Postliberalism has been vilified in America, where JD Vance’s self-identification with the “postliberal right” has seen the concept associated with the spectre of Catholic authoritarianism in scenes reminiscent of the anti-Catholic panics of a hundred years ago. Yet here in Britain post-liberalism is denounced from the right as an abandonment of “Anglo-Saxon individualism” and a dangerous distraction from deregulating the housing market. So are post-liberals scary Schmittians or unserious mushy communitarians? Are we inhabitants of the Shire, or servants of Saruman?

This fundamental confusion is reminiscent of another term whose original, and precise significance was obscured by the hot air of a generation of wooly-minded writers — neoliberalism. Neoliberalism described a very clearly identifiable worldwide trend towards privatisation, financial deregulation and the embedding of free market assumptions in policy that occurred across the world in the 80s-90s. Originally championed by the right, these measures were soon adopted by the left, and a compromise was reached in which an expanding welfare state would be supported by the tax dollars of an unleashed capitalism. Yet the term, partly because it was so often in the mouths of the most thoughtless and ideological sections of the Left, has lost currency. In the process, the fact that we are at the far end of an economic revolution that has in many respects failed, has simply been forgotten and goes unmentioned. Assumptions around banking, finance, markets and state intervention that only crystallised in the decades of neoliberalism, are now treated as timeless objective truths, even following the catastrophe of 2008 and the continuing housing crisis across the English-speaking world.

The current disfavour in which postliberal ideas are held follows a similar track — a clear term rooted in historical reality is dismissed because it is seen as inconvenient. Indeed, the emergence of postliberalism is itself a reaction to the inability of contemporary liberalism to operate outside of increasingly narrow economic limits.

Postliberalism has two main senses, analytical and ideological. The former sense is one that few now seriously question — it is the contention that liberalism is in crisis, with liberal ideas falling out of favour, liberal institutions losing legitimacy and illiberal states and actors on the rise. We are in a postliberal moment, precisely because the time of liberalism’s triumph in the 90s-00s ended in the horrors of the War on Terror and the chaos of the financial crash. At that time, opponents of globalisation were sneered at by both right and left as hippies, romantics and the losers of history. Now, we recognise that it was economic liberalism that saw America create a new superpowered nemesis in the shape of all too illiberal China, even as it sowed the seeds for a populist and nationalist backlash through deindustrialisation and mass migration.

We must develop a political vision that moves on from the failures of liberalism

What follows from this analysis, one that few serious observers now challenge? That we must develop a political vision that moves on from the failures of liberalism, one rooted in the timeless ideals of Western civilisation and culture — notions of political virtue, the common good and human dignity.

One is of course free to disagree with this analysis, but it is frustrating to see it so frequently misrepresented. Only the other day, John Gray in the New Statesman made a case against postliberalism that revealed how untenable the terms of the opposition are.

Gray fully grants the postliberal analysis of where liberalism is. He admits that society has become divided into warring identity groups, driven by human rights and “ultra-individualism”, and that mass migration has created an existential challenge for modern liberalism. According to Gray, “the issue is not how to integrate minorities into an overarching culture, but how ways of life that will remain divergent can cohabit in some sort of modus vivendi.”

The issue with Gray’s vision is that, like the Hobbesianism he praises, it essentially despairs of the idea of a common future or a civilisational project for Western countries. Ironically, for a project to “save liberalism”, there will be precious little left of it at the end of the process. Liberalism, according to him, is “an accident of history” and “was never a universalisable way of life”.

Yet nothing about the liberal tradition, from Locke, to Rousseau, to Rawls, authorises such a reading. Locke’s entire politics is based on the assumption that property rights are an “original law of nature”. Hobbes’ account of his political commonwealth is likewise “the final cause, end, or design of men”. These more naturalistic accounts have given way to more abstract sentiments, but even as natural law has been abandoned by liberals, universalism is an essential and fundamental aspect of the project. Whilst there is no Hobbesian “artificer” in Rawls’ liberalism, we each of us step into the shoes of God as we stand behind the “veil of ignorance”, and in that place every person must rationally assent to liberalism.

Gray’s assertion of the cultural particularism of liberalism may be accurate, but it is a critique that belongs to illiberal critics, whether from marxist, postmodern or conservative standpoints. Once one has rejected the idea that liberalism is a universal creed, or even a national culture, one has dismissed it entirely.

What is left, is necessarily a postliberal liberalism. In other words, it is a liberalism which contains identifiable ideas — like individualism and property rights — but has fundamentally uprooted those concepts from their original context. This vision of “postliberalism” is easy to perceive, and can be found in Dubai or Singapore today. Your economic freedom in such societies is generally far greater than in the West, at least for the wealthy. In your personal life, so long as you don’t disrupt society, your individual freedoms are considerable. Anti-social behavior and crime are rigidly policed, and whilst demographic homogeneity is a thing of distant memory, group self-interest is firmly suppressed.

What of course does not exist in these societies is government by the people, free speech, freedom of assembly, the right to privacy, or any number of cherished liberal norms. These are individualistic, free market societies governed by illiberal autocrats and oligarchs. Yet despite the admiration expressed for them on the right, they lack much of what traditional conservatism would value. Traditional culture is generally subordinate to commerce, beauty and aesthetics go unvalued, collective endeavor has given way to the monopoly of central power.

This final triumph of state and market creates states that are unequal, unfree and soulless; where the good life cannot be pursued and where humanity is subordinated to the mindless expansion of material wealth, without concern for quality of life or the common good. How are we going to address fundamental challenges like the degradation of the natural world, global conflicts, or life-changing technological revolutions when we are left with only Machiavellian princes and a night-watchman state?

This moral and spiritual crisis of liberalism cannot be addressed by pragmatic statecraft alone

That a philosopher as thoughtful and honest as Gray can only imagine a post-universalistic liberalism and a post-national state points to a governing liberal ideology that can no longer deliver on its most basic promises or live up to its own ideals. This moral and spiritual crisis of liberalism cannot be addressed by pragmatic statecraft alone, but requires — as political order has *always *required — a deeper cultural and metaphysical story. The resurgence of nationalism reflects not only a desire for the return of order and social harmony, but also a renewed hunger for meaning in an increasingly sterile society.

The problem with Gray’s story is that it is one of essential passivity. He is surely right when he says that “the maladies of modernity are the result of technological and economic change abetted by state power, not simply of shifts in ideas”. But he seems to propose no serious challenge to these forces, nor suggests any meaningful project for shaping, taming or directing them to better ends. His call for a “strong state” fails to reflect the fact that truly strong and sustainable states, capable of self-renewal, rely on strong national and civic cultures. The stability of Britain over its history is a matter not only of effective institutions, but of an extremely strong and energetic culture. Renewing that culture, and rebuilding the state, will necessarily mean leaving the mistakes of liberalism behind, not perpetuating its worst mistakes into the future.

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