Year XXXVIII, Number 3, November 2025

Nadia Urbinati 
Kyriakos Tsakopoulos Professor of Political Theory, Department of Political Science, Columbia University, New York.

Today, high-tech engineering holds the reins, with the ambition of designing a social system in which personal choices are monitored and the will of the individual is redirected. It is capitalism in its most advanced, monopolistic, and illiberal form.

The war orchestrated in Iran as an advertising campaign aimed at convincing Western public opinion to buy American weapons and high technology in exchange for less draconian tariffs: this is the trademark of White House capitalism, a plan for despotic economic and technological domination that makes no concessions and erases two centuries of liberal thought.

If European leaders do not understand what is happening, it is because they are either incapable and incompetent, or they share the American project of demolishing constitutional democracy.

In the post-World War II political culture, constitutional democracies were fueled by the idea that they were the most coherent response to totalitarianism, creating the conditions to prevent its future resurgence.

Theoretical writings on totalitarianism, starting with Jacob Talmon’s classic text and continuing with essays on liberal theory (Raymond Aron, Isaiah Berlin, and Friedrich von Hayek) and democratic theory (Robert Dahl, Norberto Bobbio, and Giovanni Sartori), were guided by a premise that seemed justified by history: totalitarianism was the extreme result of the
 
divorce between liberalism and democracy, between private freedom and political power; it can be prevented by constitutions which, as pacts signed by citizens, establish both individual and political rights in their forms and limits. Constitutional democracies bring together the two horns of the modern polis: the individual and the citizen.

One factor remains to be considered, which has only been mentioned so far: capitalism. Historically born in opposition to the absolute powers of the state and pre-modern monopolies, it has progressively demonstrated its own tendency towards monopolistic control. It already demonstrated this with the enclosure of common land in England in the early 19th century, and then gradually adapted all forms of production and profit generation to itself.

America is the continent where capitalism has demonstrated its ability to radically and rapidly change human nature and social relations (as Fabrizio Tonello tells us in his recent book L’America in 18 quadri: dalle piantagioni alla Silicon Valley, Laterza 2025).

In America, it succeeded with relative ease (and a great deal of violence), partly because in that country of immigration, it encountered no resistance in traditional and community values. The American Republic was born with a project of expansion and revolution.
The surprising fact of recent years (let’s call 

them Trumpian for convenience, even if their roots go back to American social history at least since the Reconstruction after the Civil War) is that capitalism is proving to have disturbing totalitarian potential.

The Trump administration has announced the creation of a single national database (i.e., operational throughout the federation), entrusted to the autocrat Peter Thiel, head of Palantir, whose company, with taxpayer money, will create a system to concentrate all American data: data that emerges from the use of services (healthcare, taxes, pensions, and social security), from behavior regulated by platforms for any reason (social media, home banking, professions).

The goal of the“new future,”of which the anti- democratic Thiel is one of the main exponents, has a clear purpose: to profile every act and, ideally, every desire of citizens, just like the Chinese platform that terrifies liberals.

For years, we have read that China is using technological engineering to create a homogeneous world from which individual will should ideally be expunged. Today, the“free world” is not only fascinated by this dystopia
 
but is using the power of the state to implement it. The distance between authoritarian forms is getting shorter and shorter.

This totalitarian engineering project, which dwarfs the rudimentary espionage systems of East Germany, tells us in no uncertain terms that democracy, based on the free will of every citizen, is anachronistic; it worked as long as the social and political sciences dominated the study of collective behavior.

Today, high-tech engineering holds the reins and, with the help of neuroscience, cultivates the ambition to design a social system in which the accidents and irrationality that result from choice are monitored to be eliminated and the will redirected. Capitalism in its most advanced form is monopolistic and illiberal.

You don’t need to resort to Karl Marx to understand this. The liberal J.S. Mill had sensed that capitalism could destabilize the modern social world and limit personal freedom, not just political freedom: private property, he thought, would be sucked up by the monopolistic tendency, and with it the freedom to choose and make mistakes, to challenge and be autonomous.

This comment has been originally published in the newspaper Domani on June, 30th 2025.