Europe is living its Weimar moment. The historic task of the European Union (EU) today, the book argues, is to articulate and institute a new imaginary of prosperity. Imaginaries of prosperity integrate societies around the shared pursuit of a prosperous future, while rendering “political-economic” questions the main preoccupation of politics. The new imaginary of prosperity today has to be both credible (able to provide answers to contemporary challenges) and appealing (conjuring a world in which people want to live). It has to include not only an alternative macroeconomic framework (a different role for tax, public spending, or welfare provision) but also a different set of microeconomic institutions (a new role for the corporation, technology, industry, finance, and consumption). It is exactly in this latter space that the EU has undertaken the first important steps towards reimagining prosperity. The book analyses several policy fields, showing that the EU has already made significant efforts to foster more caring consumption, circular products and technologies, sustainable industry, and fairer corporate activity. But the EU has to go further and faster – if it intends to respond effectively to the soaring problems, while halting another Europe’s slide into tribalism.

Chapter 2 provides a theoretical framework for the book. I articulate, first, why it is useful to think in terms of social imaginaries, rather than alternative sociological concepts (such as paradigms or ideologies), for analysing social integration in modern societies. I then explore why, in modernity, it was imaginaries of prosperity that provided the most stable foundations for social integration. These imaginaries can bridge, I argue, the plurality of worldviews and identities, while at the same time play into modernity’s strengths, namely democracy and knowledge governance. However, any particular imaginary of prosperity can provide only a temporary foundation, because it will sooner or later produce too many problems and contradictions to continue fulfilling its integrative role. When such problems mount, imaginaries of prosperity become subject to their own dialectics, having to shift eventually between privatised and collective routes to prosperity. If, however, the pressures for change cannot be institutionalised through democratic channels, we have seen in the past – and are seeing again today – that illiberal and undemocratic tribal imaginaries may take hold, making identity (rather than prosperity) the main vector of politics.

I pursue the case of natural technology by arguing that it is a technology at odds with political life as such. (1) Community and loneliness. I argue that we wax rosy about “community” online to the extent that we are evoking features of offline communities that we cannot have in online terms. (2) Context and information. By removing speech from social circumstances, the internet produces insoluble problems for the understanding and regulation of speech. (3) Facing and defacing. I discuss how changes in our sense of context make a difference to our conception of who we are and of where our identities are at stake. (4) Equality and authority. I scrutinize what is meant by “democracy” in digital terms and show that it is democratic in name only. (5) Ethnonationalism and cosmopolitanism. Digital communication is tending to polarize citizens throughout the Western world either toward some form of ethnic nationalism or toward cosmopolitanism beyond material borders. I consider China as a candidate for what the internet’s intrinsic “political form” might be. (6) Little men, bigly. I show how many rhetorical features of President Trump’s tenure make sense when understood in light of the imperatives of online communication.

The concluding chapter renarrates the history of the Christian just war tradition in a way that better accounts not only for the ongoing interactions between the political and the natural but also for the ironies, disjunctions, and ambiguities that arise as the tradition transitions out of one social imaginary and into another. Along the way, it suggests a way of interpreting traditions as formed around a particular set of questions – which in the case of Christian just war thinking are those of theological anthropology – which exert centripetal, cohering, forces even as answers to those questions exert centrifugal forces which shape the tradition’s contextual engagements within a particular social imaginary. The moral foci of traditions do not, therefore, drive them forward through time so much as exist as moral precipitates arising out of those contextual answers. Including environmental history within narratives of the history of the Christian just war tradition does more than enrich that tradition, though. It helps shape it to address wars in a warming world as we exit the Holocene and enter the Anthropocene.

Blockchains and distributed ledgers, like records of all kinds, can be viewed as socio-informational-technical ecosystems, not just technical artifacts. As such, they are governed by principles, procedures, and rules created by social actors. These “epistemic rules of the game” – and the version of social “truth” that results from their operation – are deeply interrelated to epistemic and social trust, and with power and authority. When peer disagreements arise within blockchain and distributed ledger ecosystems, much can be learned from how such epistemic disagreements are resolved (or not) about what version of “truth” concerning a state of affairs will be accepted in the face of two alternate justified true beliefs, and about the basic character and cohesiveness of these ecosystems and the socio-epistemic realities they constitute.

The aim of this chapter is to explore how our ideas about the economy and the market shape the way in which we think about the law, as well as how ideas about the law condition our understanding of what the market “is” and what it “needs”. I argue that legal and economic discourses share a set of fundamental pre-understandings as the relation between the subject of the legal-political order and the social whole. These shared pre-understandings ensure that the law and legal discourse tend to support, rather than subvert, the tenets (if not the particulars) of socio-economic organisation. However, by uncovering this entanglement, we unearth a potentially subversive role for the law. If law and legal discourse succeed in unsettling the shared pre-understandings, and offer alternative imaginaries as to the role of the law in society, they may become a trigger for a broader social transformation.

In the first part of the chapter, I develop a theoretical account, arguing that different economic, political and legal discourses converge around shared, and historically determined, pre-understandings (social imaginaries) as to what constitutes the socio-economic whole, who can act on it, and how. I further elaborate this argument by exploring the transformations of private law as a response to different imaginaries of the economy, politics and society in the last two centuries. In the second part, I turn to European private law to show how a new socio-economic imaginary enters and settles in European consumer law and policy – exposing both the conduits and the contingency of this transformation. I conclude by discussing some of the important impacts of the new socio-economic imaginary on European private law.