The election of Donald Trump and the advance of populism across Europe confirm that we have already entered a postliberal era. Our age marks the end of liberal hegemony that first emerged in the 1960s and 1970s before triumphing after the end of the cold war – the fusion of left-wing social-cultural liberalism with right-wing economic liberalism.
Contemporary liberal thought – with its focus on the individual, negative liberty, subjective rights and utility-maximisation – fails to understand the world we live in or the nature of reality. Part of the reason is that much of 20th-century liberalism denies any notion of substantive, transcendent goods in favour of individual rights. Contemporary liberalism has tended to reduce questions of justice either to matters of legalism or utilitarian calculations. This has had the effect of de-politicising fundamental issues, such as the impact of globalisation and mass immigration on society, while handing ultimate decisions either to unelected bureaucracies, parastatal bodies or the courts.
As a result, liberal societies have in recent decades witnessed a centralisation of power, a concentration of wealth, and a commodification of everyday life. All this undermines those liberal commitments to equal opportunities, the rule of law, democratic rule and universal human rights.
The roots of liberalism’s failure go deep. Both liberal philosophy and liberal ideology turn out to be contradictory and self-undermining. First, liberalism replaced older notions of natural order and natural justice with a new artificial social contract between the collective sovereign state and the sovereign individual – as exemplified by Hobbes’s Leviathan. Then, liberal institutions and practices have privileged forms of individualism that over time produced instability, even anarchy. As the French philosopher Jean-Claude Michéa has shown, the triumph of contemporary liberalism ever-more brings about the ‘war of all against all’ (Hobbes) and the idea of man as a self-owning animal (Locke) that were its presuppositions. That is why liberalism endlessly oscillates between individual freedom and collective coercion.
But it is not only the case that liberal ideology is contradictory, because the inevitable clash of rival rights can only be arbitrated by centralised power. It is also true that individual liberty, once disconnected from self-restraint and mutual obligations, slides into unfreedom – even tyranny – because unfettered freedom favours the strong over the weak, the wealthy over the poor, the powerful over those without a voice. We can see this in the UK today with the proposed legislation to legalise assisted suicide.
Liberalism represents the unnecessary victory of vice over virtue. It has replaced the quest for reciprocal recognition and mutual flourishing with the pursuit of wealth, power, and pleasure – contributing to economic instability, social fragmentation, culture wars, and ecological devastation. It undermines the conditions for common life in society: the erosion of close bonds and communal solidarity, the disintegration of foundational communities – especially the family – leading to a dizzying rise in loneliness. Western societies cannot afford to dissolve into uncontrolled mass immigration, and there’s a deep injustice if women have to compete against transgender athletes in the name of self-identification. It is time to bury this brand of liberalism.
Postliberalism is not antiliberal. First, postliberalism is committed to renewing the ‘liberal’ in an older sense of generosity, tolerance and civility of manners. That was exemplified in the social order of the postwar era, when liberalism was still embedded in inherited networks of associated corporate bodies and in substantive ethical cultures, ultimately grounded in a religious inheritance.
Secondly, postliberalism is committed to renewing the principles of liberality such as free speech, free association and free religious practice. The reason why liberalism threatens free debate is that freedom of speech assumes the possibility of a shared quest for objective ethical and metaphysical truth that liberalism on its own denies. Therefore, present-day ultraliberalism is in reality the most consistent relativism. If truth is simply a matter of subjective opinion and private preference, then debate becomes pointless, even ‘offensive’.
The third respect in which postliberalism is not antiliberal is in relation to questions of policing and punishment. To base punishment on either deterrent or retribution alone is to embrace the modern liberal reduction of human life to a calculation of utility and rights. Postliberalism is instead committed to a politics whose ultimate aim is to make people virtuous in the sense of genuinely happy and flourishing. The purpose of punishment, as for Aristotle, can therefore only be at once economic restitution to victims and the rehabilitation of the offender. Justice is inherently restorative, else it is simply vengeance.
President Trump’s administration won’t be postliberal unless it sides with the economic agenda of JD Vance
Postliberalism is incompatible with the rise of increasingly unrestrained oligarchies – whether right- or left-leaning – that imposes its views through billions of dollars to cement its dominance. Virtue, service and simplicity are essential for building the common good. To achieve this, people with simple hearts must collectively take political control, within good institutions equipped with effective checks and balances, allowing ordinary persons to accomplish extraordinary things together. Postliberalism cannot, therefore, ally itself with lawmaking oligarchies but must confront and ultimately dismantle them.
The business world, of course, should foster value creation but without becoming the sole concentration of all political and media power or the funnel of stupendous private wealth. As American democracy is threatened by the forces of liberal oligarchy and populist plutocracy, President Trump’s administration won’t be postliberal unless it sides with the economic agenda of JD Vance on defending workers and unions and national production against the policies of mass firing, union busting and an ever-greater reliance on China as with Elon Musk.
A postliberal politics needs to build a pluralist democracy. It’s all too easy for a necessary spirit of community to transform into a herd instinct, rallying around scapegoats. Respect for the past risks sliding into servile reverence for rich and powerful aristocracies. Rejecting the excesses of mass abortion, uncontrolled immigration, or ‘transgender religion’ can turn into foolish macho chest-thumping, a culture of exclusion, and ultimately, a slide into neofascism. The Chinese, Russian and Iranian dictatorships would revel in such a loss of our freedom balanced by mutual obligation, the very thing that defines our strength.
Postliberals have to focus offer an alternative to both ultraliberal globalism and antiliberal nationalism. The task is to civilise (state or market) capitalism and transform it into a social and mutual market economy. Whereas capitalism – especially global finance capital – is ultimately based on debt and speculation, a more mutual market embedded in strong civic institutions and social relations is focused on assets and production.
Key to this is bringing together the interests of capital and labour in a negotiated settlement, which has to be anchored at once in stronger state capacity and in a greater involvement of both local government and civic institutions. One core aspect of such a settlement is a renewed partnership between government, business, trade unions, and communities to break with market globalisation and central state nationalisation, in favour of a more plural and democratically governed corporatist model.
A postliberal international order acknowledges the enduring presence of chaos and the lurking danger of authoritarianism
In other words, an economic democracy that complements political democracy involves a democratic, non-state and non-market corporatism in which government at different levels helps to broker negotiations between capital and labour. This should start with collective bargaining between organised business and organised labour in unionised sectors.
It is illusory to expect individual workers to be able to negotiate wages or working conditions in large businesses, just like state control or ownership of the means of production will not empower employees either.
Another arrangement that would help businesses and trade unions to have greater social purpose is co-determination – worker representatives on company boards. Wage boards should also be considered in service sectors that have low levels of unionisation, many small employers, and poorly paid with low skills. Workers should be included on remuneration committees and company boards. A specific policy, that would enable workers to have a say in the running of companies, is to introduce a legal requirement that a minimum of, say, 20 per cent of shares be held by employees.
In recent years, we have witnessed the growing power of self-styled civilisational states, such as China and Russia. To overcome not just the cold war mentality but also avoid the clash of the two superpowers, social democracy needs a more realistic international idealism that does not merely accept the tragic nature of competing nations and the mere option of choosing between greater and lesser evils, but rather some new ideals around which nations can coalesce.
Otherwise the danger is that realism will end up in some catastrophe, be that the escalation of proxy wars into a wider conflagration or the tragedy of roads not taken, for example the failure to build a pan-European security architecture and prevent Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Avoiding war with China and Russia and living in some form of peaceful coexistence with them will ultimately require postliberal rules and some consensus on norms such as universal human rights that also reflect national or civilisational traditions of ethical judgement and statecraft.
A postliberal international order acknowledges the enduring presence of chaos and the lurking danger of authoritarianism. However, it refuses to accept either anarchy or tyranny just because the need and interest of human persons, communities and the family of nations is to coexist as peacefully as possible in a permanently pluralistic world.
A longer version of this speech was delivered at the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute Postliberalism conference in Cambridge on 13 to 14 December.
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