This year has seen three crucial sets of elections: in the US, across the EU and in the UK. Yet in all three cases the manifestos offered by various political parties and platforms have failed to speak to the crucial issues that confront the West and the world today. Against this background, we offer a true manifesto for transformation and a way out of the current crisis. Today’s crisis is one of liberalism’s own making. To recover from this crisis, therefore, means to be postliberal.
Our manifesto is postliberal in a genuine sense that is neither anti-liberal, nor populist, nor integralist, but rather radically associationist – an order of the world that is founded on a politics of virtue and bonds of belonging, flourishing and love. Everywhere we look, at every level – political, social, economic, environmental, international – the old order is collapsing and no one knows how to save it. In the personal sphere, the fulfilment of our most intimate needs and human desires – for friendship and family, home and belonging, dignity and purpose, beauty and love – seems increasingly out of reach. In the public sphere, within every nation, there is widespread institutional breakdown, corruption and degradation of civic life. Between nations, there is growing conflict sometimes breaking out into war.
The old order is liberalism. And liberalism cannot be saved because it is dying by its own hand. Freed of all limits after the end of the Cold War, an unshackled liberalism briefly triumphed before succumbing to hubris. This great unravelling has revealed the bankrupt ideal of liberalism itself. The myths of liberalism, once so compelling and apparently humane, have been tested to destruction: the autonomous individual, the absolute sovereignty of the nation state, the benign character of a globalised market, perpetual progress and a worship of liberty as the highest end in itself, rather than the pursuit of mutual flourishing and the common good.
In both the economic and the cultural realm, it turned out that individualism cannot of itself generate a substantive order, as Hobbes supposed. Instead, the clash of interests leads to ever more inequality and alienation, and the control of populations by oligarchic and technocratic elites. Inevitably, stronger individuals prevail and exercise their power through increasingly impersonal processes. Thus, the one common value which an older liberalism tended to recognise alongside rights, namely “utility”, now comes to dominate and distort all the others. But in the absence of any consensus as to what would even constitute material happiness, this engenders a proceduralism that always ensures the triumph of means over ends.
In doing so, it has created an ever more illiberal society. Parastatal bodies increasingly displace democratic government by imposing goals and “best practice” which pretend neutrality but actually advance a political agenda and foreclose debate. One result of this process, sometimes deliberately sought by ruling elites, is to divert social energies away from any pursuit of shared class interests or common public purpose. If, therefore, the appearance and operations of liberal democracy persist, then it is only in a zombified manner. Hence the collapse of hope and trust in politics today: for the dream of a shining city on a hill has been replaced by the nightmare of survival among its ruins.
Postliberalism is, in the first instance, the recognition of this “postliberal” reality: that liberalism has mutated into an intolerant ultraliberalism that is variously authoritarian in both political-economic and cultural regards. In the second instance, postliberalism is the argument that liberalism alone was never sufficient. The liberal primacy of individual choice was always destined to evolve into the ultraliberal inviolability of self-assertion. Once this principle is in place, order can only be maintained in arbitrary and often coercive ways, albeit masked by liberal legalism and proceduralism. Therefore, postliberalism argues in the third instance that respect for liberty must be balanced by a shared pursuit of economic justice and the common good. Only on this basis can respect for reasoned argument and democratic debate be restored.
A postliberal politics is necessarily universal but rooted in the particular legacy of the West. It unites the three great quests of the West: the Greek search for the eternally good, true and beautiful; the Jewish search for a pure worship of the one personal God; the Roman search for grandeur and just order. All of these were harmonised by the Christian tradition, in which universal ideals of charity and justice allow for a politics based on mutuality rather than pure force, upholding the social beyond the merely political and legal. Thus, the particularity of the West is paradoxically human universalism, an absolute valuing of every human person simply as human.
Today, this particularity of the West is once again under threat and therefore human universalism is under threat. They are under threat from both outside and within the West. The Western legacy of universalism is assaulted by a false universalism of global money indifferent to national or cultural attachment. It is equally assaulted by an atavistic particularism which takes the form of ethno-nationalism. Yet often these seemingly opposite forces are in collusion with each other.
Global capitalism makes selective and cynical use of nations. At the same time, national populists prove powerless in the face of capitalism and often have to attract its most debased forms to sustain the illusion of national sovereignty. Meanwhile, a denial of the Western legacy has been promoted by those who should be defending it the most: our educational and cultural elites. In denial of every civilisational legacy, there is a new preparedness to override human dignity. A pseudo-environmentalism which subordinates human beings to natural forces is converging with a technological accelerationism favoured by transhumanists.
Thereby, the distinctness of human life is squeezed out between a debasement into the purely animal and a pseudo-elevation into the purely robotic. Through the fusion of the two, people become more and more manipulable by impersonal and remote forces entirely outside their control. Perversely, a decadent West continues to impose on the rest of the world a version of itself reduced to capitalism, technocracy and subjective human rights. Understandably, the rest of the world often finds this imposition to be humiliating, bewildering and oppressive.
The redemption of the worst of the West can only be by the best of the West: a legacy of relational personalism, and peacefully interacting associative bodies, which bring to new light insights present in every human civilisation. This humanistic vision finds expression in St Augustine, who, elaborating on Cicero, spoke of the ordo amoris – a political order founded on love which advances from the local and intimate to universal bonds of human association between persons, and between humanity and nature. This vision sees society as more fundamental than politics and the economy. Both the political and the economic are embedded in the social from the level of the village to that of the entire planet.
In the face of today’s liberal crisis, the first priority is to renew the West from within. The cultural tradition of the West can be summarised as a quest for a flourishing human life in which all can freely participate. A postliberal vision of renewal begins with persons embedded in groups and places already formed by various cultural traditions and specific attachments. It conceives of politics as an attempt to shape an ever-greater body composed of these smaller bodies within a wider reality of human relational well-being and culture, discouraging the ersatz which is the result of both market manipulation and state propaganda.
This does not mean that postliberalism is mere conservatism. Rather, it regards the Western tradition as an eternal quest for the genuinely good life. It supports the Classical and Biblical view that the good life always consists in political participation, theoretical contemplation and artistic creativity. But the nature of these activities is subject to constant development and reconsideration. Thus, postliberalism is just as radical as it is traditional. This means that a Classical search for the true ends of life is balanced by a medieval legacy of collaboration between overlapping corporate bodies and an Enlightenment cultivation of sympathy with the perspectives of others. Sympathy is not a sufficient end in itself, but rather a requisite for mutual understanding and emotional solidarity. They both require in addition a constantly renewed discernment of the shared ideals and modes of living that positively bind us together.
Peace and consensus require a strong agreement as to ultimate ends. However, such agreement is never going to be complete, and a formal allowance of agreeing to differ will always have an important place in a constitutional order. In three ways, therefore, 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. The New Deal in the USA and the postwar settlements in Europe were not simply a reassertion of liberal democracy, but also involved explicit covenants between government, business, trade unions and cultural bodies at both national and international levels. Nonetheless, this admirable consensus ultimately collapsed, because elites did not remain sufficiently aware of its corporatist character and its expression of the last Christian settlement in the West.
Secondly, postliberalism is committed to renewing the principles of liberality such as free speech, free association and free religious practice. The reason why mere 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”. Thus, universities have ceased to be places of vigorous discussion and have instead become theatres for protecting individuals from being exposed to any challenges to their self-understanding.
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.
A humanist attitude towards punishment must nevertheless be balanced by continuously effective policing with the support of the community. There is nothing genuinely radical about the fomenting of anarchy. Currently, we have the opposite combination of ever longer prison sentences on the basis of either utility or rights, with increasingly ineffective policing and the failure to catch the perpetrators of serious crime. Like all our other institutions, policing has succumbed to impersonal bureaucratisation. As a result, there are fewer police on the beat and more police filling in pointless forms. Thus, at the heart of postliberalism is not the denial of the importance of personal freedom, but the primacy of interpersonal relations over impersonal forces.
The West is at an impasse, caught between technocratic and populist politics that is variously authoritarian and demagogic. Faced with the forces of capitalism, unmediated techno-science and bureaucracy, neither old orthodoxies nor new ideologies are offering transformative ideas and policies to foster human flourishing. The old order dominated by liberalism is collapsing because liberal philosophy goes against the grain of humanity. It wrongly assumes that humans are more prone to vice than they are capable of virtue – selfish rather than reciprocal, greedy instead of generous, distrustful of others and prone to violence, not inclined to trust and cooperate.
And “really existing liberalism” has produced in practice the conditions that it originally assumed in theory – rampant individualism, economic inequality, social atomisation, ecological devastation and wars in the name of human rights. We are losing the dignity that makes us human. Against liberalism, we believe that human beings are political and social animals – capable of great good, but only when our natural needs for solidarity and fellowship are met and reflected by society. Our manifesto provides a way out of the impasse and a vision that runs with the grain of our humanity: the exercise of virtue in the service of the common good.
This is an extract from The Politics of Virtue: A Postliberal Manifesto. It was authored alongside Susannah Black Roberts, Sebastian Milbank, James Noyes, Philippe De Roux and Oliver Willmott.
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