Postliberalism

Based on Wikipedia: Postliberalism

Something strange is happening in Western politics. Politicians who would normally be bitter enemies—left-wing Labour activists in Britain and right-wing Republicans in America—have started agreeing on a peculiar diagnosis: liberalism, the philosophy that has shaped democratic societies for over three centuries, has failed.

Not failed in a small way. Failed catastrophically.

This is the animating belief behind postliberalism, a political movement that has quietly gained influential adherents in universities, think tanks, and legislative chambers across the English-speaking world. Its proponents argue that the very principles we've long celebrated—individual rights, free markets, government neutrality on questions of morality—have hollowed out the institutions that give human life meaning: families, churches, local communities, and shared traditions.

What Liberalism Actually Means

Before we can understand what "post" liberalism is, we need to be precise about what liberalism means in this context. This isn't about the American sense of "liberal" as left-leaning or progressive. The liberalism that postliberals reject is something much broader and older—a philosophical tradition stretching back to thinkers like John Locke in the seventeenth century and John Stuart Mill in the nineteenth.

Classical liberalism rests on several core ideas. First, that individuals possess inherent rights that exist prior to and independent of the state. Second, that government exists primarily to protect those rights, not to mold citizens into particular kinds of people. Third, that markets, left relatively free, tend to produce prosperity. And fourth, that the state should remain neutral on questions of the good life—it shouldn't tell you what religion to practice, what to value, or how to find meaning.

These ideas won. Spectacularly. They defeated absolute monarchy. They ended legal slavery. They produced unprecedented material abundance. By the late twentieth century, after the Soviet Union collapsed, many observers believed liberalism had no serious rivals left. Francis Fukuyama famously called it "the end of history."

Postliberals think that triumphalism was premature. They believe liberalism is now devouring the very social foundations that made its success possible in the first place.

The Core Critique

Imagine a plant that grows so successfully it depletes all the nutrients in its soil. That's roughly how postliberals view liberalism's relationship to traditional communities and institutions.

Their argument goes like this: Liberalism treats individuals as autonomous agents who freely choose their values, relationships, and life paths. But humans don't actually work that way. We're born into families we didn't choose. We absorb languages, customs, and moral intuitions from communities we didn't select. Our identities are shaped by traditions stretching back generations. We are, fundamentally, social creatures—not isolated atoms floating in a void.

When liberal philosophy encourages us to question every inherited commitment, to treat relationships as provisional and renegotiable, to view tradition with suspicion—it gradually dissolves the social bonds that make life meaningful. Patrick Deneen, perhaps the most influential American postliberal thinker, argues that liberalism encourages people to approach even their deepest commitments with what he calls "flexibility." Marriage becomes a temporary arrangement. Religious practice becomes a lifestyle choice. Community membership becomes optional.

The result? Epidemic loneliness. Declining birth rates. Weakened families. Opioid addiction in communities hollowed out by deindustrialization. A pervasive sense that life lacks meaning or purpose.

Postliberals don't think this is accidental. They believe it's the logical endpoint of liberal principles consistently applied.

The Problem of State Neutrality

One of the most philosophically interesting postliberal arguments concerns the liberal ideal of state neutrality. Liberal theorists, particularly John Rawls—the most influential political philosopher of the twentieth century—argued that in pluralistic societies, the state should remain neutral among different conceptions of the good life. Government shouldn't favor Christians over atheists, traditionalists over progressives, or any particular vision of human flourishing over another.

Postliberals contend this neutrality is an illusion. Every political order, they argue, is built on fundamental assumptions about human nature, the good life, and what matters. When a liberal state claims neutrality, it's actually imposing a very particular set of values: individual autonomy is supreme, traditional authority is suspect, and inherited obligations are merely optional.

Consider how this plays out in education. A truly "neutral" state education system would have to avoid teaching that any way of life is better than another. But can you really run schools without any vision of what a good person looks like? Without any sense of what students should value or aspire to become? Postliberals argue that liberal neutrality inevitably defaults to a kind of implicit teaching—that personal choice is paramount, that tradition is arbitrary, that meaning is whatever you decide it is.

This isn't neutrality. It's a very specific, very contestable philosophy disguised as neutrality.

From Blue Labour to the New Right

Here's where the story gets interesting. Postliberalism didn't emerge from a single ideological camp. It grew simultaneously on the left and the right, from thinkers who would agree on almost nothing else.

In Britain, postliberalism first developed within the Labour Party through a movement called Blue Labour. Maurice Glasman, who was elevated to the House of Lords as Baron Glasman in 2011, helped articulate its core ideas. Blue Labour drew on traditions of Christian socialism and working-class mutualism. It argued that Labour had become too focused on individual rights and market liberalization, abandoning its historic connection to families, faith communities, and local institutions. The "blue" in Blue Labour referred to traditionally conservative values—flag, family, faith—that the movement believed the left had wrongly abandoned.

Blue Labour was critical of mass immigration, suspicious of globalization, and nostalgic for a working-class culture organized around stable employment, strong unions, and intact families. It represented a left-wing critique of liberalism rooted in solidarity rather than individual rights.

Across the Atlantic, a very different strain of postliberalism was developing among American conservatives. These thinkers were frustrated with what's called "fusionism"—the alliance between free-market libertarians and social conservatives that had defined the American right since William F. Buckley Jr. forged it in the 1950s.

Fusionists believed that economic freedom and traditional values were natural allies. Postliberal conservatives disagree. They argue that unregulated capitalism is just as corrosive to traditional communities as progressive social liberalism. What good is a free market if it enables corporations to move factories overseas, devastating communities that took generations to build? What good is economic liberty if it produces a culture of atomized consumers with no loyalties beyond their next purchase?

The Intellectual Architects

Several figures have shaped postliberal thought in distinctive ways.

John Gray, a British philosopher who taught at Oxford and the London School of Economics, was one of the earliest and most provocative voices. Gray had actually been an influential defender of free-market liberalism in the 1980s before dramatically reversing course. His later works argue that liberal progress is a myth—that history doesn't move toward ever-greater freedom and rationality, but cycles through periods of order and chaos. Gray views liberalism as a kind of secular religion, offering false promises of perpetual improvement that reality inevitably disappoints.

Patrick Deneen, a political theorist at the University of Notre Dame, wrote what became the movement's manifesto: "Why Liberalism Failed," published in 2018. The book argues that liberalism hasn't been betrayed or corrupted—it has succeeded. The social dysfunction we see around us is liberalism working exactly as designed. Individual autonomy has been maximized. Traditional constraints have been dissolved. And the result is widespread misery, because human beings aren't built to be autonomous atoms. They need roots, obligations, and belonging.

Deneen's book was unusual for an academic work—it received attention from political figures across the spectrum, including Barack Obama, who included it on a reading list. Its core argument proved compelling to readers who might disagree about solutions but recognized something true in its diagnosis.

Adrian Vermeule, a Harvard Law professor and Catholic convert, has developed what he calls "common good constitutionalism." This approach rejects the idea that constitutional interpretation should be neutral or procedural. Instead, Vermeule argues, judges and legislators should explicitly pursue substantive goods—human flourishing, social solidarity, family stability—rather than pretending the law takes no position on what makes life worthwhile.

Rod Dreher, a journalist and author, wrote "The Benedict Option," which argued that traditional Christians should focus less on winning political battles and more on building thick communities that can preserve their way of life amid a hostile liberal culture. The book's title references Saint Benedict of Nursia, who founded monasteries during the decline of the Roman Empire. Dreher suggests faithful communities today should think similarly—creating local institutions strong enough to survive liberalism's cultural dominance.

The Religious Dimension

Religion runs through postliberal thought like a deep vein of ore. This isn't coincidental.

Many postliberals argue that liberalism is, at root, a parasitic philosophy. It inherited moral intuitions—human dignity, equality, care for the vulnerable—from Christianity, but severed them from their theological foundations. For a while, these values persisted through cultural inertia. But as religious belief has declined, the moral inheritance has begun to dissipate.

Why should individuals have inherent dignity if they're just clever animals produced by blind evolution? Why should we care about the distant stranger if our only obligation is to ourselves and our freely chosen relationships? Liberalism, postliberals argue, lacks the resources to answer these questions. It coasts on borrowed capital from traditions it actively undermines.

Catholic social teaching has been particularly influential. This body of thought, developed through papal encyclicals over the past century and a half, emphasizes principles like subsidiarity—the idea that matters should be handled by the smallest competent authority rather than centralized power—and solidarity, the obligation of mutual responsibility within a community. It explicitly rejects both unregulated capitalism and state socialism, arguing instead for an economy ordered toward human flourishing and the common good.

John Milbank and Adrian Pabst, both British theologians, have developed what they call "Radical Orthodoxy," which argues that secular liberalism is philosophically incoherent and can only be remedied by recovering robust Christian metaphysics. Their work is dense and academic, but their core claim is straightforward: you can't build a healthy society on the assumption that ultimate questions about meaning and truth have no answers.

Postliberalism and International Relations

Postliberal ideas haven't stayed confined to domestic policy. They've shaped an emerging critique of the international order that America and its allies built after World War Two.

That order—sometimes called the "liberal international order"—rested on institutions like the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and eventually the World Trade Organization. It promoted free trade, democratic governance, human rights, and international law. Its architects believed that spreading these liberal principles would produce peace and prosperity globally.

Postliberals view this project with deep skepticism. They argue that liberal internationalism, despite its rhetoric of universal principles, often served to extend American power and impose Western values on societies with very different traditions. The Iraq War, in this view, represented liberal internationalism at its most hubristic—the assumption that liberal democracy could be installed in a society with no experience of it, through military force.

Milbank and Pabst make a more provocative argument: that liberal universalism contains a hidden tendency toward total war. Drawing on the thought of Carl Schmitt—a controversial German theorist who joined the Nazi Party—they suggest that when conflicts are framed as battles between civilization and barbarism, between enlightenment and darkness, there's no limit to the violence that can be justified. Traditional conflicts between nation-states at least had natural boundaries. Liberal crusades for human rights potentially have none.

This critique has found receptive audiences among both anti-war leftists and nationalist conservatives who believe America has overextended itself in futile nation-building projects abroad.

The Populist Connection

You cannot understand postliberalism without understanding its relationship to populism—the political insurgencies that have disrupted established parties across the Western world.

Brexit in Britain. Donald Trump in America. Marine Le Pen in France. The Sweden Democrats. The Brothers of Italy. These movements share a common pattern: they mobilize voters who feel abandoned by both traditional parties, who believe elites have prioritized global integration over national community, and who reject the cultural liberalism of educated professionals.

Postliberalism provides an intellectual framework for understanding why these movements emerged and what they might be reaching toward. If liberalism has indeed weakened the institutions that gave ordinary people meaning and security—stable jobs, cohesive communities, shared traditions—then populist anger isn't irrational. It's a predictable response to genuine loss.

Viktor Orbán, Hungary's prime minister since 2010, has become the most prominent political leader associated with postliberal ideas. Orbán explicitly describes his government as building an "illiberal state." He has consolidated power over media, courts, and civil society in ways that critics describe as authoritarianism dressed in democratic clothing. But he also champions policies—support for families with children, opposition to mass immigration, defense of national culture—that resonate with postliberal themes.

In a 2023 speech, Orbán declared: "The postliberal era we look forward to, which will replace the current progressive-liberal era, will not come automatically. Someone has to make it happen. And who will make it happen, if not us?"

This embrace creates obvious problems for postliberalism's more thoughtful advocates. If your ideas are being implemented by leaders who dismantle independent courts and muzzle opposition media, what does that say about where those ideas lead?

The Critics Respond

Postliberalism has attracted vigorous criticism from multiple directions.

Liberals argue that postliberals fundamentally misunderstand what liberalism actually claims. Liberal philosophy doesn't deny that humans are social creatures or that communities matter. It simply insists that the state shouldn't coercively impose any particular vision of community or tradition on people who don't share it. In a pluralistic society with multiple religions, ethnic backgrounds, and ways of life, liberal neutrality isn't a cop-out—it's the only framework that allows different communities to coexist peacefully.

They also point to postliberalism's uncomfortable relationship with illiberal politics. When postliberal ideas are implemented, the results look less like thriving traditional communities and more like consolidated state power, reduced civil liberties, and hostility toward minorities. The "common good" postliberals invoke tends to be defined by whoever holds power, which historically has not gone well for women, religious minorities, gay people, or anyone who deviates from dominant norms.

Critics from the left offer a different objection. Socialist historian Chris Wright argues that postliberalism's focus on culture and community conveniently distracts from economic inequality and class power. The real problem isn't that liberalism dissolved traditional communities—it's that capitalism exploits workers and concentrates wealth among elites. Postliberal nostalgia for pre-liberal community romanticizes periods of rigid hierarchy, limited mobility, and narrow horizons for most people. The working-class communities that postliberals mourn were also communities of sexism, racism, and constrained possibility.

Free-market conservatives mount yet another critique. They argue that postliberalism's embrace of economic intervention—protectionism, industrial policy, skepticism of free trade—would damage the prosperity that allows people to actually choose how to live. Traditional communities survived for centuries in conditions of material deprivation that no one today would accept. The market capitalism postliberals criticize has lifted billions from poverty and provided ordinary people choices their ancestors couldn't imagine.

Perhaps the sharpest criticism is philosophical. Even if postliberals are right that humans need meaning, community, and tradition—who decides which traditions, which communities, which meanings? In a society where people genuinely disagree about fundamental questions, postliberal appeals to the "common good" can easily become vehicles for majorities to impose their preferences on minorities. Liberal neutrality may be imperfect, but at least it provides some protection for those who don't fit the dominant mold.

The Feminist Counterrevolution

One distinctive strand of postliberal thought has emerged around feminist critics of the sexual revolution—thinkers sometimes called "reactionary feminists" though they might resist that label.

Writers like Louise Perry, Mary Harrington, and Christine Emba argue that the liberation feminism promised—sexual freedom, reproductive autonomy, economic independence from men—has produced deeply ambivalent results for many women. Dating apps have created a brutal marketplace that advantages men seeking casual sex. Hookup culture pressures women into encounters they don't really want. The delay of marriage and childbearing in favor of careers has left many women struggling with fertility and isolation.

These critics don't advocate returning women to domestic subordination. Rather, they suggest that liberal feminism failed to anticipate how sexual liberation would interact with male psychology and market dynamics. The freedom to choose ended up meaning the freedom to compete for attention in a system optimized for male preferences.

Their proposed solutions vary—some emphasize strengthening norms around commitment, others focus on economic support for mothers—but they share the postliberal intuition that more freedom doesn't automatically produce better outcomes. Constraints, properly structured, can protect the vulnerable rather than oppressing them.

The American Political Moment

Postliberal ideas have found their most consequential political expression in the contemporary Republican Party.

JD Vance, who became vice president in 2025, explicitly identifies with postliberal critiques of American political economy. Before entering politics, Vance wrote "Hillbilly Elegy," a memoir about growing up in Appalachian poverty that blamed both cultural decay and economic dislocation for his community's struggles. He has since called for more aggressive antitrust enforcement against big tech companies, skepticism of free trade agreements, and industrial policy to rebuild American manufacturing.

Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri has advanced similar themes, criticizing corporate power and calling for a politics rooted in place and community rather than abstract individual rights. Senator Marco Rubio has written about "common good capitalism" and the need for economic policy that considers workers and families, not just efficiency and growth.

These politicians represent a significant departure from Republican orthodoxy as it existed even a decade ago. The party of Ronald Reagan celebrated free markets and limited government as moral goods in themselves. The postliberal Republicans view markets as tools that should serve social purposes—and when they don't, government should intervene.

Whether this represents a durable realignment or a temporary adjustment remains to be seen. The Republican coalition still includes committed free-market conservatives who view postliberal economics as apostasy. The tension between these factions will likely define the party's direction for years to come.

Is There a Postliberal Center?

Perhaps the most intriguing question is whether postliberalism could transcend the left-right divide that has organized Western politics for two centuries.

The original Blue Labour vision imagined exactly that—a politics that combined economic protection for workers with cultural conservatism, patriotic attachment to nation with solidarity across class lines. Some observers have suggested that Keir Starmer, who became Britain's prime minister in 2024, harbors sympathies in this direction, though his actual governance has remained firmly within mainstream progressive parameters.

The appeal of such a synthesis is obvious. Many voters are economically left but culturally right—they want strong public services and secure jobs, but they also want immigration control and respect for traditional values. This combination has no natural home in conventional party systems. Postliberalism might offer it one.

But the obstacles are equally obvious. Any coalition requires agreement on what the common good actually is—and left and right postliberals have very different answers. Blue Labour's vision of working-class solidarity looks different from national conservatives' vision of religious renewal. Agreement that liberalism has failed doesn't produce agreement on what should replace it.

The Deeper Question

Beneath all the policy disputes and philosophical arguments, postliberalism raises a question that liberal democracies have tried to avoid: what is all this freedom for?

Liberalism was brilliant at removing constraints—absolute monarchs, established churches, rigid hierarchies. It gave individuals unprecedented power to choose their own paths. But liberalism was always better at describing what people should be free from than what they should be free for.

Postliberals argue this omission matters. Freedom without purpose becomes aimless consumption. Choice without roots becomes paralysis. The autonomous individual, liberated from all unchosen obligations, discovers that a life with no obligations beyond preference is strangely empty.

Critics respond that this is the wrong lesson to draw. The solution to empty freedom isn't less freedom—it's better communities that people freely choose to join. Churches, clubs, voluntary associations, strong families—these can flourish under liberalism. They don't require the state to enforce shared values on everyone.

Who is right? That question will likely define political philosophy for the coming generation. The liberal order that seemed triumphant just thirty years ago now faces challenges from within as well as without. Whether postliberalism represents a genuine alternative or merely a way station to something else—nationalism, authoritarianism, or perhaps something yet unimagined—we cannot yet know.

What we can say is that the argument has begun. After centuries of liberal dominance, the question of what comes next is genuinely open.