TR I wanted to ask you just a bit about your background, how you came to the Berggruen Institute, and also, how your previous academic work, specifically your book Mandarins of the Future (2003), informs what you are working on now. 

NG I did my PhD in History, which produced Mandarins of the Future, which I finished 25 years ago. I’ve never been an academic; I’ve taught occasionally at universities, but I’ve never had an academic appointment. I spent the first six and a half years of my career working in tech, at software companies, and then another seven years doing consultancy work at the so-called three letter agencies in the US. That was in the late War on Terror era, early Obama years. After that, I spent four years working as chief of staff to the chancellor at Berkeley, which gave me a lot of experience about how big bureaucracies do and don’t work. In some ways, it was really quite important for my thinking about making sure that decision rights are allocated to the proper level or zone within a multi-scalar hierarchy. The great frustration of that job was that we were constantly held responsible for things over which we had not been given authority. So when that period ended, I looked around for a variety of different jobs and this opportunity emerged in the spring of 2017. When I met Nicholas [Berggruen], I asked him “How do you want this place to be remembered 50 years from now?” He gave me the most extraordinary answer, which he has echoed since: “I want to grow to be a place where the most interesting people around are asking the most interesting questions of the time.” What’s so remarkable about his answer is that people usually have some specific idea they want to promote, like tax cuts for the rich, or a methodology like complexity science. But this is a completely open-ended thing. He’s really got a nose for, what we might call in glib Hegelian terms, where Geist is hanging out. The point at which I joined, in Spring of 2017, was an inflection point. The institute was initially a convening organisation dedicated to governance, on the assumption that there were big governance challenges in the world and also people with a lot of good ideas about how to do governance. It just needed to get those two things together and good things would happen. To make a long story short, then 2016 happened, and with Brexit and Trump came the realisation that the institutional infrastructure of our governance was much more deeply broken than either had seemed initially. So the institute decided to build a research programme not just to find people with good ideas but to actually originate and develop ideas internally. Which is what I was brought in to do. Now, specifically about Mandarins of the Future. Some people have noted that the argument I made – and I should say I was in my early twenties when I wrote it – was a pretty acerbic take on the ambitions of mid-century American liberals. However, by the time I finished the book I was much more sympathetic to their perspectives. As I got deeper into the literature, I became more familiar to the opposition they were facing. This was the late 1990s. Today we’re living in a world in which the “polycrisis”, as we now call it, has become much more intensified. The grim reaper of climate change is at the door. After 25 years of work experience working in, high level organisations, I have become much more attuned to the practicalities of the ways in which both institutional and radical change does and doesn’t take place.

TR We met at the Berggruen Institute’s Planetary Summit. During and since then, it seems that people have loved to question you on the word “planetary”, asking how it is different from the global. During the Summit, Holly Jean Buck remarked that the event was exactly the sort of thing that the conservative rural communities she researches are worried about: a room of technocrats making decisions for them. 

NG I’ve gotten quite a lot of pushback on the term planetary. In fact, I had lunch just the other day with Jane Harman, who for many years ran the Intelligence Committee for the United States House of Representatives, a very powerful person in the defence and intel community. And she said, “I love the idea, but I hate the term.” I’m like, “Well, do you have a better one?” The term globalisation, or global actually itself, has an interesting intellectual history. Without getting into all of it, the initial terms used in the 1970s and 1980s were things like “interdependence” and “transnational”, more than global or globalisation, which was first used in the 1980s. Its first appearance in the New York Times was in 1985. There were a lot of people who didn’t like it and thought it sounded weird and jargony. I think the distinction is clear enough. There’s the globalisation of things that humans move intentionally, like trade, goods, ideas, money, services, stuff like that, that we’re intentionally moving, and then there are other things that are also flowing around the globe that are biogeochemical processes and not a product of human intention and will. Things like viruses, the challenge of space junk, oceanic plastics, nitrogen blooms, and so on and so forth. People sort of get the distinction, and conceptually, I don’t think it’s a difficult distinction. Where people maybe get a little bit more hung up on the idea is that it, like the institutions that were designed to deal with global issues, are just simply in our estimation, is not fit for purpose; it’s unable to deal with the planetary issues. The second thing that you brought up is really important. I want to talk about the relationship between the technocratic and populist, or whatever the counter-concept is. The theory of change we have at the Berggruen Institute is an unquestionably elite theory of change, and this goes to a larger set of reflections about how systemic change typically comes from one of two places within a network, and real change usually happens through some combination of them. Real change happens because there’s some combination of elite motivation and grassroots motivation. There is social movement, plus lawyers writing laws. The American civil rights movement is a classic example. You have Thurgood Marshall working through the legal system to get Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka [to the Supreme Court] over a 20- year legal campaign, and you have Martin Luther King leading the March on Washington. It’s the combination of those things that eventually leads to real change. It’s a sort of top-down, bottoms-up thing, or centre-periphery. People who are at the centre of the power structure have a lot of power to change that power structure, but change can also come from the distant periphery. Perhaps the most influential musical movement of the last half century is hip-hop. It comes out of the roiling social dysfunctions of Brooklyn and the Bronx in the 1970s; it’s not happening in Hollywood, London or Nashville. The “innovators dilemma” is another example. Why do you get start-ups that are able to beat giant corporations? It’s because they’re not constrained by infrastructure and committed relationships to existing customers. So change can come from both directions, and really profound change typically happens when there’s some combination of top-down, bottom-up and inside-outside game. Why is Trump so disruptive? It’s not just because he’s taking control; it’s because there’s also a MAGA movement, which is a bunch of marginalised, fragmented groups of people. Facebook promised us initially that every isolated gay kid in every small town would find the next isolated gay kid in the next small town to be able to form a community. Well, that was true. But at the same time, every previously isolated Nazi in every small town found the Nazi next door, and they created communities, too. One of the reasons I’m excited about the planetary as a concept is that it opens up vast new spaces for rethinking lots of different things, lots of presumptions that we’ve had about the way in which the state, economy and society relate to one another that basically emerged in the 19th century in the North Atlantic. Technology is changing, social relations are changing. The nature of the perception of planetary-scale challenges is changing. The human exceptionalism that was just the baseline presumption of the Enlightenment is no longer really something that is at all scientifically or philosophically tenable. Since all the institutions we have in the world were basically built on the presumption of the rational rights-bearing liberal subject, if that category no longer holds, then all these institutions need to be rethought. What we did at the summit and what we did in Children of a Modest Star (2024), the book I co-wrote with Jonathan Blake, was beginning to deal with this – but there’s so much more to do. Many lifetimes of work to be done. 

TR There was something profound in bringing all of these different people together for the Planetary Summit – people whose work overlaps in different places, which taken together presents an interesting constellation of ideas and work that is going on. At the beginning of the first day, I thought, I want to grab the thread, so what’s the argument here? But gradually I realised in a more zoomed-out way, that’s not really the point. A comment by Ngaire Woods in the first panel did stay with me: that here in the UK and the US, and across the West, we’re at this inflection point where people would rather not think at a planetary scale; where they’d rather hunker down and hold on to things that are more local and certain. There’s a nationalist retrenchment where the idea of pooling or letting go of sovereignty is fraught with anxiety. How do you, and the Institute, plan to weather this storm? 

NG In his closing remarks Nathan [Gardels, Berggruen Institute co-founder] commented that the role of philosophy is to speak uncomfortable truths and untimely ideas. Milton Friedman, a person with whom I disagree substantively about almost everything, is a good example. When the first edition of his magnum opus, Capitalism and Freedom was published in 1961, it was way outside the academic mainstream. He had a critique of Keynesianism, of demand management, and an idea that inflation is a purely monetary phenomenon that has nothing to do with demand; everything is a matter of money. Then fast-forward 25 years and he had won the Nobel Prize, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and Alan Greenspan was about to become head of the Fed. So Friedman wins. In the preface of the 25th anniversary edition, he wrote that the role of the policy intellectual is to keep ideas alive until they go from seeming impossible to becoming inevitable. So I feel like part of what we can do here at the Institute is to keep this conversation going. It may be that we end up in some neo-nationalist, fascist future and that somebody invents a technology that will eat atmospheric carbon and AI will figure out how to zap zoonotic viruses and we’ll use synthetic biology to invent new species to make up for the ones we’ve killed off. Maybe there will be a whole bunch of technological deus ex machinas, and my ideas will be doomed for the dustbin of history – but until that happens the current systems are going to fail at some point. This may sound immodest but many people who are out of step with the ideas of their times are later vindicated and revivified, sometimes decades, sometimes centuries later. The fact that these ideas are out of step with the set of elections we had in the last couple of years in the wake of a pandemic is the point. The pandemic with a case fatality rate of 10 is coming. It may be 100 years from now, but it is coming, and it may be a lot sooner than that, especially if it’s genetically engineered. So to me, these are ideas that will inevitably at some point become much more relevant than they seem at this particular political conjuncture, right when all the parties that were in power during the post-pandemic inflation, two and a half years ago, just got thrown out of power. Maybe I’m whistling past the political graveyard, but I guess that’s the way I rationalise and continue to do these things in the face of a Trump administration, Putin on the march, Netanyahu rewriting the Middle East, or whatever it may be. 

TR It’s interesting because it seems that there’s been a rush to declare the end of liberalism with the re-election of Trump. 

NG One of my favourite books is called Three New Deals (2006), by Anglo-German historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch. It’s a comparison from the viewpoint of 1937 of Mussolini, Hitler and FDR’s economic policies, and the point is that they are all anti-liberal. The feeling at the time was that liberalism in the economic sense had completely and catastrophically failed between 1929 and 1933 and things had to change fundamentally. Many people criticised FDR in 1937 for overreach – blowing up the institutions, threatening to pack the Supreme Court, trying to override many precepts and spending money like a drunken sailor. A lot of people felt like this was highly anti-liberal, but by the end of the war he’s a very different character. A sort of post- Stalingrad liberalism emerges as the dominant form in the North Atlantic, and becomes instantiated in West Germany and the UK and Italy, eventually in Spain and Greece as well. As a historian I think it’s a big mistake to over-index: George Bush is still the only Republican to win a majority of the popular vote since the end of the Cold War. .