Kahn again: “We simultaneously affirm an international legal order of human rights; a global order of sovereign states; and a single market that knows no geographic bounds. These are the perspectives of reason, will, and desire. Each can make a global claim, geographically and conceptually. We are replicating at the international level just those conflicts of faculties, values, and perspectives that we have been managing in our conceptions of domestic order since the modern nation-state emerged as a product of a revolutionary act expressing the will of the popular sovereign in an age of reason, and at the point in time when the promise of markets to satisfy the social question first became imaginable.”

Kahn understatedly adds, “We do not have the resources for managing this clash at the international level.” And then, “liberal theory is itself part of the political problem” since liberals think that reason (which tempers interest) has triumphed over will, the rule of rights and markets over nationalism. That, he warns, is a perilous simplification of the real world.