In 1941, with Norway under German occupation, a father told his son that Hitler would fail. Hitler would fail, he said, because he did not know when and how to stop. The son was Johan Galtung, a founder of peace research with a habit of forecasting the ends of empires. He foresaw the collapse of the Soviet Union nearly a decade before it came. In 2000 he gave the American empire twenty-five years. The cause of its decline, he later wrote, was imperialism itself, with a cosmology that could expand but never contract.
The Australian philosopher Arran Gare takes that second prediction as all but fulfilled. His article “Ecological Civilization and Multipolarity,” in the first issue of the Journal of Ecological Civilization Studies, begins where the title of Galtung’s book ends: and then what? Gare’s answer is that multipolarity opens the way to a global ecological civilization and belongs to it. Nothing guarantees the outcome. A world of many poles could as easily become a world of rival fascisms. What it needs is a set of principles. Gare finds them in two ideas, “communities of communities” and transculturalism.
An Order That Could Not Stop
Gare’s story begins in 1991. The dissolution of the Soviet Union left a single hegemon, and on Gare’s account its ruling class was becoming a global class, rooted in transnational corporations. Its creed was neoliberalism, which sought to make every relation between people a market relation. Gare reads the following decades as that creed enforced abroad. He cites a Congressional Research Service tally of at least 251 American military interventions between 1991 and 2022.
For the economics he turns to Karl Polanyi, who called the self-adjusting market a stark utopia. Such an institution, Polanyi wrote, could not last without annihilating the human and natural substance of society. Gare sees the annihilation under way. Production moved offshore, and wealth flowed upward through what Peter Turchin calls a wealth pump. In Turchin’s account, such pumps end in political disintegration. Meanwhile China, India and Brazil learned to make the most advanced goods, and Russia rebuilt its industry. In Gare’s telling, the war in Ukraine is where these forces met American ambition and held. BRICS became the organized form of the multipolar challenge.
The collapse he describes is larger than a change of hegemon. For Gare it closes the era of modernity, which began with Portuguese and Spanish conquest in the fifteenth century. Galtung’s father had named its flaw in advance. It did not know when to stop.
Two Enlightenments
To say what might replace modernity, Gare first says what it is. He traces its liberalism to the seventeenth century, when Cartesian dualism, Newtonian atomism and an instrumental idea of reason remade European culture. Hobbes, and Locke after him, recast society as a contract among self-interested individuals. The end of life was no longer virtue. It became pleasure and property. Jonathan Israel calls this current the Moderate Enlightenment, and Gare, following Domenico Losurdo, stresses that it made room for slavery and conquest.
Against it Gare sets a counter-tradition. It runs from the Florentine Renaissance and its revival of paideia, the education of a person’s humanity. It passes through Giordano Bruno’s self-organizing universe and Giambattista Vico’s call for imagination in understanding peoples who thought differently from us. Suppressed in the seventeenth century, these ideas returned in the Radical Enlightenment, with Rousseau and then with Herder, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel and Marx. Herder’s notion of culture stands at its center. Individuals become self-conscious agents only through a culture. And because a culture is a human creation, it can be questioned and transformed.
Marx’s critique of political economy is, for Gare, the exemplary act of such questioning. It showed the categories of economics to belong to one culture, and so to be open to change. People of different cultures can also learn from and criticize one another. Gare calls the method of that exchange dialectics. It refuses both relativism and dogmatism, denying knowledge any absolute foundation while allowing for real progress.
The Scaffold and the Building
With these distinctions Gare weighs the leading visions of a multipolar order. Jeffrey Sachs revives Franklin Roosevelt’s vision of sovereign nations bound by international law through the United Nations, with neutral states separating the great centers of power. Gare places the vision within the Radical Enlightenment but finds it thin. It does not ask how nations cohere as cultures, or how the struggle for energy drives their conflicts. Alexander Dugin, in The Theory of a Multipolar World, makes culture central and argues for a plurality of civilizations with fuzzy borders. But his multiculturalism, Gare argues, gives civilizations no common ground on which to agree. What follows from it is a clash of fundamentalisms.
Gare’s resolution borrows a figure from biology. In biosemiotics, which grew from process metaphysics, life is the making and reading of signs. Evolution builds what Jesper Hoffmeyer called semiotic scaffolding, a web of checks and balances through which organisms sense, interpret and cooperate. Each stage supplies the conditions for the next. What emerges can then strengthen the scaffold that raised it, or damage it.
Gare applies the figure to history. Peace has often been scaffolded by violence. The Qin, most brutal of China’s warring states, unified the country and so made possible the more benign Han. In the same way, Gare suggests, Europe’s imperialism, capitalism and industry have unified the world. That unity could scaffold a peaceful global order, if the scaffold is transformed rather than torn down. Schelling foresaw as much, imagining East and West compelled to fuse into a single world-consciousness.
Ecological civilization is the building. Both of its words came from Europe and now carry beyond it. “Civilization” once marked European superiority, and so supplied a standard by which Europe could be judged. The reply attributed to Gandhi, that Western civilization would be a good idea, makes the point. “Ecology” grew out of Western science. Joseph Needham argued that a process ontology owing much to Chinese thought could make it the science of all humanity.
A Household of Households
The case now turns to economics in an older sense. Stephen Bunker’s study of the Amazon showed how the core zones of the world-system keep their power by channeling usable energy toward themselves. The peripheries are left to deplete their own ground. Bunker called for a revaluation of labor and nature but offered no vision to replace the ideology he attacked. Gare finds one in Aristotle, who was Hobbes’s main target.
The word “ecology” was coined by Ernst Haeckel in 1866, from the Greek oikos, the household. The same root gives us “economy.” In the first book of the Politics, Aristotle distinguished household management, oikonomia, from chrematistike, the art of getting wealth. Household management seeks what a good life requires, and so it has a measure. Acquisition pursued for its own sake has none, since money can always be added to money. Aristotle drew his line at the point where wanting more breaks loose from living well. The two words that now name our science of nature and our science of wealth began as names for keeping a house.
Gare’s Aristotle judges a constitution by whether it lets people achieve eudaimonia, a fulfilling and fulfilled life. Such a life is reached by exercising the virtues in the common life of the polis. Gare reads this through ecology. A healthy ecosystem gives its members niches in which they flourish, and their flourishing enriches the niches of others. Gare names this activity eco-poiesis, the making of homes. Since ecosystems nest within ecosystems, the same judgment can be passed on groups. A nation or a civilization can be asked whether it augments or undermines the homes of other communities.
Here the phrase from Herman Daly and John Cobb does its work. They wrote of communities of communities at many levels, some nested and some intersecting. A scientist belongs at once to a worldwide community of inquiry and to a nation. With the phrase Gare can hold Dugin and Sachs together. Nations remain the primary political agents, and civilizations gain agency alongside them. Humanity and the global ecosystem are communities too. What binds the levels is law grounded in justice, a revived natural law set against the legal positivism Gare traces to Hobbes.
The last element is transculturalism, which Gare takes from Mikhail Epstein. Where multiculturalism claims universality while denying it, transculturalism asks cultures to respect, learn from and criticize one another. Switzerland, with its four languages, is one of his examples. At the scale of the world, a diversity of civilizations keeps possibilities open. It also checks each civilization’s drift toward dominance abroad and decadence at home.
Gare ends by ordering his highest terms. Justice means giving each their due, and rights are defined by it. Justice answers in turn to humanity, the supreme virtue of Chinese thought. Humanity answers to the valuing of life, as Indian traditions have fostered it. Galtung’s father judged a conqueror by whether he knew when to stop. Gare’s measure for a civilization is whether it makes room for others to flourish.
Gare, Arran. “Ecological Civilization and Multipolarity: Ecocivilization as Communities of Communities.” Journal of Ecological Civilization Studies 1, no. 1 (2026): 130–59. https://ctr4process.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/JECS-1.1_130-159_Gare-Ecological-Civilization-as-Multipolarity.pdf.
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