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Level setting
By David J. Lynch
The Levelling: What’s Next after Globalization?
Michael O’Sullivan, PublicAffairs Books, 2019
M
ichael O’Sullivan asks the right question in The Levelling: What’s
Next after Globalization?
O’Sullivan, a former chief investment officer at a major
bank, argues that the world is rapidly exiting a 30-year period
of ever-greater global integration and entering a new era of populist disruption.
The U.K.’s departure from the European Union, known as Brexit, and Donald
Trump’s shock 2016 election win are just the opening salvos, he writes. “Global-
ization as we know it is over,” he concludes. “The world has run out of breath
economically and run out of patience politically.”
O’Sullivan correctly identifies several issues that deserve attention as global-
ization fades: central banks’ outsized influence following the 2008–09 financial
crisis; mushrooming indebtedness that threatens global prosperity; and multilat-
eral institutions such as the International Monetary Fund, World Trade Organi-
zation, and World Bank that are facing their own challenges. And he sets an
ambitious goal of devising the intellectual “frameworks and ideas that can help
breathe new life into politics, policymaking, and economic growth.”
He gets off to an intriguing start by highlighting an episode from...the end
of England’s first civil war in the mid-17th century. In a formative moment in the
development of representative government, the officers and soldiers of Oliver
Cromwell’s victorious army staged a series of debates about the shape of a politi-
cal constitution. These Putney Debates — named for the southwest London
community where they were held — represent a historic milestone with contem-
porary relevance, writes O’Sullivan.
The author’s sympathies understandably lie with the largest group at Putney.
These were the Levellers, advocates of equality and plain speaking who helped
craft the first written blueprint for constitutional democracy, known as the “Agree-
ments of the People,” and from whom he derives his book title.