, giving executives pretexts to tighten controls in mega-cities like Delhi or Chongqing and to discipline peripheral regions under the banner of national honour. The real deterrent to open war is not mutual affection but mutual dependence on AI-run river basins and satellite climate services that none can afford to see sabotaged. Across the Himalayas and into the Indo-Pacific, maritime choke points turn into theatres for ritualised confrontation. Indian Ocean patrols, PLA Navy “escorts,” and U.S. freedom-of-navigation transits stage rival ideologies, Hindu civilisational renaissance, Chinese rejuvenation, American guardianship of an “open order” even as all three quietly coordinate on piracy suppression, data cable repair, and oil-spill response. 

Gellner would underline the functional convergence: identical ships, interoperable satellites, similar officer-training regimes; the slogans differ, the operating logic does not. Macfarlane would read each incident as grist for domestic consolidation, with televised standoffs feeding metropolitan control dashboards that fine-tune subsidies, curfews, and crowd control across AI-governed megacities. In the Gulf and greater Middle East, ideological registers - Islamic solidarity, anti-imperialist resistance, civilisational pride - frame contests that are, beneath the surface, fights over desalination plants, green-ammonia export terminals, and migration corridors. Gulf city-states showcase pious high-modernism; Iran emphasises sacral sovereignty; Turkey performs neo-Ottoman tutelage. 

Gellner would call this sacral branding for resource brokerage: whoever narrates the moral purpose of water and energy infrastructures wins compliance at home while selling reliability abroad. Macfarlane would emphasize enclave management: elite technopoles remain productive because they are buffered by religious legitimacy and security exemptions, while the broader polity is tightened through moral–legal narratives that delegitimate dissent as betrayal of the ummah. In North and East Africa, the Nile and interior aquifers turn into diplomatic metronomes. Ethiopia, Egypt, Sudan, Sahel states, and outside patrons - the U.S., EU, China, Gulf - rotate between crisis and pact, each resolution celebrated as ideological vindication: civilisational guardianship of the river, African sovereignty, Islamic stewardship. For Gellner the real coin is remote-sensing data, dam-operating algorithms, and insurance backstops. For Macfarlane the recurrent “victories” justify domestic states of exception and metropolitan securitisation in Cairo, Addis, and Khartoum, with liberties traded for water guarantees. The Arctic is Russia’s prime stage. Moscow narrates Orthodox–Eurasian guardianship of the north; Washington recasts its presence as rule-of-law navigation; the EU as ecological trusteeship; China as polar scientific modernity. Underneath, they bargain transit slots, LNG off-take, seabed mining blocks, and ice-cap geoengineering tolerances. 

Gellner would emphasise the sameness of their technics and crews, post-ideological operators running similar kit to serve different flags. Macfarlane would see Russia’s siege mentality confirmed: ideological dramaturgy for public consumption, permanent emergency for domestic control. Flashpoints remain bounded because all sides fear systemic cascade from an Arctic infrastructure failure. Europe’s eastern marches become the classroom for performative ideology with hard resource cores. NATO and the EU speak of democratic frontiers; Russia answers with civilisational defense; Turkey layers its own historical claim. Grain corridors, gas interconnectors, and refugee routing dominate actual negotiations. Gellner: a competition between nearly identical administrative states for control of allocation pipes. Macfarlane: repeated crises serve to ratchet executive power in Warsaw, Berlin, and Moscow alike, while municipal liberties survive as narrow exceptions inside wealthy metros.   

The United States is both stage and producer of the global script. Externally it performs constitutional patriotism and “free world” leadership; internally it has settled, in this scenario, into a post-liberal soft-to-hard authoritarian order with archipelago freedoms in major metros. In the Western Hemisphere, Washington frames migration governance and Amazon stewardship as democratic stewardship against narco-populism or foreign meddling, while the material instruments are AI border grids, labour-broker pacts, and climate-insurance compacts with Mexico, Colombia, and Brazil. In the Indo-Pacific, the U.S. leans on alliance ideology, Indo-Pacific “values”, but its bargaining chips are semiconductor resilience, naval logistics, and layered export controls. Gellner would say American ideology persists as a high-status brand that oils transactions; what matters is the embedded corporate–state platform that standardises allies’ tech stacks and security practices. Macfarlane would treat U.S. nationalism as the legitimacy glue for permanent emergency governance at home; federalism preserves pockets of liberty, but each external crisis - Taiwan scare, Arctic incident, migration surge - feeds new layers of domestic centralisation. The ideological export remains potent for coalition-building, even as internal governance converges with other authoritarian cores. 

In Central Asia, ideology is a rotating mask for water and corridor brokerage. Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and their neighbours sell multi-vector identities - Turkic renaissance, post-Soviet sovereignty, Islamic heritage - to balance Russia, China, the U.S., and Turkey. Under the hood are contracts for river allocations, lithium, uranium, and rail–fiber routes. Gellner would point to the functional role of universities and think tanks as state organs producing just-in-time narratives for deals struck by engineers and quartermasters. Macfarlane would note how each “civilisational” pivot is domestically monetised to compress dissent in cities like Almaty and Tashkent under the rubric of guarding the national course. Latin America becomes an arena where green developmentalism and social-Christian or indigeneity narratives are mobilised against or with U.S. and Chinese bids for lithium, copper, and biodiversity credits. Ideology travels well online; contracts travel better. 

Gellner would see convergent provincial governance dashboards from Santiago to São Paulo managing protests and rationing; Macfarlane would stress the tug-of-war between empowered city-regions and central executives using security–climate pretexts to claw back power. Across all these theatres, both would underline the meta-pattern. Ideological rivalry remains vivid in flags, speeches, and school curricula because regimes require affective legitimacy; but the conflicts themselves are administered through interoperable technocratic systems - AI water exchanges, corridor security APIs, carbon–food insurance markets that render the backstage nearly identical. For Gellner, that sameness is the telltale sign of a post-ideological structure wrapped in ideological skins. For Macfarlane, it is the historical signature of an uninsulated world in permanent emergency where liberty has been reduced to enclave exceptions and public myths do the everyday work of rule. The United States, far from being an exception, exemplifies the model: a powerful producer of ideological narration abroad, a manager of archipelago freedoms at home, and a principal architect of the very infrastructures that make the global convergence run. 

Identity Politics 2050 

Gellner would begin by situating identity politics within the structural dynamics of the new hard authoritarian world. For him, the disappearance of deep ideological divides such as capitalism versus communism does not mean the end of mobilising symbols; rather, it produces a vacuum into which culture-based identities naturally flow. He would see nationalism, ethnolinguistic pride, and religious affiliation as the most resilient organising principles in a world where centralised states need emotionally resonant justifications for rule but no longer have a coherent universal ideology to offer. In this sense, identity politics becomes the low-cost, high-yield legitimacy tool of authoritarian regimes: it is flexible enough to be tuned for domestic cohesion, yet powerful enough to channel dissent into safe, state-manageable forms. 

In Gellner’s modernist terms, these identities are largely manufactured, products of state schooling, media choreography, and selective historical mythmaking but they feel authentic to those who inhabit them. He would note, however, that the hard authoritarian convergence creates a curious dynamic: identities are intensified domestically yet flattened internationally. In each zone - China’s Sinic civilisationalism, India’s Hindutva-inflected nationalism, Russia’s Orthodox-Eurasianism, America’s constitutional patriotism - identity is a performance for internal audiences, while the global backstage is post-ideological and technical. This makes identity politics an instrument, not an existential driver, of the system. Resistance movements in this setting, Gellner would predict, risk being trapped within the same grammar: oppositional groups will often frame their dissent in counter-identitarian terms (reviving suppressed languages, regional traditions, religious minorities) but will be constrained by the infrastructural dependencies of the hard authoritarian order. Transnational solidarities may form around environmental crises, indigenous rights, or minority protections, but they will be subject to rapid infiltration and co-optation because the very digital and logistical systems they rely on are owned or monitored by the regimes they oppose. 

Macfarlane would see identity politics through the lens of insulation and the historic fragility of liberty. In his reading, the erosion of buffers between political power, economic organisation, and cultural life means that identity politics will rarely emerge as genuinely autonomous civic expression; instead, it will often be curated from above as a safety valve. He would draw analogies to the way religious sects in early modern England flourished only insofar as the political order tolerated them, and how the same organisational forms that made them vehicles of liberty could also be harnessed to central power. In the AI-managed megacity world of 2050, identities will be embedded in algorithmic governance , given space to breathe in certain districts, festivals, and online zones, but switched off when they threaten the stability of the metropolitan order. This will produce a strange duality: on the one hand, citizens may feel a heightened sense of group belonging in their ethnic, religious, or ideological niche; on the other, these niches will be administratively legible, datafied, and subject to behavioural scoring systems that make true political resistance extraordinarily difficult. 

Macfarlane would emphasise that hard authoritarian regimes, aware of their vulnerability to mass unrest, will study past insurgencies and re-engineer urban space, media flows, and associational life to prevent spontaneous coalition-building. Resistance, when it does occur, may look less like grand ideological mobilisation and more like hyper-localised refusals: neighbourhood mutual-aid networks, digital sabotage cells, migrant-worker solidarity pacts, or environmental micro-defences against destructive infrastructure. Yet each of these will face the problem that the regime’s own legitimacy narratives will co-opt their language, casting them as patriotic initiatives or local cultural expressions rather than political opposition. The management of such resistance will be granular: targeted arrests, subsidy withdrawals, reputational downgrades in social-credit systems, all carried out without the visible mass repression of earlier dictatorships, allowing regimes to maintain a façade of pluralism while structurally neutering dissent. 

Both would agree that in this 2050 world, identity politics will mutate into a form of managed pluralism, a set of curated, state-readable cultures and causes that provide texture to otherwise centralised orders. Gellner would frame this as the continuation of nationalism’s functional role in modernity, scaled down to micro-nationalisms and lifestyle-ethnicities, each operating as a contained zone of loyalty-production. Macfarlane would frame it as the erosion of the very civil society that once made identity a possible engine of liberty, with the state now controlling the trust-like spaces in which identities operate. 

Resistance 2050 

Genuine resistance, in their shared analysis, would be rare, fragile, and often invisible, emerging in the interstices of the system, only to be absorbed or destroyed once it became legible to the central power. Gellner would see any future global resistance networks in the hard authoritarian world as emerging from the same structural pressures that produce nationalisms, but with an additional transnational dimension imposed by climate change, mass migration, and resource scarcity. He would expect them to form not out of abstract ideological commitments, but from the concrete solidarities of displaced peoples, diasporas, and marginalised groups that cross borders by necessity rather than design. In his analysis, these solidarities could acquire a kind of proto-national character - Kurdish, Tuareg, Rohingya, or climate-refugee identities - that begin as survival communities and develop political consciousness in response to exclusion from host states. However, he would stress that such formations are deeply vulnerable to infiltration and manipulation, both by the regimes they oppose and by rival authoritarian powers seeking leverage. They would be too fragmented, too dependent on digital infrastructures, and too reliant on clandestine logistical chains to achieve the kind of sustained mobilising capacity that older nationalist or ideological movements enjoyed. 

Macfarlane would approach this from the historical problem of insulation. He would argue that in earlier centuries, resistance could flourish when there were spaces, geographic, institutional, or cultural, beyond the reach of the central state. In 2050, with AI-administered mega-cities and planetary surveillance integration, such spaces are almost non-existent, so resistance must find temporary, shifting forms. He would expect new underground structures that borrow from the organisational logic of medieval merchant guilds, secret religious fraternities, and the trust-like entities he sees as the origin of civil society. Migrant workers, for example, might form rotational labour-sharing compacts that are invisible to official metrics but enable survival in cities where automated economies have left them excluded. Environmental collapse could generate illicit water-sharing networks or seed-exchange cooperatives that function both as mutual aid and as quiet defiance of state monopolies. These networks would be intensely local but connected through deniable channels family ties, encrypted exchanges, smuggling routes creating a thin but resilient membrane of transnational resistance. 

Gellner would see climate change and resource scarcity as having a double effect: driving mass movements of people that force authoritarian states into either selective assimilation or militarised exclusion, and creating a planetary underclass with a shared experience of dispossession. This underclass could become the substrate for global resistance identity, but he would caution that it will lack the institutional base to challenge the macro-structures of power. It could disrupt, embarrass, or slow authoritarian regimes, but it would rarely be able to supplant them. Instead, its existence might be used by regimes themselves to justify harsher control measures - framing the “migrant threat” or “water insurgency” as a reason to centralise even further. 

Macfarlane would add that demographic imbalances - aging populations in core zones like East Asia and Europe, youth bulges in parts of Africa and South Asia - will give resistance movements different character depending on their origin. In the aging zones, resistance might be led by younger migrant populations excluded from citizenship but necessary for economic functioning, producing quiet forms of leverage through labour withdrawal or urban disruption. In youth-heavy zones, resistance could take on a more militant, insurgent form, but would be channelled by regimes into proxy conflicts or regional rivalries, much as in earlier imperial systems. 

Both would see the defining feature of such resistance in 2050 as its hybridity - part humanitarian survivalism, part cultural preservation, part political defiance. But they would also agree that it will exist under constant pressure to be co-opted or crushed, because in a world without insulation, any network that grows large enough to matter will become legible to power. Gellner would end on a sober note: that the new authoritarian order will be adept at turning even resistance into a functional component of its own stability, using it as proof of pluralism and as a training ground for counter-insurgency capacity. Macfarlane would add that the only resistance likely to escape such a fate will be that which remains so small, so embedded in everyday exchange and trust, that it can pass beneath the thresholds of detection for years at a time. 

Gellner would interpret the technological landscape of 2050 as the most advanced apparatus of social control ever constructed, but also as an inherently unstable terrain because of the constant interaction between the monopolising drive of central authorities and the decentralising tendencies of innovation. He would see AI infrastructures- governing transportation, communications, healthcare, commerce, and even personal relationships - as functioning in the same way as the centralised schooling systems of modernity, only vastly more totalising. These systems would not merely produce the linguistic and cultural homogeneity that industrial society required; they would calibrate behaviour in real time, rewarding conformity and flagging deviance before it reached political expression. In such an environment, overt ideological conflict would be minimal because dissent could be anticipated and redirected long before it became organised. Yet he would also note that the same integrated networks that allow authoritarian states to manage populations create vulnerabilities: a single flaw in a code base, a compromised data node, or a sympathetic insider in an infrastructure hub could have consequences on a scale unimaginable in earlier political struggles. 

Resistance could emerge as a kind of cyber-guerilla warfare, carried out by actors without territory or conventional armies but capable of inflicting material and symbolic damage. Macfarlane would approach the same reality by emphasising how AI systems and biotech could be used to close off the very spaces where civil society once flourished. In his reading, the trust-like institutions that historically insulated liberty from the state’s reach are replaced by digital platforms whose ownership is either directly in the hands of the regime or embedded within its regulatory and surveillance apparatus. These platforms might allow highly visible diversity of opinion on trivial matters, but questions of power, coercion, and legitimacy would be algorithmically deprioritised or socially stigmatised. The effect is not the theatrical repression of twentieth-century totalitarianism but the gradual normalisation of obedience through personalised, data-driven environments. Biotechnology, particularly in the areas of genetic enhancement, neuro-modulation, and population health monitoring, would be framed as benevolent public policy but would, in practice, allow authoritarian states to track, predict, and influence individuals at the level of physiology. 

Gellner would expect technology to be used by authoritarian regimes to reinforce the divisions between core and periphery zones, creating graded rights of access. In the core megacities - Shanghai, Singapore, Delhi, New York, Moscow - citizens and approved migrants would live in hyper-regulated environments where AI governance promises security, efficiency, and convenience in exchange for complete informational transparency. In the peripheries, whether inner-city slums, refugee corridors, or climate-ravaged rural zones, access to such systems would be partial, intermittent, and politically contingent, creating an incentive for populations to seek inclusion on the state’s terms. This asymmetry would reinforce loyalty in the centre while keeping the periphery dependent and surveilled. 

Macfarlane would focus on the paradox that such total integration makes regimes brittle as well as powerful. The more dependent a society becomes on centralised AI infrastructure, the more catastrophic any systemic disruption could be, whether from internal sabotage, external cyberattacks, or environmental shocks. He would predict that in some cases, resistance movements might emerge not as explicit political campaigns but as parallel systems of provision - underground mesh networks, off-grid energy sources, biohacked medical treatments - that begin as practical workarounds but evolve into subversive alternatives to the state’s monopoly on services. However, he would caution that the regimes themselves are likely to anticipate such developments and use them as laboratories for perfecting countermeasures, folding successful underground innovations back into the centralised framework under controlled conditions. 

Both would agree that by 2050, technology will have redefined the very nature of political legitimacy. In a world of hard authoritarian convergence, legitimacy will be measured less by the delivery of ideological promises and more by the delivery of seamless, uninterrupted infrastructural functionality. Resistance, therefore, will often take the form of disrupting that functionality, whether by degrading a water distribution algorithm in a desert megacity, scrambling facial recognition in public spaces, or manipulating the data inputs that AI systems use to forecast dissent. Gellner would see this as a new kind of high-modernist warfare between states and their subjects, fought in code and sensors rather than slogans and barricades. 

Macfarlane would see it as the final proof that liberty’s survival depends on preserving - or reinventing - the insulated, trust-based spaces that allow human communities to organise outside the total gaze of central power, even if those spaces now exist in the flicker of an encrypted channel rather than the walls of a medieval guildhall. Gellner would see the cultural and psychological consequences of such a technological-authoritarian order as a deep acceleration of trends he had already identified in modernity: the decline of deep, organically embedded cultures and their replacement with a manufactured, standardised, and constantly refreshed symbolic environment. 

Under the conditions of AI-administered life, cultural production would be not merely standardised but dynamically tailored to reinforce the behavioural patterns the regime desired, collapsing the space between entertainment, socialisation, and political conditioning. Nationalism, which in Gellner’s analysis was the modern world’s dominant form of political legitimacy, would persist but as a curated performance within the digital sphere, always flexible enough to integrate migrant elites, emerging economic actors, and carefully managed cultural pluralism. He would see this as producing a curious psychological state: individuals would experience constant stimulation, constant affirmation of belonging to the national story, yet simultaneously a hollowing out of any independent civic or moral identity. The central irony would be that the intense personalisation of experience would coexist with a deep structural uniformity, producing what he might call “algorithmic patriotism”, loyalty sustained not through ideology in the old sense but through the micro-engineering of habit and affect. 

Macfarlane would look at this through the lens of historical disembedding. In earlier centuries, he would note, people derived meaning and solidarity from the enduring frameworks of religion, kinship, and local economy, and even in modernity these persisted in altered form within civil society institutions. By 2050, under hard authoritarianism, those frameworks would survive only as heritage displays or controlled micro-communities, permitted to persist as long as they were politically neutral and economically functional. The human capacity for trust, central to his account of liberty’s origins, would be eroded in daily life, replaced by reliance on system-mediated verification. Relationships, transactions, and even intimate communications would require algorithmic authentication, producing a subtle but pervasive alienation in which spontaneous solidarity is viewed with suspicion. In such a climate, resistance in the form of genuine human connection, friendship networks, clandestine intellectual circles, unrecorded acts of mutual aid, would be politically subversive in themselves. 

Gellner would predict that identity politics, rather than disappearing, would mutate into regime-sanctioned diversity frameworks, where identities are celebrated as long as they remain compatible with the broader national narrative and the infrastructural order. In the same way that nationalism in the modern period could absorb and domesticate regional cultures, the 2050 authoritarian order would absorb identity politics as a spectacle of pluralism, using it to showcase the system’s tolerance while preventing those identities from forming cross-cutting solidarities that might challenge the core power structure. Minority identities would be recognised, celebrated, and algorithmically amplified, but only in forms that reinforced loyalty to the regime and avoided any critique of its legitimacy. 

Macfarlane, however, would stress that even in such a constrained environment, identity can be a seed of resistance if it retains embeddedness in alternative structures of meaning. He might point to historical cases where religious or cultural identities persisted for centuries under hostile or controlling states, maintaining languages, rituals, and moral codes in semi-clandestine ways. In 2050, the equivalent might be cultural enclaves that operate as both visible heritage zones and invisible sites of dissent, where encrypted archives, oral traditions, and intergenerational trust networks allow a memory of liberty to survive. Yet he would also emphasise that these enclaves would exist under constant threat of co-option, commodification, or outright eradication, and their survival would depend on an almost monastic discipline of concealment and patience. Both would agree that the psychological consequence of such a world would be a narrowing of the capacity to imagine alternative orders. In previous authoritarian eras, opposition movements could at least draw on visible alternative models - foreign democracies, underground presses, exiled intellectuals. 

By 2050, the universality of the technological-authoritarian order, coupled with the managed diversity of its ideological expressions, would make such alternatives harder to conceive. Resistance would thus rely less on presenting a competing blueprint and more on sustaining the conditions - material, cultural, emotional - under which the capacity to imagine remains alive. Gellner would frame this as a struggle to preserve the anthropological constant of human adaptability in the face of structural homogenisation. Macfarlane would see it as a battle for the fragile spaces of trust without which, in his view, no liberty has ever survived for long. 

Education 2050 

Gellner would see education in 2050 as the perfected descendant of the national schooling systems that he argued were essential to industrial society. In the core authoritarian zones, education would no longer be an institution in the nineteenth- or twentieth-century sense but a continuous, immersive process woven into every aspect of life through AI-mediated environments. Its function would be not simply to transmit knowledge but to maintain the linguistic, cultural, and behavioural homogeneity necessary for the system’s stability. He would expect this education to be more personalised than ever before, with AI tutors adapting content to individual learning profiles, yet doing so within a narrow ideological frame that subtly but relentlessly reinforces loyalty to the state. He would note that such personalisation paradoxically intensifies conformity, because the apparent individual tailoring makes the ideological content feel natural and self-generated rather than imposed. Education, in this sense, becomes indistinguishable from the ongoing socialisation carried out by the infrastructure itself. In peripheral or semi-integrated zones, education would still be delivered as a discrete institutional experience but heavily supplemented or replaced by automated learning systems designed to align peripheral populations with core cultural norms, providing limited technical competence without fostering political autonomy. 

Macfarlane would approach the question by emphasising the inversion of enchantment and disenchantment. In regimes that he would classify as enchanted, such as China, where power, culture, and economy remain intertwined and sacralised, the state would paradoxically emphasise a rhetoric of disenchantment in education. Students would be taught the rational, scientific, and managerial languages of the global technological order, producing citizens who can operate in international markets and scientific communities, but always within the boundaries of an overarching ideological frame that remains unquestioned. In other words, the surface of education would be thoroughly modern, pragmatic, and “disenchanted,” while the structure of the society it serves remains enchanted, its legitimacy deriving from a fusion of political authority, cultural tradition, and economic coordination. 

This allows such regimes to generate the technical and scientific elites they require without creating the broader cultural conditions for liberalisation. In contrast, in disenchanted regimes, liberal-democratic in heritage but now operating under hard or soft authoritarianism , Macfarlane would see education adopting an opposite strategy, reintroducing forms of enchantment to create emotional loyalty and collective meaning. Here the appeal to myth, heritage, national destiny, and civilisational mission would be woven into the curriculum, not as explicit political propaganda in the crude style of the twentieth century, but as an undercurrent running through cultural studies, history, and even the framing of science and technology. The goal would be to produce not sceptical citizens capable of independent judgment, but affectively invested subjects who experience their identity as bound up with the destiny of the regime. In such contexts, even highly technical education would be suffused with moralised narratives about the collective purpose it serves, blending disenchanted skill acquisition with re-enchanted ideological framing. 

Both would agree that by 2050, the traditional liberal-humanist ideal of education as a space for critical inquiry would survive only in rare and marginal enclaves, perhaps within small, elite institutions that operate semi-autonomously under the protection of prestige or economic indispensability. These enclaves, while potentially nurturing dissidents, would also serve the regimes as talent pools and as legitimating symbols of openness. In most cases, however, education’s role would be the continual reproduction of the social order, using the most advanced cognitive science, behavioural psychology, and AI-driven personalisation to remove the need for overt repression. Gellner would stress that this is simply the logical extension of the functional requirements of modernity into the authoritarian future. Macfarlane would underline the irony that the regimes most committed to “rational” economic and technological modernity may remain enchanted at the structural level, while those that once prided themselves on secular disenchantment may find themselves reinventing political enchantment as an instrument of control. 

Religion 2050 

Gellner would see religion in 2050 as surviving less as a competing source of political authority than as a domesticated element within the cultural apparatus of the state. In the core authoritarian zones, it would be permitted, even encouraged, as long as it operated within clearly defined boundaries, functioning as a reservoir of ritual, identity, and moral vocabulary that could be harnessed to reinforce national cohesion. In Islamic states, where religion retains structural centrality, Gellner would expect regimes to refine their capacity to present a modern, technologically competent face abroad while preserving religious orthodoxy at home, using AI-driven interpretation of scripture and religious education to ensure consistency of doctrine and eliminate unauthorised variants. In previously secularised zones that had moved toward soft or hard authoritarianism, religion might return not as a fully independent authority but as part of an orchestrated revival of heritage and moral discourse, lending transcendental legitimacy to political aims. He would note that this would not mark a true return to pre-modern religiosity but a re-enchanted simulation, designed to evoke loyalty and emotional investment without ceding genuine autonomy to religious institutions. 

Macfarlane would stress that religion’s fate would depend on whether the society remained structurally enchanted or disenchanted. In enchanted regimes, religion would be inseparable from the broader fusion of culture, economy, and power, even when framed in “modern” terms. Education in such societies would present religion as a natural component of civic life, a source of moral order that aligns with state goals, thus avoiding the disruptive secularising tendencies that liberal modernity experienced. In disenchanted regimes turned authoritarian, religion would reappear as part of a broader project of re-enchantment, selectively drawing on symbols, festivals, and moral themes that could unite populations fractured by economic inequality or cultural fragmentation. For Macfarlane, the key point is that even in an age of advanced science and AI, the appetite for transcendence remains, and authoritarian regimes will exploit this by offering controlled, aestheticised, and politically safe forms of the sacred. 

Art and Literature 2050 

In art and literature, Gellner would see the collapse of the distinction between “high” and “low” culture that industrial modernity had already begun to erode, replaced by a fully integrated cultural economy in which every form of artistic production is subject to algorithmic curation. Art would remain a space for symbolic play, but its political ambiguity would be systematically managed: works critical of the regime could exist as long as they were hermetically sealed within interpretive frameworks that defanged their oppositional potential. The vast digital archives of literature would be curated not only by availability but by recommendation algorithms that subtly suppress works carrying undesirable political resonances, making dissenting canons increasingly invisible to the public. For him, the vitality of modernism’s cultural revolutions would be gone; what remained would be a controlled churn of styles and genres, sufficient to provide novelty and cultural consumption but not to disrupt the social order. 

Macfarlane would bring a longer historical perspective, seeing art and literature as bearing the same inversion of enchantment and disenchantment that he traced in education. In enchanted regimes, the state might promote starkly realist, rational, and technocratic aesthetics in art and literature, framing them as the mark of modern civilisation, while the underlying political order remains sacralised. This could produce a strange cultural climate where the surface tone of artistic life is coolly disenchanted, yet its institutional context is deeply enchanted. In disenchanted regimes turned authoritarian, art and literature would be deliberately re-enchanted: works would be infused with mythic narratives, heroic archetypes, and civilisational destinies, giving cultural production the feel of a shared epic in which the individual participates by consuming, imitating, and internalising the story. Both would agree that genuine artistic and literary resistance would survive, but only in marginal forms: private archives, small-circulation encrypted publications, ephemeral performances that exist for a few moments before disappearing from the record. 

Gellner would caution that such work would be important for the individuals involved but structurally insignificant without access to mass dissemination. Macfarlane would counter that in the longue durée, such marginalia can preserve alternative traditions and imaginations that, given the right rupture, can become the foundation for future freedoms. In both readings, religion, art, and literature would no longer be autonomous realms but curated environments in which enchantment and disenchantment are deployed as tools of governance, each adapted to the structural logic of the regime. 

Science 2050 

Gellner would see science in 2050 as remaining one of the most indispensable pillars of modernity, but also as fully embedded within the ideological machinery of the state. In his view, authoritarian regimes would never abandon the technological and scientific capacities that underpin both their economic strength and their control systems, but the openness that had once characterised scientific inquiry in the liberal era would be narrowed into channels that align with strategic objectives. The ideal of pure research for its own sake would be allowed only where it does not threaten political orthodoxy or reveal politically inconvenient truths. International collaboration would still occur, but increasingly through tightly monitored exchanges between approved research clusters. 

In core authoritarian zones, AI would manage vast quantities of experimental design, data interpretation, and even hypothesis generation, making the human role more that of supervisory curation than of original discovery. The speed of innovation might even accelerate, but the epistemic culture would be one of instrumentalism, science as a tool, not a vocation. In semi-peripheral zones, science would be fostered in specific applied domains, particularly those relevant to resource management, climate adaptation, and population control, but would be far more constrained in fields like political science, sociology, or historical research, where the risk of ideological contamination would be greater. 

Macfarlane would approach science in this world by again applying his inversion thesis: in enchanted regimes, science would be promoted under a rhetoric of disenchantment, cast as the rational, objective mastery of nature that legitimates the state’s claim to modernity, even while the overall civilisation remains politically enchanted. This would mean that scientists could be genuinely world-class in technical fields, yet would operate within an unexamined assumption of the political order’s sacral legitimacy. In disenchanted regimes that have re-enchanted themselves for political purposes, science would be subtly reframed as part of the civilisational mission - space exploration, climate geo-engineering, genetic innovation all cast in mythic terms of national destiny, making even the most technical work an act of political affirmation. For Macfarlane, the danger is that science would lose its cultural position as a realm of doubt and open-ended questioning, becoming instead a theatre of certainty that serves the regime’s narrative needs. 

Philosophy 2050 

In philosophy, Gellner would note the near-total collapse of its public function in most zones, with philosophical discourse either co-opted into the ideological apparatus as a legitimating voice or confined to abstract, apolitical niches. Critical traditions, particularly those that interrogate power structures, would be preserved in small academic enclaves with no public resonance. He would argue that in an age of AI, where vast synthetic systems can generate philosophical arguments tailored to ideological ends, the role of philosophy as a check on political myth would be virtually extinguished. Macfarlane would again insist on the civilisational inversion: in enchanted regimes, philosophical discourse might be encouraged so long as it is framed as practical ethics, social harmony, or the reinterpretation of tradition, avoiding any confrontation with the sacral structure of power; in disenchanted regimes turned authoritarian, philosophy might be repurposed into a kind of civic theology, producing grand narratives about the meaning of the national project, often borrowing from existential or civilisational idioms to sustain emotional commitment. 

Sport 2050 

Sport, for Gellner, would become one of the key secular religions of the authoritarian age, a domain in which mass participation and spectator engagement can be channelled into controlled displays of identity and loyalty. International competitions would persist, but their organisation and presentation would be more overtly political, with medal counts, team symbolism, and ceremonial spectacle all integrated into the national propaganda system. Domestic leagues would be shaped to reinforce regional and class cohesion under the central order, with major teams functioning as soft power assets at home and abroad. The commercialisation of sport, already intense, would become total, with AI analytics dictating training, tactics, and even athlete selection, and spectator experience tailored algorithmically to maximise both loyalty and consumption. 

Macfarlane would see sport in 2050 as another arena where enchantment and disenchantment are inverted. In enchanted regimes, sport would be officially presented in rational, meritocratic terms - scientific training, data-driven performance optimisation but would operate as an emotional ritual binding the population to the state, with victories presented as proof of the civilisation’s vitality. In disenchanted regimes that have re-enchanted themselves, sport would be even more explicitly mythologised: athletes cast as national heroes, teams as avatars of historical destiny, matches as symbolic battles in the ongoing civilisational narrative. For him, the very physicality and drama of sport makes it one of the last domains where mass affect can be reliably mobilised without overt coercion, which is why authoritarian regimes would cultivate it as both a unifying spectacle and a form of managed catharsis. 

In their shared view, by 2050 science, philosophy, and sport would no longer exist as fully independent realms but as integrated components of an overarching cultural-political economy. Each would retain its own internal logics and standards, but all would be subtly, continuously steered toward sustaining the legitimacy and stability of the regime, with the inversion of enchantment and disenchantment providing the cultural flexibility to adapt these domains to the structural needs of very different types of authoritarian order. 

Family 2050 

Gellner would view family life in 2050 as one of the most tightly managed yet superficially “private” domains in the authoritarian order. In core zones, demographic engineering would be pursued with precision, using AI-driven monitoring of fertility patterns, genetic screening, and incentives or disincentives to shape the population’s size and composition. Pronatalist or antinatalist policies would vary according to each state’s resource base and strategic needs: some regimes would promote early marriage and larger families to counter aging populations, while others would discourage births in favour of maintaining a smaller, more easily governed populace. The family would remain a crucial site for the transmission of the regime’s values, and education systems would be integrated with parental responsibilities in ways that blur the line between public and private authority. He would predict that sexuality, in this world, would be permitted as a private pleasure but heavily normed in public culture, with non-normative identities tolerated or repressed depending on whether they can be co-opted into state narratives or kept socially marginal without destabilising effects. 

Macfarlane would again emphasise the inversion of enchantment and disenchantment. In enchanted regimes, the family would be officially presented as a rational, functional unit for economic and social reproduction, but in practice sacralised as a core part of the civilisation’s moral order, bound up with ritual, ancestry, and the fusion of religion with state ideology. Sexuality in such settings would be treated as both a regulated resource and a source of moral legitimacy: traditional norms would be preserved to project continuity, even as technological interventions in reproduction and genetic optimisation proceed in the background. In disenchanted regimes turned authoritarian, the family might be rhetorically re-enchanted, presented as the sacred microcosm of the national community, with sexuality cast in mythic or heroic terms, parenthood as a patriotic duty, reproductive choice framed in terms of civilisational survival. 

For Macfarlane, this inversion would make it possible to sustain high levels of technological intrusion into reproduction without sparking resistance, as the interventions are cloaked in either rationalist inevitability or sacred obligation depending on the zone. Gellner would also anticipate that sexuality itself, while heavily monitored, would become increasingly mediated by technology: AI-managed dating systems, genetic compatibility matching, hormonal optimisation for desired traits. These systems could be used as tools of social engineering, pairing individuals to strengthen desired class or ethnic mixes, or conversely to maintain separations useful for managing social hierarchies. He would argue that even apparent liberalisation in sexual expression - toleration of non-traditional orientations or lifestyles - would be strategically permitted as a pressure valve, ensuring that the regime can absorb and neutralise subcultures rather than face the risk of their radicalisation. 

Macfarlane would point out that demographic engineering in such a world would be both a cause and consequence of broader civilisational tendencies. Enchanted regimes, with their centralised political orders, could sustain tight control over reproduction without necessarily dismantling kinship-based moral systems; disenchanted regimes, already accustomed to seeing the family as a flexible unit within a market society, could re-enchant it selectively to justify interventions that might otherwise seem invasive. Both paths would converge on the same outcome: the family as a semi-public institution, deeply enmeshed in the state’s demographic, economic, and ideological strategies. In both analyses, resistance to demographic engineering and sexual regulation would be difficult to sustain. In core authoritarian zones, attempts to challenge reproductive policy could be reframed as acts against national survival; in semi-peripheral and peripheral zones, where economic vulnerability is greater, incentives could ensure compliance without overt coercion. Pockets of opposition would persist - diasporas, transnational activist networks, underground cultural movements but these would remain on the margins, surveilled and infiltrated. 

Gellner would be sceptical that such resistance could amount to structural change without a wider political rupture. Macfarlane would hold out the possibility that in the longue durée, the preservation of alternative family models and sexual ethics, even in hidden forms, could one day provide a seedbed for rethinking the political order, just as kinship and household structures had played unexpected roles in earlier transformations. 

Health and Medicine 2050 

Gellner would see health and medicine in 2050 as fully integrated into the infrastructure of state control, with AI managing population health not only for public welfare but as a key element of demographic engineering and social stability. Preventative medicine would be universal in core zones, but the data collected, biometrics, genetic profiles, behavioural indicators, would double as a system of continuous surveillance. Medical AI would predict not only disease risk but also behavioural nonconformity, linking physical and mental health into a unified regime of bio-political governance. In such a system, the distinction between curing illness and managing populations would dissolve; health policy would be driven less by the ethics of care and more by the logic of optimising the productive and politically stable life-span of citizens. Access to advanced treatments would be stratified by loyalty, status, and utility to the state. Semi-peripheral zones would have more uneven systems, with health technologies deployed in concentrated urban centres while rural areas rely on minimal, cost-efficient provision, again monitored through AI but with less redundancy. 

Macfarlane would frame this within his inversion thesis. In enchanted regimes, medicine would be publicly framed as a rational, objective science, the triumph of disenchantment over superstition, yet it would operate as a quasi-sacred domain in which the state embodies the role of guardian and healer of the people. Medical interventions would be intertwined with ritualised narratives of national renewal, the saving of lives cast as part of the civilisational mission. In disenchanted regimes that have re-enchanted themselves, medicine might be presented as part of the heroic destiny of the nation, with cutting-edge therapies, life extension, and genetic optimisation framed in the language of sacrifice, perseverance, and historical greatness. In both contexts, medicine would not only treat disease but actively shape the citizenry, producing bodies and minds that conform to the desired vision of the future. 

Gellner would argue that mortality management in such a system would be unprecedented in scope. With AI able to forecast life expectancy with high accuracy and to control the timing and quality of end-of-life care, regimes could subtly calibrate population turnover. This could mean quietly accelerating the end for those deemed no longer useful, or prolonging life for those whose symbolic or productive roles remain valuable. The ideological framing of death would differ between zones: in enchanted regimes, passing might be couched in terms of joining the ancestors, fulfilling one’s life duty; in re-enchanted disenchanted regimes, death could be presented as an ultimate act of service to the national cause. 

Macfarlane would emphasise the cultural implications: in enchanted settings, the aura of medical authority would blend seamlessly with religious or civilisational narratives, reinforcing trust in the system; in disenchanted settings, the rhetoric of empowerment, choosing the time and manner of one’s death, “living fully until the end”, could mask the structural pressures guiding those choices. He would stress that the management of mortality would be one of the most politically potent tools available to these regimes, capable of defusing the social unrest that accompanies aging populations while also shaping the intergenerational transmission of culture and loyalty. 

Resistance to this medical-political complex, Gellner would note, would be particularly challenging because healthcare is universally valued and its expansion is often welcomed. Opposition could arise where intrusive data collection or visible discrimination occurs, but the centrality of health to human life makes it a natural domain for soft authoritarian control. Macfarlane would see the possibility of counter-narratives emerging from religious traditions that frame life and death outside the calculus of state utility, or from alternative medical cultures in semi-peripheral zones. Yet in the main, both would agree that by 2050 health, medicine, and mortality would be as politically charged as any domain of economic or military policy, and more effective as a subtle but totalising means of shaping the population. 

Law, Policing, Military 2050 

Gellner would see law, policing, and military power in 2050 as fully merged into a single continuum of coercive governance, even where the formal separation of institutions remains. In core authoritarian zones, law would no longer function as an independent constraint on the state but as an adaptive tool of the regime, its language retaining the appearance of neutrality while being continually rewritten by executive decree and algorithmic regulation. Courts would be streamlined into AI-assisted decision-making systems that can process vast case volumes in real time, allowing for selective harshness against political threats while maintaining procedural efficiency for apolitical disputes. Policing would be predictive, anticipatory, and omnipresent, driven by AI models that integrate health, economic, and social data to flag potential unrest before it materialises. The military would be both outward-facing and deeply embedded in domestic life, with elite cyber and drone units capable of targeting individuals globally, blurring the line between foreign and internal enemies. 

Macfarlane would note that in enchanted regimes this apparatus would be clothed in the language of moral duty and cosmic order. Law would be presented as the embodiment of civilisational values, policing as the shepherding of the flock, and military action as the fulfilment of historical destiny. The surface rhetoric would be one of protection and guardianship, even as the underlying system disenchants by reducing all behaviour to patterns that can be monitored, modelled, and corrected. In disenchanted regimes that have re-enchanted themselves, the same coercive system would be framed as the heroic defence of liberty, order, and civilisation against an endless array of enemies, foreign and domestic. Here the inversion is complete: the more pervasive and pre-emptive the policing, the more it is celebrated as a guarantor of freedom. 

Gellner would anticipate that legal structures in the semi-periphery would remain more hybrid and volatile, partly constrained by inherited constitutions or international agreements, but increasingly subverted through informal political pressures and selective enforcement. In the periphery, legal institutions might be skeletal, with policing and military rule openly merging, justified as necessary for stability in the face of climate migration, resource scarcity, and chronic insecurity. He would argue that, by 2050, the distinction between police and military would be functionally irrelevant in most of the world, with both subsumed under centralised security ministries or AI command systems. 

Macfarlane would extend this into the longue durée perspective, seeing law’s transformation as part of a wider historical cycle in which civil society’s countervailing powers erode under sustained pressure, allowing the state to reclaim a monopoly on coercion in new technological forms. In his terms, the “trust” structures that once insulated individuals from the direct reach of the state would be dissolved or absorbed, replaced by “trust” in the system’s predictive algorithms and centralised authority. He would stress that in both enchanted and re-enchanted disenchanted regimes, the legitimacy of coercion would rest on its integration into a moral or civilisational narrative, making overt repression appear as an act of public service rather than political domination. 

Economics 2050 

Gellner would see the economics of 2050 in a hard authoritarian world as a managed and deeply stratified system in which class divisions are both sharper and more rigid than in the industrial or early post-industrial eras. AI-driven automation would have eliminated vast swathes of routine and even complex professional work, creating a permanent surplus population that cannot be absorbed into traditional employment. The state, in core zones, would maintain this population through a combination of universal basic provisioning deliberately set at subsistence or slightly above to ensure compliance and tightly controlled access to opportunities for upward mobility, which would be granted primarily to those who demonstrate political loyalty and functional utility. The upper economic tier, made up of technocratic elites, party-affiliated capitalists, and strategic industry leaders, would enjoy unprecedented wealth and privilege, while the middle tier would consist largely of managerial and technical roles tied directly to the state or state-dependent corporations. 

Macfarlane would interpret this as another case of inversion: in enchanted regimes, the rhetoric of economic policy would be that of rational, scientific efficiency presented as a disenchanted system of optimisation while its actual effect would be to reinforce a quasi-sacred social hierarchy in which each class plays a moralised role in the life of the nation. In disenchanted regimes that have re-enchanted themselves, the authoritarian control of economic life would be framed as the heroic management of scarcity, the defence of prosperity against chaos, or the preservation of “our way of life” in the face of climate-driven migration and global instability. In both cases, economic policy would become a form of political theatre in which scarcity and abundance are consciously managed to shape loyalty and obedience. 

Gellner would stress that class in such a system would be less about income alone and more about access to networks, data, and protected domains of activity. The new ruling class would not be a traditional bourgeoisie but a fusion of political, technical, and security elites who control the algorithms, platforms, and infrastructural systems upon which all economic life depends. Below them, a service class, often precarious and politically voiceless, would maintain the functioning of daily life in megacities, while large numbers of citizens in semi-peripheral and peripheral zones would survive in informal economies, subject to periodic crackdowns when they threaten central stability. The global economic structure would be zoned: core authoritarian economies would be highly automated and tightly regulated; semi-peripheries would serve as both industrial backends and experimental zones for labour control; peripheries would provide resource extraction and cheap labour, often under conditions of near-military discipline. 

Macfarlane would connect this economic order to the decline of civil society’s buffering institutions. In his view, the “trust” structures that once mediated between individual and state - guilds, unions, professional associations - would be hollowed out, their functions replaced by AI-administered labour management systems. Work itself would become less a source of identity and more a mechanism of political discipline, with employment tied to loyalty scores, ideological conformity, and willingness to participate in state-sanctioned projects. 

The disenchantment of work in industrial capitalism would be followed by its re-enchantment as a patriotic duty, even as it becomes increasingly artificial and symbolic for the majority. Both would recognise that this economy would also serve as a tool of demographic management. In zones facing population decline, economic incentives would be used to promote reproduction among politically loyal groups, while in overcrowded or resource-stressed zones, economic hardship would be deployed as a quiet form of population control. The pressure of climate change, reducing arable land, intensifying water scarcity, would reinforce the logic of a command economy in which the state, not the market, becomes the final allocator of basic necessities. 

Resistance to this system, Gellner would argue, would require either control of alternative productive systems, such as decentralised energy, agriculture, or currency networks or the ability to operate in black and grey markets that evade algorithmic oversight. Macfarlane would suggest that such resistance would inevitably be culturally coded, drawing on older solidarities and moral economies to counter the imposed logic of the authoritarian market. Gellner would see the cultural psychology of citizens in the 2050 authoritarian economy as shaped by a constant negotiation between public conformity and private adaptation. 

The dominant mode would be a learned performativity in which individuals outwardly display the loyalty, optimism, and ideological alignment that the state’s AI monitoring systems expect, while inwardly maintaining degrees of scepticism, irony, or quiet disengagement. This dual consciousness, he would argue, is not new, it was a feature of many earlier authoritarian systems but in 2050 it would be amplified by the ever-present awareness that one’s gestures, facial expressions, online interactions, and even biometric signals are subject to continuous analysis. Such a condition produces a citizen who is both hyper-socialised and emotionally guarded, capable of rapid shifts between authentic feeling and prescribed expression. 

Macfarlane would interpret this through his notion of the inversion between enchantment and disenchantment. In enchanted regimes, the surface life of citizens would be drenched in symbolism, ritual, and moralised narratives of belonging, yet the underlying emotional world would be one of cautious calculation, as individuals seek to navigate the constraints of the system without jeopardising personal security. In disenchanted regimes that re-enchant themselves, the public life would be framed as rational, meritocratic, and efficient, but would be suffused with staged spectacles, mega-events, heroic technological achievements, and moralised crises, that provide the affective glue of the system. For Macfarlane, everyday life would thus oscillate between a theatre of meaning and a backstage of guarded pragmatism. Gellner would stress that the daily routines of most citizens would be structured by the architecture of the megacity and the infrastructure of AI administration. 

Work, leisure, consumption, and political participation would be algorithmically optimised, producing a life that is efficient but also highly standardised. The range of permissible choices would be vast enough to create an illusion of freedom, yet narrow enough to prevent destabilising variation. Social relationships would increasingly be mediated through state-approved platforms, where even friendship and romance are subtly shaped by loyalty metrics and compatibility scores derived from behavioural data. Macfarlane would highlight the gradual erosion of unsupervised spaces in which alternative moral or political orders might emerge. The “oases” of cognitive liberty that historically allowed dissent and creative innovation would persist only in small, marginalised niches, religious enclaves, subcultural artistic communities, or rural retreats beyond the reach of dense surveillance networks. These oases would be tolerated when they serve as harmless pressure valves, but periodically disrupted if they begin to foster politically dangerous solidarities. In this sense, he would argue, authoritarian modernity does not seek to eradicate individuality outright, but to contain and direct it, turning even idiosyncratic self-expression into a managed spectacle of diversity within unity. 

Both would recognise that in such a world, the internalisation of surveillance would produce new psychological types. The compliant loyalist, the ironic cynic, the opportunistic shape-shifter, and the quiet resistor would all coexist, often within the same individual at different moments. For Gellner, the risk is that over time the very capacity for autonomous judgement erodes, replaced by an instinctive reading of the political wind. For Macfarlane, the danger is that the moral imagination shrinks, as the possibility of alternative futures becomes harder to visualise when every narrative of change is pre-emptively co-opted by the regime. 

Democracy 2050 

Gellner would see the geopolitical landscape of 2050 as one in which authoritarian zones dominate the global order, with any remaining democratic enclaves functioning less as competing models of governance and more as anomalous holdouts in a system that has largely converged on managed illiberalism. In his framework, the consolidation of hard and soft authoritarian regimes would create a world of blocs, each internally stable enough to avoid collapse, yet engaged in constant competition for strategic resources, technological advantage, and ideological legitimacy. The few surviving democratic states would exist on the peripheries of these blocs, often economically dependent on them, and their survival would be contingent on their ability to maintain niche advantages in finance, innovation, or security partnerships. 

Macfarlane would note that in this geopolitical architecture, the line between democratic and authoritarian regimes would blur. Even the most self-consciously democratic enclaves would adopt authoritarian techniques - pervasive surveillance, data-driven population management, managed media ecosystems in the name of defending themselves from the external threats posed by the dominant blocs. In practice, he would argue, the “oases” of democratic practice that survive within these enclaves would be smaller in scope than in the mid-20th century and often more fragile than they appear, since the broader structures of power and coercion would remain centralised. 

For Gellner, relations between the blocs would be characterised by a mixture of pragmatic cooperation and contained rivalry. Climate change, resource scarcity, and demographic pressures would create an unavoidable interdependence: authoritarian blocs would have to trade in order to secure critical resources and technologies, and even democratic enclaves would be drawn into these networks. However, cooperation would be carefully managed to avoid creating vulnerabilities; cross-border flows of people, ideas, and information would be heavily restricted. Authoritarian blocs would seek to dominate their respective spheres of influence, with semi-peripheral buffer states serving as zones of competition. 

Macfarlane would emphasise that in such a system, the traditional 20th-century categories of First, Second, and Third World would mutate. The new “First World” would not be defined by democracy but by technological mastery and control of key infrastructures, whether authoritarian or democratic in nominal form. The “Second World” would consist of technologically capable but resource-vulnerable states that must continually navigate between the blocs to maintain sovereignty. The “Third World” would comprise resource-rich but institutionally weak regions, subject to a new form of managed neo-imperialism in which the dominant blocs use AI-driven logistical systems and private security networks to extract resources without the costs of direct colonial administration. Both would see climate change as a central driver of geopolitical instability, accelerating migration crises that test the cohesion of even the most controlled regimes. 

Gellner would argue that authoritarian states, with their ability to impose rapid and decisive measures, would manage these pressures more effectively in the short term, but risk long-term brittleness if their legitimacy is undermined by repeated failures to deliver stability. Macfarlane would see the management of migration and resource scarcity as a moral and ideological theatre: authoritarian regimes would frame their control measures as acts of civilisational preservation, while democratic enclaves would cast theirs as reluctantly necessary, blurring the moral distinction between the two. In such a world, resistance at the geopolitical level would be less about overthrowing authoritarian regimes and more about creating alternative networks of exchange, security, and communication that bypass centralised control. 

Gellner would predict that these networks would emerge in technological niches, encrypted data flows, decentralised energy production, while Macfarlane would expect them to arise in cultural niches, drawing on historical solidarities, diasporic ties, and moral economies to build transnational alliances capable of surviving in a world dominated by hard power logics. Gellner would expect that by 2050, the dominant form of war in a world of consolidated authoritarian blocs would be hybrid and asymmetrical rather than large-scale conventional conflicts between great powers. He would argue that the central lesson learned by states in the nuclear age, direct confrontation between major military powers risks mutual annihilation, would still hold, and so the struggle for supremacy would be waged through proxy wars, covert operations, cyber campaigns, and the weaponisation of economic and technological dependencies. In his framework, authoritarian blocs would cultivate client states and armed non-state actors in contested regions, using them to undermine rival blocs without crossing the thresholds that would trigger full-scale war. 

Macfarlane would agree that formal state-on-state wars would be rare, but he would put greater emphasis on the internal dimensions of conflict within each bloc. He would see large authoritarian states using conflict as a means of domestic control, periodically engineering external crises to consolidate internal loyalty, divert attention from economic or environmental strains, and justify intensified surveillance and militarisation. In his analysis, such conflicts would often be staged at the edges of the bloc’s influence(think Russia and Ukraine, USA and Gaza) resource corridors in Africa, water access routes in Central Asia, maritime choke points in Southeast Asia, not simply for strategic value, but for their political utility in sustaining a narrative of perpetual mobilisation. 

Gellner would analyse cyberwarfare as the primary battleground between the blocs, given that AI-run infrastructures by 2050 would govern every critical system from energy grids and food distribution to financial transactions and population monitoring. He would predict a steady escalation of low-visibility cyberattacks designed to degrade rival systems, create cascading failures, and destabilise economies without leaving clear fingerprints. These attacks would be paired with disinformation campaigns targeting the cultural cohesion of adversary states, with nationalist and identity politics weaponised both to weaken rival regimes and to reinforce loyalty within one’s own. 

Macfarlane, drawing on his historical sensibility, would stress that even in this high-tech environment, the fundamental patterns of imperial rivalry and civilisational boundary-making would persist. He would expect border zones, physical or maritime, to remain flashpoints where resource scarcity, migration flows, and competing legal regimes collide. In his view, the most dangerous wars would not be fought for ideological supremacy but for survival under acute ecological stress: the collapse of a key water basin, the breakdown of a transnational food network, or the forced migration of tens of millions from coastal megacities could trigger desperate moves that spill over into armed conflict. Both would foresee an intensification of proxy conflicts in the new “Third World,” where authoritarian blocs would compete for access to critical raw materials, rare earths, lithium, arable land, and freshwater reserves. 

Gellner would stress that these zones would become the laboratories of future warfare, where experimental technologies, autonomous drones, AI-assisted logistics, biotech-enhanced soldiers, would be tested under conditions of limited global scrutiny. Macfarlane would warn that the local populations in these regions, already stressed by climate change and authoritarian client regimes, would experience these conflicts as the continuation of a centuries-old pattern of exploitation, further deepening cycles of instability and migration that would rebound into the core blocs. On the question of whether conventional war between the great authoritarian blocs could ever erupt, Gellner would concede it is possible if one bloc, under severe internal strain, miscalculates the resolve or capabilities of another. He would nonetheless see this as the low-probability, high-impact scenario that all major powers would organise their deterrence strategies to avoid. 

Macfarlane would be less confident: in his view, the authoritarian reliance on centralised, personalised leadership creates structural vulnerabilities in decision-making, where a single leader’s misjudgment, amplified by the echo chambers of elite loyalty, could escalate a manageable crisis into a catastrophic war. 

Conclusions

By 2050, both Gellner and Macfarlane would see a world that has moved decisively away from the late 20th-century liberal optimism, yet the way they would arrive at this conclusion and the emphases they would place on its features would differ in telling ways. Both would recognise the global consolidation of hard or semi-hard authoritarian regimes, and both would agree that the long experiment of large-scale, rights-based democracy is either over or so diminished as to exist only in enclaves and exceptions. The conditions sustaining liberty, in Gellner’s industrial-modernist sense or in Macfarlane’s more historically embedded framework, would have eroded under the combined pressures of technological centralisation, environmental crisis, demographic stress, and the militarisation of governance. 

Gellner would frame this in terms of the transformation of nationalism and statehood under new technological and geopolitical realities. His earlier work depicted nationalism as a product of the transition from agrarian to industrial societies, in which the state provided a uniform high culture to ensure mobility and coordination in a complex economy. In 2050, he would see a parallel process at work: the “information-industrial” state using advanced AI infrastructures to maintain cohesion in mega-polities, but now with an explicitly authoritarian orientation. Education, media, and culture would be bent towards maintaining not simply loyalty, but a readiness for permanent competition, military, economic, and symbolic, against rival blocs. In this sense, the state’s control of culture would be both more pervasive and more technologically sophisticated than in the 20th century, with identity politics repurposed as a tool for mobilisation rather than pluralist negotiation. 

Macfarlane would agree on the authoritarian trajectory but would explain it through a longer historical lens. He would return to his “island thesis” to argue that the loss of geopolitical insulation, Britain tied to Europe after 1914, the United States drawn irreversibly into global entanglement after 9/11, removed one of the critical supports for liberty. He would also stress the collapse of the balance of countervailing institutions that once mediated between the state and the individual, whether through civil society, professional autonomy, or local self-governance. In his view, the new authoritarian order would resemble earlier imperial forms, not only in its centralisation but in the way it permitted or even cultivated limited oases of cognitive liberty in science, technology, and certain arts, while keeping political and economic power closely integrated under state control. This, he would argue, would explain how civilisations like China and Japan had sustained technical and commercial dynamism without ever fully separating power, culture, and economy and why similar hybrid arrangements could flourish in 2050’s authoritarian blocs. 

Where Gellner would place greatest analytical weight on the homogenising, mobilising functions of education and culture in this environment, Macfarlane would be more attuned to the contradictions and tensions that arise when regimes both suppress and selectively encourage creativity. For Gellner, the danger to liberty would lie in the efficiency and comprehensiveness of the new state apparatus, its ability to fill every cultural space with content that reinforces the civilisational mission. For Macfarlane, the danger would be coupled with a paradox: even the most centralised regimes require zones of unpredictability to innovate and adapt, and these zones might harbour forms of resistance, however precarious. Both would see identity politics continuing, but stripped of its liberal-democratic framing. 

For Gellner, identity categories would be instrumentalised, mobilised as part of the bloc’s narrative of unity and defence, functioning as a modernised version of the high-culture nationalism he analysed in the 20th century. Macfarlane would view them as more unstable, shaped by deep historical currents and capable, in certain moments, of slipping beyond the state’s intended uses. Religion, art, and literature in this world would be doubly politicised and employed as tools of legitimacy but also carrying within them the potential for coded dissent. Science would be celebrated but kept within the bounds of state priorities, while sport would be a proxy for international rivalry. 

The key similarity between them would be their agreement that liberty, in the full modern sense, would be the rare exception by 2050, and that the default mode of governance would be centralised, technologically saturated, and sustained by narratives of civilisational competition. Their disagreement would lie in the scope for agency within such systems: Gellner would tend to see cultural and ideological forms as either captured or neutralised by the state, while Macfarlane would allow more space for the survival of semi-autonomous zones that could incubate alternative values and visions. In the end, both would recognise that the defining condition of the mid-21st century would be not the end of ideology, but its reorganisation into tightly managed, civilisation-scale projects, projects that claim to be the guardians of collective survival in a world where survival itself is presented as perpetually under threat.