An Interview with Philosopher Juan Manuel Cincunegui
By Josu Azcona Latasa

The collapse of neoliberal globalization has ushered in a new era of fragmentation and imperial competition. In this “post-global” world, the old categories of political and philosophical thought are insufficient to grasp the magnitude of the change. Human rights, once conceived as a universal language of emancipation, have lost their mobilizing power, co-opted by power structures and transformed into instruments of governance rather than resistance. Meanwhile, contemporary political thought seems trapped between two extremes: a paralyzing relativism that dissolves any normative horizon, and a deterministic scientism that reduces human agency to mere biopolitical mechanisms. This scenario has paved the way for reactionary conservatism, which channels social unrest through authoritarian and exclusionary narratives.

In this context, philosopher Juan Manuel Cincunegui has developed a critical diagnosis of the present, integrating political, epistemological, and existential dimensions. In his books Planned Misery: Human Rights and Neoliberalism (Madrid: Dado Ediciones, 2019) and Mind and Politics: Dialectics and Realism from the Perspective of Liberation (Madrid: Dado Ediciones, 2024), he argues that the crisis we face is not only political or institutional but also a crisis of thought itself — of the ways in which critical thought has been absorbed by the very power structures it should be questioning.

We spoke with him about the post-global era, the collapse of formal democracy, the crisis of human rights as a device for legitimizing the neoliberal order, and the problem of bureaucratism as a structure that paralyzes political action and blocks the imagination of alternatives. We discussed the need to recover a philosophy of liberation that not only challenges the logic of globalization and exclusion but also explores new strategies of resistance that allow us to break free from predetermined orbits of confrontation and open spaces where the unexpected can emerge. All this in a context where critical thought faces the challenge of reinventing itself in a world where the horizon of universality seems to have crumbled.

The End of Neoliberal Globalization and Transnational Human Rights

—Your last two books seem to respond to the same diagnosis of the present, but from different angles. How would you define the current moment?

We are living in a post-global era, a period in which neoliberal globalization is no longer the inevitable horizon of politics and economics. Until just a few years ago, it was taken for granted that the world was moving towards ever-increasing integration, with free markets, liberal democracy, and human rights serving as the universal languages of progress.

That world has collapsed. Globalization has given way to a fragmented world, marked by imperial competition, where nation-states have regained a central role. Major powers—the United States, China, Russia, the European Union, India, and Brazil—are all competing to establish and consolidate their spheres of influence.

This transformation has disoriented both the political right and the left. The right, which for decades championed free markets, now leans toward protectionism and nationalism. The left, which had embraced the idea that human rights and the international order were tools of justice, now faces a reality in which these same institutions have been absorbed into global power structures.

This is the starting point for my two recent books: exploring how this transformation has reconfigured both politics and critical thinking, and examining what possibilities for emancipation still remain in this new global context.

—In Planned Misery, you argue that human rights have been co-opted by neoliberalism. How did this happen?

The problem with human rights is that they were designed to operate within the system, not against it. Since the 1970s, the institutionalization of human rights has coincided with the global expansion of neoliberalism. Rather than challenging existing power structures, human rights have increasingly become a tool for managing misery within the narrow confines the system allows.

This dynamic became particularly evident in the 1990s: human rights were promoted as the moral language of globalization, but in practice, they were deployed to justify wars, economic interventions, and sanctions that ultimately benefited Western powers.

Now that this global order is in crisis, human rights are crumbling along with it. On the one hand, human rights discourse has lost legitimacy among large sectors of the population, who see it as nothing more than a bureaucratic language with no real transformative impact. On the other hand, the far right has successfully co-opted public discontent, reframing human rights as a tool of globalist elites.

The challenge, then, is to detach human rights from the neoliberal order and rebuild them as a language of struggle, rather than an instrument for managing power.

From Political Crisis to Epistemological Crisis

—In Mind and Politics, you expand your critique by asking how this ideological capture of human rights was possible. How does the crisis of human rights connect with an epistemological crisis?

Because the problem isn’t just political—it’s also epistemological. We’ve been convinced that there’s no alternative to the system because we’ve accepted frameworks of thought that actively block the imagination of alternatives.

In the past few decades, critical thought has oscillated between two equally paralyzing extremes. On one side, postmodern relativism tells us that everything is a discursive construction, that there are no real structures we can meaningfully transform. On the other side, deterministic scientism reduces human beings to mere components in impersonal systems, stripping us of any meaningful agency.

Both frameworks have weakened our ability to think about transformation. If everything is just an arbitrary narrative, then political struggle is reduced to wordplay. And if everything is determined by immutable structures, then political action is futile.

What I propose in Mind and Politics is to recover a realist dialectic—a framework that recognizes the existence of real, material structures that shape our lives, while simultaneously recognizing that these structures are not absolute and can be transformed.

In the post-global era, imagining emancipation requires more than just political analysis. It demands the reconstruction of a philosophy of liberation that is political, epistemological, and existential.

Exteriority, Figures of the Limit, and Figures of Liberation

—In the book, you draw on Enrique Dussel’s concept of exteriority and develop it by contrasting “figures of the limit” with “figures of liberation.” How does this idea fit into your diagnosis of the present?

Modern thought has always operated under the assumption of totality—the belief that the world can be fully understood as a closed system. From Hegel to vulgar Marxism, this logic has dominated how we think about history and politics.

The problem with the logic of totality is that it erases the very possibility of exteriority. If everything is determined within the system, where could transformation even come from? Today, this logic of closure has reached its epistemological peak with the rise of artificial intelligence, and its sociopolitical equivalent in what Yanis Varoufakis calls technological feudalism.

Dussel shows us that genuine critique does not arise from within the system’s logic but from its margins—from those excluded subjects whose very existence resists the system’s terms. In Mind and Politics, I develop this idea by contrasting figures of the limit—negative figures that do not fit within the dominant structure but whose mere existence destabilizes it—with figures of liberation, who actively invite us to imagine new worlds.

A clear example of a figure of the limit is found in Wendy Brown’s analysis of walled states: political entities that claim to protect us from external threats but, in the process, imprison us within their logic of closure and exclusion. These structures do not resolve the system’s contradictions; instead, they expose them, revealing the impossibility of achieving the security and sovereignty they promise.

In contrast, figures of liberation emerge in spaces that point toward alternative forms of imagination and collective action. These can be found, for example, in communal experiences—whether religious or non-religious—which do not aim to directly confront capitalism or bureaucracy, but instead create pockets of solidarity where another world becomes imaginable. These experiences prefigure new ways of organizing life beyond the constraints imposed by market rationality and bureaucratic management, opening cracks in the system through practices that embody different values and social relations.

In this sense, exteriority is not only a structural and political issue; it is also epistemological and even existential. As Charles Taylor has shown in his analysis of secular modernity, the immanent frame—that is, the self-contained, self-sufficient structure of meaning that defines modernity—tends to obscure the possibility of transcendence. Yet keeping this frame open to transcendence is crucial if we are to resist the closure of meaning imposed by dominant ideologies.

Therefore, if we want a genuine political and economic transformation of our ways of life, we need new ways of understanding ourselves and the world—ways that remain open to the unexpected, to that which lies beyond what we already know.

In this sense, thinking about liberation in the post-global era does not just mean rejecting closed political and economic systems, but also resisting epistemic and existential closure, preserving the possibility of alternative ways of being, knowing, and acting. It requires us to stop seeking solutions within the traditional frameworks and instead learn to think from exteriority, from the cracks that disrupt the system’s totality and allow new horizons to emerge.

The consolidation of walled states around the world and the rise of new imperialisms are purely negative responses to the discomfort produced by modern capitalist order itself. They do not offer real alternatives; instead, they reinforce the same structures of domination they claim to protect us from. Our survival, therefore, depends on our ability to move beyond these reactionary responses, to imagine and practice ways of life not dictated by fear, control, or exclusion, but rather by new possibilities of liberation.

The Crisis of Liberal Democracies

—Given the collapse of the neoliberal globalization horizon and the crisis of legitimacy facing its institutional forms, how do you see the future of our democracy? In your view, what political strategy should we adopt?

At this moment, it’s difficult to imagine any viable response through electoral means alone. It also seems unlikely that we can forge any broad consensus that is not already shaped or influenced by the reactionary agenda. Reactionary forces have successfully capitalized on the failure of formal democracy, and they have understood something crucial: the real struggle is not just electoral or institutional—it is cultural and symbolic. They are not simply trying to manage the existing order; they are pursuing a deep institutional reconfiguration, which gives them a much broader strategic horizon than their adversaries.

They have managed to construct an alternative common sense, supported by a legitimate critique (in my view) of neoliberal technocracy, along with a media-technological apparatus that reinforces this new cultural and political hegemony. This cultural battle is not a spontaneous phenomenon; it is the result of systematic intervention into the collective imagination, where neoliberal frames of reference have been displaced by authoritarian narratives that offer certainties in the face of the liberal order’s collapse.

In this context, the progressive strategy cannot depend solely on electoral alternatives, nor on the vain hope of recovering institutions as we once knew them. These institutions have already been hollowed out, stripped of real democratic content. This is why I place such importance on the problem of bureaucratism.

—What do you mean by “bureaucratism”?

When I speak of bureaucratism, I’m not just referring to the existence of procedures and regulations. I mean a mode of governance that has invaded every sphere of life and has emptied politics, democracy, and even human experience of substantive meaning. Bureaucratism happens when institutions no longer serve society, but instead become self-preserving structures, functioning primarily to maintain themselves rather than to solve real problems. It’s what happens when democracy ceases to be a space for contestation and decision-making, and becomes instead a web of rules and procedures designed to prevent any real change—where every problem is simply managed but never actually resolved.

Bureaucratism has turned politics into the management of the possible, where governments no longer govern, but merely administer what markets or supranational institutions allow them to. Decisions are made in technical committees, closed-door offices, and meetings with experts who are accountable to no one, while citizens are reduced to spectators. There is no real deliberation, no room for transformation, just a machine designed to keep the system running, even when the system itself is in ruins.

But this logic is not limited to politics. It has become the organizational model of contemporary capitalism. Far from being a free market, today’s capitalism functions like a massive private bureaucracy, where banks, corporations, and digital platforms establish their own rules and procedures—often more rigid and opaque than those of any state bureaucracy. What Varoufakis calls technological feudalism is precisely this: a system of control based on algorithms, platforms, and invisible bureaucracies that regulate our lives without any possibility of democratic intervention. We no longer have sovereignty over our economies or even our own information; everything passes through power structures that no one elected and that present themselves as inevitable.

The same logic is at work in the world of knowledge production. Critical thought has been suffocated by metrics, impact factors, and administrative criteria that have turned the production of ideas into a race for accreditations and publications. It no longer matters what you think or discover, only how many papers you publish, in which journals, and with how many citations. Universities, which should be spaces of free thought and critical formation, have become data factories, where reflection is subordinated to bureaucratic procedures.

This also seeps into everyday life: more forms, regulations, and absurd protocols that turn every action into an endless process. Booking a medical appointment, solving a banking issue, even buying something online—everything is mediated by forms, passwords, fine print contracts, and automated responses that solve nothing. This organizational model consumes our time, energy, and patience, generating nothing but frustration and helplessness.

But the most dangerous aspect of bureaucratism is that it depoliticizes and paralyzes. When everything is reduced to administrative processes, people stop believing that change is possible. They stop seeing politics as a space for transformation and start seeking answers in more radical discourses—in those who promise to break the system entirely. This is where reactionary forces step in. They have successfully channeled the frustration with this dysfunctional system and turned it into an offensive against democracy itself. People are tired of every problem being dissolved into a sea of procedures with no solutions, and this is exactly where authoritarian discourse finds fertile ground.

—Does this mean we should abandon the electoral arena altogether?

No, it means we have to recognize that democratic renewal at this point requires far more than just an electoral victory by so-called progressive forces. First, we must understand that the left and the right today operate within the same conceptual space, even though their rhetoric appears radically opposed. In reality, both operate in the same orbit, and therefore they are destined to collide. The crucial task is to exit this orbit entirely—to stop operating within this pre-defined space.

That’s why, as I mentioned earlier, we need to look for answers in the unknown. Let me share a story. In the early 1990s, I had the good fortune of meeting the Tibetan community in McLeod Ganj, India. I spent nearly ten years living among Tibetan exiles and Western converts to Buddhism. You probably know the history. In the 1960s, a wave of Tibetan exiles fled to Nepal, India, and the West after China’s invasion of Tibet, which led to the Dalai Lama’s exile.

What struck me most about that exile was the decision made by Tibetan religious authorities. They realized they couldn’t militarily resist Chinese forces, so they focused on preserving their tradition. They didn’t stop denouncing the invasion or the brutality of the occupation, but at the heart of their exile strategy was the conversion of Tibetan religious culture into their source of strength and survival.

What interests me here is how a defeat can become a space for reformulating identity, avoiding the danger of being co-opted by the enemy’s logic. It’s much like certain martial arts, like judo: instead of directly opposing the adversary’s force, you redirect their energy, using their own momentum to unbalance them. To do this, you must refuse to respond directly to their attack and instead find leverage within their own strength, making them fall under their own weight.

The Cultural Battle

—To close, I’d like your thoughts on something some analysts, such as Pérez-Reverte and others, have suggested: that the current authoritarian drift is, to a large extent, a reaction to a decade of “wokeism.” The argument goes that excessive political correctness, the radicalization of identity politics, and the intolerance of dissent within certain progressive spaces have created a climate of polarization that ultimately strengthened reactionary responses. Do you think this interpretation is accurate, or is the phenomenon more complex?

No, I think that kind of analysis is superficial and suffers from a certain culturalist idealism—the belief that historical changes are determined exclusively by transformations in the realm of ideas, without considering the material conditions that make those changes possible. To believe that the authoritarian drift is directly caused by what we call wokeism is to ignore the structural and material factors that shaped the current crisis. It reduces a complex phenomenon to a cultural backlash, failing to account for the economic, political, and social dynamics that produced this scenario.

If by wokeism we mean a set of identity-based movements focused on intersectionality and politics of recognition, then it’s true that they have played a visible role in the public debate. However, reducing the democratic crisis to a reaction against these movements is an extreme oversimplification.

What we are witnessing is not just a cultural adjustment, but a structural reconfiguration of global capitalism. The authoritarian drift is not just a rejection of wokeism; it’s a response to the breakdown of the neoliberal order, to the inability of democratic institutions to channel social discontent, and to the rise of new economic and technological powers seeking to redefine the rules of the game.

As happened with human rights discourse, the problem is not simply the radicalism of certain identity struggles, but their association with the neoliberal establishment, which has instrumentalized these demands while consolidating an exclusionary economic model. This association has made wokeism an easy target for reactionaries, who present it not as a force for social transformation, but as a legitimizing device for the status quo. This is something Nancy Fraser warned about nearly a decade ago when she described “progressive neoliberalism”—a form of progressivism that embraces cultural causes while sustaining the logic of capital accumulation, generating deep resentment among sectors whose economic and political expectations have been thoroughly frustrated.

Of course, there’s some truth in this line of argument. There’s no denying that polarization is real and deeply fractures society. However, when conflict is reduced solely to cultural and identity issues, without considering its material dimension, it becomes ineffective—or even functional to the system itself. Fragmenting political struggle into isolated identities prevents the construction of any broad project of structural transformation, making it easier for neoliberalism to absorb symbolic demands without altering power relations.

A clear example of this is “woke capitalism”, where large corporations adopt progressive rhetoric on diversity and inclusion, while simultaneously engaging in exploitative labor practices, outsourcing production to countries with inhumane working conditions, and evading taxes. This shows that rights-based discourse, when detached from a critique of the economic system, can easily be neutralized and commodified by the market.

This doesn’t mean that gender and race aren’t fundamental issues—they absolutely are, and they must be addressed with all their complexity. But if they are treated in isolation from the economic structures that perpetuate those inequalities, they risk becoming domesticated demands, absorbed into the market and used as tools to legitimize the system. The central issue is not to replace some struggles with others, but to understand how gender, racial, and class inequalities are intertwined and mutually reinforcing.

Rather than opposing one struggle against another, we need a perspective capable of understanding how these forms of oppression relate to each other and how to build a political horizon that not only responds to symbolic exclusion but also addresses the material conditions that sustain it. This is Marxism at its best: not a reductionist view of class as the only structure of domination, but a method for understanding how systemic inequalities intersect and reinforce each other within capitalism.

Therefore, wokeism cannot be understood as the primary cause of the authoritarian turn. At most, it is just one cultural element within a much broader process, whose real roots lie in the structural crisis of global capitalism and the crisis of legitimacy afflicting liberal institutions, which are increasingly perceived as instruments that protect corporate and technocratic interests rather than representing the people.

The reaction against wokeism is not causal, but symptomatic—a reflection of a much deeper unrest, which has found a convenient scapegoat in these discourses, but whose real source lies in the institutional inability to address growing social uncertainty. This crisis is not merely one of governability, but the result of a process in which liberalism itself has undermined its legitimacy by severing its connection to material justice and prioritizing market stability over democracy.

In this context, the authoritarian turn is not just a cultural reaction; it is part of a political restructuring aimed at managing capitalism’s systemic crisis, where social control and repression replace material solutions for the majority.

As Ellen Meiksins Wood argued, if actually existing liberal democracies have been the institutional vehicles of neoliberal capitalism, then a crisis of neoliberalism necessarily triggers a crisis of liberal democracy itself. In other words, the collapse of the economic model that supported the liberal consensus has not only delegitimized the neoliberal project, but has also dragged down the democratic institutions that administered it. The growing authoritarianism we are seeing today is less a reaction to the excesses of progressive movements and more a structural adjustment—a way for the state to reconfigure itself to manage a crisis that cannot be resolved within the framework of liberal governance.

Or, to put it another way, if wokeism were really the main driver, then we should be able to explain phenomena like the rise of protectionism, the return of economic nationalism, or the dismantling of the welfare state in relation to its influence. But what does wokeism have to do with new tariffs, the U.S.-China trade war, or the increasing control of tech conglomerates over our daily lives? Absolutely nothing. These processes follow much deeper structural dynamics, linked to the crisis of global capitalism and the reconfiguration of power in the post-neoliberal era.

The narrative that “wokeism caused authoritarianism” is, at best, a convenient distraction, and at worst, an ideological smokescreen that diverts attention from the real economic and political forces reshaping the post-global world. Instead of analyzing the actual fractures in contemporary capitalism, we are being offered a story that blames cultural struggles for a crisis whose roots go much deeper.

Despite Everything, the Future is Still in Our Hands

—To close, I’d like to ask you to reflect on “what comes next.” Given the depth of the current crisis—of capitalism, of democracy, and even of the frameworks through which we make sense of the world—what do you think is necessary to break out of this stagnation? What kind of intellectual, political, and ethical transformations would be needed to imagine and build a different horizon?

First, I think we need to take seriously the challenges posed by the far right—or whatever we choose to call it. It’s not enough to dismiss it as irrational, media manipulation, or just a revival of past reactionary forces. We need to understand why its discourse resonates so deeply with a significant portion of the population. That means identifying what elements of truth exist within its narrative—what grievances and frustrations it is channeling. The far right is tapping into real problems: the erosion of democratic representation, the precarization of life under neoliberalism, the disconnect between political elites and ordinary citizens. If we refuse to recognize this, we’ll be trapped in a moralistic condemnation that does nothing to counter its appeal.

Second, it’s clear that the solution cannot be a return to the old order. The progressive neoliberal agenda is dead, for better or worse. Trying to revive technocratic governance, market-driven globalism, and the institutional liberalism that dominated the last few decades is not only impossible, but also undesirable. That model failed to address the material and existential crises affecting the majority of the population—and, in fact, it helped create the conditions for the current authoritarian turn.

The challenge is not to restore a broken consensus, but to forge a new one—one that transcends the contradictions of neoliberalism and the limitations of its progressive justifications. This requires us to rethink democracy, the economy, and collective life in a way that does not merely react defensively to the far right, but instead genuinely reimagines what a just and livable world could be. The crisis of legitimacy we face is not just about institutions—it’s about the failure of the entire political and economic system to provide meaning, security, and dignity.

Third—and this is the hardest point—the need for security, dignity, and meaning cannot be fully met within a closed immanent framework. Late modernity has turned security into a scarce commodity: economic instability, precarious work, ecological collapse, and authoritarian retrenchment have created a permanent state of uncertainty, where the sense of vulnerability runs deeper every day. But the crisis doesn’t stop there. Even if security could be guaranteed, it would mean nothing if dignity were eroded. A world in which people are treated as means rather than ends, in which individuals are reduced to their economic function or their bureaucratic profile, is a world that has lost sight of the intrinsic value of human existence.

Yet, even if we could restore some sense of security and dignity, the crisis of meaning would still persist. The challenge is not only to accept the limits of our existence—our finitude and the uncertainty that defines us—but to open ourselves to the unknown, to allow ourselves to be interpellated by what we cannot yet comprehend. The crisis of meaning that defines our age is not just the absence of collective narratives—it is the inability of the system itself to offer anything that transcends its own internal logic. It’s about responding to the invitation of radical newness, to a possibility not already determined by the present, not already trapped in the instrumental rationality that led us here.

Opening ourselves to the Other means recognizing their life beyond our own interests, their continuity beyond our time and world. And opening ourselves to the Other—what lies beyond this life—means opening ourselves to the possibility of another life, another horizon, another meaning still to be discovered.

Ultimately, a civilization like ours, which holds in its hands the power to destroy itself—and with it, countless other species that share this beautiful planet—has to begin by recognizing its own finitude. Without this awareness, we continue hurtling toward potential ecological or nuclear collapse, guided by the illusion that we can indefinitely sustain our current model of control and expansion. But recognizing our finitude is not surrender, nor is it resignation to decline. It means accepting that the future does not belong to us alone, that our history is only part of a larger weave, where other forms of life and other temporalities unfold, independent of our will.

This is why leaving gracefully and with kindness is not just about letting go without resentment—it’s about leaving with hope and genuine gratitude. Hope that life, in all its multiplicity, will continue to flourish beyond our history. And gratitude for the very mystery of having inhabited this world, for having been part of a greater tapestry that we do not own but that has sustained us.

It is learning to release without fear, but also to remain in another way—leaving behind our compulsion for control and domination, and instead participating in the world from a place of openness and humility.

Because the unknown is not the end—it’s the beginning of something else. And recognizing our finitude does not mean we disappear—it means we discover new ways of existing, beyond the obsessions that led us to this point.

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Juan Manuel Cincunegui holds a Bachelor’s and a PhD in Philosophy from Universitat Ramon Llull, a PhD in Citizenship and Human Rights from Universitat de Barcelona, and a PhD in Sociology from Universitat de Barcelona.

He is the author of:

• Planned Misery: Human Rights and Neoliberalism (Madrid: Dado Ediciones, 2019)
• Mind and Politics: Dialectics and Realism from the Perspective of Liberation (Madrid: Dado Ediciones, 2024)
• Constellations of Identity: Charles Taylor and His Interlocutors (forthcoming).