Liberalism in its corporate form triumphed by the end of the 19th century. It marked the definitive end of the era of the great European revolutions of the 18th century that relegated the traditional world to history and launched the era of individualism. By liberalism, we mean both representative democracy in its parliamentary form and private enterprise capitalism. The latter in its corporate form acquired the status of a legal entity, pursuing its own interests in the world. This deployment of corporate liberalism reached the four corners of the planet before being slowed first by the First World War and then the Great Depression of the 1930s. It reached the limit of its incoherent spread in the second great armed conflict that arose in Europe in two generations. The use of the atomic bomb on civilian populations culminated in the United States and its allies becoming the world’s policing and economic powers. The end of the Second World War meant: left to its own stratagems, the conflicting interests of private corporations had led the world to a violent confrontation over those interests. In response, the Keynesian compromise, also known as social democracy, was adopted, according to which capitalism must be regulated and framed by social policies for the redistribution of wealth, because the primary interest of corporations is not naturally compatible with the well-being of the population. This new social paradigm presided over the extraordinary economic and technological growth of the third quarter of the 20th century: populations were educated, women emancipated, social mobility increased, poverty decreased, colonialism was challenged, and its advance was slowed, all in the context of the Cold War with the USSR. Liberalism proved resilient, however, and a powerful deregulatory movement against state intervention in the name of collective ethics, under the guise of private enterprise efficiency, unfolded in the last quarter of the 20th century. Supported by the spectacular growth of information technology, this neoliberalism, under the relentless leadership of large corporations and billionaires, launched the world into a new wave of market globalization, delocalization of production sites and internationalisation of social relations to the point where, faced with the Covid-19 pandemic, the world realized that no country had the means of self-sufficiency anymore, except perhaps China, which was itself seeking to supplant the United States as the dominant world power. The development of new spheres of alliances and influence is leading to new tensions in increasingly militarized forms. The emergence of Chinese power on the world stage is not the only element that points to a new paradigm of social relations on a planetary scale. The magnitude and incredible complexity of climate change seem to be playing an increasingly important role in the world order, both in the disruption of food production conditions (droughts, floods, disappearance of ecosystems, collapse of species) and in the conditions under which land is occupied (rising oceans, amplitude and frequency of storms, displacement of populations). Further, this new climate seems conducive to the spread of new viruses: HIV since the mid-1980s; Ebola and SARS since the beginning of the century; and Covid-19 recently. The polarization of wealth, both globally and within countries around the world, is manifesting itself in huge migrations of people from poorer regions (Africa, Central and South America, the Middle East) to richer regions (Europe and North America). These movements are accompanied by immigration policies whereby developed countries literally recruit the richest and best educated individuals from poor regions to foster their own development, to the detriment of poorer regions. To denounce the effects of company relocations and ‘job thieves,’ to incite discontent …