The Post-War Freedom Paradox Extraction and the Crisis of Meaning in Late-Modern Political Order

The Post-War Freedom Paradox examines how the post-1945 European liberal order, originally designed to protect society from totalitarian certainty and coercive collective meaning, gradually produced a new anthropological condition of detachment. The article introduces the concept of Extraction to describe the progressive separation of human agency from genealogy, consequence, and telos. It argues that this process has been intensified by technocapitalism, algorithmic governance, surveillance capitalism, and AI-mediated selfhood, producing spectacle, anxiety, exhaustion, and hyper-isolation. The paper proposes repair compacts as democratic, contestable institutional forms capable of reconnecting freedom to responsibility without authoritarian restoration or metaphysical closure.