In 1989, Francis Fukuyama proclaimed that liberal democracy marked “the end of history.” Yet the decades since have told another story: 9/11 and the War on Terror, the 2008 financial crisis, the populist revolts of the 2010s, the world-stopping pandemic of 2020, and the rise of global multipolarity. Far from ending conflict, liberalism has reopened the Schmittian question—friend or enemy—with renewed force. The dream of a post-political world of all friends and no foes now recedes in the rearview mirror.

But the crisis runs deeper than geopolitics. Liberalism has become the architect of its own unravelling. By dissolving the social capital on which it depended—trust, identity, hierarchy—it has sawn through the branch on which it sits. When that branch finally gives way, what follows will not be chaos, but devolution: the migration of sovereignty from states to smaller, tighter, more organic units of power.

Drawing on elite theory, comparative history, and insurgency studies, Maxwell shows how fragmentation follows a recognizable pattern. Where ancient empires decayed, new loyalties condensed in families and warbands; where absolutist monarchies faltered, the managerial elite rose. Today’s West is reverting to its ancestral state—a neo-medieval patchwork of overlapping jurisdictions and rival moral codes. The result is not mere decline but the birth of a different political ecology in which legitimacy must once again be earned face-to-face, not proclaimed from the centre—the age of tribal politics dawns.

Liberalism was never history’s conclusion but its interregnum: a brief suspension between centralized empire and the tribal orders now re-emerging. Tribal Future of the West is a guide to that passage and a field manual for what comes after liberal modernity.