The Hollowed Out State
Recent events confirm that the state is less and less capable of delivering what we need - and ever more concerned with controlling us. We'll be debating what this all means at The Academy 2026.
Ahead of Ideas Matter’s annual residential weekend – The Academy 2026: Hollow Leviathan: the state against the demos - on 22 & 23 August at Wyboston Lakes (full details below), Jacob Reynolds reflects on recent events and how they illustrate the themes of the conference.
It is increasingly hard to shake the feeling that the contemporary state – every aspect of government, every major institution, every aspect of the functioning of public authority – is becoming more like a stage set. While the reach of government into every aspect of our lives is mighty, the state is at the same time somehow hollow, empty, unable to really offer any solutions to the problems of our time. We have instead a series of hollowed-out institutions that have retained their titles and their budgets while losing any claim to authority and any ability to deliver the goods.
This is not merely a matter of ‘government incompetence’, a phrase far too mild for the current moment. It is the emergence of a state that has fundamentally broken its contract with the demos, moving from a protector of the people to a manager of their decline.
The Anarchy of the Soft State
Look at the streets of Clapham this week, with teenagers running amok and stealing from shops. Amid a rather tame (by historical standards) mob of looting and disorder, the police seem totally paralysed. The same police that waste no effort in knocking on doors for wrongthink appear powerless to deal with genuine public disorder. Of course, the lawlessness implicates a wider culture as well - a depressing ‘hood aesthetic’, which seems to thrive in our social collapse and the absence of broader public solidarity.
The seemingly light-touch approach to policing the street appears to be a systematic strategy by the public authorities, who implicitly understand that they are not capable of enforcing order. The decline of what is always derisively called ‘old fashioned’ (read: visible) policing, the growth of administration and virtual speech-crime enforcement, and the broader breakdown of authority that all adult figures including the police face – the police respond to all this with a retroactive approach of promising to check the CCTV a few days later. In other words, when the state loses its moral authority and its physical confidence, the vacuum is filled by the most chaotic elements of the street.
This breakdown of order is not an isolated riot; it is a systemic rot. We see its most tragic manifestation in the failures surrounding Valdo Calocane and the Nottingham killings in March 2023. Here, the machinery of the state - the NHS, the mental-health services, the police oversight - all clicked through their bureaucratic gears, yet produced nothing but a lethal vacuum. The ‘systemic failures’ reported were not a lack of rules, but a surplus of them that served only to obscure responsibility. The state knew Calocane was a danger; but it seemed capable of inventing any myriad number of reasons why nothing should be done. This is more than just the outrageous fact that ‘health officials declined to section him because of the “over-representation of young black men in prison”’.
The most telling part of the whole scandal is that the default response of public authorities was not just evasiveness about their own failing, but a seemingly deliberate strategy to treat the victims and their families as the real problem. The authorities seem to view each tragedy as just another public-relations disaster that requires the careful choreography of state power to avoid turning into a scandal.
This is the ‘Anarchy’ in Anarcho-Tyranny: a state that cannot or will not perform the most basic, Hobbesian duty of keeping its citizens safe from violent lunatics and street mobs.
The Tyranny of the Rationed State
But as the state retreats from its public duties, it becomes increasingly brazen in its hostility toward the individual. Consider the latest news from the NHS: a plan to ‘ration’ referrals, effectively telling people who need specialist care to, quite literally, f-off.
We are told we must ‘protect the NHS’, yet the NHS now views the sick as a ‘demand’ to be managed out of existence. It is a staggering inversion. We pay record-high taxes into a system that then treats our request for medical care as an inconvenience. The state is no longer a tool used by the public to achieve common ends; it is a self-serving entity that views the public as a ‘risk factor’. Whether it is rationing your healthcare or ‘nudging’ your behaviour through ULEZ cameras and speech codes, the message is clear: you are the problem.
The Hostile State
Why can the state police your tweets, but not your streets? Why can it tell you which doctor you can’t see, but not how it lost track of a triple-killer?
The answer lies in the nature of the contemporary ruling class. They have retreated into the ‘soft tasks’ - the policing of language, the management of ‘misinformation’, the ritualistic enforcement of petty regulations - because the ‘hard tasks’ are beyond them. But more than that, there is a palpable sense of malice. The state has become ‘hostile’. It treats the aspirations of ordinary people - for safety, for healthcare, for a say in their own lives - with a mixture of disbelief and disgust. The demos is seen as a volatile mass that must be restrained, taxed and lectured, while the state itself undergoes a process of internal collapse.
THE ACADEMY 2026
HOLLOW LEVIATHAN:
THE STATE AGAINST THE DEMOS
Saturday 22 & Sunday 23 August
Wyboston Lakes, Bedfordshire, MK44 3AL
This inversion of the social contract cannot be sustained. A state that breaks its promise to protect and serve, while simultaneously demanding total control over our private lives and public thoughts, is a state in crisis. It is a Leviathan that has lost its legitimacy.
The upcoming Academy 2026 – the annual residential weekend organised by Ideas Matter – is dedicated to unpicking this paradox. We will ask the uncomfortable questions: Why has the state become so incapable of delivering the basics? Why is it increasingly set against the very people it claims to represent? And how do we reclaim a sense of agency in an era of ‘hollowed out’ institutions?
About the event
Today’s state is a sprawling leviathan. It reaches into our lives to an historically unprecedented degree. Yet it is, at the same time, fragmenting, incompetent and unable to maintain control of safety and security, internally or externally.
Beyond this, something is missing: any sense of legitimacy. Political legitimacy in the modern era is conferred by the people – the demos – yet the contemporary state often appears to be set explicitly against them. Ordinary people are seen as a problem to be managed, a source of danger, as something for the state to be protected from.
The Academy 2026 will explore the origins and development of the contemporary state. Why is the state, which seems to be growing inexorably, apparently incapable of delivering? Is it increasingly set against the people – and if so, why?
Lectures include
What is the National Interest?
Professor Frank Furedi
executive director, MCC Brussels
Islamo-Leftism and the roots of contemporary Third-Worldism
Dr Tim Black
books and essays editor, spiked
Coming apart: authoritarian strategies for a fractured society
Chris Bayliss
contributing editor, The Critic
What remains? Art and memory in the Post-Cultural State
Lola Salem
Marshal Research Fellow and music lecturer, Oriel College, Oxford; author, Artless (Polity, forthcoming); contributor, The Critic, Engelsberg Ideas, Telegraph
Recommended reading
Thomas Hobbes – Leviathan (1651)
Alexis de Tocqueville – Democracy in America (1835-1840)
James Burnham – The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom (1943)
Peter Turchin – End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites and the Path of Political Disintegration (2023)
Tickets
You can choose to buy day tickets without accommodation, or tickets that include accommodation at Wyboston Lakes Resort. Day tickets only include lunch
Tickets with accommodation include:
• Brilliant food: a quality breakfast (including continental and cooked options), an extensive lunch, and a three-course dinner
• Excellent facilities: access to the Wyboston Lakes gym, swimming pool and other amenities during your stay
• Social opportunities: staying the night means you’ll experience the full, collegiate atmosphere of the event and get the chance to carry on discussions over dinner and in the bar.
Have a friend who is also interested? You can save up to £65 each by doubling up with a friend. Select ‘double occupancy’ and let us know you’d like a twin room.
Click on the links below to purchase:
If you have your own accommodation and would just like to join us for the conference sessions, use the links below:
If you would like to pay a concession rate (for full time students, senior citizens and unwaged), or pay in instalments, please email geoff@ideasmatter.org.uk for further details.