ANU School of Sociology Seminar Series: Prof Roger Burrows

Please join us for the first ANU School of Sociology seminar series talk for 2026! "The Sovereign Individual reloaded: surfacing Thiel’s alt-canon" by Prof Roger Burrows (University of Bristiol).

• Date: Tuesday 17 February, 2026

• Time: 12 – 1:30pm

• Location: RSSS Room 2.56, and Zoom (register to receive Zoom link)

The Sovereign Individual reloaded: surfacing Thiel’s alt-canon

Peter Thiel’s ideological commitments, financial networks and political interventions reveal a deliberate effort to dismantle democratic governance in favour of elite-controlled sovereignties. Drawing on Girard, Spengler, Strauss and especially The Sovereign Individual (Davidson and Rees-Mogg), Thiel envisions a world where wealth insulates elites from public accountability, taxation and state oversight. His investments in seasteading, Urbit, Palantir – whose CEO studied under Habermas – and political figuressuch as J.D. Vance illustrate how these ideas shape emerging governance structures.

Thiel’s alignment with neoreactionary (NRx) ideology, particularly Yarvin’s patchwork GovCorp model and Land’s Dark Enlightenment, promotes corporate autocracy, accelerationism and architectures of exit. This vision is materialising in privatised jurisdictions, from financial corridors that circumvent national regulation to autonomous city-states governed by market logic. These developments signal a shift beyond neoliberalism, where economic power is increasingly detached from state oversight.

By embedding these ideas in Silicon Valley, state institutions and financial infrastructures, Thiel advances a model in which citizenship is reduced to consumer choice, governance operates beyond democratic control and sovereignty is reconfigured through technological means. This paper situates Thiel’s project within broader sociological concerns about elite withdrawal, so-called digital feudalism and the restructuring of governance through technological and financial infrastructures.

About the speaker

Roger Burrows has worked in UK higher education since 1985, holding positions at Surrey, Teesside, York, Goldsmiths, Newcastle and currently Bristol, where he is Head of the Centre for Urban and Public Policy Research (CUPPR). At Goldsmiths, he was Pro-Warden for Interdisciplinary Development. He is also an Honorary Professorial Fellow at the University of Melbourne’s Centre for Cities and an Adjunct Professor at the Australian Centre for Housing Research, University of Adelaide.

His research spans housing, urban studies, digital cultures and social inequalities. He has published over 170 works, with half focusing on housing and urban studies and the rest covering theory, methods, digital culture, health, global inequalities and higher education.

He was co-editor of Housing Studies (2002–2005) and led the UK ESRC E-Society Programme (2005–2007). He has served as a UK REF assessor and sits on the editorial boards of Body & Society and Theory, Culture & Society. His recent work examines algorithmic risk profiling in housing, the social geography of the super-rich, fintech use among young people and the ideological foundations of neoreactionary (NRx) thought.