The Transition to the Knowledge Economy
On a Friday evening in April 2026, we gathered in the Henry Cavendish Room at Peterhouse, my college and the oldest college in Cambridge, by candlelight, as old Cambridge custom would have it. A few steps from the River Cam, at King’s College, John Maynard Keynes had completed The General Theory almost a century earlier. During the war, when the London School of Economics was evacuated to Cambridge and hosted at Peterhouse, Friedrich von Hayek entered that charged intellectual space, compressed between war, university, and economy. The two men corresponded and debated with great civility, while disagreeing on almost everything. Neither man knew, as he wrote, that what he was setting down would shape the next half-century of political economy.
That is the moment memory returns to when I think about where we stand today. This is not the moment of ratification. It is the moment of articulation.
The first thesis through which I became conscious of the meaning of “transition” was my father’s doctoral dissertation in organisation theory on “the transition to the private sector.” From that time, transition was never, for me, merely an administrative procedure. It became an epistemic condition: how does a society move from one way of seeing to another?
Keynes saw that the market sometimes cannot save itself. Hayek feared that intervention which begins in the name of rescue may end as a restraint on liberty, because for him the market was a system of distributed knowledge that no state could gather without suffocating society. Then came the Reagan-Thatcher moment, and neoliberalism rose as a global verdict: the market would discipline the state. There was a real cure in this for real stagnation. But over time it produced a blindness of a new kind: what does not enter the price is not recognised, and what does not appear on the balance sheet is not counted as a complete reality.
The system did not fail because it could not produce numbers. It failed because it believed that numbers were enough to apprehend productivity. Left outside the calculation were the dignity of the worker, the knowledge of communities, public trust, environmental impact, and the rights of future generations. What used to be called externalities are today the very substance of the economy: the energy that carries artificial intelligence, the carbon that reveals the cost of production; law understood as market architecture, and the trust on which markets stand.
The question is no longer: do we choose the state or the market? The question of this century is: how do we build a knowledge political economy that recognises what both have missed?
To those in the Gulf who lost themselves inside the description “rentier state,” or accepted being reduced to it by others, the Hormuz War revealed that the matter was never inert wealth, but a capacity for transition. Energy, sovereign wealth funds, carbon, the circular economy, development funds, and stable digital currency are not margins of the world system. They are institutional instruments for shaping a new political economy, if they are properly recognised.
This is why we cannot wait for a theory of post-neoliberalism to arrive from elsewhere. We must take part in articulating it. What we are now working on, in institutional dialogue with Peterhouse, Cambridge, on the economic transition to 2045, and with the Huth Initiative for a New Political Economy at the London School of Economics, is not an ideology that defeats what came before. It is an attempt at recognition: the recognition of what was excluded from the account.
At the core of maqāṣid jurisprudence, scarcity exists, but it is not the hidden god of the system. The principles are trust, circulation, shared risk, and the prohibition of capital that profits without exposure.
The greatest transition in the human estate came when it was said: Read. Reading was not letters alone. It was recognition: the recognition of what had been unseen, and the recognition of what had been left outside the account. If the twentieth century turned between Keynes’s fear of market unemployment and Hayek’s fear of state tyranny, our century needs a reading in which growth follows recognition, not the organised blindness of an old calculus.
Here begins the road to redemption.
Read.
Discipline begins in Atturaif…
and in the world it is tested.
Prof. Dr. Malik Ãl-Dahlan
Professor of Law and specialist in international law; International Mediator.
Honorary Professor, University of St Andrews;
Emeritus Professor of International Law and Public Policy, Queen Mary University of London, and;
Member, Peterhouse, University of Cambridge.