Angus Burgin (left), Sohrab Ahmari (center), and Elizabeth Anderson (right) in discussion at the Post-Liberalism: An Exploration conference. October 20, 2025.

Is there any prospect for policy cooperation between post-liberals and left-liberals? I call “left-liberals” anyone who supports identity and lifestyle pluralism and social equality while rejecting the neoliberal economic consensus that dominated U.S. policymaking from 1980-2016. I call “post-liberals” people who reject neoliberalism, but who also reject pluralism and social equality. All our disagreements on social issues concerning immigration, religion, race, gender, sexuality, reproductive freedom, and family organization come down to disagreements about pluralism and equality. Despite our profound disagreements on these issues, it seems to me that there may be room for building agreement on economic issues.

Suppose we take the proclaimed post-liberal aspirations seriously to (1) improve the economic prospects of the working class and (2) enhance the flourishing of local communities across the United States. At the October 2025 Post-liberalism: An Exploration conference at The George Washington University, my co-panelist Sohrab Ahmari proposed post-WWII European Christian democracy as a model for the right. I have recently defended social democracy as a model for left-liberals. These two models, Christian and social democracy, are united in their commitment to democracy and both flourished in the postwar era in liberal democratic Europe. Many technological, economic, and social circumstances have changed since then, which would require substantial updating of both models for the 21^st century. In this short post, I’ll propose some modest steps forward in economic policy that I think could enjoy broad support across the electorate. Cross-party cooperation on these steps could do much to restore confidence in democracy, reduce partisan polarization, and enable Americans to take more ambitious steps to ensure that the economy works for ordinary people across the entire country, and not just for urban elites.

By many measures, the U.S. economy has never been richer. So why is discontent with our neoliberal capitalist order so widespread? The short answer is that labor’s share of national income has been trending down since its peak in 1970, and its distribution has been increasingly concentrated at the top. Moreover, opportunities for economic advancement are concentrated in a handful of major metros that are unaffordable to most Americans. Trade agreements since the 1990s have also deindustrialized many places in the U.S. So we have increasing geographic inequality. The economy in aggregate terms may be strong. But millions of Americans are suffering poverty, precarity, limited prospects for advancement, and are living in stagnant or declining communities.

These problems have many causes. Immigration is not to blame: it has increased the wages of native-born Americans. But other neoliberal policies beyond global trade have played key roles in suppressing wages and promoting inequality since 1980s. Until the Covid-19 recession, the federal government practiced austerity macroeconomics, which undermined the long-term prospects of people entering the job market. Labor unions have been under assault since Ronald Reagan’s presidency, assisted by adverse judicial interpretations of labor law. Many labor-protecting regulations, particularly at the state level, have been weakened or are barely enforced. Employees’ legal rights are regularly nullified by employment contracts that include noncompete clauses, mandate arbitration, and ban class actions. Financialization has enabled immense fortunes to be made on Wall Street, based on zero-sum trading of derivatives that does nothing to support the real economy. The virtual suspension of antitrust enforcement has led to monopsonistic wage suppression, primarily in rural areas.

Reversing these policies would likely be popular across the country. Rural populist voters powered the antitrust movement in the late 19^th century. They have strong reasons to support it today, given the monopsony power of “big ag.” Labor unions enjoy supermajority support across the U.S. Laws to strengthen the ability of unions to organize and force employers to engage in good-faith bargaining would put that support into practice. Raising the minimum wage is very popular, including in red states. Noncompete clauses, mandatory arbitration, and bans on class action suits by workers should be banned as unfair to workers.

Americans across our political divide were rightly outraged by the failure of the Obama administration to prosecute the financiers whose fraudulent dealings in worthless mortgage-backed securities brought the economy to its knees. Finance should serve the real economy, not enable great fortunes to be made by creating and trading fake assets. Some of the government-bestowed power of national banks to issue loans and thereby create assets out of thin air could be usefully redistributed to credit unions and community banks which, by charter, are dedicated to serving the needs of their depositors rather than promoting zero-sum financial speculation. This could provide resources for revitalizing local communities and distributing economic opportunities more equitably across rural areas and small towns and cities. Such measures could improve the prospects of those who can’t afford to live in the major metros.

I propose these policies as starting points for experimentation. Many ideas must be tried to see what kinds of policies would help ordinary Americans. Seriously attempting economic policy experiments that are explicitly aimed at ordinary Americans rather than elites could have positive effects for democracy and political polarization. It’s not just elite failure, but the profound intergroup distrust, contempt and even hatred that lies at the heart of our democratic crisis. These hostile intergroup attitudes are unjustified. The vast majority of Americans are decent people, whatever their class, race, religion, gender identity, sexual orientation, immigration status, partisan affiliation, and place of residence.

Americans have a strong base of shared values. I worked on the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Commission on Reimagining the Economy from 2020-2023. The Commission included academics, business leaders, community leaders, and religious leaders with different viewpoints. We issued recommendations for economic policy based on the values that we found were shared by ordinary Americans. We organized listening sessions of Americans from 20 states including every region of the U.S. and every community type (rural, suburban, urban), across different ages, incomes, occupations, education levels, religions, racial identities, immigration status, party affiliations, religions, and so forth.

Again and again, we heard people expressing the same values and aspirations for the economy. Virtually everyone wants to actively support themselves and their families, serve and strengthen their communities, and be able to make long-term plans beyond bare day-to-day survival. This requires real opportunities to earn a steady income that covers basic needs with enough left over to accumulate savings. It also requires housing, health care, and education to be affordable. Americans want enough time to spend with their families, serve their communities, and enjoy some leisure. They want their communities to have the resources and investment they need to flourish. And they want a more democratic country, one that is responsive to their needs and not just elite interests.

I think if Americans listened in to these sessions (which the Library of Congress plans to make available), our trust in people different from ourselves by social identity, region, religion, immigration status and so forth would increase. We share more values than we think. If left-liberals and post-liberals recognized that and worked together on economic policies attuned to the shared concerns of ordinary Americans across the country, we would thereby promote intergroup trust and toleration and restore our faith in democracy. This, in turn, would strengthen democracy itself.

Elizabeth Anderson is Arthur F. Thurnau Professor and John Dewey Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy and Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan and specializes in political philosophy, ethics, and philosophy of economics.

Stefan Borg presents his book at an event hosted by the Institute for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies on January 26, 2026.

In your book, The Return of the Common Good: The Postliberal Project Right and Left, you treat post-liberalism as a fairly coherent tradition, even if it manifests in different kinds of political projects. But would you situate post-liberalism within an intellectual genealogy that includes anti-liberalism and illiberalism? In other words, what is new in “post-“ liberalism, and what is just an adaptation of known critiques that seeks to make them relevant in the current political climate?

It’s an excellent question, and I’m not sure I can really do it justice, but I’ll offer some preliminary thoughts. I think that many, if not most, post-liberals, and particularly post-liberals on the left, do not consider their project to be illiberal or anti-liberal; they reject these genealogies, which of course can be deeply reactionary. I think at its core, for the British post-liberals and some American post-liberals, post-liberalism is a sort of rejuvenated, somewhat updated form of communitarianism.

But it can also be taken in a deeply illiberal direction, particularly when taken up by someone like Adrian Vermeule, who is essentially a Schmittian. He is not at all a Burkean conservative, or working in the intellectual footsteps of Tocqueville, and so on and so forth. I think that project is really quite distinct. It’s also perhaps important to say something about Patrick Deneen and his project because, in a book like Regime Change (his follow-up to Why Liberalism Failed), I think there are two voices. One is the voice of a relatively moderate Burkean bottom-up conservative who wants to strengthen and revitalize local communities that have been eroded. But there is also a much more illiberal voice, a more illiberal dimension to his argument, too, that is about empowering a virtuous elite to sort of steer the population towards the realization of the Common Good. There is a fundamental tension here.

It is also perhaps important for me to say that, when it comes to post-liberalism, I don’t think it should be understood in the genealogy of nationalism, of nationalist thinking. That is also what makes it more interesting in a sense. Because we know a lot about nationalism, and nationalists have always tended to blame an outsider, something on the outside, for all the social ills and so on. Whereas the post-liberals, at their core, instead blame something deeply inherent to the Western tradition itself.

One more question on relating post-liberalism to another concept: populism. When post-liberals are critical of the so-called professional managerial class (PMC)—a criticism that is, in my view, one of post-liberalism’s core elements and probably the one that resonates most—one can see how this, in a sense, reinvents the category of “the elite,” which is so important in populism. In that case, is post-liberalism a rejoinder to the populist critique of the elites, one that calls for changing or reversing the symbolic hierarchy between the PMC and the more “blue collar” segments of society? Perhaps it is here where the distinction between the left- and right-wing versions of post-liberalism is most potent.

I completely agree with you that a very important dimension of the post-liberal project lies in the critique of the professional-managerial class. And this is, in some sense, very Marxian sounding. But I also think that one of the biggest problems here is that the PMC, in the post-liberal story, becomes an incredibly broad category that includes pretty much anybody involved with management, with making sure that a system works, even on the very margins of that system.

So, it is a very blunt categorization of society. But it really does speak to this overlap between strands of thinking that are conservative and strands of thinking that are quite leftist, in some ways. At the end of the day, that is perhaps one of the most intriguing aspects of a post-liberal project, as I understand it.

I want to turn now to the role of gender theory in the post-liberal critique of liberalism. There is a way in which, rightly or wrongly, gender debates became a key representative of liberal thought. And so, post-liberals have had to think deeply about their own views on gender, and how gender (and more broadly, the role of the family) would be re-articulated in a hypothetical post-liberal future.

That is another excellent question and something that I have been trying to think about because, while post-liberalism appears in different domains as I have tried to tease out in my book, one crucial domain is that of gender relations.

First of all, post-liberal feminists have to be understood against the background of the #MeToo movement, which caused a lot of people to go back and re-visit second wave feminism, particularly perhaps the writings of Andrea Dworkin and Katherine MacKinnon, who were preoccupied with questions of pornography and sex more generally speaking. And Andrea Dworkin was often, I believe, unfairly or not read as being negative towards sex. So, the third wave of feminists tended to be much more “sex positive” on many of the key issues. Post-liberal feminists are reacting to all this. There are two or maybe three key books to understand their position. The first is certainly The Case Against the Sexual Revolution by Louise Perry. She talks about post-liberalism and, I think, sees herself as a post-liberal. She targets liberal feminism because she believes that it wants to reduce sex to a commodity not dissimilar to any other commodity—that is, something to be traded in transactional terms.

Post-liberal feminists also take issue with the view that says, “Well, as long as consent is in place, everything is fine and well.” So, Louise Perry, and someone like Christine Emba in her book Rethinking Sex: A Provocation, argue that the focus on consent tends to obscure all kinds of gendered inequities in relations between men and women. What is also interesting here is the reception that these books received. Many reviewers were really quite sympathetic to the diagnostic part of these books, basically saying, “Yes, liberal feminism has, in fact, in certain ways been appropriated by the logic of the free market.” But the solutions offered by post-liberal feminists were more controversial. In general, an important part of a post-liberal feminist project is to take a much more skeptical stance towards sex positivity, its capture by the market, and processes of commodification in the realm of gender relations in general.

I want to ask you about something that does not receive a lengthy treatment in your book, but that cannot be separated from the notion of the common good, which is our relationship with the environment. How could one reinvent the common good without reference to a changing view of nature? Some post-liberals seem really interested in that issue, while others have remained largely silent. Once again, maybe this is why distinguishing between left- and right-wing post-liberalisms is important.

I think you are exactly right that the environment is really key to this because, in the post-liberal master narrative, the story is basically that a more and more aggressive kind of individualism has taken over, which also entails an attitude of trying to master nature for our own ends. Whatever we want to do with nature, we should be able to do with it. It’s ours, in a way. We own it. And of course, that might be a strawman of liberal modernity, but it is a central feature of the post-liberal critique of liberalism, this ethos of mastery over nature. You are also right that some post-liberals take this issue seriously. For someone like Adrian Pabst, this is very important to the project that he has been developing with John Milbank. So, their post-liberalism has an ecological, a “green,” dimension. Whereas for other post-liberals, like the Catholic integralists, for example, I’m not sure (but it also does appear in Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed).

One final question. Post-liberalism is developing across multiple fields, ranging from political theory, theology, international relations, jurisprudence, gender theory, and more. Where do you think that it has made its strongest argument? Or put a different way, where is it most likely to have a long-lasting impact?

There are many directions one could take this question. But let me start with a brief point about the post-liberal section of the New Right in the United States, which has ostensibly been very opposed to American interventionism and expansionism. I would even go so far as to say that virtually every segment of the “post-fusionist” New Right in the United States (i.e., not just the post-liberals) has been very skeptical of such things. They have proclaimed their opposition to never-ending wars and all of that kind of stuff. So, naturally, a lot of people thought, “Oh, well, maybe that is going to have some sort of impact then on what is happening in the United States with regard to the current administration.” But that is absolutely not the case. It is just the opposite, in fact. We are seeing a highly interventionist and expansionist American foreign policy. So, if right-wing post-liberal thinkers seem to be fairly close to power in the United States, we can definitively say on this issue that they seem to have had absolutely no effect whatsoever.

Related to your question, I think that we may actually see the return of an inclusive, broad-based social democracy in Europe. One that is meant to respond to the far right, to populism, and so on. And I think that social democracy of that kind may actually align with post-liberalism insofar as it forwards quite a fundamental critique of market logic, a logic that has taken over more and more domains of our lives. It is asking what we can do collectively to stem that thinking and that mode of operating in the world. And so maybe there is something there. And to be honest with you, when somebody like the recently elected mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani, talks about “the warmth of collectivism,” I think he is pointing towards a kind of return of the common good. He, of course, uses a different frame of reference, but he is nonetheless expressing a fatigue with a deeply transactional individualism, which has maybe run its course. He is hinting that maybe, just maybe, we are going back to something more communal...

Stefan Borg is Associate Professor in Political Science at the Swedish Defence University. His current research agenda includes contemporary critics of liberalism, as well as U.S. foreign and security policy. He has previously written a book on the theoretical foundations of European integration called European Integration and the Problem of the State: A Critique of the Bordering of Europe (2015), and has published articles in a number of international journals.

This article is adapted from remarks delivered by Stefan Borg at an event with the Institute for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies on January 26, 2026.

So, the book is called The Return of the Common Good: The Postliberal Project Left and Right. I wanted to write a reconstruction and intellectual history of post-liberalism as rigorously and as fairly as I could, that both post-liberals and liberals would appreciate and find fair. It is not a polemical work and it is ultimately an argument, I think, for taking post-liberal ideas seriously as an intellectual enterprise, and one that resonates with quite a lot of people.

To start off, some three years ago, I wrote an article published in the European Journal of Social Theory where I argued for a specific interpretation of post-liberalism as a strand of thought. And what I found particularly intriguing, and what I wanted to highlight and further explore, was that this critique was politically ambiguous. It came from the right and from the left. So, the book is very much a development of some ideas that I put forward in that article. In this talk, I will start by saying a few words about why I felt it was worthwhile to write a book about post-liberalism. Then I will discuss the origins of post-liberalism, as I understand it in this book. From there, I will present a reasoned definition of post-liberalism according to its main component parts—again, as I understand it in this book. And finally, I will raise some criticisms of post-liberalism.

Why Post-liberalism…and Who Counts?

First things first: why write a book about post-liberalism? Well, it is, of course, a widely used label. The label is also understood by different people in rather different ways. It has been very hard to make sense of what post-liberalism really means. Another reason to write a book about post-liberalism is that quite a few contemporary liberals have, since the early 2020s until now, engaged with post-liberalism or key thinkers in this tradition. However, work on post-liberalism tended to only actually deal with the American branch—America here meaning the United States—and to treat post-liberalism as something wholly on the right of the political spectrum. Finally, the reason to write a book on post-liberalism has much to do with the fact that, in addition to being a set of ideas, post-liberalism is also a political project in an important sense.

Before I offer a definition of post-liberalism, I think it would make sense to say a few words about who I think should be included here, because at the end of the day, the book is deeply inductive in that sense.

So, the post-liberals are essentially a bunch of philosophers, theologians, political and social theorists, as well as public intellectuals. The British branch of post-liberals includes John Milbank, Adrian Pabst, Maurice Glasman, David Goodhart, Philip Blond, Mary Harrington, and Louise Perry. The American branch includes Patrick Deneen, Adrian Vermeule, Gladden Pappin, Chad Pecknold, Michael Lind, Sohrab Ahmari, Christine Emba, Erika Bachiochi, and also, in some important diagnostic dimensions I think, somebody like Catherine Liu, actually.

There is also a set of 20th century thinkers who post-liberals typically draw on, a list that includes Karl Polanyi, James Burnham, Christopher Lasch, and Alasdair MacIntyre. The latter is key, as MacIntyre’s critique of liberal modernity echoes many of the themes taken up both by British and American post-liberals. But there are also, I think, many similarities between the communitarian critics of liberalism from the 1980s and 90s and the post-liberals today. It is my belief that Michael Sandel, for example, can be seen as post-liberal adjacent in important ways.

Of course, for post-liberalism to be a meaningful label, it must denote an understanding of liberalism that has a certain degree of specificity, which is something that I will return to below. Prescriptively, post-liberals disagree quite strongly on alternatives to the liberal order. Some post-liberals are on the left, some on the right, and some say that they embrace a kind of ‘radical center.’ Given all of this diversity, I still argue that there is a certain “core” to the post-liberal project, which I will turn to shortly.

Post-liberalism’s Origins…and What is Liberalism, anyway?

But first, let me just say a few words about the origins of post-liberalism, first in the United Kingdom and then in the United States. The deeper roots of British post-liberalism lie in a particular Christian theological and philosophical school of thought known as radical orthodoxy, which is highly critical of liberal modernity and primarily associated with theologian and philosopher John Milbank. Though figures like Catherine Pickstock, Graham Ward, and certainly Adrian Pabst—one of the most important contemporary British post-liberal thinkers—are also associated with it.

That said, the most immediate origin of British post-liberalism, as a movement, lies in the formation of what became known as Blue Labour in 2011. Blue Labour was founded by the academic, a political theorist actually, Maurice Glasman, who is also a Labour party life peer in the House of Lords. Blue Labour was highly critical of the market-friendly New Labour project championed by Prime Minister Tony Blair and his successor, Gordon Brown. Some of the leading people associated with Blue Labour argued at that point that in the past decades, “corporatist, localist, federal, and institutional politics came to be replaced by a liberal and consumerist kind of politics that ceased generating the leadership necessary to sustain a democratic movement.”

Now, when it comes to the United States, we can say that Trump’s first election opened the door to an extensive debate on the meaning of conservatism. And I think one could say that there are at least three strands of “post-fusionist” conservatism in the United States: the National Conservatives, the West Coast Straussians, and the Post-liberals. Post-liberalism in the United States, then, mostly originated within American academia, though some politicians also voiced support for post-liberal sounding themes (Marco Rubio and J.D. Vance, perhaps most notably). As mentioned above, Patrick Deneen, Michael Lind, Adrian Vermeule, Gladden Pappin, Chad Pecknold, and Sohrab Ahmari, can be understood as the most important post-liberal thinkers in the United States.

As I alluded to above, to understand post-liberalism we first need to understand how they understand liberalism itself. To give a very abbreviated account here, let me first say—and this is key—that post-liberals typically approach liberalism both as a political theory, i.e., a set of propositions and assumptions about the world that you find in a particular canon of texts from Hobbes, Locke, Mills, Rawls, and so on, and also as a sociopolitical project of ordering societies in specific ways, a worldview that is instantiated in social structures, in institutions and human practices. Once again, this is very much in line with how Alasdair MacIntyre understood liberalism.

Liberalism is, of course, about so many different things. But the core of the liberal project, post-liberals believe, lies in a desire to do away with everything that impedes the exercise of human will. In other words, liberalism desires to maximize the sphere of individual autonomy. Post-liberals thus argue that liberalism should first and foremost be understood as a form of philosophical voluntarism, since liberals throughout history, they argue, have prioritized human will over other faculties such as intellect or emotion. So, human will is the crucial faculty for liberals. For liberals, in this telling, life is ultimately about liberating our will. So, the implication of this is that anything that could potentially limit or constrain human autonomy comes to be seen as suspect in some fundamental sense. Community, norms, culture, religion, tradition, family, even modern science—all can be viewed with suspicion if they appear to put constraints on human self-mastery.

Three Components of Post-Liberalism

From here, I think it is safe to begin discussing what I think of as the three core components of the post-liberal worldview. The first component, or dimension, of post-liberalism concerns its account of change. This account of change is macro-historical and is an account of how liberalism undermines itself in various ways. This is, of course, a sweeping argument to make, and there are quite a few ways of characterizing this erosion. But the key here is that the post-liberal story goes something like this: the project of maximizing autonomy comes at the expense of attachment, connection, and community. That suggestion is at the heart of the post-liberal story. Thus, even though post-liberals typically write about many different macro-historical processes, they are keen to emphasize that liberalism is the engine propelling the dynamics that they explore.

Right. So, the first component of the post-liberal project focuses on processes of large-scale historical change. The second component turns to a holistic investigation of the liberal order, which blends political theory with a much more sociologically oriented mode of analysis. So, it is a much more static or structural analysis of the liberal order and the social stratification that liberalism produces. More specifically, liberalism is here understood as a kind of “ideology critique.” Ideology is, in the words of Jon Elster, understood as, “A set of beliefs or values that can be explained through the position of interest of some social group.” So, the liberal order has generated a particular kind of elite, this argument goes, which primarily works toward the perpetuation of its own privileges— and to the detriment of working-class interests. It is important to stress here that, for post-liberals, class belonging is often understood as having less to do with wealth and more to do with possessing certain forms of cultural capital associated with membership in the quintessentially liberal classes. This class has become known as the professional-managerial class, or the PMC.

Who belongs to the PMC then? Well, they are the middle-class professionals, college-educated, urban, not the working class, but also not the owners of any means of production. On the point, post-liberals typically draw from James Burnham and Christopher Lasch. However, it should also be noted that the idea of a PMC was coined by thinkers on the left, namely Barbara and John Ehrenreich in the late 1970s. Moreover, the critique of the liberal order advanced by Lasch has been updated and expanded by contemporary writers who I understand to be post-liberal—precisely because they partake in the sort of ideology critique that I have just described. Catherine Liu, in her Virtue Hoarders: The Case against the Professional Managerial Class and Michael Lind in his The New Class War, have both advanced projects along these lines. They both understand populism as a symptom of, and the reaction to, the accelerating liberalism of Western ruling elites.

The third and final component of the post-liberal synthesis/project is more forward-looking. It seeks to address the following question: “Well, what is to be done about the liberal malaise?” That malaise being obviously characteristic of Western societies, in their view. To put this in broad and general terms, they answer this question by suggesting that politics should be reoriented away from maximizing individual autonomy, and toward a more robust promotion of the so-called “common good.”

What is this common good? It is usually understood as having to do with the realization of human flourishing. There is something very important to be said here: for many of these figures, there is an objective component to what flourishing means. It is not just what you or I think, it is not simply what we love to do or what we believe is in our interest. There is, in other words, a capitalized, objective Common Good.

Three Criticisms of Post-liberalism

There are, of course, lots of criticisms that can be directed at post-liberalism. And I would recommend you to turn to the very recent and important books by Paul Kelly and Matt Sleat here. But let me just briefly touch on three. First, are post-liberals attacking a straw man? Given the multifaceted character of the liberal tradition, perhaps the most obvious criticism of post-liberalism is that its leading scholars have misconstrued liberalism. And I think there is certainly something to be said for this criticism, although some post-liberals are more careful in defining what they mean by liberalism than others Some years ago, Helena Rosenblatt wrote a wonderful history called The Lost History of Liberalism, where she emphasizes that virtually all, or at least a great many, liberal thinkers and political practitioners were in fact deeply concerned with the common good and how the narrow pursuit of self-interest undermined it in some fundamental sense. There has always probably been that dimension to the liberal project, too.

A second criticism can be asked as a question and goes like this: is it inherently illegitimate to refer to the common good? The common good can be given a very soft interpretation, along the lines of proposals that many people would find appealing. For example, strengthening trade unions and intermediate bodies between the state and the individual citizen, trying to give ordinary people a voice in their own government, subsidiarity, and the like. On the other hand, the common good tradition can also be taken in a very, I would say, problematic and pretty authoritarian direction. You can find this—and I am not trying to be unfair to anybody, but I think it is true—within Adrian Vermeule’s project, which he calls in his book of the same name, Common Good Constitutionalism. I think you can quite clearly see that in his project the state is tasked with the imposition of the common good upon a political body, which takes the common good tradition away from the pluralistic understanding that the British post-liberals advocate, and in a quite clearly, illiberal direction.

Finally, a third criticism can again be led into with a question: is it possible to regenerate the social states and corresponding set of practices that post-liberals believe liberalism has eroded? This is a point of critique that you can level at many forms of communitarian thinking. I think one may seriously doubt whether the enabling conditions for flourishing local communities, democratic virtues, and solidarity can be cultivated and resurrected through political means. To re-create thick communities in an age of global supply chains, digital media, and geographic mobility in societies characterized by deep pluralism and heterogeneity along all possible axis of differentiation seems like a pretty tall order.

Whether one finds the post-liberal diagnosis of liberalism convincing, or one of the post-liberal projects attractive, or rather finds the criticisms enumerated above more persuasive, or liberalism worth supporting and redeeming today, the fact nonetheless remains that post-liberalism is a potent force in politics today, and very well may remain so for some time. If my book helps to clarify some things about our contemporary moment, then it will have served its purpose.

Stefan Borg is Associate Professor in Political Science at the Swedish Defence University. His current research agenda includes contemporary critics of liberalism, as well as U.S. foreign and security policy. He has previously written a book on the theoretical foundations of European integration called European Integration and the Problem of the State: A Critique of the Bordering of Europe (2015), and has published articles in a number of international journals.

Dear readers, presented below is the agenda that accompanied the Institute for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies’ conference Post-Liberalism: An Exploration, held on October 20, 2025, at The George Washington University. We have recreated it here for two reasons. First, it is a testament to the exciting and novel work we are undertaking here on our Postliberalism platform. Second, the themes, speakers, and their biographies may be useful resources for those interested in our changing societies and their futures.

In a time marked by deepening disillusionment with liberal orthodoxies, this conference gathers scholars and thinkers to explore the contours of an emerging postliberal imagination. We use post-liberalism as a placeholder for a multifaceted exploration into the crisis of liberal thought and practice and the new political imaginaries that have opened to replace liberalism or compete with its cultural hegemony. While the prefix “post-” presupposes a chronological positioning of what might come after liberalism, we include in our definition a plurality of right-wing and left-wing proposals to reframe our political and social order, as well as possible reimaginings of liberalism itself.

9:00 am | Welcoming remarks from Marlene Laruelle

9:15 - 10:30 am | Panel 1: Is Postliberalism Already Here?

This first panel explores the evolving political landscapes of the United States and Europe through the lens of postliberalism. It examines how liberalism is transforming under the pressures of populism, cultural fragmentation, and economic discontent, and how various forms of illiberalism have emerged in response, offering alternative visions of political and moral order. Panelists will consider whether these developments signal the decline of the liberal consensus or its adaptation to new conditions, and to what extent postliberal ideas are already shaping policy, institutional life, and cultural narratives on both sides of the Atlantic. What is lost when we move beyond liberalism? What, if anything, must be retained from the liberal order?

Chair: Joshua Tait, Ronald Reagan Institute

Adrian Pabst, University of Kent

Helena Rosenblatt, City University of New York

Matthew Schmitz, Compact Magazine

11:00 am - 12:30 pm | Panel 2: Twenty-first Century Christianity versus Technofuturism

To what extent can transhumanism be understood as the next stage in human evolution, potentially enabling the transcendence of our biological limitations? This vision of humanity’s future raises profound ethical questions concerning the desirability and implications of post-humanist trajectories. Should such aspirations be regarded as an opportunity for radical enhancement, or rather as a perilous attempt that risks undermining the very essence of what it means to be human? Furthermore, it is worth considering whether religious traditions, such as 21^st century Christianity and others, offer ontological frameworks capable of informing and shaping ethical approaches to emerging technologies, including artificial intelligence. Could these traditions provide sufficiently robust conceptions of human dignity and purpose to ground new forms of technological regulation?

Chair: Jerome Copulsky, Berkley Center

Kevin Vallier, University of Toledo

Leah Libresco Sargeant, Author

Will Wilson, CEO, Antithesis

1:15 - 2:30 pm | Panel 3: Postliberalism, Capitalism, and Class Structures

How can postliberalism fulfill its commitment to the revitalization of local communities and social bonds? What stance should postliberal thought adopt toward capitalism and neoliberalism, given their emphasis on market individualism and global economic integration? Furthermore, is the pursuit of the common good feasible in the absence of a strong state capable of promoting and safeguarding shared moral and social ends? Finally, should postliberals seek strategic alliances with libertarian actors, despite their differing conceptions of freedom and authority, or would collaboration with segments of the political left offer a more promising basis for advancing communal and solidaristic goals?

Chair: Angus Burgin, Johns Hopkins University

Sohrab Ahmari, UnHerd

Elizabeth Anderson, University of Michigan

Stan Veuger, American Enterprise Institute

2:45 – 4:00 pm | Panel 4: Civilization, Nation, Empire, Network Cities?

How might we reconceptualize our collective experience in a world that is increasingly moving beyond liberal paradigms? One possible approach is a renewed emphasis on nation-state sovereignty against supranational institutions, while another considers the potential revival of imperial structures as frameworks for political order. Alternatively, emerging models such as network cities may offer new forms of citizenship and belonging that transcend traditional territorial boundaries. This raises further questions about the existence and coherence of civilizations: can such civilizational identities be meaningfully delineated and preserved in contemporary contexts?

Chair: Peter Slezkine, Stimson Center

Emma Ashford, Stimson Center

Christopher Caldwell, Claremont Institute

Sumantra Maitra, Center for Renewing America

4:15 – 5:45 pm | Panel 5: Humans in their Environment

This panel explores how postliberal thought confronts rival visions of progress. Critics of growth emphasize ecological limits, warning against extractivism and urging restrained, sustainable pathways. By contrast, advocates of abundance argue that radical increases in supply—housing, energy, infrastructure, public services— combined with regulatory reform and stronger state capacity can expand prosperity and reduce scarcity without resigning to permanent limits. Rather than isolating the environment as a technical issue, the discussion situates it within the larger struggle over the meaning of progress: is nature a boundary to respect or a challenge for human ingenuity?

Chair: Gerard Toal, Virginia Tech

Alec Stapp, Institute for Progress

Simon Nicholson, American University

Dirk Philipsen, Duke University

Anatol Lieven, Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft

Speaker Bios

Sohrab Ahmari is the U.S. editor of UnHerd. Before that, he co-founded Compact, and served for nearly a decade at News Corp., as the op-ed editor of the New York Post and a columnist and editor with the Wall Street Journal opinion pages in New York and London. In addition to those publications, his writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, The New Republic, The New Statesman, and Dissent, among many others. His books include Tyranny, Inc (2023) and The Unbroken Thread (2021), both published by Penguin Random House. His next book, The Triumph of Normal, is forthcoming from HarperCollins.

Elizabeth Anderson is Arthur F. Thurnau Professor and John Dewey Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy and Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan and specializes in political philosophy, ethics, and philosophy of economics.

Emma Ashford is a Senior Fellow with the Reimagining US Grand Strategy program at the Stimson Center. She works on a variety of issues related to the future of U.S foreign policy, international security, and the politics of global energy markets. She has expertise in the politics of Russia, Europe, and the Middle East. Ashford is also a nonresident fellow at the Modern War Institute at West Point, and an adjunct assistant professor in the Security Studies Program at Georgetown University.

Angus Burgin is Associate Professor at John Hopkins University. He is currently finishing a book on the intellectual history of the internet. Other recent writings on the political economy of technology are available in The Presidency of Donald Trump: A First Historical Assessment (Princeton, 2022), Beyond the New Deal Order (Penn, 2019), and American Labyrinth: Intellectual History for Complicated Times (Cornell, 2018). He is an executive editor of the series Intellectual History of the Modern Age with the University of Pennsylvania Press, and is on the editorial board at Modern Intellectual History, where he served as co-editor through 2022.

Christopher Caldwell is a contributing editor at the Claremont Review of Books and a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times. He was previously a senior editor at the Weekly Standard and a columnist for the Financial Times. He is the author of Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam and the West and the New York Times bestseller The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties.

Jerome E. Copulsky is a research fellow at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs at Georgetown University. Previously, he served as a Senior Advisor in the Office of Religion and Global Affairs at the U.S. Department of State and was a Jefferson Fellow at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History. He is the author of American Heretics: Religious Adversaries of Liberal Order (Yale University Press, 2024).

Helena Rosenblatt Dhar is Distinguished Professor of History and Political Science at The Graduate Center, CUNY and recent recipient of a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. She teaches in the PhD Programs in History, French, and Political Science, and the MA Program in Liberal Studies at the Graduate Center. She is also a faculty member of the M.A. Program in Biography and Memoir. Her third and most recent book, The Lost History of Liberalism from Ancient Rome to the Twenty-First Century, Princeton University Press, 2018, recovers the moral core of liberalism by tracing the history of the words “liberal” and “liberalism” across the centuries.

Marlene Laruelle is Research Professor of International Affairs and Political Science at the George Washington University. She is the Director of the Illiberalism Studies Program and the editor of postliberalism.org, and the former Director of the Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies (IERES) at GW. Trained as a political philosopher, she studies the shifting ideological landscapes of Russia, Europe and the United States, with a focus on the rise of illiberal movements and the emergence of postliberal imaginaries.

Anatol Lieven is the director of the Eurasia Program at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. He was formerly a professor at Georgetown University in Qatar and in the War Studies Department of King’s College London. He also served as a member of the advisory committee of the South Asia Department of the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office and of the academic board of the Valdai discussion club in Russia. He holds a B.A. and Ph.D. in history and political science from Cambridge University in England.

Sumantra Maitra is the Director of Research and Outreach at The American Ideas Institute, a Senior Fellow at Center for Renewing America, and an Elected Fellow at the Royal Historical Society, London. He is also an advisor to the Congressional Greenland caucus. He coined the Dormant NATO doctrine, and his latest book is titled The Sources of Russian Aggression, published in 2024 by Rowman & Littlefield.

Simon Nicholson is Associate Professor and Associate Dean for Research in the School of International Service at American University. He also co-directs American University’s Institute for Responsible Carbon Removal. He writes and teaches on global environmental governance, the politics of climate change response technologies, and global food politics.

Adrian Pabst is Professor of Politics at the University of Kent and the Deputy Director of the National Institute of Economic Studies. He is a contributing writer to New Statesman and the author of Postliberal Politics (2021).

Dirk Philipsen teaches economic history at Duke University and plays a leading role in Duke’s climate commitment initiative. He is also Senior Fellow at the Kenan Institute for Ethics, director of the Duke University Focus cluster on “Building a Better World,” Fellow at the Royal Society of Arts, and founding associate of the Wellbeing Economy Alliance. His latest book is The Little Big Number: How GDP Came to Rule the World, and What to Do About It (Princeton University Press). He is the co-author, alongside Lewis Akenji, of a forthcoming book on Dignity for All as a foundation for transformative futures.

Leah Libresco Sargeant is the author of three books: The Dignity of Dependence: A Feminist Manifesto (University of Notre Dame Press, 2025), Arriving at Amen: Seven Catholic Prayers that Even I Can Offer (Ave Maria Press, 2015), and Building the Benedict Option (Ignatius Press, 2018). Her freelance writing has appeared in The New York Times, First Things, The Dispatch, The New Atlantis, and others. She runs the substack community Other Feminisms (otherfeminisms.com) and works on family policy in D.C.

Matthew Schmitz is the editor of Compact and co-host of Against the Grain. Previously he was a senior editor of First Things. His essays on politics and culture have appeared in publications including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, and Politico. A native of O’Neill, Neb., he holds a bachelor’s in English from Princeton University and lives in New York City with his wife and four sons.

Peter Slezkine is Senior Fellow and Director of the Russia Program at the Stimson Center and host of The Trialogue Podcast. He has expertise on US foreign policy, the former Soviet Union, and Sino-Russian relations. He received his Ph.D. in history from Columbia University and has held fellowships at East China Normal University, the Wilson Center, the Clements Center at the University of Texas, Austin, the Belfer Center at the Harvard Kennedy School, and International Security Studies at Yale University.

Alec Stapp is the co-founder and co-CEO of IFP. Previously, Alec was the director of technology policy at the Progressive Policy Institute, a research fellow at the International Center for Law and Economics, a technology policy fellow at the Niskanen Center, and a graduate research fellow at the Mercatus Center. Alec’s work has been published in the Washington Post, The Atlantic, MIT Technology Review, and Politico. He has also been cited in numerous publications including the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, and the New York Times. He received his master’s degree in economics from George Mason University and a bachelor’s degree from the University of Arizona.

Joshua Tait is a historian of American conservatism. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina and is a visiting scholar at the Ronald Reagan Institute. Between 2021 and 2024, he worked for the New Zealand government. Tait is the author of the “To Live is To Maneuver” Substack and a forthcoming history of the conservative intellectual movement.

Kevin Vallier is a Professor of Philosophy at the Institute of American Constitutional Thought and Leadership at the University of Toledo. He is the author of four monographs, five edited volumes, and over fifty peer-reviewed book chapters and journal articles. His published works include Liberal Politics and Public Faith: Beyond Separation (Routledge, 2014), Must Politics Be War? Restoring Our Trust in the Open Society (Oxford University Press, 2019), Trust in a Polarized Age (Oxford University Press, 2020), All the Kingdoms of the World: On Radical Religious Alternatives to Liberalism (Oxford University Press, 2023).

Stan Veuger is a senior fellow in economic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the editor of AEI Economic Perspectives, and an affiliate of AEI’s Center on Opportunity and Social Mobility. He is also a visiting lecturer of economics at Harvard University, an affiliate of Harvard’s Center for American Political Studies, and a fellow at the IE School of Politics, Economics, and Global Affairs. He was a Campbell Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution in May 2022.

Will Wilson is the co-founder and CEO of Antithesis. Prior to becoming an entrepreneur, he was a mathematician and AI researcher, and worked in software engineering roles at Apple and Google.

Dirk Philipsen delivers remarks at the Institute for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies’ conference Post-Liberalism: An Exploration, held on October 20, 2025, at The George Washington University.

Dirk, you have argued in many articles and in your latest book, The Little Big Number: How GDP Came to Rule the World, and What to Do About It, that GDP and the discussions and rankings based on it is a broken compass for analyzing economies. Could you summarize for our readers what is fundamentally wrong with the growth-centric ways of understanding our economy today, and specifically the metric of GDP?

What is wrong with GDP and what is wrong with a growth-centered economy are two slightly different questions. I started analyzing GDP as more than just a metric, for it is also a goalpost of today’s economies. It is about as singular and as basic, i.e., rudimentary, of a metric as you can possibly imagine because it counts nothing other than market transactions: what goods and services are bought and sold in the marketplace. It makes no differentiation as to whether these goods and services are good or bad. It has no insight on what impact they have on society, whether they create inequality or enormous amounts of environmental damage. None of those things are part of the metric. If you want a “wellbeing economy”—or strive for any other kind of valuable purpose, like sustainability of fairness or equity or opportunity—GDP as a metric is a complete failure.

Having said that, it is also important to note that just changing the metric would not change the system, because GDP is actually a pretty well-suited metric for the nature and logic of capitalism. Here I would say the same thing about capitalism that I said about GDP, which is that capitalism is effectively a system defined by its systemic imperative to grow forever. That imperative comes from its singular goal of growth and profit. In that sense, both capitalism and GDP are profoundly and simply, using the words of systems thinker Donella Meadows, and not putting too fine of a point on it, “stupid.” Why? Because their exceedingly narrow lens does not take into account anything that real people care about, whether that is freedom, justice, sustainability, or any other value that sustains or improves lives.

Economists like to claim that economic growth drives human wellbeing—that there is a close correlation between growth and wellbeing. But the evidence is actually remarkably thin. Many of the gains we celebrate—like rising life expectancy—stemmed not from growth at all, but from basic public health measures such as sanitation. And some of the most profound advances in human dignity—the abolition of slavery, the end of child labor—emerged not because of capitalism’s logic, but in direct resistance to it.

There are two key aspects of capitalism that one should note. One is that it is a system that always takes more than it gives back. Two is that it is a system that by definition has to grow forever and exponentially. This requires a little bit of clarification, because in my experience as a scholar and teacher, I have found that even smart academics can’t really wrap their head around the exponential function. Exponential means that, if you followed what economists would generally consider to be a healthy growth rate of about 3%, the economy would have to double in output roughly every 24 years. You would very quickly get to the point where every five-year-old would tell you that this is complete and absolute insanity. It’s absurd to think that we could do that, and it’s absurd to think that we would find it desirable. I want to say that very clearly: what every smart five-year-old would understand to be insane is what drives economic policymaking in every advanced modern economy in the world today.

From socialists all the way to right-wing autocrats, all have one thing in common: they support this idea of exponential economic growth. They differ with each other really only in terms of how to most effectively bring growth about and then distribute its rewards. But if you try to find an economic system or an economic school of thought or a political party anywhere in the Western world that recognizes that exponential growth is impossible, literally making us passengers on a train hurtling towards the cliff, you will find none. I don’t know a single one, including green parties and left parties, which effectively leaves people who do my line of work without a political home altogether.

You say that everybody, from socialists to radical neoliberals, believes in the exponentiality of growth. That means that, to move toward a post-growth strategy, we need to recuse not only the neoliberalism that has been predominant since the 1980s but the last 200 years tout court, given the fact that these years have been characterized by the liberalism-capitalism dyad. A lot of the left’s criticisms of today’s status quo centers neoliberalism, but to what extent do we need to go further back in time and rethink the notion of progress itself, in both its economic and technological forms, as we’ve known it since at least the early 19th century?

The way you frame the question, of course, makes it sound daunting—and it is in some ways. To clarify what I’m saying, it is indeed true that I think that every major political ideology—nationalism, capitalism, socialism, communism, fascism, liberalism—has that fundamental defect: none of them are useful for charting a path towards a future of wellbeing for people and planet.

All of them are actually tied up with the larger architecture and project of capitalism. They are, in some form or fashion, a way to promote, respond to, or ameliorate some of the effects of capitalism. In that sense, of course, what I am saying is profoundly and historically anti-capitalist. By that I don’t mean necessarily to give up on markets and I certainly don’t mean to give up on choice and freedom or development and innovation. I very much mean to give up on a system that reduces, in Karl Polanyi’s words, nature and people to commodities, and a system that functions for one purpose and one purpose only: growth and profit.

There’s no question in my mind that we will soon see this system as a very strange and dangerous detour that we took in history. So, yes, I am questioning all of those projects, every single one of them. And I question them in large part because they all happen within the larger architecture of a system called capitalism that is fundamentally moving us in the wrong direction.

How much do you think that capitalism is also deteriorating democracy and democratic resilience? In many ways, the incredible visibility and power of Big Tech help us see that technological progress is no longer a progressive force, as it has been framed for so long. Rather, it may be a threat to, or at least weakening, democracy. But can that also offer us an opportunity to say that a resilient democracy is based on a vision of progress that is post-growth?

There are two questions that you’re raising, one about progress and one about democracy. Starting with progress, most “modern people” would also define progress almost exclusively as a function of economic growth, by which they effectively mean GDP growth: we see progress when economies grow, when output grows, and when demand grows. Progress, thus, is not necessarily a function of happiness, wellbeing, sustainability, social justice, safety, or any of those more human-centered metrics, which confines us to a very narrow spectrum of things to talk about. So, I would question the way we define progress in the first place.

Next, this notion that capitalism and democracy go hand in hand is bizarre to me. There are historical examples galore showing not only that they do not support each other, but that they are, in reality, in direct conflict with each other—and always have been. The point of a good capitalist is to undermine democracy (and the market, by the way) and monopolize his position, because that is how you most easily make a lot of profit. We have in history dozens and dozens of autocratic, fascist, nationalistic, non-democratic societies that have been capitalist.

I also think this is a good moment to raise this question of what we mean by democracy. I have been arguing this forever with many other people, that what America calls a democracy was always a very truncated form. But it is now becoming obvious that we are moving in a direction where, what I may have previously considered an oversimplification by Karl Marx, namely that the state is the executive committee of property-owning capitalists, is in fact increasingly true. So, I don’t know what people mean by democracy. If 340 million people in America have the choice between two parties, both of whom are completely capitalist parties, both of whom effectively buy into the same economic logic, it’s a bit like going into a bar and being told that the choices of drinks are Diet Coke and Diet Pepsi. Since I don’t like either, I probably will turn around and leave, which is basically what half of Americans regularly do—they no longer vote because they feel like it’s useless. This is also why we have these very strange political phenomena of people voting in the same election for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Donald Trump. Again, Karl Polanyi knew this: people will revolt and push back when they no longer have options. That’s where we are.

It is not surprising to me that there is an increasing conflict between what we call democracy and capitalism. When you talk about Big Tech, that’s just a more serious and modern iteration of the very same dynamic: a concentration, to put it bluntly, of naked power, immense amounts of money, and increasingly weaponized access to information in the hands of ever fewer people. We are having this conversation at a moment in history that likely stands out as featuring the highest level of inequality we have ever seen: we now have a world in which 1% of people own more wealth than the rest of the 99%. That means, for all intents and purposes, that any and all conversations about freedom, justice, and democracy are over before we even start them. Unless and until we begin to address this level of concentrated power and wealth, and begin to take steps toward equalizing it more, I think all these other conversations are just simply doomed, which is why I’m writing a book on private poverty.

If you just visualize the planet for a second, this amazing and hospitable body we call the blue marble, this little ball that is hurtling through space, not only does it become pretty obvious that drawing artificial borders—calling one place Canada, and the other one the United States, and the next one Mexico—and envisioning this as something that can be owned by people and used according to whatever whims the owners have, is a slightly bizarre idea. What it means in terms of politics and economics is that we cannot avoid addressing and rethinking this question of who owns what and why.

In a post-growth world, what would the role be of the state and of the private sector? Moreover, what role would technology play, how could it be understood in a post-growth world? In other words, how might we rethink many of dynamics that we have, for so long, taken for granted?

I’ve begun to worry about terminology like “post-growth” or “de-growth.” I still think it’s important to use these terms because the singular fixation on growth is the elephant in the room. However, in no shape or form do they allow people to imagine a future. So, to be clear: what scholars in the post-growth arena are really arguing is that, rather than organizing our economy—and with it our politics—around the goal of growth, we should organize it around achieving the greatest wellbeing for the greatest number of people within the biophysical boundaries of the planet, so that we can survive and live well.

This could mean a lot of different things and probably should mean a lot of different things in different places, contexts, and countries. It certainly will continue to involve technology, efficiency, and development because we want people to live well and to not do jobs that nobody wants to do. But we also want to do this in a way that does not burn up the planet and destroy the very foundation on which we stand. I can go into far more specifics on what this might look like in each and every case, but the key is really that once you begin to change the goalpost and begin to develop metrics, criteria, and regulations around the question of what impact they will have on the wellbeing of people and planet, how you act, build, and develop will change radically.

I just had a graduate student in my office who was talking about the fast fashion industry, for instance. What’s the problem with fast fashion? Everything is wrong with fast fashion, but where would you stop it? On the one hand, we have a lot of stressed and lonely people who often don’t have enough money and so are going out to buy clothes all the time in order to feel good about themselves. On the other hand, you have an industry that really couldn’t care less about fashion, people, or the planet; it cares about its bottom line, its return on investment. So, they come up with every conceivable way to sell more clothes. The cheapest, most toxic, most terrible clothes that you could possibly imagine, but the more, the better. As long as you have a system that functions on those principles, there’s no hope. We can engage in all kinds of campaigns around the world trying to tell people they shouldn’t do this and go to Patagonia instead, but none of that is going to change much. What will change things is to change the architecture and operating logic of the system itself. No longer reward this ravenous, predatory, destructive, and extractive operating system. Instead, reward and incentivize things that actually contribute to the wellbeing of people and planet.

How do we move toward that? How do we help citizens construct their own transformative visions? Citizens have themselves been socially shaped to be consumers and see their status in terms of income and consumption, and so that subjectivity would need to change. Likewise, without grassroots pressure, the corporate world will not change. So the question is where to begin and what kind of cultural work can be done to help citizens consider that what matters is well-being, care, and sustainability?

That’s, of course, the $6 million question. If I had an easy answer for that, I would probably not be sitting here. However, I don’t want to dodge the question either. I think where we begin is on all fronts. We need all hands on deck and we need everybody who is willing to contribute to that project. The reality is that we will not always succeed in building what we envision. But it is definitely also true that we cannot build anything without envisioning it first. I think we find ourselves in a world with essentially two political narratives. One is a sort of authoritarian or fascist version (Putin, Bolsonaro, Trump etc.) and the other one is neoliberalism (Macron, Harris, Merz). As I just pointed out, both have in common some fundamental flaws that are disqualifying when trying to build a stable and functioning democracy, much less a sustainable economy. Where’s the third alternative, the third political narrative? It’s just not there.

If I don’t understand what the root of the problem is, I will have a really hard time coming up with answers and solutions. Once there is a conversation that points out very clearly that the root of the problem is capitalism—specifically, the element of capitalism that always takes more than it gives back and always must grow—then we can begin to have a democratic dialogue about how to address that problem and build a new vision around it. This is what tens of thousands of people are beginning to do around the world. I am merely a small part of a much larger collective effort to create a political narrative and vision that can guide us towards a post-growth, wellbeing society. To be sure, we haven’t worked out all the details, nor should we, because this needs to be a project that everybody who is interested can participate in.

It also needs to be a project that looks different in France than it does in Zimbabwe or Russia. But its principles are clear; we have made enormous progress in laying them out and the book I’m writing on property will contribute to this as well. That’s the work that needs to continue, so that when you ask the question “where and how can I contribute,” we have a long list of things you can do within your community, region, state, and nation, whether you are an economist, an artist, a teacher, a nurse, or a programmer. We can at least have a north star to work towards. We need to build alternative places where people can become actively involved. In my workplace, for instance, we need to have economics departments that actually teach this. Right now, I cannot send my students to the economics department and say, “take this course on wellbeing economics,” because it doesn’t exist. That’s a tragedy.

This also very much includes having parties that actually represent us, so that I have somebody to vote for. Personally, I have voted in every election over the last 40 years in this country, and yet I have only really voted for someone once; all the other times, I was essentially forced to vote against someone else even worse. That’s not democracy. That’s corporate capture. So, on all of those levels we can immediately start working—right here, today.

Do you think people are ready to hear and embrace that?

Oh, do I think? I think it’s safe to say, “I know!” We had a post-growth conference in Oslo where we thought we could maybe get 150 people. 1,500 people signed up! See the latest election in New York City with Zohran Mamdani. These people are more than ready. The young people that I work with at the university every day are so ready for a different narrative that can give them some hope and prospects, not just a little less crap. If ever there was a moment ready for a third political alternative, this is it.

What about the usual criticism that we often hear? For instance, that post-growth is only a prospect in the Global North whereas, in the Global South, people still need growth and consumerism to develop first? To what extent does the North have to, in a sense, pay the price before the Global South can be asked to also move towards post-growth? This view has good points related to fairness and redistribution. How do we address the legitimate concern coming from the Global South about the cost of development?

I’m very glad that you bring up this really important question. Again, a little bit of historical context is important here: the question makes sense only if you assume that growth actually translates into benefits for people. It just simply doesn’t. The reason the Global South is impoverished—and is actually continuously developing the Global North, as evidenced by the fact that there’s far more money and resources going from the Global South to the Global North than the other way around—is precisely because of this growth regime. If you are engaging in an activity that harms people and planet, arguing that the people who have been harmed should continue this regime in order to get out of it just makes no sense.

Now, does that mean that we therefore don’t have a responsibility towards the Global South? Not at all, quite the opposite. But it does mean that I think it’s probably safe to say that the Global South would’ve fared better if the Global North left it completely alone—not extracted, not enslaved, and not made it dependent. It is also true, now that it has stolen and extracted so much, that the Global North has a responsibility to give back. In large part because of exploitation and colonization, the Global South now indeed has a lot of need for development. And, in some cases, also growth.

But in reality, development is not at all the same as growth; after a basic level of wellbeing, you can actually develop much better without overall growth. It’s obvious, for instance, that you would like your two year old to grow—she has to if she wants to be healthy. But when she’s twenty, you would be insane if you forced her to continue to grow in size—eventually you would end up killing her. Instead, you now want her to grow in experience and learning and such, not size.

That’s the thing: capitalist growth economies can’t make this distinction. So, they force us to grow until we die. It’s the logic of the cancer. Unless, that is, we finally decide that there are much better ways to organize an economy. Cut out the cancer, and instead focus on wellbeing of people and planet.

Dirk Philipsen teaches economic history at Duke University and plays a leading role in Duke’s climate commitment initiative. He is also Senior Fellow at the Kenan Institute for Ethics, director of the Duke University Focus cluster on “Building a Better World,” Fellow at the Royal Society of Arts, and founding associate of the Wellbeing Economy Alliance. His latest book is The Little Big Number: How GDP Came to Rule the World, and What to Do About It (Princeton University Press). He is the coauthor, alongside Lewis Akenji, of a forthcoming book on Dignity for All as a foundation for transformative futures.

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Sohrab Ahmari (left), Elizabeth Anderson (center), and Stan Veuger (right) in discussion at the Post-Liberalism: An Exploration conference. October 20, 2025.

This article is based on comments delivered at the Institute for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies conference “Post-Liberalism: An Exploration,” held on October 20, 2025, at The George Washington University.

Defining Postliberalism

So-called postliberalism is better defined by what it opposes than by what it supports. Adrian Vermeule wants to centralize government entirely and have one ruler embody it; Patrick Deneen traffics in warmed-over Tocquevillianism without the liberalism and emphasizes local control. At a recent conference hosted by the Institute for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies at the George Washington University—this article is a version of my comments there—speakers with postliberal sympathies tried to frame both the Biden administration’s social democratic economic policies as well as European Christian democracy as postliberal.

But whatever they claim to support is typically thinly sketched out, poorly thought through, and illustrative of political theory at its worst. As my AEI colleague Peter Wallison put it in a review of Vermeule’s Common Good Constitutionalism:

“Clichés like “the genuinely common good of political life is the happiness or flourishing of the community, the well-ordered life in the polis,” just won’t do. But at the end of the day, that’s all he is offering.”

All that is indicative of the fact that what unites postliberals, as they actually exist in the intellectual sphere in American politics and policy, is that they dislike liberalism and liberals. A more fruitful way to think about them is as opposed-to-liberalism or anti-liberal rather than as post-liberal. As Julian Waller has written, “[f]or nearly all postliberals, discontent with the regime type of liberal democracy… is widespread, and asserted to not be the only way one can organize political and social order in the 21st century. All share the reactionary mode of disgust with and disdain for the contemporary cultural and political status quo.”

Their disdain for the status quo stems from and manifests itself as opposition to immigration, to free trade, to LGBT rights, to due process, to international law, to multilateral organizations, to vaccines, etc., in different combinations and to different extents but always combined with a deep hatred of mainstream economics. That is how to think of them.

If our goal is to understand postliberals as a political movement with priorities for public policy and modes of governance, it is not particularly productive to treat each postliberal’s specific qualms as meaningful. This is particularly true—and I know this does not sound nice—because approximately no one would care about their ideas were it not for the electoral successes of right-wing populists at home and abroad. It is the elected officials, political parties, and public policies they associate themselves with and who associate themselves with them that make them interesting, to the extent that they are. (The publication records of all but a couple of them bear testament to the limited traction their philosophizing has otherwise gained.)

Postliberal Policy

One reason why analyses of postliberal writing are often focused on theoretical differences between flavors of postliberalism is because it is a movement that operates heavily within the sphere of legal and political philosophy, without putting much thought into public policy.

This has, for the practitioners of postliberalism, at least three advantages.

First, they do not have to bridge their own differences. It is much easier to complain about liberalism and juxtapose it with “well-ordered life in the polis,” than to think through the pros and cons of centralization in rigorous fashion, or to consider and predict and agree on the implications of, say, sudden shifts in or even the details of trade policy. It is certainly easier to blame malicious foreigners or lambast globalists for allegedly betraying America’s workers.

Second, they can remain at a distance from the policies that are implemented in their names. Something you will hear from postliberals is that they are interested in revitalizing local communities, and they will point to neoliberal policies in the immigration and trade sphere and claim they have devastated said communities.

What you will not hear from them is how stripping large numbers of US residents of their Temporary Protected Status helps bring communities together. What they will not do is express concern let alone opposition when immigration enforcement actions trigger massive, negative responses from the local communities they claim to want to strengthen.

Third, it is not clear that their movement is capable of serious policy analysis. To take one salient example: twenty years ago, Patrick Deneen, one of the most prominent postliberal academics, was already auguring the inevitable failure of liberalism, as he does today. What would trigger it back then was one of those intrinsic limits to growth that the enemies of capitalism always see around the corner, peak oil. Peak oil—world petroleum production at its maximum possible level before precipitously declining, culminating in “nature’s reassertion of her authority”—has been predicted for almost as long and almost as erroneously as the Second Coming. Here is how Deneen described some of its “imminent” consequences:

“[D]eclining amounts of energy raises serious questions about the viability of “globalization.” (..) A contraction of the economy will occur, and with it, the basis of many of the jobs that now result from an economy based upon growth. Much of the financial services industry will unravel; indeed, banking itself will come under extreme stress as fiat currencies loose value worldwide, and inflation makes existing and future loans increasingly worthless and dries up sources of investment. (..) Movement of products and people will become more difficult and less frequent. There is significant question about the future viability of commercial aviation. (..) The imminence of peak oil directly and adversely impacts our ability to grow and transport sufficient quantities of food. (..) As far-fetched as these “prophecies” might seem, they are the logical extrapolation of the reality of declining worldwide energy, and with it, declining wealth and the end of expansion and growth. (..) [P]eak oil portends the end of a particular aspect of modernity, the end of liberalism.”

Oil demand and supply—and more importantly for staving off the apocalypse, energy demand and supply--have of course continued to grow. The disappearance of the empirical foundation for his prognostications did not change Deneen’s faith in said prognostications one bit.. In fact, ten years later he published Why Liberalism Failed, in which oil or energy resources no longer even make an appearance and we are back in a safe space free of nasty specifics.

Or think of trade policy. For years now, postliberals and their political allies have complained about the relatively free movement of goods and capital that characterized the quarter century before the first Trump presidency. In this context, the major complaint about liberated trade flows is that they may have been beneficial in the aggregate but created losers in addition to winners, disrupting economic life in some communities. We are now engaged in a much more aggressive version of the same experiment in the opposite direction, with rapid increases in tariffs on practically all imports. Has a single postliberal or national conservative pondered how this will disrupt local communities, while also being harmful in the aggregate? Of course not, and any critic can be written off as a “liberal,” the kulak of postliberalism.

Postliberal Politics

As postliberals are motivated more by what they oppose than what they support, everyday politics is relatively straightforward for them. Embrace the enemy of your enemy, and progress will ensue. Are large corporations woke? Then let’s work with neo-Brandeisian antitrust types. Do Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have an anti-usury policy proposal? Here we go! Is there a number of antisemites who oppose aid to Ukraine, and a set of anti-Muslim agitators who oppose immigration? Postliberals welcome them without hesitation.

This sounds a little thin, and it puts postliberals who engage in political punditry more than political philosophy in a difficult spot. They are supposed to be deep thinkers. They cannot just say, “Well, my incredibly profound political philosophy leads to the inevitable conclusion that I must support whatever Donald Trump and Stephen Miller cook up.” That is simply not their role in the discourse.

And this is where we enter the land of absurdity. I referred earlier to the speaker who tried to frame Christian democracy as postliberal (or preliberal, to continue the semantic games), my fellow panelist Sohrab Ahmari. Let’s think about how this fits in with what we have learned about postliberalism.

Mr. Ahmari does not, of course, mean that he supports Christian democracy as it actually exists, represented by political parties like the German CDU or the Dutch CDA. Actually existing Christian democracy represents a century and a half of reflection, politicking, engaging with the world, and attempting to win elections. Embracing what real-world Christian democratic parties bring to the table would force Mr. Ahmari to embrace numerous viewpoints at odds with his own, including a tradition of center-right moderation, religious diversity, and a broad commitment to free trade. Instead, what he refers to as Christian democracy is a set of impulses derived from his own reading of Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum, combined with nostalgia for the 1950s.

That is fine and perhaps interesting, but it is not, of course, Christian democracy. It is the same rhetorical move discussed earlier. Mr. Ahmari’s project involves the creation of yet another slightly different flavor of postliberalism that allows one to remain at a distance of specific policies, lets one avoid having to think through trade-offs or engage in serious policy analysis, and, perhaps most importantly, vaguely hints at supporting whatever national conservative elected officials do without expressly saying so.

Stan Veuger is a senior fellow in economic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the editor of AEI Economic Perspectives, and an affiliate of AEI’s Center on Opportunity and Social Mobility. He is also a visiting lecturer of economics at Harvard University, an affiliate of Harvard’s Center for American Political Studies, and a fellow at the IE School of Politics, Economics, and Global Affairs. He was a Campbell Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution in May 2022.

Image made using “Marcel Gauchet en février 2017,” by 13okouran under CC Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

This contribution proposes to consider the reception of The Disenchantment of the World through the lens of the philosophy of history that the work implies, particularly via the tension between, on the one hand, the autonomy of modern political society as the opening of man to his historical truth and, on the other, the persistence of a social exteriority to itself—even if now represented in the immanent form of the state. To accept this second proposition is to question the persistence of a “holistic” dimension within modern societies, beyond the individualist doxa, and to attempt to discern in Gauchet’s work traces of a reflection on those “structural invariants” inherent in all human sociality—for example, through the understanding of contemporary ideological phenomena.

One of the most important themes raised in the reception of the monumental The Disenchantment of the World concerns the relationship between Marcel Gauchet’s “transcendental anthroposociology” and the philosophy of history as it is characteristically expressed in Hegel’s work. Despite the author’s constant denials and his firm rejection of the errors of a teleological perspective, critics from anthropological or theological backgrounds have repeatedly pointed out the presence, throughout the book, of more or less explicit assertions about the nature of liberal democratic modernity as a historical moment marking the beginning of humanity’s self-fulfillment—discovering truth through and about itself—an accomplishment marked by the passage from heteronomy to autonomy.

Yet today, as Gauchet’s more recent works have become increasingly severe and short-term pessimistic about the fundamentally antidemocratic evolution of liberal societies, he is now more often accused of adopting a reactionary stance that calls into question the gains of the “age of identities,” characterized by multiculturalism and pluralism. It is clear, however, that Gauchet’s thinking seeks to clarify and reinterpret, at its own level, the dynamics of “democracy against itself,” taking a stand in favor of the political and collective dimension increasingly overshadowed by identity-based and corporatist demands born of expanding juridical and economic logics.

Nonetheless, Gauchet’s descriptions and value judgments concerning the tensions and contradictions of the contemporary period prompt a closer reexamination of his analysis of modernity—an analysis framed only in contrast to the religious world, which provides a powerful counterpoint and is grounded in a universal view of the human condition. The assessment of modernity’s possible trajectories—and the normative positions that aim to guide it—cannot be separated from the “dimensions of invisibility and otherness that are constitutively within us,” in other words, from the recognition of the limits to any radical will of self-institution.

This recognition of limits—expressed in various terms with a shared family resemblance: “otherness,” “exteriority,” “the transcendent,” or “the absolute”—seeks to describe realities that, far from vanishing with the full departure of Western societies from the religious world, persist in renewed and transformed forms due to their anthropological grounding. These persistences play out on registers that may be antinomic. Indeed, the preservation of “regulatory otherness” in modernity manifests itself not only through institutional forms seen as highly positive in the genesis of political modernity—particularly because they support the expansion of autonomy (the nation-state seems, for Gauchet, to be the paradigmatic example of this first modern moment, during which vectors of immanence take on the appearance of transcendence, especially in how subjects perceive authority)—but also through the emergence of new figures seen as fostering a kind of “dispossession” (e.g., the growing hegemony of juridical and economic regulation, which disempowers collective agency).

Thus, the motley variety of these forms of otherness—supposedly evidencing a “continuity with the humanity of the age of religions”—must be delimited and ordered in order to distinguish, where possible, functions that truly stem from a “shared anthropological core” from those that abusively claim the status of naturalness and exteriority. It is also necessary to differentiate or connect, or both, the “experiences of the other, the invisible, and the one” that shape individual existence, on the one hand, and that underpin the cultural and sociopolitical foundations structuring the very formation of individuality, on the other.

While some critical analyses (see Section I below) interpret Gauchet’s thesis as a global narrative of “oriented historical development,” rationalist and progressivist, whose truth can only be perceived and articulated once the full trajectory is complete, Gauchet explicitly rejects this comparison—though he acknowledges the merit it may have: “I am (…) convinced that one cannot escape the philosophy of history: one either does it unknowingly or knowingly, that’s all, and in my humble opinion, it’s in our best interest to know which one we’re doing.” It is only in this very specific sense that Gauchet claims a relationship to a possible “philosophy of history.”

We are thus left to consider how Gauchet conceives of a philosophy of history while he rejects the speculative errors that marked its intellectual failure. He advances at least three fundamental arguments that allow his thesis to claim exemption—if not from the philosophy of history altogether, then at least from its teleological version:

• First, Gauchet’s description of the religious modality of being-in-the-world as a coherent and consistent anthropological type, which—despite its lack of historicity—embodies an “existential” choice not confined to the archaic past but always present as a potential form of collective institution, even as we seem to move irreversibly away from it (Section II);

• Second, his forceful rejection of the progressivist and teleological determinism associated with Hegelian-Marxist philosophies of history, in the name of the radical contingency that governs the adoption of major historical orientations—even when the logic of their emergence can be reconstructed in hindsight (Section III);

• Third, this conception of history—one that gives room to novelty and creativity—can only truly emerge if it is subordinated to the transcendental dimension of Gauchet’s anthropological project, which posits a human nature and calls for a reexamination of the conditions of possibility for any human-social establishment, as well as the blind spots and one-sidedness inherent in its always-particular historical incarnations (Section IV).

The key concept in Gauchet’s position here is the notion of otherness, which expresses both a structural invariant and—through the diversity of its manifestations—the radical discontinuity that separates the religious universe from historical time (Section V). This exteriority thus becomes a pivotal notion for rigorously articulating anthropological permanence and historical creativity, and a fundamental modality of individual and collective existence—almost a universal, whether political, epistemological, aesthetic, or ethical—encouraging a rediscovery of “the constitutive nature of the political shaping of human communities.”

(I) The Accusation: A Rationalist and Finalist Philosophy of History?

Most critics of The Disenchantment of the World have placed the work in the wake of Hegelianism, reading in it a late version of the self-legitimation of liberal democratic modernity, which supposedly offers the key to the human adventure by opening the individual and collective subject to the truth of its condition as a transformative apprehension of the world. For the anthropologist Emmanuel Terray, Gauchet’s interpretation explicitly belongs to a “philosophy of history” by assigning humanity “a direction and a meaning.” For the theologian Paul Valadier, it draws its postulates from the “rationalist thought of identity,” reproducing the radical premises of Feuerbach concerning the reappropriation by religiously alienated man of his creative essence, and inscribing itself in Hegel’s philosophy of the “Same” through a linear and mechanistic reading of history.

While it is important to point out what these readings may involve in terms of misunderstanding, it is true that these assessments are not without foundation within Gauchet’s own writings. It does indeed seem possible to find in him traces of the assertion that the original Decision of humans in favor of religion results in a temporary renunciation of their very essence as historical beings. From the regime designated as “normal” for historicity to its perception as “the truth of man’s organization in what is most specific to it,” it is undeniably the case that the multimillennial religious moment of humanity could be interpreted unilaterally as a long blindness to itself, the mystery of religion being understood by the fact “that the human species, through a very remarkable difficulty in assuming what constituted it, entered history literally turning its back on itself, rigorously closing itself off from the data of its own nature, absolutely refusing the expression of its founding structures as a social species—a denial and rejection from which we are only just beginning to truly emerge.” Religion would thus be only an ideology, in the sense that it hides from actors the profound meaning of their existence in the terms of its generic grounding.

Against this theoretical possibility, Gauchet develops three main arguments to refute his belonging to a teleological philosophy of history.

(II) Religion as a Structurally Complete Mode of Being-in-the-World

Gauchet has never hesitated to repeat how much the influence of ethnology played a major role in the development of his thinking regarding the intrinsic coherence of traditional societies preceding the state, and thereby his conceptualization of historical evolution through the transition from religion to politics. The existence of these societies—not merely stateless but organized against the state (Clastres)—led Gauchet to evoke, always more or less explicitly, this “decision” or “choice” at the origin of the shaping of a religious universe, enigmatic in many respects, but indeed deriving from a true “sociological act” “for which no deterministic sequence can account”: the human species “opted for the religious path, it is in the process of renouncing it, it could have never taken it.”

The effect of this Decision proves to be an “instituted non-power,” which expresses, in a manner certainly unexpected for moderns, a reflexive capacity of the social regarding its own existence, in full freedom so to speak, without this resolution being able to be linked or reduced in any way to external conditions (biological or material), non-political, of the collective being-in-the-world. From the depths of history, humanity is indeed “always already engaged in highly elaborated systems of institutions and beliefs which can only be understood as materializations of a certain disposition of itself.” Gauchet moreover uses the term “unconscious intentionality” to emphasize that “religion is, in the strongest sense of the term, a fact of institution, a human-social stance of heteronomy”—an institutional stance which stems from an “unpremeditated choice” for which Gauchet would have acknowledged the conceptual lineage with Heidegger’s radical gift of Being, but which here tends rather to elevate the religious choice to the status of a paradigm of the freedom of human social establishment in relation to the biological or natural substrate that supports it, even if only to block the historicity potentials that begin to appear through this primordial negation of the given.

For “nothing absolutely compelled the human species to enter history through the door of the denial of its power of history; nothing required that it tear itself from this, in part, through the appearance of the State, and once this crucial step was taken, nothing necessarily led it to switch entirely to the side of deliberate and reflective historical production—just as nothing absolutely prevents it from tomorrow returning to the obedience of the past and to submission to something higher than itself.” And Gauchet concludes: “These are two structurally equivalent systems of options, one of which I value more, but which must be described in their internal logic and completeness.”

This duality of collective orientation all the more strongly refutes the possibility of a teleological philosophy of history “in that there is not one history, we might say, but two histories, driven, from the same human elements, in two different directions.”

(III) The Rejection of Progressivist Determinism

In correlation with this first point, which tends to refute the irreversible linearity of historical evolution from one type of symbolic organization (religious) to another (political), Gauchet endeavors to highlight the absence of what is undoubtedly the most salient feature of philosophies of history: the very necessity of historical development according to an evolutionist and progressivist schema. Gauchet is entitled to assert that “the perspective adopted, insofar as it reasons in terms of the exceptionality of the modern experience, immediately stands in opposition to any idea of necessary development of the Hegelian-Marxist type”: “Not only am I not saying that ‘the disenchantment of the world’ is the meaning of history, but I am saying the opposite: it is the characteristic as singular as it is improbable of the world we live in.”

Thus, the disenchantment described by Gauchet is constructed in opposition to the Hegelian historicist option. The very concept of “disenchantment” is not a simple process of rationalization “involving the necessary advent (…) of humanity to the truth of its powers.” Likewise, the categories of “laicization” or “secularization,” when used to offer a spontaneous understanding of the process of exiting religion, prove to be sources of profound misunderstanding: “The historical process contains no goal toward which it would direct itself on its own and which would reveal itself from within. It is we who shape it, more or less successfully, from the outside and who subjectively assign it the values and goals toward which it is to tend. We have definitively left the Hegelian orbit.”

This resistance to being carried away by historicist drift does not, however, mean a rejection of the very project of intelligibility regarding the meaning of human history. It is thus necessary to reclaim the full and entire significance of the power of historicity, most intensely expressed by the modern experience, by detaching it from its theological anchoring, perceptible in the ambition of total reflexivity, which ends history at the very moment it unveils it.

(IV) A Transcendental Anthropology of ‘Human Nature’: Otherness to Oneself

If the discontinuity between religion and modernity proves insurmountable at the level of the inevitable choice of a mode of collective being, it nonetheless rests on various formal invariants and a transcendental necessity unchanged since the advent of human societies, leading Gauchet to assert that “Humanity, from the point of view of its ultimate values, lives in relative continuity with itself.” Religion and politics must ultimately be conceived as two fundamental institutional choices, two economies of being that embody two different ways of distributing the same constitutive elements and of responding to the same necessity, namely “(…) the enigmatic capacity to determine oneself in relation to an outside of oneself. A capacity that underlies both a phenomenon such as political power and an individual property such as consciousness.”

It is ultimately this elevation of otherness to oneself to the level of a transcendental condition of human experience—declinable in multiple, distinct but interdependent forms (political, ethical, psychological, aesthetic)—that constitutes for Gauchet the irreconcilable and definitive hiatus between his perspective and all philosophies of history, still marked by the religious-origin fascination with the ontological One. The exhaustion of the “secular religions” embodied by philosophies of history represents not the dissolution of modernity but its full realization, and Hegelianism is thereby radically deposed. Unambiguously, the full unfolding of this phase—an attempt to restore total possession of oneself by and through history—concluded in totalitarian and revolutionary madness, supposedly aimed at repairing the split within political communities caused by the externalization of states in relation to civil societies.

In the evolution Western societies have undergone over the past 30 years, what we are witnessing is far more a metamorphosis of ideologies than their disappearance. It is as “secular religions” that they wither and vanish, only to be recomposed through a deepening of historical consciousness and the mechanism of societies’ self-production, now seemingly impermeable to the narrative of Progress and of Humanity reconciled with itself. Hence, the emergence of a new ideological pathology, “a pathology of non-belonging” based on the appearance of “the figure of a pure individual, owing nothing to society, yet demanding everything from it.” Entry into a “market society” induces an “individualism of disconnection or disengagement” whereby individuals conceive themselves as prior and superior to the social bond that shapes them. Yet this individual of authenticity is “the first individual to live without knowing that he lives in society”, relying on a symbolic and cognitive rupture with the social whole, in favor of localized and instrumental connections aimed at allowing him to be a “self.”

But what truly is the nature of this “immanent otherness” once it is irreversibly transported into the human world? If one defines otherness as that which always escapes, from a certain point of view, rational mastery by individuals or collectives, is there not in Gauchet’s thought an implicit distinction between its constitutive forms (as expressions of transcendental conditions of relation to self and world) and its pathological ones (as effects of modern man’s inability to accept his finitude), both incarnated in this unalterable dimension of human experience?

(V) Contemporary Forms of Otherness to Oneself, Individual and Collective

Gauchet’s wager is to account rationally for this human openness to a dimension that exceeds it, without stretching it metaphysically into an unfathomable mysticism, nor reducing it scientifically to a causal or psychic process. In other words, the goal is to elucidate the original donation (this primordial “debt of meaning,” stripped of its religious shell) that allows man to become what he is, and to be what he becomes.

The exploration of this “earthly absolute” was initially structured in Gauchet’s work around a classic tripartition of the relationship to oneself, to others, and to the world. The internalization of otherness at the heart of modernity thus plays out on three levels: of the subject (divided from itself, as shown notably by the discovery of the unconscious), of society (with social conflict and the State), and of nature (with labor and resource exploitation). Among the activities that encourage the perception of this “otherness to oneself,” which continues, despite the exit from religion, to nourish subjective experiences, Gauchet mentions a heterogeneous set where festivities, sports, music, and even drug use mingle—a “religiosity that ignores itself.”

The interpretation of the notion of “autonomy” thus operates under a renewed meaning—not full mastery and capacity for detachment, but endless work of reflexive elucidation, which concerns both subjectivity and collectivity: “When metaphysical identity—autonomy—takes hold, humanity’s relationship to itself becomes a relationship of functional otherness, whether on the collective level, in society, in politics, or on the individual level. Everything plays out between self and self, but by means of a practical exteriority to self. This is the modern economy of subjectivity. It is the notion of that general form of relation where the effectuating difference is the support of an open identity, in search of itself, unfinishable.”

But above all, the aim is to uncover the nature of the political as “otherness to self.” For the stakes of the political are transcendental: “the political, beyond politics, remains instituting, invisibly or implicitly. It remains instituting without being determining—at least in an open way.” Unlike sacred power, whose legitimacy is anchored in an invisible beyond, politics as rediscovered in the modern, post-religious era “no longer needs to be that which commands the order of the community; it is that which institutes it, that which allows it to exist as a community. It does not dictate its way of being—it makes it be.” (ibid.:302).

Nonetheless, this reflexive “collective autonomy” in action is not expressed in full mastery of the causes and consequences of its historical destiny. Depending on the triumph of democratic principles—which affirms the possibility that some of its specific components (the market and law as regulatory spheres, the individual as a primary value) may turn against the very conditions of possibility that ensure and determine its existence (the nation as a historical-cultural form of being-together, and the State as the instrument of self-determination for the sovereign political community)—moderns find themselves led to a “forced and constrained rediscovery of the political.” Even though, for the past 30 years, the political has been progressively obscured by the predominance of the “liberal fact” (expressed through the expansion of the juridical and economic domains at the expense of the nation-state collective), it remains an irreducible dimension of human experience, even if contested by proponents of a more or less theorized cosmopolitanism.

This split in modern autonomy helps explain why multiple processes—which, strictly speaking, arise only from the voluntary interactions of individuals and organizations—end up projected into a form of hidden and insidious heteronomy. For “explicit autonomy,” left to itself, proves to be infinite and unlimited—in the name of claims to authenticity, expressivity, self-sufficiency, dignity—until it turns against all the foundational dimensions of otherness, all the structuring institutions indispensable to the subject’s becoming fully human within free collectives: the State, the nation, the school, the family, etc.

And thus, the unbound subject continues nonetheless to fuel logics of regulation (reconfigured at other levels) that escape all control, because they are presumed to directly express a “neutral” and descriptive point of view (expert, scientific, juridical: all that superficially appears to escape political or ideological influence, now rendered synonymous with arbitrariness). The macro-social, systemic constraints that bind the individual prove all the more incomprehensible and opaque, in that they are fed by the proliferation of rights and claims that are impossible to order or hierarchize through shared norms: “Decision, from then on, either tends to become a sort of automatic outcome of pressures exerted from all directions—constantly renegotiated—or is relegated backstage, its elaboration becoming the affair of a technical oligarchy.”

Conclusion

The unexpected rehabilitation of a “human nature” as the foundation of transcendental anthroposociology appears to be the keystone of the difficult theoretical balance attempted by Gauchet, in order to do justice to the dimension of historicity specific to the moderns without elevating it to the stature of an immanent Spirit. Condemned as he is—like all of us—to historicity, Gauchet perhaps deepens, as liberal modernity unfolds beyond all trace of the One, both a previously unnoticed possibility—the dissolution of the very idea of society, and thus of collective reflexive grasp over human endeavors—and the axiological necessity of theoretically salvaging this aim of collective self-determination, even if it means reinscribing it within the dimension that makes man what he is, namely the commitment to that which transcends him: “It is this dimension that religious societies privileged, to the point of making it the keystone of a complete system of meaning placing the human condition in total dependence on an extrinsic donation.”

The quest for “that which makes man capable of history” thus requires a “new understanding of anthropogenesis,” a “radical reconsideration of what makes us human.” If “the experience of otherness, eternal matrix of dependence” has “become the constraining benchmark of freedom,” there is no doubt that modern freedom presents itself as a constraint—both for individuals and collectives—an absolute constraint to never be what one wishes and thinks oneself to be. This is a dispossession that, although internal and immanent in appearance, may be even more radical than the debt of meaning assumed by heteronomous societies—not so much because it knows itself to be final, but because it is experienced as unjustifiable; not because it will remain unatonable, but because it ultimately expresses itself as senseless.

Stéphane Vibert is full professor at the University of Ottawa (Canada). He holds a PhD in social anthropology from the EHESS (Paris) and degrees in political science and comparative sociology. His research focuses on the concept of “community” in the social sciences and contemporary societies, as well as on the theoretical and epistemological understanding of holism, through an examination of collective identities.

Image made using “Voiture en étau de vélos,” by Jeanne Menjoulet licensed under CC Attribution 2.0 Generic.

In this article, Céline Marty exhumes the work of André Gorz, whose work on ecologism and emancipation in a post-capitalist future has found newfound relevance given the contemporary climate crisis. Marty discusses some key ideas in Gorz’ philosophy—degrowth, “sobriety,” and free management of production and time—and their relevance today.

Heir to Sartre and Marx, the philosopher André Gorz bequeaths to us a dual body of work. Under this pseudonym (Gorz was born Gerhart Hirsch and became Gérard Horst after his father’s name change and conversion to Catholicism), he first published Marxist essays theorizing alienation within the society of mass production and consumption, as well as strategic perspectives on emancipation centered around workers’ control, culminating in works from the late 1950s and 60s such as The Morality of History, Workers’ Strategy and Neocapitalism, Reform and Revolution, and The Difficult Socialism. At the same time, and under a different pseudonym, Michel Bosquet, he participated in founding Le Nouvel Observateur in 1964. As a journalist, he disseminated his anti-capitalist political ecology there, grounded in libertarian and humanist principles. He also defended the principle of self-management of needs against the imposition of a way of life by capitalist and technocratic forces. His critique of both the content and the volume of capitalist production led him to the project of degrowth of social production, according to an ecological rationality that would limit it to what is sufficient: less, but better. This collectively chosen sobriety still seemed foreign to the socialist movement of his time. For this reason, Gorz then questioned the relevance of the revolutionary movement of the proletariat, understood solely as the working class, and conceptualized, in works like Farewell to the Working Class: Beyond Socialism and Paths to Paradise: The Agony of Capital, a “postindustrial neo-proletariat” whose demands concerning quality of life could not be reduced merely to improving working conditions. Finally, in works like Metamorphoses of Work: Quest for Meaning, Critique of Economic Reason, and Capitalism, Socialism, Ecology, he defended the self-management of working time as a condition for an anti-productivist existence, allowing for activities and experiences outside of economic rationality.

These ideas, theorized several decades ago, are at the heart of public debate today, in a context where work is examined through the prism of happiness and meaning, and where ecological urgency compels us to rethink our philosophical systems. We thus seek to demonstrate the contemporary relevance of André Gorz’s philosophy and its fruitfulness for thinking about the social and ecological problems posed by the organization of employment, as well as the perspectives that enable social production to be readapted to fit needs and sufficiency.

Degrowth

Going beyond the Marxist tradition, which focuses its critique of capitalism on working conditions—denouncing alienation (workers are dispossessed of the control and outcomes of their activity) and exploitation (their labor is not remunerated at its fair value, with profits being appropriated)—Gorz attacks the content of production itself.

From The Morality of History onward, Gorz criticizes capitalism’s boundless productivist logic, which seeks growth in production as an end in itself. Production is intended to increase perpetually and at an ever-accelerating pace in order to guarantee a certain profit rate. To achieve this, it is organized to constantly stimulate future consumption—through waste, advertising, marketing, or various forms of planned obsolescence that degrade the quality and use-value of products. Gorz’s conclusion is unequivocal: capitalist production aims to maximize profits rather than to sustainably meet social needs. In contrast, socialist production could better satisfy these needs while consuming far fewer resources and producing higher-quality goods.

This choice of reducing production is grounded in an analysis of capitalism’s ecological consequences. As early as the 1960s, in his articles, Gorz/Bosquet warned of the health and climate effects of air pollution, of the finitude of productive resources (fossil fuels and metals) that capitalism presupposes to be unlimited, and of the problems caused by the industrialization of agricultural production, such as dependence on industrial inputs and declining yields due to soil degradation. Gorz recognized the ecological cost of every act of production: it irreversibly destroys material, energy, and human resources, wears down infrastructure, and generates waste and other phenomena requiring additional human labor to address.1

By revealing the material limits of production, ecology contradicts the goal of infinite growth and is thus necessarily anti-capitalist. Gorz observes that capitalism does not consider these material constraints and its extractions from ecosystems, unless they are monetarily evaluated, quantified, and attributed to a stage in the value chain. However, capitalism can attempt, temporarily, to adapt in order to maintain its profit rate by increasing the prices of goods or relocating polluting industries to poorer countries. In parallel, the state can take advantage of ecological urgency to strengthen its power by creating institutions and regulations managed by experts, rather than developing a democratic ecology.

Furthermore, the prospect of ecological degrowth in production comes up against the conservatism surrounding employment. In a wage-based society, where employment determines access to economic resources and social rights, it also becomes socially fetishized. At the individual level, having a job becomes an end that dictates educational pathways and life choices, while at the collective level, unemployment is seen as the scourge of the century, to be fought at all costs by creating jobs, regardless of their purpose or working conditions.

Gorz critiques this ideology of work that, by portraying it as the quintessential human activity, justifies the existence of any job and acceptance of the capitalist labor market as it is. Due to the slowdown of economic growth, the gradual deindustrialization starting in the 1970s, and the emergence of structural unemployment, governments saw the “service society” as a way to create non-relocatable jobs, even though it could instead have been an opportunity to radically reduce both production and everyone’s working time. For this reason, Gorz opposed these “servant jobs” (such as delivery services or domestic cleaning), consumed by the wealthiest who can afford to buy the time of the most precarious workers rather than doing domestic work themselves.

Today, employment conservatism is reflected in defending the continued production of good or services with minimal utility (such as meal deliveries), that are highly polluting (aviation), and even socially harmful (advertising), simply to preserve the jobs they entail. Not all of the jobs we know today are necessarily desirable in an ecological society. While the ecological transition will create certain jobs (in repair, recycling, teaching daily skills, peasant agriculture, care work, and sustainable mobility), it will also require eliminating existing jobs that serve capitalist production and have negative collective consequences.

Self-management

Gorz’s original contribution is to subordinate the content and volume of production to social needs. Whereas the Eastern Bloc partially copied Western capitalist production—notably in the case of individual automobiles—Gorz envisioned eco-socialist production in a radically different way. The latter would be organized according to ecological criteria (sustainability and resource conservation) combined with socialist values (resource sharing and equalization of living conditions).

Such a perspective requires questioning the relevance of our needs today and imagining how to satisfy them without relying on capitalist goods and tools: which of our needs should take priority, and what are the most resource-efficient means to fulfill them? What are our actual transportation needs, and how can they be met other than through airplanes or individual cars? What are our dietary needs, and how can they be satisfied without industrial, meat-based, globalized food systems? The goal is not to “green” current production but to transform it, reducing it to what we collectively deem sufficient for a good life.

To determine these modalities, Gorz preferred collective and democratic deliberation over centralized and technocratic planning, as implemented in Eastern Bloc countries. Populations, aware of their own situations and local resources, are best placed to know their needs and the most effective means to satisfy them. This is a form of self-management of needs bringing together producers, consumers, users, and residents, which Gorz envisioned after theorizing workers’ control over production. This collective organization of subsistence was once at the heart of peasant communities before being undermined by industrial capitalism through rural exodus and the commodification of need satisfaction.

For Gorz, an “ecological nebula” of popular movements seeks to fulfill its needs outside of markets and institutions, opposing capitalist and technocratic projects that appropriate resources (water, land, energy) and then impose specific conditions for their use. In his view, political ecology is intrinsically self-managing: it demands that popular power over the conditions of life be restored. It aims not so much to delegate power to political parties or representative institutions as to create spaces and means of action through which everyone can directly exercise power.

Sobriety

Gorz advocated genuine sobriety in production and consumption to achieve sobriety in energy and other material resources. He presupposed that the capacity to moderate one’s efforts to match what seems sufficient is an anthropological constant, exemplified by ancient ethics. It is capitalism, conversely, that imposes the unlimited expansion of effort and desire. By giving individuals the means to think and act according to what they deem sufficient, conditions for collective sobriety could be established.

Human labor-based production is thus conceived instrumentally: work is a collective-productive activity to satisfy social needs with collective resources. As a means serving an end, work can be intentionally limited if needs, resources, and productive efforts are themselves limited.

We must also reflect on the tools used in production. In discussion with Ivan Illich, who advocated convivial tools to replace the industrial mega-machine, Gorz sought techniques that promote autonomy. Thus, as early as the 1970s, he opposed the nuclear power program for technical but above all political reasons: nuclear energy entails centralized and authoritarian management of investments, production, distribution, control, and maintenance. By contrast, renewable energies can be managed, produced, distributed, and consumed locally. Rather than producing electricity to power the tools of industrial society (such as electric ovens, refrigerators, and heaters), these energies can be used directly to cook, cool, and heat. Such low-tech solutions are more easily handled and repaired, thereby increasing user autonomy instead of making them dependent on technical or energy infrastructure.

Gorz also questioned our modes of housing, transport, education, and health care. The civilization of individual automobiles distances workers from their places of living, work, and consumption; capitalist schooling specializes children according to the needs of the labor market; curative medicine attempts to compensate for civilizational diseases without addressing their causes. Conversely, he advocated a school that would disseminate vernacular knowledge, rooted in popular experience, to teach the use of convivial, manageable, human-scale tools, and to satisfy diverse needs autonomously, thereby reducing professional specialization.

Degrowth in production and consumption would improve working conditions by removing stressful productivism, while also massively reducing working time. This would have ecological effects insofar as it would reduce resource depletion, but it would also have social and political effects. It would give each person the means to exist beyond their economic function as producer-consumer, allowing them to engage in the activities of their choice—social, political, familial, cultural, or simply useless, selfless, and free-floating—without being accountable to an employer or the state. This free time would also empower civil society in the face of concentrated political and economic power.

But how can such perspectives be realized, in theory and in practice, when we are steeped in the capitalist culture of “always more at the lowest cost,” which prioritizes short-term interests? After advocating for the self-management of work and needs, Gorz championed self-management of life time as a way to escape the rhythms of productivism. Political revolution calls for an existential revolution.

Self-management of time

Only a different relationship to time can sustainably transform individuals and enable them to envisage, imagine, and desire a degrowth-oriented ecological society. Capitalism imposes its norms through its rhythms, both of production and of consumption: accustomed to working ever faster and more intensively, hurried workers also desire to consume in the same manner, satisfying needs and desires as quickly and cheaply as possible, even during breaks and vacations, which are illusorily considered “free.” Yet the immediacy of consumption carries a significant ecological cost, particularly due to the transport and storage infrastructure it requires.

From the 1980s onward, Gorz studied how capitalism dominates our life time and the temporal organization of our existence. He developed an existentialist critique of working time, revealing its alienating consequences for people’s lives. Drawing on Christian Topalov’s The Birth of the Unemployed, Gorz showed how full-time employment was imposed on the working class, in contrast to earlier practices of intermittent and discontinuous work, as well as multiple activities, which reflected flexible uses of working time. Work time used to be chosen based on income needs, the time of year, economic circumstances, and decisions between various productive activities. Workers were dispossessed of autonomous use of their working time, subordinated instead to the rhythms of industrial production and consumption.

William Beveridge, initiator of anti-unemployment policies and founder of Britain’s welfare state, believed that the labor market and advances in production processes were hindered by intermittent workers who refused strict hourly discipline. As John Smith wrote in the eighteenth century, “the poor will never work more hours than necessary to feed themselves and fund their weekly debaucheries.” Consequently, Beveridge suggested forcing them into full-time work so they would work “enough”: he instructed employment offices, which distributed work, to reject “those who want to work once a week and stay in bed the rest of the time” or “those who want to find precarious jobs from time to time.”

Following the Swedish economist Gunnar Adler-Karlsson, Gorz attributed the economic growth of the Trente Glorieuses to full-time employment, which created exhausted workers inclined to mass consumption of commodities, as they were deprived of the time and tools needed to satisfy their needs otherwise. The more time spent working, the stronger the tendency to consume market goods and services. On the one hand, consumption of “ready-to-use” commodities increased, in volume and quality, due to a lack of the time and energy necessary to produce one’s own means of satisfaction; on the other hand, this increasing consumption was a result of the workday itself, to compensate for frustrations or to reward efforts. The loss of control over work rhythms also prevented workers from adapting their output according to their lived experience at work, with major physical and mental health consequences.

Gorz thus theorized self-management of time, work, and life as a condition for individual autonomy and resistance to capitalist rhythms. It involves being able to decide on one’s own work rhythms and schedules, both in the short term and over a lifetime. This is why Gorz envisioned annualization of working time and discontinuities throughout life with periods of training, breaks, and leave. He asked: “If we could adjust our working time to the needs we actually feel, how many hours would we work?” Self-managing one’s working time allows one to genuinely reflect on one’s need for economic resources. Based on surveys of his era, Gorz estimated that workers would prefer to reduce their working hours to regain existential autonomy, by asking themselves what tasks they actually want to devote time to. They could then, as they wish, carry out daily and domestic tasks that capitalism’s rhythms have forced them to delegate (such as food preparation, home repairs, and childcare).

Since economic rationality is imposed under capitalism in the limitless expansion of efforts and needs, reducing the time devoted to productive efforts and the satisfaction of needs is a way to delimit economic rationality and decrease reliance on production/consumption, which in turn allows for a reduction in everyone’s working time. Creating time outside economic rationality, where the individual is no longer merely an instrument of someone else’s or a utilitarian project, enables them to regain power over their existence: they can engage in activities according to their own interests and values, regardless of their productivity. Such practices are deemed revolutionary because they cannot be fulfilled within capitalism. Self-management of time nurtures individuals’ autonomy and makes them more critical of all aspects of their lives, including at work, which in turn fuels struggles for emancipation within the workplace.

For Gorz, self-management of time is a dimension of the project for a cultural society, one that frees time from economic rationality to allocate resources to other activities, whether social and associative or nonutilitarian and selfless. It goes beyond the capitalist organization of leisure because it genuinely gives individuals the means to pursue projects that hold meaning for them—not merely those compatible, during breaks, with capitalist rhythms. Organizing the coexistence of these different ways of life, relationships to time, and activities is a crucial issue for a democratic society that aims to be pluralistic. This enables various projects and values to coexist: taking time to raise children, developing artistic and community projects, or devoting all one’s time to a business. Current social protection, based on the norm of lifelong full-time employment, does not allow for such arrangements. This is why Gorz considered decoupling wealth distribution first from full-time employment and then from the amount of work performed and guaranteeing all workers an independent income. He ultimately envisioned universal income as a way to share collectively produced wealth among everyone, ensuring material conditions of existence while enabling a plurality of projects and relationships.

Today, this position is debated on the left because it is perceived as replacing struggles for emancipation at work. However, Gorz also viewed universal income as a tool for these struggles: it would free individuals from the compulsion to sell themselves at any cost on the labor market and would allow them to refuse certain jobs to negotiate their working conditions. Unemployment insurance partly fulfills this role, which is why it is currently under attack in many Western countries. By giving individuals the opportunity to live experiences of autonomy outside of work, in other temporalities and activities, universal income subjectively transforms them: it makes them more demanding with respect to their working conditions, which can, in turn, transform them further.

Thus, working less is a desirable horizon for Gorz, according to his eco-socialist values and project, which combine a social critique of capitalism—focused on working conditions and relations of production—with an ecological critique, which warns of ecosystemic transformations. What he failed to anticipate is that this objective can today be seen as a necessity in the context of the climate crisis, which is above all a health crisis, as the World Health Organization argues: it is first and foremost our material conditions of existence, notably our bodies’ capacity to rest, that are affected by the increasing frequency of heat waves and extreme heat (on similar themes, see Chapter 10 of Éloi Laurent’s Economics for the 21^st Century). A human born in 2020 will not have the same conditions of rest and work as a human born in 1970. Yet the repercussions of climatic conditions on working conditions are still barely integrated into collective reflections—including public policy—on the concrete organization of work.

We cannot assume that human labor will continue in the same way—even less that it can be increased and intensified. Reducing our reliance on living labor through restrained production seems all the more necessary given that we do not know, empirically, how we will work, physically, in 20 or 50 years in a climate that is +2 or +4 degrees Celsius warmer.

Céline Marty is a doctor of philosophy; her thesis focuses on the philosophy of André Gorz, analysed through the problem of alienation and the ideal of self-management. She has written two books based on her thesis, Découvrir Gorz (Editions Sociales, 2025) and L'écologie libertaire d'André Gorz (PUF, 2025). Her current research focuses on the ecological transformation of work and degrowth, following on from her book Travailler moins pour vivre mieux (Dunod, 2021).

Most of us today, I wager, spend at least part of our days marveling at how our institutions in the political West have become so corrupt. By “corrupt” I do not mean, at least not in the first instance, “on the take.” I mean spiritually corrupt: incapable of telling the truth; either altogether complacent about evil or positively anxious to do evil; motivated by monetary gain to the exclusion of all other considerations; swept up in a rebellion against nature and God reminiscent of Dostoevsky’s Demons.

How did this come about? A certain “postliberal” philosophical tradition, a tradition to which Simone Weil, Alasdair MacIntyre, George Grant, D.C. Schindler, and John Milbank (in his earlier writings) belong, answers that it came about due to a prior corruption in our understanding of key concepts. Those concepts have been with us for so long, however, that we often do not even realize that we have accepted them or appreciate all that they entail. Although the philosophers listed above subject liberal modernity to a thoroughgoing critique, they do not do so as revolutionaries. It is not their goal to replace an evil power with their own, good power. Their critique, precisely because it is philosophical, is concerned not with power, but with truth. Overweening interest in power is precisely the first thought error of liberal modernity.

Power, Truth, and the Good

In the opening chapter of his An Intellectual History of Liberalism, Pierre Manent provides an account of how Machiavelli set the stage for liberalism by effectuating a change in the status of the good. “One of the most deeply rooted traits of the modern soul,” Manent tells us, “is doubt of the good, the smile of superiority and mockery, the passion for losing one’s innocence.” Machiavelli accomplishes this “loss of innocence” by insisting, by recourse to extreme situations in the life of the city state, that evil is more fundamental than the good; by insisting, in effect, that evil is more effective. More effective at doing what? At avoiding still greater evils, is the best one can say, because the good has already been set aside as the standard.

Another lesson modernity acquired from Machiavelli was that we should understand politics as a technique for acquiring and holding onto power. Simone Weil, noting that this is how modernity understands politics, makes an observation which, though it is in a sense perfectly obvious, is quite often ignored: power is not an end, but a means. To orient politics, therefore, to power, is, from Weil’s perspective, to fail to practice politics at all. It is to uproot politics from its true end and to immerse it instead in a literally futile—because of its inescapable limitlessness—quest.

The end toward which politics should be oriented, in the view of the postliberal philosophical tradition of which I am writing,[1] is that of the Good—toward precisely that end that the Greek and Christian (and other ancient traditions) used to talk about before Machiavelli deposed the Good, and before Nietzsche certified God’s death.

Weil, without by any means abandoning modernity—she retained an abiding respect for Kant, for example—attempted, in her writings, to reinsert into modernity the priorities of the ancient and Christian world. Leo Strauss frequently describes political modernity as a “lowering of one’s sights.” Weil sought to raise them back up again. She considered many of the “values” central to political liberalism to be relative things. In the context of a society itself properly rooted in the good, these “middle values,” when properly set in balance, can play an important role in the life of the community.[2] But for the life of the person and the community to be spiritually healthy, that life cannot take its orientation simply from avoiding (“fleeing”) evils and discomforts (a theme repeatedly taken up by the heirs of Machiavelli, to include Locke, Hobbes, Montesquieu, and Adam Smith). It cannot even take its cue from aiming at middle-level goods. With her characteristic mix of concision and radicalism, Weil insists on an orientation to the good that goes all the way:

One of the fundamental truths of Christianity is that progress toward a lesser imperfection is not produced by the desire for a lesser imperfection. Only the desire for perfection has the virtue of being able to destroy in the soul some part of the evil which defiles it. Hence Christ’s commandment: ‘Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.’

In calling for “perfection,” Weil is of course addressing her thought not to the legal code, but to the soul.

The Liberal Non-Subject

Thus far, we have established two characteristics about liberalism: that it reversed the ancient world’s ordering of means to ends; and that it, in effect, privileges evil over the good in the sphere of politics. It is at least plausible to suppose that these changes have something to do with explaining our present-day madness (it would be hubristic to claim we can do any more than point at various hints and clues; at any rate, we can obviously not dream of achieving an exhaustive account). In his 2004 essay, “The Gift of Ruling,” John Milbank takes a deep dive into Manent’s Intellectual History precisely with the goal of rooting out how liberalism managed to replace what came before it, including, in the first instance, by replacing the good with evil.

Milbank begins by noting what he views as Manent’s inadequate account of why and how liberal modernity appeared on the scene at all, much less in the capacity of being a replacement for the classical world (a world which still lived on, at least in parts of Europe, until as late as the 17^th century). According to Milbank’s reading of Manent’s account, things came to a head due to the conflict between two visions of human excellence: on the one hand, the self-abnegating saint, and on the other hand, the self-asserting political hero. To skirt this aporia, a new vision of humanity was invented more or less out of whole cloth. The new “liberal” humanity, Milbank accurately notes, would not set itself up as a rival to Christianity in the sense that it would propose some new ideal. To the contrary, political man was now destined to become a pure abstraction from which considerations of good and evil were a priori absent:

…politics was thought of not as the realisation of a natural telos, nor as the abetting of a supernatural one, but simply as the most efficient co-ordination of competing wills, and their summation into one common, powerful collective will…The only thing that now distinguished this bare existence from a blade of grass or an asteroid, was its reflexive capacity for self-moving: its will, which might be equally for good or for evil. Such a choice was now politically irrelevant. Or rather, as Manent says, if anything there was, from Machiavelli through Hobbes to Montesquieu and Hegel, a bias towards the primacy of evil.

This essay by Milbank, it must be said (I add parenthetically that it was D.C. Schinder who first made me aware of it), is, aside from its other virtues, a rhetorical tour de force and well rewards a careful reading and re-reading. Milbank’s argument is that, far from itself being natural, liberalism proposes something “fantastically peculiar and unlikely” about what humans are. Real persons have souls, beliefs, associations. In the Christian world, we were thought of as “a divine gift, as defined by [one’s] sharing-in and reflection-of, divine qualities of intellect, goodness and glory.” The liberal self, by contrast, is a simple blank, to which are attached “rights.” The liberal fascination with freedom and the will has, indeed, precisely the very flaw to which Milbank alludes: the autonomous subject, the supposed holder of all these famous “freedoms” and “rights,” does not exist. Liberalism itself has dispensed with the subject.[3] To the extent it turns everything it touches into a means, it likewise dispenses with truth.

The Unreality of Liberal Autonomy

We have not yet provided a suitably precise philosophical definition of liberalism. In Anatol Lieven’s fascinating contribution to the Oxford Handbook of Illiberalism, he offers progressivism as a key to understanding modern liberalism. In the context of his essay, which emphasizes the distinction between democracy and liberalism, such a definition is extremely useful. It is worth noting, moreover, that the very idea of “progress” is admirably vague about the content of that progress (is it progress toward good or toward evil? Is it perhaps the progression of a disease?). So, in this sense, at least, Lieven’s starting point is very much in harmony with the themes we have taken up thus far. We will explore here, however, a somewhat different take on the essence of liberalism.

Man in his modern dignity, having emerged from childhood into adulthood, is self-directed; he does not need some outside authority but derives his law from within. Such was Kant’s position. This idea of self-direction points us to a concept that D.C. Schindler examines with considerable care—the concept of autonomy. His close reading of autonomy will bring us considerably closer to an adequate understanding of both liberalism and the postliberal critique thereof.

It is a commonplace of liberal apologetics (think Milton Friedman) that man must be free to choose. Choices are free, from the liberal perspective, if they can be viewed as made autonomously. The liberal will, at once absolutized and devoid of substance, feels oppressed by any “thing” beyond that will. The autonomy of the will to will comes very close to being the very definition of liberal freedom, and stands at the center of liberalism as such (I discuss this theme of liberal autonomy more deeply here).

Let us look further into the insubstantiality of the liberal will, which Locke and his heirs posit as defining that “fantastically peculiar and unlikely” thing known as the “individual” invented by liberalism. Schindler begins by noting that the word auto-nomy is composed of two parts: auto, which of course refers to the self, and nomos, which refers to a rule, law or “custom.” There are, thus, two ways of understanding autonomy. One would imply a relationship to nomos as something other than me myself. It is hard to understand a “rule” as in fact (substantially) a rule if it is simply changeable at a whim. In other words, one may choose a “rule” (Montesquieu dwells at length on the monastic rule with the intention of subtly trivializing it), but having made that choice, whatever it is, the rule itself now exercises its own influence as something now beyond my “will to will.” The pre-liberal tradition at its best grants a place for autonomy, but views autonomy as transpiring always within heteronomy—in other words, it views even the autonomous self as always in relation to what is other than the self. The monastic rule, like the rule of marriage, or any given custom, for that matter, does not contradict freedom and autonomy even in their strict observance. In the ideal case these “rules” (nomoi) are embraced out of love or affection, or at any rate out of admiration for their enduring meaning.

Liberalism, for its part, asserts freedom as autonomy that does not enter into a wider relationship with anything. I will add, parenthetically, a quick preamble to my further development of Schindler’s argument. It is easy to assume, though the assumption is inaccurate in this case, that he is making a moral argument. “He is saying we should not be self-centered; that we should will something good.” That may be so, but it is not what Schindler is saying. He is making, instead, two philosophical points about the nature of what is (i.e., ontology, not morality).

The following passage is very helpful in clarifying Schindler’s argument:

…we need to see that the alternative—either self-determination or determination by the other—is a deceptive illusion. As we saw…above, one can be determined at all only through the acquisition of some new form, which necessarily entails a subordination, in some respect, to what is other. Self-determination and determination by an other, if this means a genuine transformation of the self, a becoming different—and what else could determination mean?—can only occur simultaneously.

If autonomy is defined as meaning the absence of relation to what is other, then the autonomous self, with its abstract willing and “self-determination,” collapses into unreality. That is the first point.

But there is also a second aspect important to our discussion, a discussion which, as we noted at the outset, wished to shed at least some light on qualities of our present day world that seem, not to mince words, demonic. It is once again helpful to quote Schindler directly:

If we ab-solutize autonomy (that is, sever it from any relation), which means that we deny that there is a prior nomos to which it is relative, then self-governance comes to mean the power to give oneself a rule whatever one might determine that rule to be. The inversion of means and end that we spoke of at the outset comes into play here. As we saw above, autonomy in the sense we are describing is the power that one has over oneself, but because it is by its nature devoid of determinate content [emphasis mine – PRG], this power receives its defining contours, not from any actual reality, but instead precisely from one thing alone, namely, its exclusion of the power of an other. This exclusion becomes its formal meaning.

From this (essentially liberal) perspective, neither autonomy nor heteronomy point to a “nomos” with any intelligible content. Both are reduced, very typically (!), to nothing but a power, the only distinction between the two being that one power originates from some “I,” and the other power originates from some “not I.” Schindler notes, in conclusion: “We recall that Locke can tolerate subordination to anything but the ‘arbitrary will’ of another. Thus, autonomy, interpreted as a power, is essentially diabolical: it has no other meaning than the keeping at bay (δια-βάλλω) of what is other.”

We have reached, it seems, the very heart of the matter. First, the redefinition of the individual as essentially a “power.” Then, given that this “power” is wholly other, the necessity of a “deterrence” of that “power”—whether by coercive law or by armies and all the rest. We have tracked down to its source, it would seem, not only liberalism, but also the national security state.

Liberalism’s Diabolical Freedom

The good, true, and beautiful, for Weil, is not proven, but encountered. The concept of rootedness is central to Weil’s political thought precisely because it names a complex of practices (cf. in this respect, MacIntyre) and moral attitudes— all of which, when taken together, make possible over time such encounters. Freedom is possible in such an order, because its “rules” inhere in the very nature of things, on the one hand, and on the other, because, given their link to an order that can be loved, its practices are willingly accepted. The rooted world as described by Weil, in common with Hegel’s Sittlichkeit, has the ability to keep to a minimum the number and intrusiveness of laws. It was not zoning law that created Europe’s cathedrals and beautiful surrounding towns, but patterns and a vocabulary that were passed on from generation to generation because they were loved. Liberalism, with its assertion of autonomy from the good, gets precisely wrong the source of real freedom. Liberal freedom, which cannot manifest itself except by means of conflict with the other and rejection of the real, is indeed precisely diabolical.

It is easy to see from the above that the modern (liberal) fixation on power, its rejection of limits, its belief in the greater effectiveness of evil—all this can only uproot any and every community from its own traditions and customs. The community, having lost its prior roots, is left with little more to aspire to than the acquisition of means, such as money or other forms of power. This then generates that familiar feedback loop, whereby the liberal world marches forth to save “backwards peoples,” who are attached to their various customs and religions that restrict their ability to enjoy “modern freedom” (on this point, see again Anatol Lieven’s contributions). This endless cycle of liberal liberation is, of course, deeply dishonest, because no one outside the political West is asking for this assistance (ask a Libyan today how it has worked out for them) nor this “freedom.”

Tocqueville, if I am not mistaken, believed there is no way back from modernity, and that America was in some sense the world’s destiny. After all, Tocqueville reasoned, once consent is enshrined as the political principle, it is not in man’s nature to consent to the loss of one’s consent. For all his insightfulness, Tocqueville seems here to be missing something essential about modern liberty. There is no need to repeat the points already made above. I will simply add that it does not seem such a reach to imagine even the political West eventually growing weary of this corrupt and dishonorable order.

Paul Grenier is the president of the Simone Weil Center for Political Philosophy and the editor of Landmarks: A Journal of International Dialogue. An essayist and translator who writes frequently on political philosophy, urbanism, and foreign affairs, his writings have appeared in Landmarks, American Affairs, The American Conservative, The National Interest, Telos, Consortium News, The Baltimore Sun, Ethika Politika, Johnson’s Russia List, Russkaya Idea, Tetradi konservatizma, and in translation in Russian, Spanish, and French.

[1] The term “postliberalism” can refer, as the reader already knows, to a rather wide range of different political perspectives. The perspective of which I am treating here does not yet have any accepted name, and so I am simply going to refer to it as the postliberal philosophical tradition. This is in keeping, at any rate, with the Platonic (and Christian Platonic) sensibilities of these sources. Plato did not use the word “philosophy” as moderns do. The modern, whether educated or uneducated, tends to use the term interchangeably with a certain arbitrarily chosen set of opinions or ideology. For Plato, of course, an orientation to the truth was what sets apart philosophy from, for example, the rhetoric of a Gorgias, which has the goal simply of being (surprise!) effective. The truth is one, and therefore so is philosophy.

[2] Cf. Weil’s essay, The Needs of the Soul, which was published in English as part I of Simone Weil, The Need for Roots, ibid., 3 - 39. Weil was a proponent of democracy and freedom of speech, and, indeed, condemned Stalinist communism because of its rejection of both. All the same, she did not absolutize democratic values. In her compendium of “needs of the soul,” she balances the needs for equality and freedom of opinion against the needs for hierarchy, obedience, and truth.

[3] On my reading at least, Manent makes this same point about if not the disappearance of the human subject, at any rate the trivialization of the supposed winner of modernity’s freedom sweepstakes—the human subject. Cf. Manent, The City of Man (Princeton, NJ: 1998), 156-157; 180-181, and passim. Manent’s Intellectual History and City of Man present among the most powerful and incisive spiritual critiques of liberalism available, and for this reason it strikes me as unreasonable for Milbank to take this highly-respected (and rightfully so) philosopher to task for not denouncing liberalism root and branch. It is true that he does not do so. Perhaps, under the influence of Tocqueville, he sees no way back.

In this article, Adrian Pabst discusses the collapse of liberal hegemony and the rise of postliberalism, and advocates for a left-wing postliberalism that can rival the dominance of its right-wing counterpart. His vision takes a holistic view of protectionism, pairing conservatism on immigration and integration with commitments to social protection and economic radicalism, mutual obligation, and solidarity. Pabst argues that this paradoxical combination of tradition and transformation is exactly what our moment calls for.

The West has already entered a postliberal era when liberalism is in retreat and no longer the hegemonic ideology or even the dominant framework. Donald Trump’s return to the White House confirms the emergence of new times led by the national-populist right in alliance with Silicon Valley plutocrats. Across the West, right-wing populist parties and movements are rising. Even when they are not winning elections, they are setting the political agenda as the mainstream is forced to respond to these insurgencies. A host of progressive policies—mass immigration, net zero, Diversity, Equality, and Inclusion (DEI), as well as gender self-identification—are being rejected by voters and dismantled by governments. The era of liberal hegemony has ended, and in the U.S. a new era is replacing progressive liberalism with libertarian market nationalism—to which this essay returns.

Where the Liberal Left Went Wrong

Established liberal-left politics is trapped by outdated progressive orthodoxies. Left liberalism seems simultaneously to be too fearful and too authoritarian and illiberal: free thinkers are cancelled, debate is stifled, old campaigns are relitigated, and lawfare against political opponents is deployed. Across much of the center-left, there is a longing for the politics of a dead era—radical individualism linked to maximal choice, unchecked markets associated with global free trade, and military interventions aimed at “regime change.”

The same left seems oblivious to the consequences of liberal ideology: the erosion of close bonds and community solidarity, the disintegration of families and civic associations leading to a steep increase in loneliness, the denunciation of all cultural inheritance and tradition, fast-rising economic inequality, and the disconnect of elites from ordinary citizens and their concerns. “Really existing” liberalism produces in practice the circumstances it originally assumed in theory by bringing about the “state of nature” conceptualized by Thomas Hobbes, in which “life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” and there is a “war of all against all.” The hundreds of thousands of “deaths of despair” from suicide, drug overdose, and alcoholism in the U.S. each year linked to capitalism, and the polarization of Western societies as a result of identity politics are expressions of our contemporary Hobbesian condition.

The Emergence of a Postliberal Conservative Left

There is, however, another left that has emerged in recent years—a small-c conservative left that combines greater economic equality with social moderation. This strand of the left seeks a radical transformation of the economy (moving it away from neoliberalism) coupled with support for more traditional institutions and practices, such as the family, community, work, and patriotism. It does this, however, without discriminating against people who do not fully share these values. Left conservatism rejects the “culture wars” in favor of social reconciliation and unfettered capitalism in favor of more mutual markets—including mutual protectionism among trading partners. For example, the idea of “securonomics” developed by the former U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan attempted to envision a post-neoliberal model that overcomes the “Washington Consensus” of free trade and market fundamentalism, moving toward a system of reshoring industrial production and mutually beneficial trade and protection amongst allies.

The Biden Administration was too beholden to the liberal oligarchy on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley, including donors such as the chairman of the travel site Expedia, Barry Diller, and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, both of whom called for the sacking of Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan for opposing mergers and acquisitions that exacerbate the capitalist concentration of wealth. Nevertheless, “securonomics,” together with wage increases and support for stronger unions, points in the direction of an economic model that can break decisively with the Thatcherite and Reaganite settlement. That requires strict limits on socially harmful population movements within and across countries as well as on speculative capital flows. As the U.K. Labour government is fast discovering, the left will only gain and retain power once it tackles the root cause of legal immigration—the capitalist demand for cheap skilled labor from abroad that undercuts domestic workers. Reducing immigration and reducing economic inequality are two sides of the same postliberal, non-capitalist coin.

One left-wing government has done just that. Led by Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, the Danish social democrats have radically curtailed immigration while adopting a new approach to integration: immigrants are required to accept and adopt a shared identity that rests on reciprocal obligations and mutual regard—the idea that people have duties to each other, not just to their families but to their fellow citizens as well. Mutual obligations imply solidarity with those in need, who in time will contribute to the entire society. Contribution underpins both a sense of common purpose and mutual recognition. In order to inculcate a shared identity, it is vital to nurture crucibles of social interaction and inclusion where people can associate around shared ends, such as pre-school, sports, music, work, clubs, and faith communities. It is such practical processes of integration that the Danish government has pursued alongside strict limits on immigration.

By trying to re-weave the web of mutual obligations, Frederiksen’s Social Democrats are rebuilding the alliance between the older provincial working class, who are socially conservative, and the younger university-educated metropolitan class who are socially liberal. This cross-class and cross-cultural coalition represents majority views and can hold the line against highly vocal groups that are nonetheless in the minority, those whose militant activism destroys any sense of inherited obligations that bind together different generations and help to integrate immigrants into local and national communities. The domain of reciprocal giving and receiving of help has to be both local and national, for the reason that these levels can raise the tax revenues needed to meet mutual obligations. Thus, Danish Social Democracy leads the way in developing a left conservatism that is postliberal on the economy and on culture.

Similar developments are taking shape in Sweden’s Social Democratic Party, Blue Labour in the U.K. and the Australian Labor Party, but also smaller political parties such as the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance in Germany. Common to them all is the rejection of identity politics and the embrace of paradoxical combinations: tradition and transformation, patriotism and internationalism, social conservativism on security, immigration and national bonds of belonging mixed with economic radicalism on wages, social protection of workers, and alternatives to finance capitalism. This paradoxical fusion emerges in a rich intellectual tradition that stretches from Edmund Burke, John Ruskin and William Morris to George Orwell, Simone Weil and Christopher Lasch, but also contemporary figures such as Nancy Fraser, Shoshana Zuboff and Jean-Claude Michéa.

As Renaud Large, the editor of a major recent report on the left in Europe, remarks, “post-identitarian politics has the potential to speak beyond the traditional left, because it articulates a universal language: the quest for dignity, collective security, real solidarity, and civic belonging. It could attract voters disillusioned with the right and the far right but also wary of the traditional left. It could rebuild broad, popular, national, and environmental coalitions. It could restore to the left the ambition of being a majority force, after years of internal contradiction and paralysis.” While left conservatism is still a numerically small movement, it has an intellectual energy capable of renewing the left in Europe and beyond.

What’s Wrong with Right-wing Postliberalism

For now, though, Trump and his fellow right-wing populists across the West are ascendant. Yet, their apparent postliberalism is contestable precisely on left-conservative, postliberal grounds. At first glance, the political positions of Trump and his Vice President, J.D. Vance, may appear postliberal insofar as they oppose the neoliberal model of free trade and mass immigration, advocate a national economy protected by tariffs, and defend a more traditional culture that rejects so-called “woke” extremism. The elimination of DEI programs symbolizes the defeat of political and cultural progressivism, the main ideological enemy of Trumpism. The opposition to immigration, the transition to carbon neutrality, and elite universities (for their alleged antisemitism and ideological indoctrination) stems from the same perception that these policies harm the greatness of an America that is no longer respected either domestically or internationally.

However, while the politics of the Trump administration is rather illiberal on a social and cultural level, it remains liberal, even ultra-liberal, on an economic level. With or without Elon Musk, Trump pursues a vision of “neoliberalism in one country” by deploying internal deregulation and abolishing the last bastions of the New Deal, such as worker and consumer protection. The “Big Beautiful Bill” entrenches tax cuts for America’s wealthiest while cutting Medicaid and other support for the poorest. Similarly, right-wing populists of different stripes in Poland, Hungary, and Brazil—when in power—have funded increased state spending with foreign capital, using low tax and deregulatory incentives to draw in foreign investment. Competitive fiscal dumping is part of protectionism, and complements a clampdown on cheap foreign labor. The national-populist alternative to liberal hyper-globalization is market nativism disguised as the promise of economic patriotism. In times of polarization, right-wing populists resort to Leninist tactics of political purges and institution-wrecking. Such a vision combines the pure economic freedom of the individual with increasingly authoritarian political power.

This vision has its diehard ideologues, including the National Conservative movement of Yoram Hazony (former advisor to Benjamin Netanyahu) and the libertarian ideology of populist plutocrats like Peter Thiel (co-founder of PayPal and long-time patron of J.D. Vance), who fuse political populism with the idea that wealth constitutes the ultimate basis of power—an idea shared by Trump. At the heart of this fusion lies the amalgamation of an ethnonationalist atavism and unbridled capitalism, which separately and together undermine the foundations of freedom of expression, association, and conscience. Instead of upholding free speech, it seems that Trump’s variant of national populism, in alliance with Silicon Valley libertarians, undermines substantive democracy and is now counter-cancelling instead of upholding free speech.

If this alliance endures, then right-wing populism will continue to slide into a monstrous authoritarian regression, tainted by a new technological totalitarianism and the cult of the augmented human, as Thiel advocates in his recent interview with Ross Douthat. The U.S. faces a clash between the composite monster of a transhumanist, elitist, and socially reactionary ideology, and a no less worrying transgender, equally elitist and socially ultraliberal ideology.

Right-wing postliberalism is not a constructive alternative to left liberalism. Ethnonationalist and racist ideas are not just incompatible with the notions of equality and dignity, on which the common good and democracy depend. They are also the ultimate expression of the inviolability of will as self-assertion—atavistic assertions of absolute identities. This is the logical conclusion of enthroning the individual as the highest moral entity, an idea that is shared by both contemporary liberalism and Trump’s libertarian nationalism. The nation-state and nationalism are but the individual writ large. Autonomy from constraints and absolute sovereign power over others are the guiding principles of a philosophy that institutes the will-to-power: the power of some over others and essentially the strong over the weak. In a Hobbesian state of nature bequeathed by ultraliberalism, Nietzsche’s nihilistic will-to-power is of a piece with social Darwinism’s “survival of the fittest.”

Left Conservatism as Realism

If it is going to stand any chance of prevailing against right-wing populism, the left needs to abandon liberalism’s double-headed hydra of utopian abstraction and brute materialism in favor of postliberal realism. Being realist is to engage with the world as it is—not as the liberal left would like it to be—and to shape the new political, economic, and cultural realities. Those realities include the shifts from the end of the progressive hegemony to the rise of plutocratic populism, from de-globalization to the emergence of hostile foreign blocs, from “culture wars” to ethnoreligious conflict, including within Western countries such as the U.K., France, Germany, and Sweden.

Realism demands the recognition that those countries face a crisis of state legitimacy, as central governments seem unable to create the conditions for shared prosperity, provide essential public services, uphold law and order, or build proper defense capabilities in the face of hostile foreign powers. Instead, the state is characterized by balkanization and ethnonational extremism, threatening social solidarity and democratic rule. That is why strict limits on immigration and an uncompromising stance on integrating migrants is indispensable. This includes, besides stricter criteria for granting citizenship, support for language training and civic education in exchange for sharing in the common life of society, the alternative to which is ghettoized, self-segregated communities.

The “market-state” that was built in the 1990s and 2000s for the new globalized era subordinates social ties to impersonal values and abstract standards such as global economic exchange or top-down bureaucratic regulation. It has turned out to be utterly dysfunctional since the 2008 financial crisis—hollowing out not just state capacity through draconian cuts but also inflating bureaucracy and further weakening the bonds of social solidarity. Now that the order of global liberalism is unravelling, the state reshaped in its image lives on borrowed time. A realist politics has to start with rebuilding state capacity at the local, regional, and national levels and do so all at once, in association with renewed intermediary institutions like business associations, trade unions, chambers of commerce, craft guilds, and universities. A more strategic state will use new technological possibilities such as AI and big data to reduce the regulatory and bureaucratic burden that delays core activities: housebuilding, transport infrastructure, schools, health and social care, energy and food supply, as well as reindustrialization. Not unlike the post-1945 era, the left has a unique opportunity to rebuild the polity and usher in national renewal.

Realism also demands skepticism. The left needs to question all utopian visions, beginning with ultraliberalism and the vested interests that dominate Western rentier economies. This involves rejecting the binary choice between progressives and populists, which leaves many voters across the West disillusioned and politically homeless. Being realist requires a commitment to national and intellectual renewal by exploring how the left can revitalize the best parts of its own political traditions while also transforming national and civic institutions that have lost their way in the period of unfettered globalization and hyper-individualism—an era that is now coming to an end.

In his prescient book The Coming Anarchy, published in the year 2000, Robert Kaplan warned that the disintegration of society could usher in new forms of tyranny, as people fear anarchic violence more than they fear totalitarian rule. Today, the West faces neither the prospect of a return to ancient despotism nor modern dictatorship. We are, however, confronted with the tech totalitarian control of surveillance capitalism and hybrid warfare waged by hostile foreign powers. To prevail at home and abroad, left realism has to offer constructive alternatives that can transform the rentier economy based on asset-stripping, speculation, and debt into more mutualist markets based on productive activities, investment, and the sharing of equity.

After the 2008 financial crisis, Covid, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the space has opened up for a majority politics based on greater security, national resilience, a balanced economic model, and new coalitions between social classes and cultures. Now that liberal hegemony is over, the question is who will offer such a new politics. Left conservatism has something the populist right lacks—a critique of exploitative capitalism coupled with a commitment to building a more ethical economy. Across Europe, left conservatives are arguing for economic models where more of a country’s wealth goes into the pockets of the workers and where reward and recognition are closely connected with contribution, including unpaid work such as caring for children and the elderly, work which is still mostly performed by women. Such a model involves building a covenant between the elites and the people linked to a social partnership among government, business, and organized labor to negotiate wages and working conditions. It would champion new unions in the gig economy, mutual protectionist arrangements with allies across the West, much-expanded joint defense procurement in Europe, a clampdown on illegal immigration, and a sharp reduction in economic migration.

A new politics has to begin with inherited obligations linked to old traditions and institutions. The duties we owe to ourselves, to others, and to future generations are the basis for a common life in society and a sense of shared endeavor. A new politics has to recognize that duties beget rights, and that we are more fully human when we earn the esteem of our fellow citizens for the contributions we make to the common good through our work and our care for others.

A new politics also has to begin with people as they are in the families, workplaces, communities, and nations. Most people are still broadly “communitarian” in the sense of being somehow small-c conservative in their approach to matters of family, belonging, and social solidarity, and small-s socialist on public services, fair play, and hard work. Most people cherish liberty, but value authority too. Left conservatism speaks to their paradoxical disposition to be more radical on the economy and more moderate on culture. The future of politics lies in the paradoxical fusion of tradition with transformation.

Adrian Pabst is a professor of political science at the University of Kent. He has published numerous books and essays on the role of ethics and religion in politics.

Image made using “Flag of NATO 4.4.2023 - 52792851125,” by Finnish Government licensed under CC Attribution 2.0 Generic and “Storm Clouds,” by Jo Naylor licensed under CC Attribution 2.0 Generic. All other images used are in the public domain.

For a brief 24-hour period in May, Romania—one of Europe’s poorest and most marginal countries—found itself thrust into the global spotlight as the results from the second round of its presidential election began to emerge. This attention stemmed from the view that the election—which pitted George Simion, the leader of the nationalist Alliance for the Unity of Romanians (AUR) against Bucharest’s pro-EU centrist mayor, Nicușor Dan—represented yet another battleground in the ongoing ideological and political clash often, if simplistically, framed in terms of nationalism versus globalism.

In the first round of the elections, Simion had won by a large margin, securing twice as many votes as Dan, and he seemed poised to safely win the run-off as well. Instead, in a surprising twist of events, Dan ended up securing a decisive 8-point victory over his right-wing rival. Establishment voices across Europe, and beyond, breathed a collective sigh of relief—and were quick to hail the result as a “victory for democracy.” This was a questionable assertion, considering how blatantly democratic principles were undermined throughout the entire electoral process.

Actually Existing Democratic Backsliding in Romania

Dan’s victory came in the wake of a series of events that have severely undermined Romania’s democratic credibility. Last November, the independent eurosceptic and NATO-critical candidate Călin Georgescu won the first round of the presidential election in a surprise result. However, before the runoff could take place, Romania’s constitutional court annulled the outcome, citing alleged but unproven Russian interference.

The intelligence dossier presented against Georgescu—“declassified” and published by Romanian then-president Klaus Iohannis two days before the ruling—provided no clear evidence of foreign interference or even electoral manipulation. It simply pointed to the existence of a media campaign supporting Georgescu that involved around 25,000 TikTok accounts coordinated through a Telegram channel, paid influencers and coordinated messaging. In other words, Romania’s top court annulled an entire election based on entirely unsubstantiated claims of foreign interference—a clear-cut case of institutional coup d’état.

This was the culmination of a weeks-long campaign aimed at delegitimizing Georgescu’s victory, which sent shockwaves through Romania’s ruling elite—and the Western establishment at large. This was the first time that the two parties that have come to dominate Romanian politics since the fall of the Soviet-backed regime in 1989—the Social Democratic Party and the center-right National Liberal Party, united in their commitment to the EU and NATO—both failed to make it past the first round of a presidential election.

Adding to the elites’ dismay was Georgescu’s status as a political outsider: Georgescu had consistently received negligible scores in polls throughout the campaign, had avoided televised debates and doesn’t even belong to a political party. Indeed, he had remained largely “invisible” in mainstream media coverage, relying mostly on social media to get his message out—first and foremost TikTok, which is very popular in Romania. His campaign’s grassroots strategy starkly contrasted with the traditional reliance on mainstream media and established political machinery.

The establishment’s response was swift and aggressive. The first step involved launching a media blitz—both in Romania and abroad—to discredit Georgescu, painting him as a “pro-Russian far-right ultranationalist” and all-round crackpot, and alleging Russian interference, which prepared the ground for the subsequent annulment of the election results. Meanwhile, Romanian prosecutors opened criminal proceedings against Georgescu on charges ranging from “incitement to actions against the constitutional order” to setting up an organization with “fascist, racist or xenophobic characteristics” to antisemitism—even though Georgescu’s campaign focused primarily on economic policy and Romania’s geopolitical orientation.

In short, when smear campaigns by the mainstream media and established political parties failed to stem Georgescu’s rising popularity, the Romanian state mobilized nearly every institution against him—the courts, the police and even the secret services. The objective was to eliminate Georgescu from the equation by any means necessary. Incredibly, a Romanian investigative outlet subsequently revealed that the TikTok campaign used to justify the cancellation of the election was actually paid for by the ruling National Liberal Party—the very party that supported cancelling the elections, and from which the country’s former president, who played a key role in the whole affair until his resignation earlier this year, originated.

Election Interference from the West

A new election date was set for May, but many questioned how the establishment could prevent a repeat of the November results—especially since the entire charade only strengthened support for Georgescu. The answer came in March, when the electoral commission disqualified Georgescu from running altogether. Particularly striking is the fact that the electoral commission’s ruling was based on the “foreign interference” allegations used by the constitutional court to annul the first round of the presidential election, even though these had been debunked. A lower appeals court temporarily reversed the decision, but the High Court of Cassation and Justice ultimately upheld it. At that point, Georgescu’s political fate was sealed.

There is ample reason to believe that this extraordinary turn of events was not solely driven by domestic factors. Given the country’s strategic role in NATO and the war against Russia, it is highly plausible that these actions were taken under pressure from—or in coordination with—Washington and Brussels. Romania has been instrumental in providing military aid to Ukraine. Additionally, it is at Romania’s 86th Air Base where Ukrainian pilots receive training on F-16 fighter jets. This facility serves as a regional hub for NATO allies and partners. Moreover, the Mihail Kogălniceanu Air Base, on the Black Sea coast, is undergoing significant development to become the largest NATO base in Europe. This expansion aims to support NATO operations and strengthen the alliance’s presence in the Black Sea region and its control of Russia’s “near abroad.” It’s easy to see why the Euro-Atlantic establishment would have been deeply concerned by the prospect of Romania’s role as a NATO garrison coming under threat.

No wonder, then, that the Biden administration issued a statement expressing concern over Russian involvement in the election two days before the Romanian constitutional court annulled the election. Moreover, Romanian think tanks and NGOs that received funding through USAID, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and the State Department played a key role in championing the judicial coup, as the investigative journalist Lee Fang revealed.

Some European governments likely also played a key role—most notably Emmanuel Macron’s administration in France. Last December, just hours before the constitutional court annulled the election, the pro-EU candidate running against Georgescu, Elena Lasconi, posted a conversation with Macron on her Facebook page in which the French president issued several thinly veiled threats about the grave consequences a Georgescu victory would have for Romania. Moreover, just a few days before the electoral commission’s ruling against Georgescu, the French ambassador paid a visit to the president of the Romanian constitutional court, in which the two reaffirmed the importance of resisting “the penetration of populism into the decisions or rulings of a constitutional court”—an apparent reference to the criticisms of the court’s decision to annul the election results. Telegram founder Pavel Durov later revealed that he was asked by the French intelligence chief’s request to ban conservative Romanian accounts.

In short, to the extent that there was a foreign hybrid attack against Romania, it wasn’t waged by Russia—but by the transatlantic establishment, through foreign pressure, fabricated intelligence reports, foreign-funded “civil-society organizations” and judicial subversion.

Faux Populism and Co-optation

Georgescu’s exclusion paved the way for the rise of George Simion, which had previously backed Georgescu and pledged not to run against him. He launched his campaign after Georgescu was barred, portraying himself as a defender of democracy and national sovereignty and even suggesting he would appoint Georgescu as prime minister if given the opportunity. As said, in the first round of the new elections, Simion won by a large margin. But why was Simion, unlike Georgescu, allowed to run in the first place? I believe the answer lies in the type of populism he represents. On the one hand, Simion holds much more radical positions than Georgescu on cultural and identity issues; on the other hand, however, he is significantly more aligned with establishment interests on crucial issues such as NATO, European integration and the war in Ukraine.

In this sense, Simion represents a new and increasingly common type of political actor: the faux-populist who combines strident cultural nationalism with loyalty to the economic and geopolitical status quo. This dual identity makes these characters ideal for co-option by the establishment in the latter’s attempt to respond to the populist backlash by promoting—or at least tolerating (even while publicly rebuking)—leaders who channel nationalist sentiments while leaving core power structures untouched.

In the end, however, this “plan B” turned out to be unnecessary, as the establishment’s preferred candidate, Dan, secured victory. Simon alleged that the Moldovan government was rallying the diaspora there against him and also claimed that other friendlier diasporas’ polling stations didn’t have enough ballots. He also said to have found millions deceased citizens in the electoral registries. Time will tell—perhaps—whether these allegations have any merit. But ultimately there seems to be little doubt that “it was the Romanians themselves who determined which of the candidates allowed on the ballot would prevail,” as Thomas Gallagher, professor of politics emeritus at the University of Bradford and author of several books on Romania, put it. “By a large margin, they concluded that in a fractured world that had brought war to Romania’s very doorstep, this was not a time for any leaps into the unknown.” Gallagher explained:

Fears that Simion would lead the country over a cliff started to surface. He made it easy by promising to slash jobs in the urban bureaucracy. A decisive moment was the four-hour televised debate with Dan on May 8. Simion was short-tempered and arrogant and struggled to think on his feet in the face of clever jabs from an unflustered opponent. He abruptly canceled the remaining televised debates, with Dan turning up and answering questions next to an empty chair. The rest of his time was spent traversing Europe, speaking to émigrés while seeming blasé about the economic condition of the country.

It may very well be that, from a strictly procedural standpoint, the voting process was flawless—and that voters freely chose continuity over uncertainty. But this doesn’t change the fact that election was “rigged” from the moment the November results were annulled and Georgescu was barred from running. After all, who’s to say that the outcome would have been the same if Georgescu had been on the ballot box instead of Simion, especially given the latter’s lackluster campaign? And this is not even considering the massive media and online campaign waged against Georgescu—and then Simion.

The West’s Return to Form: Repression and Elite Preservation

The events in Romania represent a new and fateful step for Western societies that claim to be liberal and democratic. Elites no longer limit themselves to influencing electoral outcomes through media manipulation, censorship, lawfare, economic pressure, and intelligence operations. When these fail to achieve the desired result, they are increasingly willing to discard the formal structures of democracy altogether, including elections.

The strategy is simple: keep rerunning or meddling in elections until the “correct” result is achieved—preferably by making sure that only candidates acceptable to the establishment appear on the ballot in the first place. By now, it should be evident to all that the Western electoral process has been reduced to little more than a mechanism for legitimizing oligarchic rule. Therefore, what transpired in Romania should be seen as a warning sign of what may soon unfold elsewhere.

It’s important to realize, however, that this anti-democratic drift has been a long time in the making. Indeed, one may argue that Western liberal-democratic states have been operating in a permanent state of exception for some time. The ease with which basic freedoms and constitutional guarantees were cast aside during the pandemic provided ample evidence of this. Ruling elites are able to do this because there is little in the way of organized mass resistance to challenge them.

For a brief thirty-year period following World War II, the masses succeeded in leveraging democratic institutions to wrest a measure of economic and political power from entrenched oligarchic elites, but the material conditions that made that possible—first and foremost the organized power of labor—no longer exist. In retrospect, the brief period of (relative) popular sovereignty was an exceptional, geographically limited deviation from the historical norm, sustained by unique material and political conditions. Indeed, countries like Romania never even experienced that, having gone straight from communist rule to neoliberal post-democracy. The two pillars of the transatlantic alliance—the European Union and NATO—have advanced Europe’s anti-democratic trends, leading the charge in undermining democratic processes and suppressing popular self-determination.

Thus, what we are witnessing is not the “degeneration” of Western liberal democracy, an unfortunate deviation from the historical norm, but rather its logical conclusion. States that were once briefly responsive to popular demands have now returned to the function state institutions have had throughout most of capitalism’s history: preserving elite power at all costs.

For more from Thomas Fazi, visit his Substack.

Thomas Fazi

Mainstream-defying reflections on (geo)politics, economics, war, energy and life in general.

Abstract:

The label “postliberalism” applies to a developing ecosystem of illiberal ideological thought in the Anglo-American world. The term captures overlapping sets of intellectuals, theorists, political entrepreneurs, and activists who have come to prominence especially since the 2016 US elections. Eight years later, the 2024 US election—most importantly the choice of J. D. Vance as vice presidential candidate for the Republican Party and the subsequent victory of former President Donald Trump—represents a triumphal moment for postliberal thought, not only as a collection of ideas and policy orientations, but also as a network of individuals moving from political marginality to influence. Although ideological trajectories are difficult to predict, it is likely the case that the 2024 election confirms that postliberalism will remain an important part of the broader ideological matrix of the American right for years to come.

The label “postliberalism” applies to a developing ecosystem of illiberal ideological thought in the Anglo-American world. As a conceptual term of art and a label increasingly chosen by practitioners themselves, it captures overlapping, but diverse, thought collectives of intellectuals, theorists, political entrepreneurs, and activists who have gained prominence especially since the 2016 US elections. Its usage remains eclectic and varied but has gathered steam as a term of choice among a variety of figures prominent in American and American-influenced right-wing circles.

Most interestingly, postliberalism has escaped from its confines among small groups of ideological entrepreneurs and can aid outside observers in helpfully characterizing new political phenomena. The 2024 US election—most importantly the choice of then Senator J. D. Vance as vice presidential candidate for the Republican Party and the subsequent victory of former President Donald Trump on a campaign of immigration restriction, economic protectionism, aggressive anti-elite bureaucratic reform, and moral-cultural reaction—represents a triumphal moment for postliberal thought.

The events of 2024 can indeed be described analytically through a specifically postliberal ideological lens. By doing so, we can capture both a collection of ideas, worldview, and policy orientations of increasing relevance, as well as characterize an evolving network of identifiably postliberal-tagged individuals moving from political marginality to significant national influence as part of a reactionary-reformist governing agenda. Put simply, 2024 was the United States’ first postliberal election.

Although ideological trajectories are difficult to predict, it is likely the case that the campaign experience and ultimate outcome of the 2024 election ensures that postliberalism of one variety, or more likely several, will remain an important part of the broader ideological matrix on the American right for years to come. We must come to grips with what we mean by this term in the first place, and in turn what it means for the evolving politics of the oldest democracy in the world.

This analytic essay first provides an initial overview of the evolving use of postliberalism as a term of art in the Anglo-American world, focusing primarily on practitioners, but one that interacts well with existing scholarly research programs on “illiberalism” and can helpfully describe emerging political trends in the US for outside observers. Academic acceptance of postliberalism as a clarifying ideological descriptor aligns with new usage patterns employed by the mainstream English-language news media, which are increasingly deploying the term as well. The label “postliberalism” captures several reference groups, from British communitarians to American Catholics, to a new generation of paleoconservatives and the broader and diverse modern New Right, characterizing many parts of a dynamic ideological ecosystem replete with a variety of eclectic and distinct strands.

With this partial terminological and conceptual genealogy established, the essay then turns to using postliberalism as a productive framework within which to understand the 2024 election and its immediate political results. In doing so, it attempts a melding of scholarly research into illiberalism found elsewhere with a more general analytic interpretation to get at the postliberal question of 2020s-era America. This essay is far from the final word on postliberalism, what it has meant, what it should mean, and what it will mean in the future. Some postliberals may dislike the new broadness assigned to the term. But this essay aims to be a constructive foray into a highly relevant semantic and ideological field that is now far more deeply ensconced within the halls of power than many would have thought possible just a few years prior.

On Postliberalism

2024 marked the year that “postliberalism,” a term of relative recency and already varied usage, entered somewhat surprisingly into the American political lexicon.[1] Unfortunately for us, postliberalism contains a plethora of distinct meanings and traditions of thought in the English-speaking world, although each in its own way holds some degree of broad connection with the others, if sometimes at a distance. And as the 2020s have unfolded, an evolving generic form of postliberal mass politics in the world’s oldest democracy can be identified, culminating thus far in the Trump campaign of 2024 and its initial period of governance in 2025.

In order to understand the postliberal moment of the 2024 election and its consequences, we need to first briefly (and surely insufficiently) recapitulate the many intellectual threads that brought this previously unfamiliar term and its users to recent prominence. In doing so, we will ultimately connect these usage patterns by those calling themselves postliberals with broader descriptions of illiberal ideological reaction, the American version of which can ultimately be captured by the same term. In brief, postliberalism began as a self-identified label; evolved into a label taken on by different actors to describe distinct strains of critical illiberal thought; and has emerged since the 2024 election as a useful, actor-acceptable, and comprehensive term to describe American illiberalism writ large both in theory and praxis.

In undertaking this survey, what is perhaps most surprising is how the very small numbers of self-described postliberal intellectual entrepreneurs (and the ideas and general framework of politics to which they are committed) have grown to become so influential and have so quickly found expression in American national politics. Part of the answer lies in the expanding definition of the term, which has moved considerably from its origin point and now contains fairly different and distinct elements that all hold a general ideological family resemblance.

Three Self-Described Postliberal Circles

In the most straightforward genealogy, the term “postliberalism” is British in origin. It refers first to a theological-critical and communitarian reconstruction of religious narratives by way of postmodern philosophical linguistic tools after (ergo, “post-”) the transformation of mainline hierarchical Christian churches and the dominance of mid-century liberal theology.[2] This idea, of course, was not necessarily intended to be conservative or right-wing (indeed, in important ways it shares more with continental Christian socialist traditions). But it was also certainly more orthodox relative to the de facto partial secularization of mainstream religious establishments and their acceptance of atomizing “neoliberal” cultural developments in Western societies over the last half century.[3] Thus emerged the original postliberal critique from a fairly discipline-specific vantage point.

Most expressly pushed forward under the “postliberal” label through the theological project of John Milbank and fellow religiously-minded writers, this effort peaked in the 2000s and early 2010s in terms of relative influence among a small collection of thinkers seeking a new philosophical basis for Christian theology. In doing so, the project also engaged broader ideas about the needs of a healthy, re-enchanted society with thick community bonds and reduced social and cultural alienation.[4] This approach intertwined with general critiques of so-called neoliberal economic and social orders also increasingly using the “postliberal” label, including influential British thinkers John Gray and Adrian Pabst.[5] By the 2020s, the term had fully shifted from its theological roots towards a more general British communitarian critique and platform for critically-oriented academics.[6]

This group’s intellectual cachet, in many ways, was its combination of communitarian and associational critique with a degree of left-right fusion, sometimes called “Blue Labour” or “Red Toryism,” referencing its British origin.[7] Ultimately, this stream of thought, while giving the term “postliberal” to the English-speaking intellectual world and infusing it with a general association of communitarianism and societal critique, is somewhat detached from later developments in the United States. Its influence on British politics is much less clear than further evolutions in America, although a feedback loop from US postliberal thought back to British writers is also evident.[8]

Postliberalism’s second life is also a religiously-inflected one. In this instance, it refers to a new movement of 21st-century intellectual political Catholicism, primarily based in the United States. This ideological project is built around rejecting mid-century and post-Cold War claims of Catholic compatibilities with market capitalism and the secular, socially liberal, individualized and atomized form of the political regime we call liberal democracy.[9]

This new Catholic postliberal approach to political action asserts the necessary and inevitable connection between religion and politics, largely grounded in the Catholic tradition, and asserts a counter-framework that moves away from a strict secular reading of the idea of church-state separation in favor of greater integration and alignment between the two.[10] It is characterized most importantly by an emphasis on the use of assertive government activity to pursue ideological goals, interest in economic protectionism to support community cohesion, reasserting the role of the natural law in jurisprudence and governance, and broad-based moral-cultural reaction against 21st-century progressive assumptions about the family, gender, sexual relations, procreation, secularism, in alignment with other social-conservative issue sets.

This strain of intellectualized postliberalism is perhaps the most prominent and well-defined one today. It feeds ideationally from philosophical and theological frameworks nurtured in more radical camps, such as the small clutch of “integralist” thinkers, who argue for a return to the superiority of and deference to the Church as a means of righting the decaying sociopolitical order and aligning with the hierarchical intentions of God.[11] Among the integralist-postliberals are the Cistercian monk Father Edmund Waldstein and a small collection of other philosophers such as Thomas Pink, as well as Harvard Law School professor Adrian Vermeule and the political scientist and Hungarian think-tanker Gladden Pappin.[12] Among the non-integralist postliberals are Notre Dame political theorist Patrick Deneen, Catholic University of America theologian Chad Pecknold, and Irish legal theorist Conor Casey, among others.[13] All integralists are postliberals, but not all postliberals are integralists. However, they do all read each other—and most are mutual friends.

American Catholic postliberalism is notable for its relative academic and institutional heft, and thus its surprisingly high intellectual status despite holding few forthright adherents. Its public proponents sit in established universities, write books in established presses, and most critically, have far more easily reached mainstream liberal and progressive audiences as a kind of curious ideological antagonist. Deneen’s famous Why Liberalism Failed (2018, Yale University Press) was plugged by former President and epitome of 2010s establishment liberalism Barack Obama.[14] Meanwhile, the Harvard-based Vermeule is one of the foremost administrative law scholars in the country, and his Common Good Constitutionalism (2022, Polity) came out of a tremendously influential article in The Atlantic in 2020—another bastion of liberal gentility.[15]

Between the two, an entire cottage industry of scandalized critics has emerged to counter them, a phenomenon which itself broadcasts Catholic postliberalism’s intellectual influence and the unexpected consternation it has engendered among a significant cohort of philosophers and legal scholars. And it is therefore primarily through Catholic postliberalism that the term first entered American political and intellectual writing.[16] Yet very recently, postliberalism has now been retroactively applied to other intellectual traditions in the US as well, thereby setting it up for usage in a significantly broader manner.

This third vein of postliberalism is now increasingly used to capture an older camp of traditional American conservatism sometimes called “paleoconservatism” and sometimes “the Old Right.”[17] Here, postliberalism is directly used less as a substantive approach itself and more a means to describe the world that is common to this tradition. We can call this the old right lineage approach. This camp argues that the classical tradition of liberalism, properly understood, died long ago with the advent of mass politics, universal suffrage, mass immigration, the welfare state, centralized managerial governance, internationalism, and the dissolution of the public-private distinction in law and custom.

For the paleoconservative, there is nothing “liberal” (as it would have been understood in the 19th century, when the term gained common parlance) about 20th-century managerial progressive statism, let alone its 21st-century metastasis. Thus, from this vantage point, we have lived in a post-liberal social and political order for many decades, or perhaps even a full century, depending on the thinker. The paleoconservative school is wide and has developed over multiple generations.[18] It includes the political scientist Paul Gottfried, the work of philosopher James Burnham, and various writers on the harder right of the American political spectrum since the Second World War.[19] Its most famous political advocate has been the 1990s-era national-populist politician Patrick Buchanan.[20]

This way of deploying the “postliberal” term here is new—paleoconservatives have relied on different labels to describe their critiques before—but has been given a revamp in recent years. In this case, the critical paleoconservative tradition has been re-energized by contemporary reaction to the social-cultural radicalization of the 2010s, known to some as the “Great Awokening,” that has taken place among cohorts of elite American left-progressives, as well as its extension through transnational institutions of conformity by way of ideological diffusion and intergovernmental coordination.

This led to the proliferation of culturally progressive governance assumptions throughout the economy and society (such as diversity mandates, de facto speech codes, protest and business restrictions, coercive climate mitigation techniques, and so on), enforced by nominally non-governmental financial, educational, and industry association institutions. The experience of covid lockdowns and other technocratic impositions furthered the spread of this critique in the 2020s, providing a lived experience of perceived unaccountable technocratic liberalism that seemed to have very little to do with the freedoms or liberty traditionally associated with the term.

Yet the height of intellectual paleoconservatism was decades ago, and the “paleoconservative” term itself has faded. In its place, a small rising cohort of self-described postliberals drawing on this school of thought have emerged. This growth parallels that of the Catholic postliberals, who also critique the trajectory of American liberalism, although they differ in claiming that liberalism itself was once normatively good. While for postliberal Catholics liberalism itself is and has always been wrong, for old-right postliberalism, there was at some point a liberalism that was worthy.

From the perspective of current-generation postliberals inspired and influenced by paleoconservatism, it is the politics of the contemporary political establishment—Democrats as well as the flagging institutional cadres of pre-Trump Republicans—in recent decades that has pushed the world decidedly into an era of “after-liberalism.” And this therefore forces the question of what comes next.

University of Florida political scientist Nathan Pinkoski has been especially prominent in making these connections between the old right lineage and the new postliberalism, most recently highlighting the interlocking nexus of state, business, and international regulatory regimes to further curtail individual rights.[21] He terms this “actually existing postliberalism,” using the term as a descriptor for a critique against society while also adopting the label itself. That is, we live in an era after liberalism, and only self-understood postliberal solutions are possible. Pinkoski is prominent among the rising generation of right-wing academics, having also previously defended Catholic postliberals from smears of “fascism,” and has gestured to the revival of Caesarist thinking (in the sense of decisive, authoritative governance breaking a sclerotic and divided democratic system) in his academic writing as key to thinking about an after-liberalism reality.[22]

Meanwhile, other writers, such as the hyperbolic postliberal influencer Auron MacIntyre, rely heavily on the paleoconservative Burnham’s theorizations on managerial domination (understood as a key liberal means of asserting social power without political responsibility) to assign blame for negative changes to culture, society, and governance in the last several decades, and castigates liberal democracy as a pernicious form of quasi-totalitarian oligarchy.[23] Pinkoski has, in fact, reviewed MacIntyre’s work, describing it as a kind of postliberal critique mixed with an old form of liberal-conservatism (that is, paleoconservatism).[24] For both, postliberalism suits them as an easy term of utility to describe a new era of old ideas about where American society and politics went wrong.

Characterizing Whole Postliberal Movements

This brings us to a fourth usage of “postliberalism”—as an Anglo-American-specific variant of what scholarship increasingly calls “illiberal” thought, or “illiberalism.” This illiberalism is a generic academic term originally developed to characterize the surprising phenomena of political disruption in post-Communist Eastern and East-Central Europe from the 2000s onward—that is, the reactive politics of cultural conservatism, immigration restrictionism, national sovereignty, civilizational pride, and forthright statism in Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, Poland under the Law and Justice party, and now beyond the post-Communist world in Italy under Giorgia Meloni. In this way, we can introduce postliberalism as an academic conceptual specification of illiberalism. Here we no longer have postliberalism as self-applied by political thinkers and intellectual entrepreneurs, but as an analytic tool to describe an entire contemporary political phenomenon useful to outside observers.

Postliberalism here is thus nested under the umbrella label of “illiberalism,” which has been used increasingly as a way to conceptually capture substantive policy- and politics-oriented ideological reaction against the perceived experience of hegemonic liberalism, expressed culturally, socially, politically, and economically.[25] This phenomenon is usually expressed “with pronounced tendencies towards the distrust of checking or minoritarian political institutions formed by apolitical experts, and focused on promoting a variety of collective, hierarchical, majoritarian, national-level, and/or culturally integrative approaches to contemporary political society.”[26] Academics using the “illiberalism” term to describe ideological reaction and its empirical political patterns in East-Central and Eastern Europe are many, with prominent definitions and “best usage” arguments developed by scholars such as Marlene Laruelle, Zsolt Enyedi, and others, alongside a growing cottage industry of handbooks, programs, and conferences in the US, France, Germany, and elsewhere.[27]

For our purposes, using “postliberalism” in this way usefully describes the American variant of illiberalism, not least because key illiberal actors on the American right now call themselves “postliberal,” refer to the general political paradigm as such, or are otherwise influenced by these ideas. The temporal implication of an after-liberalism also works well in capturing the wide variety of burgeoning heterodox visions for the 21st century, all of which have been energized as an ideologically substantive and politically powerful reaction to perceived establishment liberal hegemony.

As we loosen conceptual specificity in favor of broadness, we can use the illiberal analytic toolkit to connect identifiable political patterns across a wide and disparate field of ideological strains. In this sense, postliberalism therefore serves as an umbrella label in an English-speaking context for anything academics in other disciplines or political commentators might also call “reactionary,” “New Right,” “far-right,” “national-conservative,” “nationalist,” “Christian nationalist,” “dissident Right,” “futurist,” “tech-accelerationist,” “tech-right,” or “neoreactionary.”[28] There are good reasons to use these terms with specificity and care, but there are also good reasons to analytically group them together into a wider familial ecosystem of substantive ideological reaction.

Even as these are distinct strands of thought (and in some cases even mutually-exclusive), all can be usefully characterized as postliberal, taken one rung higher up the ladder of abstraction and helping us focus on general commonalities.[29] As postliberalism comes to define this phenomenon of broad-based ideological reaction, we enable a much wider range of ideational toolkits to enter the postliberal semantic field, including many parts of the modern right that would otherwise have little to do with the communitarian, religious, or old-right lineages but all share hostile opposition to establishment, status quo liberalism, and a search for something coming next.

Most notably, a more capacious use of postliberalism would include the Nietzschean vitalists around performance artists like Bronze Age Pervert as well as the Silicon Valley-based tech-right, which includes transhumanist, rationalist, authoritarian libertarian, and AI accelerationist strands.[30] None of these should play well with the self-described postliberals highlighted above, yet they occupy a similar reactive space, propose distinct but related critiques of liberalism’s atrophy or failure, support the same general political movement as of the mid-2020s, and help constitute the broader canon of postliberal thought in the US nonetheless.

As of early summer 2025, at least two scholars of the American New Right are finalizing their work on book manuscripts that will provide their own bespoke definitions and characterizations of postliberalism in this academic vein, further adding to the growing pile of scholarly conceptualizations on offer. We can expect this to continue over the rest of the 2020s, with this essay representing only an early, in-progress assessment of the sudden growth in “postliberalism” as a label itself.

It is helpful that the thinkers and intellectuals who call themselves other labels of note are increasingly using the “postliberal” label to refer to themselves—just as the illiberal Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán used “illiberal democracy” to describe his own political tendency in Hungary.[31] British critics of the contemporary Western order, such as Aris Roussinos and Mary Harrington, have similarly used the term both descriptively and self-referentially.[32] The highly successful American right-wing moral-cultural activist Christopher Rufo and those who look on his project positively have done so as well.[33] And America’s most famous authoritarian theorist and intellectual neoreactionary, Curtis Yarvin, has recently begun using the “postliberal” label to describe the new reactionary politics of America himself.[34]

Whether these thinkers buy into the specific programs of any of the self-described postliberal groups, they increasingly find themselves using the term “postliberal” as way to describe contemporary right-wing ideological ferment in America overall. Many still prefer other terms—conservative, New Right, or some other niche label. But we are reaching the point where “postliberalism” is no longer a label one necessarily must use to describe oneself, but one which others (friendly or otherwise) will use to capture the general phenomenon and those within it.

This finally leads us to the fifth meaning of “postliberal,” which encapsulates all of the above and adds two key ingredients: (1) a mass politics combined with a substantive set of identifiable policy orientations embodied by the 2024 Trump campaign, and (2) the subsequent, post-election reactionary-reformist governing agenda. We can call this the ideological mass politics of reaction. Until 2024, use of the term “postliberalism,” or the many variations of postliberal critique and developing programs noted above, was confined to circles of intellectuals, scholars, thinkers, influencers, and their expanding readership, primarily online, often in ephemeral discussions on social media or across blogs and Substack accounts.[35] With the 2024 election campaign, the relatively high socio-economic and socio-cultural status of the postliberal milieu was then translated by determined activists and through structural developments into a much broader political phenomenon. Postliberalism went from the world of the digital pen to the world of the campaign rally, and ultimately to high elected office.

Indeed, the experience of postliberal ideational diffusion from marginal intellectual corners to wider audiences has been extraordinarily successful in the US. This is not least a function of the internet and social media having removed most barriers of entry to readership and emulation. At the same time, postliberal writers happen to come from societally legitimate professions—the academy, law, theology, and the ascendant and wealthy tech fields. This, in turn, has granted them a certain degree of legitimacy that has separated them from the low-rent controversialists (often termed the “alt-right”) of the late 2010s, despite persistent overlaps.[36]

Postliberalism since 2024 has broken through the blood-brain barrier within the corpus politicum in the United States. This is due to two new developments. First, a diverse cadre of rising right-wing elites have been themselves influenced by various postliberal intellectual streams. This is most notably the case for Vice President J. D. Vance, who has referred to himself as a postliberal and is very well read on the entire diverse ecosystem of postliberal thought, from its Catholic postliberal end to Silicon Valley’s burgeoning tech-right.[37] But we can find postliberalism in other national elites such as Missouri Senator Josh Hawley, who has penned essays in respected right-wing journals on a kind of Protestant, Christian nationalist form of postliberalism.[38]

The second vector is through the maturation of populist politics, embodied by President Trump’s Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement. In 2016, MAGA was just a term for Trumpian populism, with all its contradictions and emotions.[39] In 2025, MAGA is still populist, filled with contradictions, and politically emotional—but it is recognizably postliberal. The 2024 campaign was built around an ideologically coherent platform of immigration restriction, economic protectionism, aggressive anti-elite bureaucratic reform, and moral-cultural reaction, undergirded by an active set of think-tank institutions, popularizing organizations, and specific plans to learn lessons from the administrative and personnel chaos of Trump’s previous stint in office.[40]

Indeed, the modern political expression of postliberalism is found directly in the re-election of President Donald Trump. With his second time in office has come a new cohort of supporters, thinkers, and activists promoting a muscular, reactionary-reformist governance model, who are now far and away more influential than they had been in Trump’s previous, much more ideologically incoherent administration.

Postliberalism in Toto

Ultimately, postliberalism shares one set of general traits across its entire ecumene. If we take the word to be more than merely a self-referential term, but to be the English-speaking instantiation of illiberal ideological reaction, then despite core divergences (religious vs. secular, traditional vs. tech-right, democratic vs. more obviously authoritarian, and so on), then every variant of postliberalism always suggests that the world does not have to be this way—that the vulgarized understanding of political scientist Francis Fukuyama’s “End of History” is not an end.[41]

For nearly all postliberals, discontent with the regime type of liberal democracy (that is, with its perceived unalterable left-progressive and oligarchic decision-making tendencies) is widespread, and asserted to not be the only way one can organize political and social order in the 21st century. All share the reactionary mode of disgust with and disdain for the contemporary cultural and political status quo, looking to the past (from the medieval period to the Founding Fathers to even the FDR or Nixon Administrations) for lessons in future governance.

Furthermore, most forms of postliberalism share an emphasis on the failure of liberalism as a model of society and governance, the importance of the power of the state, the utility of substantive policy action, a willingness to engage in disruptive reformism, and an eye to confronting existing institutions, gutting and depopulating them (and with an eye to subsequently reformatting and repopulating at least some) rather than relying on market forces or bureaucratic goodwill to hope that favored policy goals are achieved.[42] Although seemingly a paradox, postliberalism per the 2024 campaign was an exercise in ideological reactionary-reformism under a populist guise.

Notably, little of this is fundamentally different from the Eastern and Central European forms of illiberalism, although it is perhaps more radical. Indeed, countries such as Hungary, Poland, or Slovakia have it easier, with old political traditions on the continental political right from which to draw that touch on these ideological themes, including classic forms of national-conservatism and right-wing statism found throughout the 19th century and the Interwar period.[43] But for Americans it is very new and jarring, or had otherwise been forgotten amid the generational and political churn of the liberalism-dominant latter 20th century.[44]

And it is exactly this point—the combined reactionary-reformism and the populist energy—that unites all species and types of postliberalism under a single broad, vague, and evolving banner. And it is this same point that informs contemporary right-wing (and yes, even center-right) politics today: the postliberal assertion is that things do not have to be this way, and concrete steps can be taken to change them. The 2024 campaign suggested the relevance of postliberalism to the new mass politics of reaction, and its first 100 days in office has only further justified this emphasis.

The Postliberal Election

The 2024 presidential election saw the first postliberal electoral campaign, the first self-described postliberal politician to enter the highest echelons of American elite politics, and the first postliberal presidential policy platform. Although bolstered by and mixed with many other ideological strains, traditional or otherwise, on the American right wing, the color of postliberalism was unmistakable in the Trump-Vance campaign.

These developments are in real distinction with the entry of postliberal thought into the general political sphere eight years prior. American postliberalism, from the perspective of ideological production and intellectual development, found its initial cachet in the wake of Donald Trump’s victory in his first presidential campaign, in 2016. A plethora of journals and online publication outlets were founded during the period following his victory, integrated with ongoing social media conversations, primarily on Twitter, that created a sufficiently large ecosystem of written thought.[45] This was where Catholic postliberalism first found its footing on the American right, when discontented thinkers were discovering or rediscovering paleoconservatism, when the alt-right peaked, and when parts of the Silicon Valley tech-right first showed real ideational influence. But that is where this body of writing stayed, broadly speaking, cut short from achieving major policy influence.

Before and after

The Trump I Administration was not particularly postliberal in its governing approach. Legislative achievements largely mirrored standard GOP platforms of lowering taxes and pursuing deregulation.[46] Appointment patterns in the judiciary followed in the same vein, hardly rendering it distinct or different from any other hypothetical Republican president.[47] It was a Republican administration certainly—and a chaotic one at that—but not ideologically reactionary or radical, let alone coherently so.[48] Trump’s own personalist appeal was far more populist (i.e., simply appealing to the divide between a malign elite and a good people) than anything else.[49]

An elected conservative government governing within the confines of decades of conservative policy orientations does not need a new academic framework to provide new explanatory power.[50] GOP administrations have been generically, if perhaps more moderately than commonly portrayed, socially conservative, national-patriotic, and bureaucratically skeptical for decades. The most off-the-wall successes of the 2017 to 2021 Trump presidency were the Abraham Accords, which knit together an unexpected period of calm in the Middle East; and criminal justice reform, which decarcerated huge numbers of Americans in an effort far more ideologically in line with progressive reformism than anything else.[51] Trump I was a populist, frenetic, chaotic, and blustering conservative administration at the end of the day. Its illiberal tendencies, while real, were only sometimes evident in actual policy-making, and hardly coordinated.

The primary exception was the president’s implacable immigration orientation, which can plausibly be termed illiberal—in the sense of deep reaction against the assumptions and policy regime of America’s hegemonic liberal tradition—although one would not have called it postliberal at the time, even as some did make use of the illiberalism framework.[52] As the pre-Trump immigration consensus was a formal political lack of consensus, de facto favoring executive nonenforcement, which was widely supported by the left-progressive academic and media establishment, Trump’s coercive enforcement practices can be best captured as a form of illiberal reaction to a hegemonic status quo assumption. Very late in his term, the president also discovered the power to make cultural-institutional changes in the federal government (e.g., an executive order against diversity, equity, and inclusion [DEI] programs inspired by Chris Rufo), but this would last only a very short while before his leaving office.[53]

Postliberal Developments in 2024

2024 could not have been more different from the earlier years of intellectual postliberalism mixing with the eclectic decisions of the first Trump Administration. After losing in 2020, the former (and future) president ran a vigorous 2024 campaign excoriating the sitting Biden Administration on exactly the grounds of illiberal reaction that we have come to expect from exemplar states in East-Central Europe. This was not only on the questions of immigration and law enforcement that had been a hallmark of the previous administration, nor just the populist cult of personality vis-à-vis a perfidious Washington elite, but across the board: on culture, social policy, and musings on using the administrative power of the state for right-wing goals to both command and destroy the establishment liberal state.[54]

It was not just complaining about cancel culture, but forcibly ending DEI using all institutional levers available. It was not just talking about how Russian President Vladimir Putin or Chinese President Xi Jinping were tough men, it was active disdain for decision-avoiding European allies. It was not just “draining the Swamp,” it was enlisting the world’s wealthiest man, Elon Musk, to spearhead a purge of government officials justified by perceptions of their left-liberalism, their fiscal incontinence, and their bureaucratic laziness all at once.

Even more remarkable, a religious current buzzed through the campaign of a man famously irreligious and vaguely secular, who spoke of religion as a kind of nice, albeit ultimately alien thing to him.[55] Yet possibly due to the great turning point of the campaign in the death-defying showgrounds of Butler, Pennsylvania, the campaign became infused with a sense of perceived divine legitimacy pushed by the candidate himself. “Ave Maria” played at rallies.[56] The saintly image of Our Lady of Guadalupe was posted on the candidate’s personal social media site, Truth Social.[57] And in his Second Inaugural Address, the president would culminate with remarks that he had been chosen by God to lead the country once more.[58] This was new. This was very certainly postliberal.

The 2024 election also saw the catapulting of the first American politician to refer to himself as a postliberal from junior Senator (already a high position and emblematic of the vast growth in attractive postliberal thought since the mid-2010s) to the vice-presidential position on a national ticket. Senator J. D. Vance had become the posterchild figure for the diffusion of postliberalism into America’s elite millennial generation cohorts. A meteoric rise from poverty to the Ivy League to the military to venture capitalist finance to national celebrity to the upper chamber of Congress also tracked a growing interest in the huge variety of postliberal thought that was churning on the internet in the 2010s.[59]

Vance received confirmation in the Catholic Church in 2019, and would later pen an eloquent essay in the postliberal Catholic journal of arts, The Lamp, that made clear his conversion story was pulled along by the same threads that make religious postliberalism so enticing: the lack of meaning in modern, atomized, liberal society; the yearning for “Truth, Beauty, and Goodness”; and the deep desire for being told that another world is possible after all.[60] And that was all before it became clear that Vance was also reading deeply in the broader postliberal milieu, from integralists and political Catholics to the tech-right and neoreactionaries, among others.[61] Vance embodies the diverse and distinctive ecosystem of postliberal thought, and is unsurprisingly also generationally appropriate, being a millennial fluent in the social-media-based form of ideological production dominant by the 2020s.

Finally, the 2024 election saw the first postliberal policy platform of a major party in modern American history, and the first wide coterie of postliberal advisors, activists, and agitators finding influence in the American policy development ecosystem. The campaign itself was assisted by a growing number of policy wonks and think-tankers who pushed identifiably postliberal lines: economically statist, socio-culturally illiberal. A few examples will suffice here.

The economist Oren Cass and his American Compass think tank drafted major arguments in favor of tariffs, industrial policy, and pro-family-formation policy.[62] New journals like American Affairs, the online magazine Compact, and the amorphous domain of tech and “bro” podcasters became key locations for policy discussions and asserting a generic pro-Trump party line (as well as allowing for places where there were obvious coalitional disagreements). The Heritage Foundation think tank, once a bastion of older Republican conservatism, reinvented itself as the hub of MAGA thought in DC and built out a massive wish-list of programmatic goals called Project 2025.[63]

Project 2025’s policy recommendations were accompanied by an even more ambitious goal, to create a master list of loyal and willing future staffers in a prospective Trump II Administration who would not thwart or undermine the president’s intentions in their positions overseeing the bureaucracy. The series of conferences held by the National Conservatism Conference coordinating organization peaked with a gathering that brought MAGA Republican activists together with postliberal writers and thinkers of many persuasions across the so-called dissident right, as well as representatives from foreign illiberal political systems such as those of Hungary, India, and elsewhere.[64] This was mimicked through other institutional forums such as CPAC.[65]

Simply put, the 2024 election was qualitatively different from the 2016 election: the first Trump victory had put postliberalism on the map intellectually, while the second completed the integration of postliberal approaches to politics and the actually-existing Trump-era GOP of the day. This can be seen across the surprising collapse of myriad old Republican orthodoxies. Gone were pieties to conservative internationalism or neoconservative interventionism, replaced by retrenchment and reconsiderations of hemispheric empire-building.[66] Gone too was absolute social conservatism: strict pro-life claims on abortion and in vitro fertilization (IVF) were dropped from the GOP platform at the insistence of the candidate himself, and the general acceptance of right-wing, illiberal homosexuals within the Trumpian political tent became well-established.[67]

Both of these odd-fit examples actually exemplify the postliberal approach writ large, whereby withdrawing from hands-tying commitments made by the liberal order and recognizing that gaining political control—and using it—is deemed more important than losing beautifully and with doctrinaire purity.[68] But they also represent distinct corners of postliberalism as a phenomenon (international-restraint-oriented nationalists in the former, the tech-right and the pragmatic election campaigners in the latter). Others in the same camp were dismayed (both political Catholics and Protestant Christian nationalists) on social conservative grounds, but this—notably!—did not break apart the coalition. Postliberalism in its American variant, as elsewhere, defies overly restrictive assumptions about what must be for its assembling of coalition members. And that brings us to the future.

Postliberal Vistas

The first hundred days of the Trump II Administration represents a series of postliberal policy set pieces, from sharp immigration restrictions to direct offensives against liberal bastions in education and established research communities to new protectionist tariff policies to radical restructurings of the administrative state.

Many of these policy changes reflect the multiple divisions within the postliberal ideological family surrounding the new government. Immigration restrictions, as well as pro-IVF and other family-planning policies, have been castigated by some political Catholics, even as protectionism and moral-cultural issues have been declared distractions by the libertarian-influenced tech-right.[69] Even before the inauguration, fights broke out between vying pro-Trump influencers over the relative importance of visa issues for high-skilled knowledge workers versus a culturally nationalist restrictionism.[70] There is no dearth of difference across the range of Administration supporters.

Yet all remain united by the core claims of postliberal American thought: it is better to be in power and taking decisive action against the liberal and bureaucratic establishment than to be left outside the camp; it is better to push harder and more radically than to moderate in advance of the onset of policymaking; it is critical to advance an agenda reacting against perceived liberal excesses in the economic structure, the cultural field, and political institutions. Even where disagreements exist, such as between the priorities of moral-cultural conservatives, anti-immigration proponents, and the tech-right, synthesis may yet be found. This has been the case so far with the vice president’s public remarks, which have tacked back and forth arguing for implicit policy coherence by way of a fast-paced set of early media and speaking engagements.[71]

Looking on to 2025

Not everything is postliberal in first months of the Trump II Administration, but much more has been than was expected in November 2024. The speed at which radical-reactionary policy has been declared and implemented has exceeded even adherents’ beliefs in what was possible. Even in foreign policy, the area often least-touched by domestic ideological developments and one in which the bench of identifiably postliberal thinkers and subject-matter experts is clearly most narrow, has seen the postliberal preference for retrenchment and disengagement from perceived liberal imperium show up in full force.

The new Secretary of State Marco Rubio declared the globe to be transitioning to a multipolar world order that the US was uninterested in preventing, while the Administration has pushed hard to end the Russia-Ukraine War on terms of peace as soon as reasonable (rather than the Biden Administration’s insistence on a vaguely specified continuation until Russia’s ultimate defeat).[72] Viewing the rejection of establishment liberalism to be a phenomenon that spans America’s alliance network, the vice president personally communicated US intolerance for left-liberal policies during his trip to the Munich Security Conference in February 2025, while asserting European countries’ role as free-riding clients to be at an end.[73] In leaked communications between top Administration officials about intervening against Houthi attacks on Red Sea shipping lanes near Yemen, Vance represented what is evolving into the tentative postliberal position of skepticism towards the European Union establishment, coupled with geopolitical retrenchment, even as others in the Administration, not connected to postliberal ideas, took more internationalist lines.[74]

Indeed, this particular text-thread reveal was enlightening as it showed the limits of the full postliberal framing provided above. The governing elites selected by the president for his new cabinet represent a range of positions, from older Republican national-security internationalists to non-ideological Trump loyalists to postliberal critics of the status quo global order. Postliberalism is not the only way to characterize intra-Administration decision-making, but it is certainly a major tendency.

It is beyond this essay’s scope to consider the likely future steps of a very dynamic new Administration beyond its first few months. Taking cues from other governments with identifiably illiberal policy orientations and approaches to governance, a continuation of executive-driven hyperactivity is likely, as is a continuation of confrontation with oppositional judicial structures acting as a bulwark of institutional recalcitrance against the executive. Further attempts to restructure the economy along protectionist lines will continue to contour thinking, even when faced with considerable countervailing pressure. Cultural policy will continue to forward “counterrevolutionary” efforts (to use phrasing from the activist Rufo) against university and other educational institutions perceived to be highly ideological.[75] The shock war on the bureaucratic corps will surely continue, although the personal role of the world’s richest man may very well diminish. And a shifting dance between moral-cultural conservatism and tech advances will play out within the broader postliberal coalition within and outside the Administration.

Postliberalism means several things all at once. For some, it is political Catholicism, or perhaps Christian nationalism. For others, it is a critique of modernity citing older traditions of protectionism, cultural nationalism, anti-managerialism, and retrenchment from global (although perhaps not hemispheric) empire. For still others, it is used loosely to describe an anti-status quo position against contemporary establishment liberalism.

For our purposes, it is all these things and more, working as a broad characterization of the general radical-reactionary ideological tenor of the new Administration. Many have yet to take on the “postliberal” label themselves, but this confused and gradual dynamic is exactly how such broad terms are generated and enter the political lexicon. Easy nomenclature heuristics are attractive, and comfort with the term among both the news media and ideological entrepreneurs themselves has expanded considerably since the 2024 election. Where the Administration will go remains to be seen, but postliberalism has certainly not failed in achieving the highest political offices in the US, and it continues to seek expansive political goals today.

Julian G. Waller is a professorial lecturer at George Washington University and co-author of Autocrats Can’t Always Get What They Want: State Institutions and Autonomy under Authoritarianism (University of Michigan Press, 2024). You can follow him on X @julianwaller and on Substack at Political Order(s).

[1] For examples of the term emerging in the mainstream popular press, see for example: Sarah Jones, “J. D. Vance and the Rise of the ‘Postliberal’ Catholics,” Intelligencer, September 22, 2024, https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/j-d-vance-and-the-rise-of-the-postliberal-catholics.html; Peter and Michelle R. Smith, “What Is Postliberalism? How a Catholic Intellectual Movement Influenced J. D. Vance’s Political Views,” PBS News Hour, September 4, 2024, sec. Politics, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/what-is-postliberalism-how-a-catholic-intellectual-movement-influenced-jd-vances-political-views; Ian Ward, “The Seven Thinkers and Groups That Have Shaped J. D. Vance’s Unusual Worldview,” Politico, July 18, 2024, https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/07/18/jd-vance-world-view-sources-00168984; Ross Douthat, “Who Abandoned Liberalism First, the Populists or the Establishment?” New York Times, November 1, 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/01/opinion/liberals-populists.html; Patrick J. Deneen and Samuel Moyn, “Post-Liberalism in Conversation: Liberalism and Its Fate” (lecture, The George Washington University, Washington, DC, February 28, 2025), https://calendar.gwu.edu/event/post-liberalism-in-conversation-liberalism-and-its-fate.

[2] See, for example: John Milbank and Adrian Pabst, The Politics of Virtue: Post-Liberalism and the Human Future (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016); John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock, and Graham Ward, eds., Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology (Abingdon: Routledge, 1998); George A. Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 1984). Postliberalism also shares an intellectual background associated with the virtue ethics derived from, among others: Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 3rd edition (Notre Dame, Ind: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007).

[3] C. C. Pecknold, Transforming Postliberal Theology: George Lindbeck, Pragmatism and Scripture (London: T&T Clark, 2005).

[4] For one genealogy, see for example: Stefan Borg, “In Search of the Common Good: The Postliberal Project Left and Right,” European Journal of Social Theory 27, no. 1 (February 2024): 3–21, https://doi.org/10.1177/13684310231163126. See also: Ronald T. Michener, Postliberal Theology: A Guide for the Perplexed (London: T&T Clark, 2013); John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason, 2nd edition (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2006).

[5] Adrian Pabst, Postliberal Politics: The Coming Era of Renewal (Medford, Mass.: Polity, 2021); Adrian Pabst, The Demons of Liberal Democracy (Medford, Mass: Polity, 2019); John Gray, Post-Liberalism: Studies in Political Thought (London: Routledge, 1996).

[6] John Milbank, “John Milbank on The Politics of Virtue—A Postliberal Manifesto,” Telos Insights (blog), Telos Paul Piccone Institute, February 17, 2025,

Telos Insights

John Milbank on The Politics of Virtue—A Postliberal Manifesto

Over the coming days, we will be posting videos from Political Economy and the Good Life: The 2024 Postliberalism Conference, which took place on December 13–14, 2024, at the University of Cambridge. Many videos are already available, with more to come soon. If you are not yet a subscriber, be sure to…

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a year ago · 2 likes · Telos-Paul Piccone Institute

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[7] Maurice Glasman, Blue Labour: The Politics of the Common Good (Medford, Mass.: Polity, 2022); Phillip Blond, Red Tory: How the Left and Right Have Broken Britain and How We Can Fix It (London: Faber & Faber, 2010).

[8] See, for example, writings under the tag “Post-liberalism,” UnHerd (news site), https://unherd.com/tag/post-liberalism/.

[9] On the liberal-friendly “Catholic fusionism” of the American right from the 1980s to 2000s, see: Park MacDougald, “A Catholic Debate over Liberalism,” City Journal, Winter 2020, https://www.city-journal.org/article/a-catholic-debate-over-liberalism/; Kevin Gallagher, “The Eclipse of Catholic Fusionism,” American Affairs, August 20, 2018, https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2018/08/the-eclipse-of-catholic-fusionism/.

[10] For a summary of this approach and relevant citations, see: Julian G. Waller, “Integralism, Political Catholicism, and Actually-Existing Democracy in the Modern West,” in Social Catholicism for the Twenty-First Century? vol. 1 of 2, Historical Perspectives and Constitutional Democracy in Peril, ed. William F. Murphy Jr. (Pickwick Publications, 2024): 320–353.

[11] See, for example: Kevin Vallier, All the Kingdoms of the World: On Radical Religious Alternatives to Liberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023); Thomas Crean and Alan Fimister, Integralism: A Manual of Political Philosophy (Editiones Scholasticae, 2020); Edmund Waldstein, O.Cist., “Integralism in Three Sentences,” The Josias (blog), October 17, 2016, https://thejosias.com/2016/10/17/integralism-in-three-sentences/.

[12] See, for example: Edmund Waldstein, O.Cist. and Peter A. Kwasniewski, eds., Integralism and the Common Good: Selected Essays from The Josias, 2 vols. (Brooklyn, NY: Angelico Press, 2021); Adrian Vermeule, “All Human Conflict Is Ultimately Theological,” Church Life Journal, July 26, 2019, https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/all-human-conflict-is-ultimately-theological/; Gladden Pappin, Patrick J. Deneen, and Adrian Vermeule, “In God We Trust: Vers un ordre postlibéral?” L’incorrect, March 2023, https://lincorrect.org/in-god-we-trust-vers-un-ordre-postliberal-lincorrect/.

[13] See, for example: Patrick J. Deneen, Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future (New York: Sentinel, 2023); Patrick J. Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018); Gladden Pappin and Chad Pecknold, “A Kingdom Divided,” The Postliberal Order (blog), Substack, October 18, 2022, https://postliberalorder.substack.com/p/a-kingdom-divided

[14] Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed.

[15] Adrian Vermeule, Common Good Constitutionalism (Medford, Mass.: Polity, 2022); Adrian Vermeule, “Beyond Originalism,” The Atlantic, March 2020, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/03/common-good-constitutionalism/609037/.

[16] A related religious political movement in American Protestantism, termed mostly, though not entirely, by outsiders as “Christian nationalism,” clearly also has grown along recognizably postliberal lines. Its adherents do not use the term to describe themselves directly, however, and so we can treat them only below as we expand the label out into a broad analytic descriptor.

[17] Paul Gottfried, A Paleoconservative Anthology: New Voices for an Old Tradition (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2023), https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781666919721/A-Paleoconservative-Anthology-New-Voices-for-an-Old-Tradition; Joseph A. Scotchie, The Paleoconservatives: New Voices of the Old Right (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017).

[18] See, for example: Gottfried, A Paleoconservative Anthology; Jean-François Drolet and Michael C. and Williams, “America First: Paleoconservatism and the Ideological Struggle for the American Right,” Journal of Political Ideologies 25, no. 1 (January 2020): 28–50, https://doi.org/10.1080/13569317.2020.1699717; Edward Ashbee, “Politics of Paleoconservatism,” Society 37, no. 3 (March 2000): 75–84, https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02686179.

[19] See, for example: Paul Gottfried, Conservatism in America: Making Sense of the American Right (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); James Burnham, Suicide of the West: An Essay on the Meaning and Destiny of Liberalism (New York: Encounter Books, 2014); James Burnham, The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom (London: Lume Books, 2020).

[20] For a direct connection made between Buchanan and postliberalism, see: P. J. Butler, “The Once and Future President,” The American Postliberal (blog), Substack, July 25, 2023,

The American Postliberal

The Once and Future President

The legacy of a politician is ordinarily determined by a simple calculation: winners make an impact, and losers get left behind, or, in the words of Mitch McConnell, “winners make policy, losers go home.” However, this formula fails to account for candidates whose ideas outlive their unsuccessful campaigns…

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3 years ago · 16 likes · PJ Butler

[21] Nathan Pinkoski, “Actually Existing Postliberalism,” First Things, November 2024, https://www.firstthings.com/article/2024/11/actually-existing-postliberalism.

[22] Nathan Pinkoski, “Charles de Gaulle and the Revolution of 1962: Caesarism in Search of Republican Order,” Perspectives on Political Science 54, no. 1 (January 2025): 25–34, https://doi.org/10.1080/10457097.2024.2435735; Nathan Pinkoski, “How Not to Challenge the Integralists,” Law & Liberty, Liberty Fund, April 30, 2020, https://lawliberty.org/how-not-to-challenge-the-integralists/.

[23] Auron MacIntyre, The Total State: How Liberal Democracies Become Tyrannies (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 2024).

[24] Nathan Pinkoski, “Safe Passage out of Tyranny?,” TomKlingenstein.com (blog), April 1, 2025, https://tomklingenstein.com/safe-passage-out-of-tyranny/.

[25] For conceptual definitions, see: Julian G. Waller, “Distinctions with a Difference: Illiberalism and Authoritarianism in Scholarly Study,” Political Studies Review 22, no. 2 (May 2024): 365–386, https://doi.org/10.1177/14789299231159253; Marlene Laruelle, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Illiberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024), https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780197639108.001.0001; Marlene Laruelle, “Illiberalism: A Conceptual Introduction,” East European Politics 38, no. 2 (June 2022): 303–327, https://doi.org/10.1080/21599165.2022.2037079.

[26] Waller, “Distinctions with a Difference,” 372.

[27] See, for example: Laruelle, The Oxford Handbook of Illiberalism; Laruelle, “Illiberalism”; Julian G. Waller, “Illiberalism and Authoritarianism,” in The Oxford Handbook of Illiberalism, ed. Marlene Laruelle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024): 61–94, https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780197639108.013.1; Julian G. Waller, “Disentangling Authoritarianism and Illiberalism in the Context of the Global States System,” Journal of International Affairs 75, no. 1 (2022): 33–54, https://www.jstor.org/stable/27203118; Zsolt Enyedi, “Concept and Varieties of Illiberalism,” Politics and Governance, September 11, 2024, https://www.cogitatiopress.com/politicsandgovernance/article/view/8521; Anthony Lawrence A. Borja, “Conceptualizing Political Illiberalism: A Long Overdue Index of Illiberal Political Values,” Philippine Political Science Journal 43, no. 1 (April 27, 2022): 28–56, https://doi.org/10.1163/2165025X-bja10027.

[28] For varied usage and interpretations of these phenomena, see for example: Stefan Borg, “A ‘Natcon Takeover’? The New Right and the Future of American Foreign Policy,” International Affairs 100, no. 5 (September 2024): 2233–45, https://doi.org/10.1093/ia/iiae178; Nicholas Michelsen, “Hungary, Populism and the New Right,” New Perspectives 32, no. 4 (December 2024): 327–328, https://doi.org/10.1177/2336825X241296679; James Pogue, “Inside the New Right, Where Peter Thiel Is Placing His Biggest Bets,” Vanity Fair, May 2022, https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/04/inside-the-new-right-where-peter-thiel-is-placing-his-biggest-bets; James M. Patterson, “An Awkward Alliance: Neo-Integralism and National Conservatism,” Religion & Liberty 35, nos. 1 & 2 (Winter-Spring 2022), https://www.acton.org/religion-liberty/volume-35-number-1-2/awkward-alliance-neo-integralism-and-national-conservatism; Mark Sedgwick, ed., Key Thinkers of the Radical Right: Behind the New Threat to Liberal Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).

[29] Giovanni Sartori, “Concept Misformation in Comparative Politics,” American Political Science Review 64, no. 4 (December 1970): 1033–53, https://doi.org/10.2307/1958356.

[30] Julian G. Waller, “The Illiberal Right Moves Beyond Critique,” Frontiers of American Reaction (blog), Illiberalism Studies Program, Institute for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies, The George Washington University, November 2022, https://www.illiberalism.org/the-illiberal-right-moves-beyond-critique; Jasmin Dall’Agnola, “Illiberal Technologies: Linking Tech Companies, Democratic Backsliding, and Authoritarianism,” Journal of Illiberalism Studies 4, no. 3 (2024): 1–10, https://doi.org/10.53483/XCQS3577; Josh Vandiver, “Hard Men, Hard Money, Hardening Right: Bitcoin, Peter Thiel, and Schmittian States of Exception,” in Far-Right Newspeak and the Future of Liberal Democracy, eds. A. James McAdams and Samuel Piccolo, Routledge Studies in Fascism and the Far Right (Abingdon: Routledge, 2024): 205–230; Josh Vandiver, “Masculinist Identitarians, Strategic Culture, and Eurocene Geopolitics,” in Global Identitarianism, eds. José Pedro Zúquete and Riccardo Marchi, Routledge Studies in Fascism and the Far Right (Abingdon: Routledge, 2023): 175–196.

[31] Jacques Rupnik, “Orban’s Hungary: From ‘Illiberal Democracy’ to the Authoritarian Temptation,” in Contemporary Populists in Power, ed. Alain Dieckhoff, Christophe Jaffrelot, and Elise Massicard, Sciences Po Series in International Relations and Political Economy, eds. Alain Dieckhoff and Miriam Perier (Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2022), 133–151, http://link-springer-com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-84079-2_8.

[32] Aris Roussinos, “The Mythic Power of King Charles III,” UnHerd (news site), September 11, 2022, https://unherd.com/2022/09/the-mythic-power-of-king-charles-iii/; Aris Roussinos, “Ernst Jünger: Our Prophet of Anarchy,” UnHerd (news site), December 27, 2021, https://unherd.com/2021/12/ernst-junger-our-prophet-of-anarchy/; Mary Harrington, Feminism against Progress (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 2023); Mary Harrington, “Am I Really a Threat to Democracy?,” UnHerd (news site), September 6, 2022, https://unherd.com/2022/09/am-i-really-a-threat-to-democracy/.

[33] Christopher Rufo, America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything (New York: Broadside Books, 2023); Christopher Rufo, “The New Right Activism: A Manifesto for the Counterrevolution,” IM-1776, January 4, 2024, https://im1776.com/manifesto-counterrevolution/; Christopher Rufo, “What Conservatives See in Hungary,” Compact Magazine, July 28, 2023, https://compactmag.com/article/what-conservatives-see-in-hungary.

[34] Curtis Yarvin, “Migration and the Sovereign Firm,” Gray Mirror (blog), Substack, December 28, 2024,

Gray Mirror

Migration and the sovereign firm

Flushed with pride from an election win—alas, probably still just another cheap hit of publicity crack, huge in the moment and historically ephemeral; but who knows, eh?—the two halves of the so-called New Right, rationalists and traditionalists, have started our new era off in fine American style by squabbling in public over…

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a year ago · 512 likes · Curtis Yarvin

[35] Julian G. Waller, “The Illiberal Right Moves Beyond Critique,” Illiberalism Studies Program, Frontiers of American Reaction (blog), Institute for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies, The George Washington University, November 2022, https://www.illiberalism.org/the-illiberal-right-moves-beyond-critique/.

[36] Jack Thompson and George Hawley, “Does the Alt-Right Still Matter? An Examination of Alt-Right Influence between 2016 and 2018,” Nations and Nationalism 27, no. 4 (2021): 1165–80, https://doi.org/10.1111/nana.12736.

[37] Ian Ward, “Is There More to J. D. Vance’s MAGA Alliance Than Meets the Eye?,” Politico, September 13, 2024, https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/09/13/jd-vance-new-right-political-movement-00177203; Rod Dreher, “‘I Would like to See European Elites Actually Listen to Their People for a Change’: An Interview with J. D. Vance,” European Conservative, February 22, 2024, https://europeanconservative.com/articles/dreher/i-would-like-to-see-european-elites-actually-listen-to-their-people-for-a-change-an-interview-with-j-d-vance/.

[38] Josh Hawley, “Our Christian Nation,” First Things, February 1, 2024, https://www.firstthings.com/article/2024/02/our-christian-nation; Josh Hawley, “Christian Democracy for America,” Compact Magazine, October 2023, https://compactmag.com/article/christian-democracy-for-america. So-called Christian nationalism is a very contested term, and most who use it, either in academic or pejorative senses, do not yet rely on the “postliberal” nomenclature. This is changing, however, and conceptually whatever the term describes can be fit under the broad “illiberalism-postliberalism” label. See for example: Jesse Smith, “Old Wine in New Wineskins: Christian Nationalism, Authoritarianism, and the Problem of Essentialism in Explanations of Religiopolitical Conflict,” Sociological Forum 39, no. 4 (2024): 328–340, https://doi.org/10.1111/socf.13014; Jesse Smith and Gary J. Adler Jr., “What Isn’t Christian Nationalism? A Call for Conceptual and Empirical Splitting,” Socius 8 (January 2022): 23780231221124492, https://doi.org/10.1177/23780231221124492; Mike Sabo, “What Is Christian Nationalism?,” The American Mind, October 2023, https://americanmind.org/salvo/what-is-christian-nationalism/; Stephen Wolfe, The Case for Christian Nationalism (Moscow, Idaho: Canon Press, 2022).

[39] Hank Johnston, “The MAGA Movement’s Big Umbrella,” Mobilization: An International Quarterly 28, no. 4 (January 2024): 409–433, https://doi.org/10.17813/1086-671X-28-4-409; Robert C. Lieberman et al., “The Trump Presidency and American Democracy: A Historical and Comparative Analysis,” Perspectives on Politics 17, no. 2 (June 2019): 470–479, https://doi.org/10.1017/S1537592718003286.

[40] Heritage Foundation, “Project 2025: Presidential Transition Project,” Heritage Foundation website, accessed April 2, 2025, https://www.project2025.org/

; Michael Hirsh, “Inside the Next Republican Revolution,” Politico, September 19, 2023, https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/09/19/project-2025-trump-reagan-00115811.

[41] Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992).

[42] Rufo, “The New Right Activism”; MacIntyre, The Total State; Gladden Pappin, “Toward a Party of the State,” American Affairs 3, no. 1 (Spring 2019): 149–160, https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2019/02/toward-a-party-of-the-state/; Adrian Vermeule, “Integration from within,” American Affairs 2, no. 1 (Spring 2018), https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2018/02/integration-from-within/.

[43] Mihai Varga and Aron Buzogány, “The Two Faces of the ‘Global Right’: Revolutionary Conservatives and National-Conservatives,” Critical Sociology 48, no. 6 (September 2022), https://doi.org/10.1177/08969205211057020.

[44] See discussions of the Old Right in Gottfried, A Paleoconservative Anthology.

[45] Borg, “A ‘Natcon Takeover’?”; Borg, “In Search of the Common Good”; Gladden Pappin, “Requiem for the Realignment,” American Affairs 7, no. 1 (Spring 2023): 132–146, https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2023/02/requiem-for-the-realignment/; Gladden Pappin, “From Conservatism to Postliberalism: The Right after 2020,” American Affairs 4, no. 3 (Fall 2020): 174–190, https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2020/08/from-conservatism-to-postliberalism-the-right-after-2020/.

[46] Laura Ellyn Smith, “Trump and Congress,” Policy Studies 42, nos. 5–6 (September-November 2021): 528–543, https://doi.org/10.1080/01442872.2021.1955849.

[47] Amanda Hollis-Brusky and Celia Parry, “‘In the Mold of Justice Scalia’: The Contours & Consequences of the Trump Judiciary,” The Forum 19, no. 1 (July 2021): 117–142, https://doi.org/10.1515/for-2021-0006.

[48] Amanda Terkel and Igor Bobic, “Trump Is Governing Like a Traditional Republican,” Huffington Post (news site), April 3, 2018, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/donald-trump-is-republican_n_5ac2826be4b04646b6452ca6.

[49] Michael Kazin, “Trump and American Populism: Old Whine, New Bottles,” Foreign Affairs 95, no. 6 (November/December 2016): 17–24.

[50] Kurt Weyland, “Why US Democracy Trumps Populism: Comparative Lessons Reconsidered,” PS: Political Science & Politics 55, no. 3 (July 2022): 478–483, https://doi.org/10.1017/S1049096521001876; Lieberman et al., “The Trump Presidency and American Democracy.”

[51] Fred A. Lazin, “President Donald Trump’s Abraham Accords Initiative: Prospects for Israel, the Arab States, and Palestinians,” Politics & Policy 51, no. 3 (2023): 476–487, https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12533; Arthur L. Rizer, “Can Conservative Criminal Justice Reform Survive a Rise in Crime?,” Annual Review of Criminology 6 (January 2023): 65–83, https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-criminol-030920-090259.

[52] Jasper Theodor Kauth and Desmond King, “Illiberalism,” European Journal of Sociology / Archives Européennes de Sociologie 61, no. 3 (December 2020): 365–405, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003975620000181; Reijer Hendrikse, “Neo-Illiberalism,” Geoforum 95 (October 2018): 169–172, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2018.07.002.

[53] Hailey Fuchs, “Trump Attack on Diversity Training Has a Quick and Chilling Effect,” New York Times, October 13, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/13/us/politics/trump-diversity-training-race.html.

[54] Rufo, “The New Right Activism”; Heritage Foundation, “Project 2025: Presidential Transition Project.”

[55] See, for example: Joel T. Rose, Trump versus Bible Verses, independently published, 2020.

[56] Michael Gold, “Trump Bobs His Head to Music for 30 Minutes in Odd Town Hall Detour,” New York Times, October 15, 2024, sec. US, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/14/us/politics/trump-town-hall-dj-music.html.

[57] Mary Margaret Olohan, “Trump Celebrates the Birthday of Jesus Christ’s Mother with Image of ‘Our Lady of Guadalupe,’ ” Daily Wire (news site), September 8, 2024, https://www.dailywire.com/news/trump-celebrates-the-birthday-of-jesus-christs-mother-with-image-of-our-lady-of-guadalupe; John Grosso, “Reporter’s Inbox: Why Is Trump Tweeting about the Virgin Mary and St. Michael?,” National Catholic Reporter, October 1, 2024, https://www.ncronline.org/news/reporters-inbox-why-trump-tweeting-about-virgin-mary-and-st-michael.

[58] Donald J. Trump, “Inaugural Address,” White House website, January 20, 2025, https://www.whitehouse.gov/remarks/2025/01/the-inaugural-address/.

[59] Daryl McCann, “J. D. Vance and the New Republican Party,” Quadrant 68, no. 9 (September 2024): 34–38, https://doi.org/10.3316/informit.T2024091200005591771747200.

[60] J. D. Vance, “How I Joined the Resistance,” The Lamp, April 1, 2020, https://thelampmagazine.com/blog/how-i-joined-the-resistance.

[61] Ward, “Is There More to J. D. Vance’s MAGA Alliance Than Meets the Eye?”; Adam Wren, “How Lord of the Rings Shaped J. D. Vance’s Politics,” Politico, July 19, 2024, https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/07/19/lord-of-the-rings-jd-vance-00169372; Ian Ward, “Is There Something More Radical Than MAGA? J. D. Vance Is Dreaming It,” Politico, March 15, 2024, https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/03/15/mr-maga-goes-to-washington-00147054; Sohrab Ahmari, “Hillbilly Energy: Newly Announced as Trump’s Running Mate, J. D. Vance Has Become a Powerful Voice in the New American Right,” New Statesman, July 15, 2024, https://www.newstatesman.com/ns-interview/2024/07/hillbilly-energy; Pogue, “Inside the New Right.”

[62] American Compass, “The American Wake-Up Call,” American Compass website, October 24, 2024, https://americancompass.org/the-american-wake-up-call/; Mark A. DiPlacido, “Tariffs’ Long-Term Benefits Are Worth Short-Term Costs,” American Compass, March 17, 2025, https://americancompass.org/tariffs-long-term-benefits-are-worth-short-term-costs/; Duncan Braid, “‘Great Again’ Is a Promise,” American Compass, November 7, 2024, https://americancompass.org/great-again-is-a-promise/.

[63] Heritage Foundation, “Project 2025: Presidential Transition Project.”

[64] “ ‘National Conservatives’ Are Forging a Global Front against Liberalism,” The Economist, February 15, 2024, https://www.economist.com/briefing/2024/02/15/national-conservatives-are-forging-a-global-front-against-liberalism.

[65] Grant Silverman, “Building the International Right: The American Conservative Union and CPAC,” IERES Occasional Papers, no. 29, Transnational History of the Far Right series, Institute for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies, The George Washington University, February 18, 2025, https://www.illiberalism.org/building-the-international-right-the-american-conservative-union-and-cpac/.

[66] Borg, “A ‘Natcon Takeover’?”

[67] “Republicans Move at Trump’s Behest to Change How They Will Oppose Abortion,” AP News, July 8, 2024, sec. Politics, https://apnews.com/article/republicans-abortion-party-platform-trump-rnc-5561e857c5501df9864ab8ca666d8bc5; Daniel Lefferts, “My Afternoon with the ‘Normal Gay Guys’ Who Voted for Trump,” GQ, February 10, 2025, https://www.gq.com/story/my-afternoon-with-the-normal-gay-guys-who-voted-for-trump; Brad Polumbo, “Trump’s New GOP Platform Is a Massive Win for LGBT Americans,” Newsweek, July 11, 2024, https://www.newsweek.com/trumps-new-gop-platform-massive-win-lgbt-americans-opinion-1924048.

[68] Samuel Francis, Beautiful Losers: Essays on the Failure of American Conservatism (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1993).

[69] Maya Goldman, “Trump Rekindles IVF Debate,” Axios (news site), February 19, 2025, https://www.axios.com/2025/02/19/trump-rekindles-ivf-debate-vitals; Kimberly Heatherington, “Analysis: Trump’s Proposed Mandate Aims to Fund IVF’s Large-Scale Destruction of Human Embryos,” Catholic Review, October 5, 2024, https://catholicreview.org/analysis-trumps-proposed-mandate-aims-to-fund-ivfs-large-scale-destruction-of-human-embryos/.

[70] Stephen Collinson, “What the Visa Feud Says about the Coming Trump Administration,” CNN, December 30, 2024, https://www.cnn.com/2024/12/30/politics/trump-musk-h1b-visa-analysis/index.html.

[71] J. D. Vance, “Remarks by Vice President Vance at American Dynamism Summit,” White House website, March 18, 2025, https://www.whitehouse.gov/remarks/2025/03/remarks-by-vice-president-vance-at-american-dynamism-summit/; “What Is ‘Ordo Amoris?’ [sic] Vice President J. D. Vance Invokes This Medieval Catholic Concept,” AP News, February 6, 2025, https://apnews.com/article/jd-vance-catholic-theology-migration-e868af574fb2e742c6ed3d756c569769.

[72] US Department of State, “Secretary Marco Rubio with Megyn Kelly of The Megyn Kelly Show,” Department of State website, January 30, 2025, https://www.state.gov/secretary-marco-rubio-with-megyn-kelly-of-the-megyn-kelly-show/; Antoinette Radford, “Timeline of How Trump’s Pledge to End the War in Ukraine Hit Reality,” CNN, March 26, 2025, https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/26/europe/timeline-trumps-pledge-to-end-ukraine-war/index.html.

[73] Christina Lu, “The Speech That Stunned Europe,” Foreign Policy, February 18, 2025, https://foreignpolicy.com/2025/02/18/vance-speech-munich-full-text-read-transcript-europe/.

[74] Jeffrey Goldberg, “The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans,” The Atlantic, March 24, 2025, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/03/trump-administration-accidentally-texted-me-its-war-plans/682151/.

[75] Rufo, “The New Right Activism.”

Alasdair MacIntyre died early this spring. A giant in the field of moral philosophy, the tributes were appropriately voluminous and eclectic. Perhaps no other thinker in our time could have solicited grief and respect from Jacobin to First Things. The laurels are well deserved. MacIntyre was an original, and we will not see his like again. No one else recognized and affirmed deep philosophical and spiritual connections between Aristotle, Aquinas, and Marx, let alone made their integration feel both natural and vital. Combining analytical philosophy’s rigor with continental breadth and spiritual seriousness, he will be an inspiration to generations hungrily turning the pages of After Virtue.

MacIntyre’s work went through a variety of phases, and debates rage about how much of his thought is continuous and how often it broke from earlier positions. There was, however, one constant to his writing: MacIntyre unrelentingly condemned both liberalism and capitalism. This evolved depth and salt but never wavered. In this, MacIntyre is quite distinct from other philosophers once lumped under the label “communitarian.” Michael Walzer, Sandel, and Charles Taylor have long offered left and “liberal socialist” critiques of liberalism. But they made their peace with it some time ago, and the criticisms have largely been internalized into the liberal family. Not so with MacIntyre, who until the end insisted that another form of politics could, and must, be possible. In this piece, I will pay tribute to MacIntyre by briefly summarizing some of the core tenets of his critique of liberalism and its influence. I believe that a radicalized liberalism can answer them. But this is not to deny their power and provocation.

Liberal Ethics, Capitalist Perversion

MacIntyre’s critique of liberalism is sharper than his erstwhile “communitarian” kin for a simple reason: he fully integrates its ethics with the capitalist mode of production. Social democrats and liberal socialists like Walzer and Sandel think it is possible to bracket the achievements of liberalism from capitalism, saving the former and radically transforming the latter. MacIntyre was far more skeptical. Indeed, he often associated this conviction with a kind of utopian naivete of the sort both liberals and socialists, as heirs to the meliorist Enlightenment, found so irresistibly tempting.

MacIntyre’s critique of liberalism is sharper than his erstwhile “communitarian” kin for a simple reason: he fully integrates its ethics with the capitalist mode of production.

MacIntyre began his career as an eclectic Marxist and socialist. Contrary to some anti-Marxists who see him as breaking with this tradition, as late as Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity (his final great work), MacIntyre insisted that there are lessons in Marx that we are doomed to relearn again and again. In Marxism and Christianity, MacIntyre insists that Marxism carried over much of the spiritual and philosophical insights that had characterized Christianity at its most vital.

This went further than just an emphasis on the needs of the wretched of the earth. By challenging the naturalization of the market and its laws, Marxism revealed the extent to which bourgeois ideologies reify our societies and the market domination thereof. The preeminent ideological system offering apologias was, of course, liberalism, which endlessly insisted that we had reached the end of history (which was basically McDonald’s). For the young MacIntyre in Marxism and Christianity, “liberalism…simply abandons the virtue of hope. For liberals, the future has become the present enlarged.” More malignantly, liberalism opened the door to a kind of nihilism that neither Christianity nor Marxism could abide. Liberals had unquestioningly accepted Hume’s dictum that “facts are one thing, values another—and that the two realms are logically independent of one another.” However much they tried to avoid it, liberals came to subjectivist conclusions. For “the liberal, the individual being the source of all value necessarily legislates for himself in matters of value, his autonomy is only preserved if he is regarded as choosing his own ultimate principles, unconstrained by any external consideration. But for both Marxism and Christianity only the answer to questions about the character of nature and society can provide the basis for an answer to the question: ‘But how ought I to live?’”

In the end, MacIntyre claims that all of liberal philosophy’s attempts to develop a morality are in vain.

By the time of his classic, After Virtue, MacIntyre was increasingly skeptical that orthodox Marxism had the answer to the question of how we ought to live, even if he stresses that Marxism remains “one of the richest sources of ideas about modern society…” For MacIntyre, liberal moral theorizing inevitably becomes co-extensive with the vulgarized forms of rationality spread by the market. Liberal thinkers from diverse traditions, from utilitarians to Kantians, all try to ground an objective morality in strange places; from hedonistic utility maximizers who are nonetheless to put their own gratification aside to pursue aggregate well being, to Kant’s moral legislators who are free to will their own laws but should only “freely” will those laws that accord with practical reason. In the end, MacIntyre claims that all of liberal philosophy’s attempts to develop a morality are in vain. They reduce down to the morality of the case register: the emotivist conviction that morals are just a matter of personal tastes, with an inclination to be St. Benedict or St. Trump being equally valid. That is when they don’t lead to the Nietzschean will-to-power and domination. In a word, the liberal Enlightenment project was a great big failure:

The problems of modern moral theory emerge clearly as the product of the failure of the Enlightenment project. On the one hand the individual moral agent, freed from hierarchy and teleology, conceives of himself and is conceived of by moral philosophers as sovereign in his moral authority. On the other hand the inherited, if partially transformed rules of morality have to be found in some new status, deprived as they have been of their older teleological character and their even more ancient categorical expressions of an ultimately divine law.

Instead of all this, MacIntyre looks back to Aristotle (and eventually Aquinas and other Christian fathers) to provide moral alternatives to the vulgar society described so vividly by Marxism. But it is to be a redescribed “revolutionary Aristotelianism” that is, in many respects, very modern. For instance, MacIntyre largely accepts that we cannot simply go back to the pre-modern metaphysical worldview out of which Aristotle’s teleology and Christian ethics emerged. Any attempt to save their insights will have to secularize and modernize them in many respects.

MacIntyre insists that critics must learn from and admire the richness of the liberal tradition while liberals must accept that theirs is only one moral tradition amongst many.

Later books like Whose Justice? Which Rationality? and Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity attempt to do just that. In these works, his disposition towards liberalism softens somewhat. In Whose Justice? Which Rationality, MacIntyre rejects the idea that liberal morality is in any way universally true, let alone simply a neutral setting to which we should all default. Nevertheless, he admits that “liberalism is by far the strongest claimant to provide [a neutral tradition independent] ground which has so far appeared in human history and which is likely to appear in the foreseeable future.” In other words, while he rejects that liberalism is either morally true in a strong sense, or even just a neutral “political rather than metaphysical” conception that can exist atop or alongside other doctrines, he concedes that it comes closer than rivals. MacIntyre insists that critics must learn from and admire the richness of the liberal tradition while liberals must accept that theirs is only one moral tradition amongst many, with a “problematic internal to it, its own set of questions which by its own standards it is committed to resolving.”

While this may be possible for liberalism at its most morally reflective, MacIntyre remained convinced it was not possible for capitalism. In Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity, he lampoons pro-capitalist economists for their ideological myopia, noting that for the “large majority of academic economists, the gross inequalities and recurring unemployment and regeneration of poverty that result from even the best economic policies are effects that must be accepted for the sake of the benefits of long-term growth and with it worldwide reduction in the harshest poverty in underdeveloped countries.” In other words, the very Leninist solution to the problems created by capitalism is more capitalism, ever and always. MacIntyre remained convinced that liberalism likely lacked the resources necessary to adequately criticize the mode of production with which it came into the world. More likely, a “Thomist revival and the critique of capitalism that Marx made possible” would have to be mined for “new possibilities.”

Left and Right Receptions of MacIntyre

MacIntyre always considered himself a man of the left, insisting that his Aristotelianism was “revolutionary” rather than reactionary, and musing that well into life he still wished to see every rich person hanged. Even in After Virtue, he lampooned the “ideological” character of conservative thinking and acidly mused that any tradition that became Burkean was already functionally dead. MacIntyre had little time for nationalism, musing that being asked to die for the nation state was on a par with being asked to die for the telephone company. In “A Partial Reply to My Critics,” he charged that nationalism was, by and large, a poor man’s golden calf, often deployed by state officials to mobilize their people into defending causes that were contrary to the common good.

MacIntyre always considered himself a man of the left, insisting that his Aristotelianism was “revolutionary” rather than reactionary.

Nevertheless, the depth and scope of MacIntyre’s critique of liberalism and its grounding in classical and Christian sources have made it a fertile source of inspiration for many on the right. By and large, they tend to follow Mahoney’s misguided footsteps in lauding his rejection of liberalism, while insisting “MacIntyre’s brand of ‘Marxism’ is not in the end all that compelling, nor even truly Marxist—although it has had a troubling influence on young Catholics of the traditionalist sort.” That MacIntyre was more sympathetic to liberalism than to capitalism, seeing the former as partially redeemable and the latter as beneath contempt, is largely ignored by his right-wing readers and interpreters.

That MacIntyre was more sympathetic to liberalism than to capitalism, seeing the former as partially redeemable and the latter as beneath contempt, is largely ignored by his right-wing readers and interpreters.

More interesting has been the recent attraction of his work to a variety of post-liberal thinkers, some of whom have been variably willing to accept aspects of the critique of capitalism. In Compact magazine, Nathan Pinkoski argues that the ascendance of post-liberal readings of MacIntyre owes much to the failure of the left to appropriate his work. This is despite MacIntyre’s own inclinations. This has meant that the primary school of thought carrying his legacy forward has been the right, making him a reluctant godfather to post-liberal thinking. Acknowledging that MacIntyre did everything he could to disown right-wing interpretations of the right, Pinkoski observes that, though being ignored “by the left, the MacIntyrean Aristotelian paradigm ended up getting picked up by a new American right that was critical of both capitalism and liberalism. It is impossible to understand the new postliberal right without discussing Alasdair MacIntyre.”

Today, the post-liberal right is the chief ideological vehicle pushing MacIntyrean-sounding themes into the public consciousness.

Pinkoski overstates his case that MacIntyre has been ignored by the left. Indeed, over the last few years there has been an enormous surge of interest in his work. Recent books like Jason Hannan’s Trolling Ourselves To Death and Jason Blakely’s Lost In Ideology cite him as a major influence. MacIntyre is a consistent presence on the pages of Jacobin and The Nation. But Pinkoski is no doubt correct that today, the post-liberal right is the chief ideological vehicle pushing MacIntyrean-sounding themes into the public consciousness. That they often dull down the sharp ends of his contempt for capitalism into R.R Reno style bloviations—that the chief class war being waged in this country is between elites defending gay marriage and ordinary people opposed to it—doesn’t change that.

Taking MacIntyre’s Work to Heart

I believe that liberals can successfully answer MacIntyre’s critiques while acknowledging their substance. Without a doubt, there is a form of possessive individualist liberalism that is committed to a crude view of human beings as competitive hedonists who each aspire to be number one in their own office cubicle. In recent years, this form of liberalism has mutated into neoliberalism, a doctrine which, contra the rosy impulses of post-liberals, has been very easily married to right-wing populists’ cute obsessions with racial superiority, gender inequality, and keeping Andrew Tate out of jail. This should come as no surprise given possessive individualist liberalism’s competitive, meritocratic orientation synthesizes well with the right’s historic concerns for authority and hierarchy.

But there are other forms of liberalism which have long been committed not only to the public but “common” good, as MacIntyre understood it. Liberty, equality, and above all fraternity or solidarity, of course, entered the political lexicon through the bourgeois revolutions. MacIntyre is right to charge neoliberalism with failing to offer a sense of hope for the future, relying instead on the nihilism of capitalist realism. But as Samuel Moyn notes in Liberalism Against Itself, this considered hopelessness is by no means endemic to liberalism. In their tradition’s early years, liberals were revolutionaries who truly thought the world ought to be remade anew, to make it work better for the common man. Liberal socialists like John Stuart Mill insisted that a more cooperative, democratic economy would foster a greater sense of community and solidarity between people and called for an end to meritocratic mythologies.

Moreover, it isn’t clear to me that liberalism doesn’t have an advantage over moral “rival” traditions in creating greater space for the very pluralism MacIntyre commends. Theoretically, liberals have often given in to forms of crude, imperialist “abstract” universalism of the sort one still hears from ride-or-die centrists. But they have also stressed that tolerance and even the celebration of difference are necessary, precisely because of the universal truth that people are concretely different. What is good for D.H. Lawrence may not be good for Greta Thunberg. A decent liberal society creates space for both to achieve the forms of flourishing appropriate to them. MacIntyre himself seems to have moved in this direction by the time of Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity, where he celebrates the idiosyncrasy of distinctly individual kinds of lives. It is not clear to me that anything but a kind of liberal temperament and politics can enable such variety.

Liberals would all benefit from taking MacIntyre’s work to heart.

Nevertheless, liberals would all benefit from taking MacIntyre’s work to heart, especially his deep understanding of how the distortions of capitalism produce nihilistic and egocentric dispositions that destabilize and profoundly banalize the kind of dignified societies we aspire to. For that and much else, we say rest in peace, MacIntyre—the greatest moral philosopher has finally ceased to philosophize and has gone to his well-deserved rest.

Matt McManus is a Lecturer in Political Science at the University of Michigan. He is the author of The Political Right and Equality and recently The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism, among other books.

With the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party under investigation by the national security services and the formation of the new Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW), the 2024 European Union elections were particularly interesting in Germany and served as a provisional mood board before the 2025 national elections. Much has been written about the AfD, and while the formation of the BSW spurred an impressive amount of punditry, questions about its character remain. What is its political agenda, and how can we contextualize it within debates about illiberalism? What effects could BSW’s establishment have on the German and European political landscape?

Origins and Platform

As the name indicates, BSW was established by and orbits around the German politician Sahra Wagenknecht. Born in 1969 in the East German federal state of Saxony, she grew up in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR). As Germany approached reunification in 1989, Wagenknecht began her political career, believing there was still a chance to save socialism in the GDR. The failure to do so, and the victory of reunification and West German capitalism, was experienced by Wagenknecht as a “unique horror.”

In the 1990s, her political agenda was informed philosophically and theoretically by Hegel and Marx, of whom she wrote about in her doctoral thesis. Practically, her political career has been spent in various leftist and socialist parties, most notably Die Linke (“The Left”). However, even as early as the mid-1990s, her values stood out from the left norm, and her former party leader in the Party of Democratic Socialism, Gregor Gysi, described her as “rather conservative,” but in a very particular way. According to Gysi, she wanted to return to the days of the GDR and to a “Stalinist model.” Today, she is described—and indeed labels herself—as conservative, but in a very different way. She claims now that, while she still gets something from Marx, she has mostly moved on from him, and now takes inspiration from the old center-left Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD) and the center-right Christlich Demokratische Union Deutschlands (CDU). In this vein, on January 8, 2024 she founded the Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht – Vernunft und Gerechtigkeit (translated Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance – Reason and Justice).

In its program for the 2024 European elections, BSW advocated for a less integrated European Union, the revoking of sanctions against Russia, more independence from US Big Tech, Big Pharma, and Big Finance, and measurements to stop “uncontrolled migration into the European Union.” The party calls the EU an “Eldorado of lobbyists…who covertly close up backroom deals, without democratic legitimation, and with a steadily rising EU-bureaucracy.” A vote for BSW, the party declares, “is a vote for a better Europe and a red card against the current coalition in Germany: for economical reason, social justice, peace, freedom of speech and democracy.”

BSW advocates for a less integrated European Union, the revoking of sanctions against Russia, more independence from US Big Tech, Big Pharma and Big Finance and measurements to stop “uncontrolled migration into the European Union.”

Characterizing BSW

Populist

Sahra Wagenknecht and her political party can be easily categorized as populist using both the “minimal definition” preferred by some academics—wherein populist politics are characterized by the antagonism between the “pure people” and the “corrupt elite” (with populists speaking in the name of the former)—and more thoroughgoing definitions, such as that which sees populism as a “discursive and stylistic repertoire” with several distinct features. As Mudde and Kaltwasser point out in their overview of approaches to populism, populist strategies can employ a charismatic leader who fosters a direct connection to the masses, usually by disrespecting norms around language and manners.

As the name suggests, BSW orbits around Wagenknecht as its face and guide. She is charismatic, often uses colloquial speech in her Instagram videos, and calls out the current coalition and the EU for corruption and lobbyism. Her Telegram channel promises regular updates and Q&A sessions on a more personal level. Even on her YouTube and Instagram accounts, she interacts with users, directly answering their questions with a referral to their username, creating a feeling of intimacy and closeness between her and her audience. In one of her Instagram posts, she answered a question about whether she could imagine cooperating with the German Green party—which is part of the current ruling coalition—with a clear “no,” calling it the “most incompetent, hypocritical, mendacious and dangerous party in the German parliament.” It is through such examples that we can see both the ideational and stylistic core of populism shining through in the behavior of Wagenknecht: ideational in its opposition to “the elite,” and stylistic in the way this opposition is presented. Empirical analyses back up these assertions of Wagenknecht’s populism, with one study finding that she employed populist communication more than any other member of her former party and that BSW’s founding document heavily employs populist framings.

Illiberal

In this framing of the elites and of the populist politician (who consider themselves the true representative of “the people’s” will) lies the germ of something thicker than the “thin-centered” ideology of populism. Namely, illiberalism. Populism here functions as a way of legitimizing ambitions to power. As Mudde and Kaltwasser put it, “Because populism implies that general will is not only transparent but also absolute, it can legitimize authoritarianism and illiberal attacks on anyone, who (allegedly) threatens the homogeneity of people.” Other scholars have drawn more direct links between populism and illiberalism by pointing to three tendencies: the rejection of checks and balances in favor of a government run only by “the people”; the opposition to intermediaries between the people and their representatives; and the monolithic conception of the “will of the people,” wherein people with different values are Othered.

Thus, if we put BSW in dialogue with more familiar examples of illiberalism, we can draw some parallels, e.g., between BSW and Viktor Orbán’s illiberal democracy in Hungary. Plainly, Orbán and Wagenknecht are distancing themselves from the current norms of Western European politics and its values. Orbán advocates a Christian ideology and traditional conservative values, evident in his government’s ban on gender studies degrees in higher education, for instance. Wagenknecht is not explicitly promoting a certain religion or a conservative lifestyle, although in her criticism of certain movements, she seems to be, implicitly, heading in a similar direction. She actively criticizes cancel culture, wokeness, and the so-called “lifestyle left,” consisting of media, young scholars, and the middle/upper classes, claiming them to be intolerant and oblivious to the working class. Opposing the idea of multiculturalism, Wagenknecht has, according to certain observers, accused minorities such as queer people and migrants of threatening social cohesion by not recognizing the “superiority of common rules.” This example efficiently highlights the close relationship between populism and illiberalism, with the obvious difference that Orbán has the state at his disposal and thus the power to actually implement these tendencies, while Wagenknecht and BSW remain far outside the halls of power.

Wagenknecht is generally associated with left-wing parties and speaks to and for the “traditional left”…As of late, however, she’s begun advocating for the so-called Mittelstand, the small and medium-sized (often family-owned) enterprises in Germany that stand counterposed to the big corporations.

While the parallels and connections of the two cases are evident, Orbán is easily classified as a right-wing conservative. On the other hand, Wagenknecht is generally associated with left-wing parties and speaks to and for the “traditional left,” focusing on the working class, the unemployed, and class politics more generally. As of late, however, even her economic leftism has been injected with a dose of pragmatism, as she’s begun advocating for the so-called Mittelstand, the small and medium-sized (often family-owned) enterprises in Germany that stand counterposed to the big corporations. This move rightward is also evident in BSW’s aforementioned clear stance against cancel culture, in her promotion of a more nation-centric European Union, and in her discourses against so-called parallel communities with Islamist tendencies that are subject to limited law enforcement despite their allegedly growing disapproval of German culture and traditions and more. All of this tends to clash with the common values of modern left-wing parties.

However, in all of this, and by criticizing the current liberalist features of the EU and Germany and American behemoths such as the tech industry, Wagenknecht and BSW count themselves as part of a new—growing—tendency on the left that offers a political alternative to liberalism, part of what Eklundh categorizes as left-wing illiberalism. Eklundh emphasizes that this break with liberalism does not have to be antidemocratic, but rather, that left-wing illiberalism is possibly “the best safeguard” against democratic erosion.

BSW’s illiberalism is convoluted and paradoxical and, while similar in valence to other kinds, has a more democratic spirit than might otherwise be assumed by labeling it “illiberal.”

Eklundh challenges a common assumption: that liberalism and democracy are deeply intertwined, and illiberalism and democracy are opposed. She debunks this by pointing out that “liberalism has more often than not advocated for nondemocratic politics” and that many democratic breakthroughs are, while credited to liberalism, actually the efforts of socialist politics. Integral to this argument is the idea that liberalism, when left unchecked, can degrade democracy, and push it towards elitist oligarchy and technocracy. When Sahra Wagenknecht and her party point to the rise of lobbyism and the lack of transparency in the EU, the development of a small rich elite, or the fact that the EU’s liberal features such as freedom of movement and opportunities to go abroad for schooling are only available to wealthier people, they are essentially making the claim outlined above: that liberalism without democracy leads to an oligarchic state of affairs. Thus, BSW’s illiberalism is convoluted and paradoxical and, while similar in valence to other kinds, has a more democratic spirit than might otherwise be assumed by labeling it “illiberal.”

Liberal?

All that being as it may, BSW’s program is also littered with liberal tendencies and beliefs: solidarity with Julian Assange, support for a free and independent press over national security, free speech, and reversing the Digital Services Act (intended to monitor internet platforms and their content), etc. With regards to the Covid-19 pandemic, BSW heavily criticized the European vaccination policies which denied unvaccinated people access to public venues, claiming that there was no medical reason (especially among young people) for such an exclusion. She also opposed lockdown measures. For states, these measures were an attempt to minimize infections and subsequently, the amount of life-threatening cases, protecting the functionality and efficiency of medical establishments during that trying time.

From this angle then, states were protecting their infrastructure and their citizens and acting in the public interest. Wagenknecht’s opposition to these measures, when not straying into outright conspiracism, was often cloaked in the language of civil liberties and relied “on a reified middle-class concept of ‘freedom’ which frames it as an individual right rather than a social project.” Given this reliance on civil liberty and freedom (classically liberal notions), the ostensibly illiberal Wagenknecht was paradoxically speaking in defense of liberalism itself, or at least ostensibly so, a tactic that is not uncommon among liberalism’s opponents. Peering at these contradictions, one clearly sees the fragile relationship between liberalism, illiberalism, and democracy that Eklundh describes on display, lending credence to the idea that these tensions characterize modernity.

BSW’s Voters and Electoral Prospects

Wagenknecht’s anti-vaccination stances are part of her success and play an important role in her success with right-wing voters. In fact, her critique of the Covid-19 policies, paired with her anti-immigrant discourses, gain positive attention from supporters of the nationalist, far-right, AfD. In fact, early modeling suggests that the majority of those who would support Wagenknecht and her new party come from disaffected factions of not only Die Linke but AfD. While the anti-vaccination stance was not in the manifesto, Wagenknecht was always open about her opinion, and at a rally hosted by her in 2023 at the Brandenburg gate, there were also members of the radical anti-vaccination and anti-establishment “Querdenken” movement in the crowds. Her disapproval of the pandemic policies has since then been included in the BSW’s 2024 election program.

Wagenknecht’s critique of the Covid-19 policies, paired with her anti-immigrant discourses, gain positive attention from supporters of the nationalist, far-right, AfD.

Also looming large on Wagenknecht’s agenda—and also in opposition to many of Germany and Europe’s other left-wing parties—is her efforts to lift the sanctions imposed on Russia and her advocation for a “diplomatic solution” to the war in Ukraine, which she considers a proxy war between the United States and Russia. In its program for the European elections, BSW argued that the sanctions hit Europe harder than Russia, implying that they were counterproductive. The party also opposes efforts to grant EU membership to Ukraine, naming a lack of democracy, a weak economy, corruption, and discrimination against the Russian-speaking minority (even before the invasion) as their reasons. In an Instagram reel, Wagenknecht criticized foreign minister Baerbock’s meeting with Zelensky in May 2024, where Germany promised Ukraine additional financial support. She mocked Baerbock’s claim that, in defending itself, Ukraine is also protecting Germany and the EU, before naming articles in which Putin is presented as open to diplomatic negotiations. Wagenknecht concludes with the snarky remark that “Mrs. Baerbock apparently does not read newspapers.”

Additionally, while emphasizing that she does not want to generalize, Wagenknecht has labeled some Ukrainian refugees as “social tourists” who are exploiting German welfare. Like her critiques of the Covid-19 response and immigration, these foreign policy positions have the effect of making her personally, and potentially her party, attractive to right-wing voters, especially nationalists ones previously attracted to the AfD. This was especially evident in the anti-NATO rallies she organized, where both she and her husband Oskar Lafontaine dismissed concerns about the participation of AfD supporters.

Thus, if we look at who may vote for the BSW, the aforementioned mix of voters from the left and the right is very present. While Die Linke and the neoliberal Freie Demokratische Partei (FDP) are both at risk of falling short of the 5% threshold for parliament seats at the next election, the AfD has consistently been the second-strongest party in the country. The FDP is part of the current coalition and has an agenda that is heavily focused on traditional economic liberalism. Their collapse, stark even when compared to the fall of the ruling coalition’s other two members, shows a potent disapproval of liberalism, at least in the zealous form characteristic of the FDP.

The “traffic light coalition” (made up of the SPD, The Greens, and the FDP) has lost its majority and the overall attitude towards the government is bad. The German public’s disapproval of the liberalist parties, plus the investigation of the AfD and recent controversies surrounding the party, are a strong indicator that BSW could gain in strength and gain representation at the next national elections, to be held in 2025. At the European elections, BSW secured 6.2% of the vote, beating both Die Linke and the FDP, but falling well short of the percentages scored by the Greens, the SPD, AfD, and certainly the government-in-waiting CDU, which secured 30%. Most polls have BSW faring better at the 2025 national elections, with their score hovering between 8-9%.

The shortcomings of the German reunification process increases demand for new illiberal and populist parties, and BSW will certainly try and take advantage of this situation.

Elections at the local and state level will likely see the party perform better, especially in the East. Wagenknecht’s appeal in the former GDR states can be traced to the struggles of reunification, as many of these states have faced challenges when integrating into the German Federal Republic. Even now, after over 30 years, post-GDR states are still underrepresented in German leading positions, have lower wages, and an overall weaker economy. The shortcomings of the German reunification process increases demand for new illiberal and populist parties, and BSW will certainly try and take advantage of this situation.

In September 2024, voters will elect a new Landtag (state-level assembly) in the eastern German state of Thuringia. The outgoing government is led by Die Linke and also features the SPD and Greens, but the AfD (also a prominent presence) has recently surged in the state. The creation of BSW and its new spot on the ballot papers has complicated matters and appears to be disproportionally hurting Die Linke. Recent polls show BSW capturing 20% of the vote and, while their numbers has fallen from last year’s highs, the AfD still looks set to make gains on their 2019 score. The same is not true for Die Linke, which will likely see its figures halved. BSW is also set to do relatively well in the elections for the Saxony Landtag, another former GDR state, held on the same day as those in Thuringia. Polls have BSW at 15% and forecast a likely collapse of Die Linke.

Wakeup call

Dissatisfaction with the current coalition, the delegitimization of Die Linke as a force, and the new case against the AfD will provide a lot of citizens who are unsure of their next vote or uncommitted ample reason to support BSW. Sahra Wagenknecht’s charisma, populist rhetoric, and East German background position her well to capitalize on people’s dissatisfaction. However, while she is still perceived as a left-socialist politician, her discourse and agenda also consist of authoritarian and right-wing elements. Considering the amount, and diversity, of support she has managed to accrue in just over six months since BSW’s founding, it is clear that Wagenknecht strikes a chord with many German citizens and has succeeded in speaking to their fears and disappointments related to years of pandemic, inflation, and war.

BSW is a wake-up call that business-as-usual is not working…As both left-wing and right-wing voters seem to be drawn to BSW, it is imperative that the current coalition provides solutions, as the dual rise of AfD and BSW carries with it the great risk of a more thoroughgoing right-wing authoritarian turn in Germany.

BSW’s rise might form a much-needed opposition to mainstream parties within the current government and outside it (like the Christian Democrats), as well as to the far-right AfD—all of whom will easily pass the 5% threshold and therefore enter parliament. BSW, its voters, and its policy agenda remind the German mainstream of the tensions inherent in liberal democracy, between its constituent parts: liberalism and democracy. But the dangerously divisive, populist, methods of Sahra Wagenknecht, combined with her and her party’s right-wing authoritarian tendencies cannot be ignored.

Nonetheless—like the rise of the AfD—BSW is a wake-up call that business-as-usual is not working in Germany and that mainstream German politicians need to assess their focus and their communication to voters. As both left-wing and right-wing voters seem to be drawn to BSW, it is imperative that the current coalition provides solutions, as the dual rise of AfD and BSW carries with it the great risk of a more thoroughgoing right-wing authoritarian turn in Germany, and the building of a new authoritarian consensus.

Svenja Hiesgen, from Germany, holds a Bachelor’s degree in Literary and Cultural Analysis from the University of Amsterdam and is set to commence a Master’s degree in Public and Cultural Diplomacy at the University of Siena, with a profound interest in political discourse analysis and the interplay of religion within modern cultural and political contexts.

For too long, the ideology of the so-called “rules-based international order” (RBIO) has functioned as a mental straitjacket, as a barrier to thinking. Its strictures made it impossible to see, as Orwell famously put it, what was right under our noses.

Thanks to a blind faith in the rightness and efficacy of the RBIO, the cognitive dissonance of American foreign policy under the previous administration reached tragicomic proportions: In the first major foreign policy speech of his presidency, President Joe Biden boasted, “America is back. Diplomacy is back.”

Instead, what the world saw during the Biden interregnum was a country that only honored the highest ideals of the RBIO—peace, security, cooperation, respect for human rights—in the breach.

In practice, the Biden-led RBIO meant, as the historian Charles A. Beard once put it, perpetual war for perpetual peace. Under Biden, the US provided nearly limitless financial, intelligence, and military support (including the deployment of special operations forces) to Ukraine. It ratcheted up tensions with China in the South and East China Seas. And above all, it evinced a pathetic subservience to the whims of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The rest of the world had long since caught on that the RBIO was simply rhetorical window-dressing for Washington’s right to do what it wanted.

We can perhaps date the rebellion of the “rest” against “the West” to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s speech to the Munich Security conference in 2007, in which he took aim at the pretensions of the American-led order.

Less remembered, but perhaps more ramifying in this context, was Putin’s speech to the UN General Assembly in September 2015 in which he noted that, “attempts to push for changes within other countries based on ideological preferences, often led to tragic consequences and to degradation rather than progress.”

Whatever the case, it was during this time period—between the end of Bush II and the dawn of Trump I — when it became clear to “the rest" that the sun was setting on “the West.” During his first term, Trump and his advisors were unable to perceive this sea change. Yet for the better part of two decades, the most important question facing Washington was how to respond to the global shift from unipolarity to multipolarity. Unlike Trump I, Trump II seems to understand that the RBIO is an outdated operating system, fundamentally unsuited to the new multi-polar world.

And so, in a manner not dissimilar to President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s various and sundry attempts at trying anything to beat the Depression, Trump has tried his hand at a mix of policy responses in the (reasonable) expectation that anything would be an improvement over the moribund RBIO.

There is no better evidence that the times are indeed a-changing, than the speech Trump delivered in Riyadh on May 13, in which he noted that:

…The gleaming marvels of Riyadh and Abu Dhabi were not created by the so-called nation builders neocons or liberal nonprofits like those who spent trillions and trillions of dollars failing to develop Kabul, Baghdad, and so many other cities. Instead, the birth of a modern Middle East has been brought by the people of the region themselves.

In the end, the so-called nation builders…wrecked far more nations than they built, and the interventionists were intervening in complex societies…that they did not even understand themselves.. they told you how to do it but they had no idea how to do it themselves.

This is—if nothing else—a full-throated rejection of the internationalist pretensions of the RBIO. Trump’s vision amounts to a kind of “live and let live” realpolitik—it replaces values with sovereignty as the cornerstone of international relations. Ultimately, it is a defiant trashing of the rationale behind the disastrous run of “humanitarian” interventions characteristic of the Obama and Biden terms.

Yet, as it has played out over the last three months, Trump’s new world order is one that at times seems at variance with itself. It is a vision that has at least three discernible core elements: Transactionalism; Neo-isolationism; and Neo-colonialism.

Trumpist Transactionalism

“The business of America is business,” is a statement often attributed to President Calvin Coolidge. Similarly, the business of Trump II is “deals.” Both Trump and Steve Witkoff, the New York real estate magnate now serving as Trump’s principal foreign policy troubleshooter, speak the patois of corporate America. Trump’s discarding of ideology in foreign policy created a void that the principles (such as they are) of transactionalism are now filling.

At a minimum, a transactional foreign policy, rather than one based on allegedly “universal” precepts, is a more straightforward affair. A bilateral quid pro quo obviates the need for Washington to stand up an expensive and expansive national security apparatus that has as its mission the fomentation of covert and overt operations against both friendly and unfriendly countries in order to impose Washington’s agenda. Such operations—in Libya, in Syria, and in Ukraine—ultimately (perhaps purposefully) undermined the security of those regions. In that way the RBIO became, to borrow a phrase from the renowned Pentagon critic Franklin “Chuck” Spinney, a self-licking ice cream cone.

Trump II seems, so far anyway, to evince little interest in what his Director of National Intelligence, the Army combat veteran and former congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, has long derided as “regime change wars.” As such, the new administration moved quickly to shutter USAID, Voice of America, as well as offices within the State Department such as the Global Engagement Center that had as their mission the creation and funding of allegedly “independent” media outlets—outlets that often worked with pro-Western political opposition parties, in concert with American- and European- funded NGOs—in stirring up discontent against regimes Washington viewed less-than-favorably.

Under Biden, the RBIO devolved into a Manichean vision of a world divided between autocracies and democracies. And so, if you portray your adversary as the second coming of Hitler (as was often done in the case of Putin), how can you negotiate with them? You can't. No deal is possible. But, as Trump and Witkoff surely understand, the “art of the deal” is the art of the compromise. And thus far, Trump II has rejected the division of the world as envisioned by the Biden-led RBIO.

Trumpist Neo-Isolationism

The extent to which Trump II augurs the return of isolationism and a return to the “bad old days” of the interwar years —when an allegedly blinkered US Congress passed a series of Neutrality Acts in the run up to the Second World War—has always been overstated.

In his short time in office Trump has, inter alia: effected a cease-fire with the Houthis of Yemen; lifted crippling sanctions against the long-suffering people of Syria; cajoled and threatened Putin and Zelensky to come to a peaceful settlement over Ukraine; and sent American officials to Oman to find a peaceful way forward with Iran.

Isolationist? Hardly.

But the charge is not wholly without merit and usually stems from Trump’s impolitic comments regarding our immediate neighbors to the North and South—as well as his equally impolitic language regarding immigrants.

Still more, commentators wrongly mistake, or conflate, Trump’s neo-mercantilist economic policies with isolationism. Yet Trump’s oft-stated criticisms of our NATO allies adds ballast to the isolationist charge while the proposed dismantling of the offices within the National Security Council and the State Department having to do with international and multilateral organizations—as well as the proposed shuttering of US consulates and embassies across Africa— are indeed indicative of a neo-isolationist strand in his overall thinking.

One might note, however, that the most expensive (as well as expansive) pillars of the national security behemoth, the Intelligence Community and the Pentagon, remain largely unscathed. There are no plans, as far as this author knows, to shutter the principal tools of American force projection abroad: Ramstein Air Base in Germany and Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar.

Trumpist Neo-Colonialism

Trump’s rhetoric, particularly during his second Inaugural address, has been replete with neo-colonial sentiments. The veneration of President William McKinley, under whose watch the US embarked upon an unwise pursuit of an empire that stretched from Cuba to Hawaii to the Philippines, has been accompanied by the renaming of the Gulf of Mexico as well as threats to retake the Panama Canal Zone. Still more, Trump has frequently threatened to annex Greenland and—ignoring the lessons of the War of 1812—Canada.

Some of this isn’t as new or radical as it now appears. Neo-colonialism was most certainly a tool employed by Washington during the forty-year Cold War with the Soviets. Trump simply appears to be dusting off that old playbook for what his advisors no doubt see as the burgeoning Cold War with China.

The extent to which the three strands will work together or will be at odds with one another remains to be seen.

It all may yet work—or it may not. But given what came before, Trump can hardly be condemned for trying.

James W. Carden is editor of The Realist Review and a former State Department adviser.

Contemporary liberalism has increasingly faced charges of being itself illiberal. Indeed, there is a common perception that many mainstream elites in intellectual, corporate, and political spaces have shifted in their beliefs and practices and lent themselves to quite illiberal stances, particularly on cultural issues. Kevin Vallier and Brad Littlejohn agree with that assessment, and this event will put them in conversation about the causes of the current state of affairs. Some contend that the reason for the shift is the abandonment of a religious core that predates the emergence of classical liberalism - one that has acted as a guardrail for vibrant liberalism. Others maintain that secularism is not to blame and that it is entirely possible to retain humble and healthy liberal practices without invoking an imperatively religious component. What are the illiberal practices and beliefs marking modern liberalism, what is the reason for their emergence, and what should be done?

This speaker series, organized by the Illiberalism Studies Program and the Loeb Institute for Religious Freedom at the George Washington University, proposes to provide a space for intellectually stimulating discussions surrounding liberal and non-liberal ideologies. We want to promote substantive discussion of political and economic visions for the future. By facilitating open dialogues, this series seeks to transcend ideological boundaries and foster a deeper comprehension of each other's viewpoints.

The story liberalism tells about itself, about its commitment to the rule of law and neutrality and its protection of civil liberties and human rights, has been a central expression of its practice in the West for decades. Yet our contemporary politics seem to manifestly challenge this self-conception and have left many second guessing the evolution of liberalism and the extent to which its founding principles remain relevant today. In seeking answers, some wonder whether liberal principles have simply been misapplied, whether anterior promises have been left unfulfilled through misguided practice. Others wonder whether liberalism's flaws lie deeper and whether we ought to raise more fundamental questions, more foundational challenges to the liberal status quo. Does liberalism hold the key to human flourishing, or has it failed to deliver on its promises? Is a post-liberal future on the horizon, and if so, what might it look like?

This speaker series, organized by the Illiberalism Studies Program and the Loeb Institute for Religious Freedom at the George Washington University, proposes to provide a space for intellectually stimulating discussions surrounding liberal and non-liberal ideologies. We want to promote substantive discussion of political and economic visions for the future. By facilitating open dialogues, this series seeks to transcend ideological boundaries and foster a deeper comprehension of each other's viewpoints.

Present manifestations of the liberal tradition have evolved considerably from the conceptions of classical liberals such as John Stuart Mill and John Locke. While many may view the evolution of liberal thought as a refinement of a fundamentally good foundation, contemporary challenges contend that the foundations themselves warrant reconsideration and that the time for adopting an alternative model to the liberal order is quickly approaching. How lost are the classical liberal practices and thinking and do we need to recover them? Is there merit to the arguments of critics of liberalism and is it time to move beyond liberalism into something different? Something new?

This speaker series, organized by the Illiberalism Studies Program and the Loeb Institute for Religious Freedom at the George Washington University, proposes to provide a space for intellectually stimulating discussions surrounding liberal and non-liberal ideologies. We want to promote substantive discussion of political and economic visions for the future. By facilitating open dialogues, this series seeks to transcend ideological boundaries and foster a deeper comprehension of each other's viewpoints. _

Abstract

This paper aims to explore the implications of the essentially contested nature of the concept of liberalism in the conceptualization of illiberalism in order to understand the existence of misunderstandings and contradictions in the delimitation and definition of the concept within illiberalism studies. To this end, we seek to show that the contributions of linguistic political theory, inspired by the work of Wittgenstein, are are to describe and understand the conflicts that illiberalism can raise. Indeed, since liberalism is both an ideology and an analytical concept, it is difficult to define the latter without arbitrating the ideological conflicts between the “liberals pretenders”. As the synoptic comparison of the genealogies of illiberalism found in the literature shows, these conflicts are transcribed in the conceptualization of illiberalism, in a more or less imperceptible way, and are sometimes instrumentalized to invert the function and content of the concept. Consequently, our hypothesis is that the notion of “grammar” is useful in clarifying the fact that the concept of illiberalism has a different function and purpose depending on what is considered liberalism and the liberal tradition, which ultimately allows us to assess the coherence and relevance of the concept’s use.

As the literature on illiberalism—whether theoretical or empirical, comparative or monographic—consistently reminds us, the study of the illiberal phenomenon immediately faces a series of epistemological, historical, methodological, and ideological problems that form a veritable conceptual puzzle.1 Some of the ramifications of this conceptual puzzle are “ordinary” (which does not mean they are simple) in that they relate to classic issues in comparative politics and political theory. Thus, the definition of “essentially contested” notions such as democracy always raises delicate problems; similarly, the study of liberalism always raises a series of difficulties: is it an ideology? a meta-ideology constitutive of modernity? or a geographically and historically situated set of values and culture?2 From the complexity of grasping liberalism stems a number of difficulties specific to the apprehension of illiberalism, which scholars have not failed to note, as summarized by Marlene Laruelle:

To this point, illiberalism is an emerging concept in political science and political philosophy that remains to be tested by different disciplines and approaches. There are several reasons for its fluidity. First, in vernacular language, it is used as a misnomer to label political opponents. Second, it is highly polysemic and multicontextual: it is used both by scholars to describe the phenomenon they study, as well as by political actors as a normative descriptor that allows them to either reject or praise certain political movements, ideologies, and policies. Third, scholarly production on the concept remains scarce (although it is currently undergoing a dramatic increase). Moreover, in the scholarship that does exist, illiberalism often remains a value-laden concept that is defined negatively: its meaning depends on the meaning given to its antithesis, liberalism, in different cultural settings. Fourth, it competes with other, better-studied concepts, such as populism, conservatism, or far right.3

The most important manifestation of this conceptual puzzle is illustrated by the difficulty of establishing a satisfactory consensual conceptual framework for understanding illiberalism. So, while András Sajó and Renáta Uitz define illiberalism as a set of phenomena that reflects negatively liberal practices and challenge individual liberty, Jasper Theodor Kauth and Desmond King prefer to distinguish two distinct phenomena, namely, disruptive illiberalism—the authoritarian challenge to liberal procedural democracy—and ideological illiberalism, which challenges liberalism’s ideological foundations on personal liberty as well as equal treatment of individuals.4 Finally, illiberalism is also defined as a new ideology that challenges liberalism in an institutionally, philosophically, and culturally coherent way by Laruelle and Julian Waller.5 We can see that definitions (and genealogies) of illiberalism vary in the literature, although some elements, such as the inclusion of right-wing populism, are subject to convergence. Indeed, the definition of illiberalism is not just the subject of contradictory interpretations but also the subject of disagreement over the very nature of this phenomenon—is it an ideology? a mentality? or a category of political regime?—and over the appropriate method for its investigation.6

Such tensions are not solely attributable to classical epistemological and methodological disputes between “idealist” and “realist” (or “materialist”) approaches, nor those between theoretical and empirical approaches. Indeed, most studies on illiberalism do not fail to contextualize their subject and draw on the history of ideas to frame illiberalism. Recent publications of chapters and articles on the genealogy of illiberalism offer clues to some of the causes of this conceptual puzzle.7 Thus, far from facilitating the understanding of the illiberal phenomenon by establishing a consensus on the intellectual and political sources of illiberalism, these genealogies reflect the existence of unresolved (and sometimes unacknowledged) conflicts in the determination of the liberal and anti-liberal tradition.

Drawing on the work of Duncan Bell and Michael Freeden, who have explored these conflicts and their influence on the conceptualization of liberalism, my article aims to show that it is necessary to understand illiberalism in a similar way, taking into account the plurality of grammars of (il)liberalism that have emerged from these interpretations of liberal historiography.8 First, I show that the unavoidable association of illiberalism with a more-or-less complete form of anti-liberalism necessarily gives rise to methodological and epistemological problems—the conceptual puzzle—due to the ideological conflicts within the liberal galaxy (part 1). I then explore how this conceptual puzzle can be clarified by using a linguistic and comprehensive approach. In line with the conceptual framework developed by Hanna Pitkin, I advocate using the notion of a language game—borrowed from Ludwig Wittgenstein—to conceptualize illiberalism, while being attentive to the plurality of grammars of liberalism (part 2).9 Last, I demonstrate how my approach both reveals and explains the existence of contradictions in the conceptualization of illiberalism, which result from the overlooked coherence between political phenomena labeled “illiberal” and certain grammars of liberalism (part 3).

Exposing the Conceptual Puzzle

In order to shed light on the conceptual puzzle of illiberalism, it is first necessary to expose the existence of several misunderstandings within the literature mobilizing the concept of illiberalism and illiberal democracy. Indeed, a brief, inexhaustive history of the notion of illiberalism reveals that it has consistently given rise to contradictory conceptualizations ever since the need to think about illiberalism emerged in the 1990s in the wake of the third wave of democracy. Thus, for Bell, David Brown, Kanishka Jayasuriya, and David Martin Jones, the coauthors of Towards Illiberal Democracy in Pacific Asia (1995), the notion of illiberalism aims to describe the incompatibility between Western liberalism and an anti-individualist (and therefore anti-liberal) Confucian culture, which leads to the development of a “non-neutral” state governed by a technocratic and paternalistic elite that replaces rule of law with rule by law.10 For Fareed Zakaria, on the other hand, illiberalism means a majoritarian undermining of liberal institutions governing the exercise of power and individual freedoms. Zakaria conceptualizes illiberalism in continuity with the liberal critique of the tyranny of the majority. Consequently, the emergence of illiberal democracy is not the result of an incompatibility between liberalism and a non-Western culture, but the resurgence of the historical incompatibility between popular sovereignty and constitutional liberalism.11

Although Zakaria and Bell agree on the link between illiberalism and the questioning of liberal constitutionalism, their conceptualizations are therefore radically contradictory, even while they conform to relatively consensual narratives on what constitutes liberalism and anti-liberalism. Bell’s conceptualization of illiberalism is based on an opposition between a liberalism historically defined by its egalitarian individualism and a meritocratic and familialist anti-liberalism, while Zakaria’s is based on the opposition between a liberalism that historically protects individual rights guaranteeing freedom and the free market, protected by mechanisms such as checks and balances on the power of government and by the independence of the judiciary. Yet these interpretations of the liberal tradition (or the misunderstandings that their application to comparative politics induces) have considerable implications, as they give rise to diametrically opposed analyses. Thus, for Bell, the Singaporean regime, like South Korea and Taiwan, is an illiberal democracy, while for Zakaria, it is, on the contrary, a liberal dictatorship in complete opposition to illiberal democracies such as Boris Yeltsin’s Russia or Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela.

How can we explain the fact that conceptualizations of illiberalism can be so divergent, leading to completely contradictory descriptions of the same regime, while resting on common interpretations of the liberal tradition? Despite the absence of a conceptual framework structuring studies on illiberalism that would explain the permanence of certain conceptual problems—like transitology within democratizations studies—the comparison between the pioneering works on the conceptualization of illiberalism and the contemporary works that have developed in the wake of the claim to illiberalism by a growing part of right-wing populism seems to show that such misunderstandings remain in contemporary literature, as we shall see below.12

Considering these various observations, my hypothesis is that all conceptualizations of illiberalism, whether or not they pay attention to the polysemy of the term liberalism and the plurality of its appropriations, think of illiberalism in the continuity of a dichotomy between liberalism and anti-liberalism which stems from a grammar of liberalism that defines the appropriate uses of these terms.13 Consequently, it is impossible to conceptualize illiberalism without being entangled in the plurality of interpretations of liberal historiography that directly or indirectly define what anti-liberalism is.

Studies on illiberalism thus reveal the existence not only of several conceptualizations of liberalism but also of several grammars of liberalism, whose competition has been overlooked. Each scholar (and each political actor) masters a certain grammar of liberalism, that is, a repertoire of potential uses of the term liberalism, adapted to specific disciplines or geo-historical areas. The diversity of these usages is consequently limited not only by specific contexts of enunciation but also by the interpretation of what constitutes the liberal tradition. However, the identification of the liberal tradition is the subject of conflict both within liberalism—that is, among the intellectuals and political actors who claim the term—and outside it—that is, among liberalism’s ideological opponents and in the academic sphere. As a result, the genealogies of liberalism differ and clash in their division of the liberal tradition—the distinction between classical liberalism and new liberalism, for example—and in their interpretation of the core concepts of liberalism, such as freedom and individuality.

This linguistic clarification of the different grammars of liberalism is particularly important because the reading of liberal historiography determines the conceptualization of liberalism and illiberalism. As we have seen, liberalism is conceptually associated with individualism, according to a classic interpretation of liberal historiography. This association is challenged by feminist approaches, which emphasize the relative nature of this individualism due to the importance of the (patriarchal) family in liberal theories, leading to the formulation of a different grammar of liberalism.14 Similarly, the conceptualization of liberalism will differ if it is based on a “critical” interpretation of liberal historiography, like that of Domenico Losurdo or Desmond King, which will show the permeation of historical forms of liberalism with racist and eugenic practices conceptually associated with fascism.15 Consequently, the use of distinct grammars of liberalism implies different morphologizations of liberal ideology, which will give more or less interest to the formulation of a concept of illiberalism.16 Thus, if we mobilize Losurdo and King’s interpretation of liberal historiography, the variety of “illiberal practices” to be taken into account in conceptualizing illiberalism will be broader and will include states traditionally considered liberal, such as the United Kingdom.

However, the use of the same grammar can conceal contradictory interpretations of liberal historiography, which is often the case between political opponents within or outside an ideology, as Freeden has shown.17 Liberals and anti-liberals can thus agree on the association of liberalism with constitutionalism, although their decontestation of this concept may differ according to more or less contradictory readings of liberal historiography.

Of course, this observation about the contested nature of the definition of liberalism and its tradition is already known.18 However, it serves above all to preclude a consensual definition of liberalism (and, by extension, of anti-liberalism). Yet the fact that liberalism may be an essentially contested concept does not prevent us from studying the causes and implications of conflicts between different grammars of liberalism and, within it, competing grammars and conflicts over the decontestation of some. To put it another way, the fact that the definition of liberalism (and incidentally that of anti-liberalism) is contested and contestable constitutes the starting point of my study.

While it is a commonplace to acknowledge the diversity of uses of the term liberalism, the conflicts of interpretation of the liberal tradition and the intra-ideological conflicts within the liberal family are little known. Yet these conflicts have led intellectuals vindicating liberalism to exclude each other from the liberal perimeter. Thus, we can observe the consequences of this process if we compare Zakaria’s and Bell’s conceptualizations of illiberalism. So, it appears that the grammar Zakaria uses, which associates liberalism with rule of law and capitalism, insists on the importance of classical liberalism in the conceptualization of liberalism. This grammar is justified by an interpretation of liberal historiography that emphasizes the importance of Anglo-Scottish liberalism and the political and intellectual legacy of Edmund Burke or Thomas Jefferson. This interpretation of the liberal tradition implies that the progressive and egalitarian connotation of the term liberalism in ordinary American language reflects a distortion of its original meaning.

Consequently, according to this grammar of liberalism, anti-liberalism is associated with the questioning of rule of law and capitalism. The use of this grammar reflects coherent decontestations of the concepts of rule of law and capitalism, which make them inseparable. This explains why Zakaria considers the Singaporean regime to be liberal, because even if it is a “dictatorship” that does not strictly respect the principles of political liberalism, the regime guarantees sufficient civil liberties to allow the development of a capitalist market economy, and why he considers regimes that claim to be socialist to be illiberal. Conversely, the fact that Bell associates liberalism with egalitarian individualism and pluralism reflects his distinct interpretation of the liberal tradition, which places greater emphasis on its contemporary development, particularly under the influence of John Rawls. This grammar of liberalism explains why Bell regards the Singaporean regime as illiberal. Despite its capitalist market economy, the latter is not necessarily associated with liberalism, which also leads to a more nuanced apprehension of constitutionalism and a distinction between rule of law and rule by law, where Zakaria makes no such distinction.

This process of excommunication and struggle for a monopoly on the determination of the liberal tradition is therefore of the utmost importance, as it induces a semantic and conceptual conflict around illiberalism. For example, for Friedrich A. Hayek, state interventionism defended by “progressive” liberals such as John Stuart Mill is illiberal and leads to totalitarianism, because true liberalism promotes the deregulated free market.19 Conversely, for Benedetto Croce and John Maynard Keynes, it is the deregulated free-market liberal tradition that is false liberalism.20 Each of these authors justifies the excommunication of his intra-ideological opponents by his interpretation of the liberal tradition.21 Consequently, the intellectual genealogy of liberalism and illiberalism encounters a language game in which several grammars of liberalism are superposed, each based on interpretations of the liberal intellectual tradition and on its adaptation to specific sociopolitical contexts.22 This leads to major conflicts in the delimitation and interpretation of the illiberal phenomenon, as the very point of the term illiberalism is to conceptualize direct or indirect opposition to liberalism.

Hence, what is considered “liberal” in some contexts will be considered “illiberal” or “anti-liberal” in others. Studies on illiberalism are not immune to the paradoxes resulting from these overlaps. The concept of illiberalism is thus constructed from sociopolitical contexts in which specific languages of the liberalism-illiberalism relationship are mobilized and interpreted in the light of the grammar of liberalism employed by the researchers themselves. I argue that this configuration leads to a language game in which the terms liberalism and illiberalism are employed according to distinct logics, implying certain epistemological and methodological precautions in the conceptualization of illiberalism. Therefore, one of the keys to solving the illiberal conceptual puzzle is to obtain a synoptic view of the genealogies of illiberalism to clarify the conflicts in the interpretation of the liberal tradition that structures the conceptualization of illiberalism and its intellectual and political sources.

Untangling the Conceptual Puzzle of Illiberalism

Like other fields of scholarly literature devoted to notions that are sources of conceptual confusion, such as populism and democracy, illiberal studies employ tools derived from the conceptual framework of the philosophy of ordinary language or from its reception in political science and the history of ideas.23 Indeed, the study of the illiberal phenomenon calls for the mobilization of a linguistic approach, as it allows us to expose the semantic springs of certain conceptual problems affecting the apprehension of the illiberal phenomenon, while at the same time informing this very phenomenon.24 As Pitkin demonstrates in developing Wittgenstein’s contributions to philosophy (and political science):

What we really lack when we are conceptually puzzled is not a definition or rule, but a clear overview of the relevant cases, Wittgenstein says he is “not after exactness, but after a synoptic view.” The idea of perspicuity, of a “perspicuous representation,” he says is of “fundamental importance” and “earmarks the form of account” he gives, his way of looking at things. A main cause of conceptual puzzlement is the fact “that we do not command a clear view of the use of our words. – Our grammar is lacking in this sort of perspicuity.” Thus, the real task here is “not to resolve a contradiction but to make it possible for us to get a clear view” of the problem troubling us, of “the state of affairs before the contradiction is resolved.” Of course, a perspicuous overview of inconsistency is not the same as a single, unifying, consistent rule that fits all the cases. But if no single, unifying, consistent rule can fit all the cases, then an overview of the chaotic facts may well be what is really needed.25

Although it does not constitute an epistemological imperative that would invariably undermine the relevance of research that does not employ it, the linguistic approach helps to explain the blind spots and biases affecting our understanding of the illiberal phenomenon, due to the language game in which the latter is entangled.26 To say it another way, the notion of a language game helps to distinguish different coherent sets of mobilizations of the terms liberalism and illiberalism. In fact, the metaphor of a language game highlights the fact that depending on the “area of language,” that is, the context of enunciations and the grammar of liberalism in use, we can claim liberalism or, on the contrary, illiberalism to defend the same ideals, the same political agenda. So, while Ronald Reagan came to power denouncing liberalism, Margaret Thatcher justified a return to it. Therefore, language games that encircle liberalism imply certain contradictions and unthinking about the liberal and anti-liberal intellectual tradition. Far from ending up in relativist dead-end where the conceptualization of liberalism and illiberalism is impossible to define and operate, I argue that it is possible to start from this observation to better understand the sources of what is today called “illiberalism,” namely, the questioning of liberal constitutionalism.27 A comparison of these different grammars of liberalism would require a larger work to do justice to it, so in continuity with Freeden’s morphological approach, I focus here on certain concepts such as individualism and interventionism to show how certain grammars of liberalism induce impasses regarding the sources of illiberalism.

For instance, several conceptualizations of illiberalism can be found in the Journal of Illiberalism and the Routledge Handbook of Illiberalism.28 For the Handbook’s editors, liberalism is continuous with the philosophy of the Enlightenment and can be conceptually closely associated with the notion of individualism.29 Illiberalism, on the other hand, is not an ideology or a type of regime, but a phenomenon in which this individualism is challenged by a heterogeneous assemblage of old and more recent practices and ideas.30 This conceptualization of liberalism is based on a certain interpretation of the liberal tradition, whose major authors would be John Locke, Montesquieu, Benjamin Constant, and John Stuart Mill, and it places all critics of individualism, liberal constitutionalism, and enlightenment, whether conservative or progressive, in the illiberal camp.31 This grammar of liberalism is itself shared by some “conservative” and “progressive” authors (and political actors) critical of liberalism. This grammar is mainly based on an interpretation of the liberal tradition as a continuation of the philosophy of the Enlightenment—whose main components are individualism and the distinction between facts and values—and forms the basis of the critique of “liberal atomism.”32 This critique can be found to varying degrees in conservative and communitarian thought.33

Consequently, the linguistic association of liberalism with individualism is shared by liberals and anti-liberals alike. However, the fact that this grammar is shared does not mean that definitions of individualism converge. As Stephen Holmes has shown, the association of liberalism with individualism often serves as a strawman, reducing liberalism to an antisocial ideology.34 As Immanuel Wallerstein points out, this grammar of liberalism rests more or less on its assimilation to a meta-ideology of Western modernity and tends to confuse the critique of modernity with the critique of liberalism.35 As a result, reactionary thinking and communitarian, (eco)feminist, and Marxist theories, based on the epistemological, moral, and political critique of liberal individualism, can be subsumed within the spectrum of illiberalism.36 This grammar of liberalism thus induces a certain way of conceptualizing illiberalism, since the notion of anti-individualism is not adequate to characterize a precise ideology or type of regime.37

However, this conceptualization of liberalism is contested both by authors using the same grammar (the association of liberalism with individualism) and by authors who question it. Thus, for liberists or paleo-liberals, individualism is indeed a core concept of liberalism, but it does not imply the existence of individual rights apart from property rights because of their negative interpretation of the concept of liberty, which places authors in favor of political and social rights—such as Mill or Hans Kelsen—in the anti-individualist and therefore anti-liberal camp.38 This interpretation of the liberal tradition is based precisely on a critique of the Enlightenment and rationalism. Following the example of Hayek, it is possible to portray an “Anglo-Scottish” empiricist liberalism, based on the figures of David Hume and Adam Smith, as being opposed to the “continental” rationalist enlightenment. This interpretation of the liberal tradition enables Hayek to criticize Keynesian social democracy and the legal system that allows it to be established, namely legal positivism.39

There is thus a major contradiction between conceptualizations of liberalism mainly or incidentally based on the concept of individualism, which has the effect of modifying the interpretation of the anti-liberal tradition and thus the delimitation of the illiberal phenomenon. The liberist reading of liberal historiography is ambiguous about the anti-liberalism of conservative authors such as Carl Schmitt—from whom several theses were appropriated by neoliberals—and even tends to place some of them, such as Edmund Burke, in the “liberal” camp.40 Consequently, the conceptualization of liberalism based on the concepts of individualism and the free market tends to exclude from the perimeter of anti-liberalism political currents favorable to capitalism. As we have seen, this led Zakaria—and in the past, “neoliberals” such as Milton Friedman and Hayek—to include authoritarian states such as Singapore and Augusto Pinochet’s Chile within the liberal perimeter, because socialism is the real anti-liberalism, according to them.41

Finally, there are two other grammars of liberalism, in which liberalism is detached from the “selfish” individualism associated with Manchester capitalism, leading either to the denunciation of individualism, as in the case of L. T. Hobhouse, or to the defense of an “egalitarian” and democratic interpretation of individualism, as in the case of John Dewey.42 These “progressive” grammars of liberalism are based on two readings of the liberal tradition. Among the proponents of new liberalism and the welfare state, such as Raymond Aron, there is a rejection of classical liberalism, associated with laissez-faire and the rise of inequality during the 19th century. However, there is another interpretation of the liberal tradition shared by Keynes and the first generation of the Chicago School.43 The second interpretation is based on a more democratic reading of the classical liberal tradition and aims to denounce its recuperation by a business elite and appropriation by intellectuals such as Herbert Spencer.44 Historically, these two interpretations of the liberal tradition have led to the idea that socialism is compatible with liberalism, while the free market is associated with conservatism or even anti-liberalism.45

Thus, according to Freeden, supporters of the free market are “mistaken liberals” who have been excluded from the liberal perimeter since the first half of the 20th century and are in fact conservatives.46 The outcome is a conceptualization of anti-liberalism that is radically different from previous ones, although it can be superimposed on the first grammar of liberalism based on the philosophy of the Enlightenment. Thus, for proponents of “progressive” grammars of liberalism, one of the main intellectual sources of illiberalism is to be found in the thought of Schmitt, because his critique of liberalism targets both liberal constitutionalism and the egalitarian individualism of the new liberals.47

Unlike the grammar of liberalism that positions a “homogeneous” liberalism opposite several anti-liberal critiques of modernity, the progressive grammar rests on a conceptual rupture between liberalism and capitalism (or between political and economic liberalism). The concept of the free market advocated by “pseudo-liberals” like Hayek and conservatives like Schmitt is thus opposed to regulated capitalism (or planned economy) and seen as incompatible with fundamental freedoms and liberal constitutionalism, which allows its inclusion in the concept of illiberalism.48

Thus, if from a linguistic perspective we can see a convergence in the use of the term illiberalism to describe right-wing populism, this common labeling actually covers up radically different conceptualizations of illiberalism.49 Hence, I understand part of the conceptual puzzle of illiberalism to lie in these contradictory and mutually exclusive interpretations of the relationship between concepts of individualism, fundamental rights and freedoms, constitutionalism, and the market economy within the liberal tradition. The notion of a language game seems appropriate here to account for the resulting conceptual, semantic, and genealogical imbroglio:

Historically, the different meanings of liberalism vary according to the different national historical-political traditions.50 The performativity of these different grammars on the political level leads to a problem of articulating the genealogies of liberalism, because by being appropriated by political actors, these different grammars have led to the sedimentation of different forms of liberalism. Regardless of how we conceptualize liberalism, we therefore need to adapt to what liberalism means in a given geo-historical context and adopt a certain distance from political actors’ claims to liberalism or illiberalism. But the meaning of “liberal” is not only historically nonlinear within a single historical tradition; it is also open to contestation.51 Thus, the common opposition in ordinary language between a “progressive” Anglo-American liberalism and a “conservative” continental liberalism is in fact proof of the ideologically driven competition between different grammars of liberalism. This unequal performativity of the grammars of liberalism explains why, in the name of Catholicism and traditionalism, the critique of liberalism is opportune for Patrick J. Deneen but less so for Pierre Manent.52

On the ideological level, the use of the term “liberal” is the subject of conflicts dating back to the French Revolution, as Helena Rosenblatt reminds us.53 This conflict exists both within the liberal family, meaning the currents claiming a monopoly on the definition of liberalism, and outside the liberal family. This semantic conflict leads to confusion, as the label “liberal” can be used to describe or apprehend distinct, even opposing, ideological formations. Thus, the criticism leveled at “liberalism” by communitarians such as Michael Walzer is in fact aimed solely at “high liberalism” and does not prevent him from claiming to be a liberal himself.54 Similarly, defenders of liberalism can always contest the fact that the criticism leveled at liberalism is in fact aimed at a caricatured and truncated version of the latter, since it is based on a different interpretation of liberal historiography.55

These language games surrounding liberalism thus raise several analytical problems in the conceptualization of illiberalism. Indeed, a descriptive approach to illiberalism, limited to a given geo-historical context, will necessarily come up against certain grammars of liberalism and may correspond to what is considered liberal in another context. As I have already mentioned, this language game can be observed from the very genesis of the notion of illiberalism; but this competition of grammars is made apparent when certain languages of liberalism are reversed and described as “illiberal,” as Frank Furedi did when he denounced the deceptive nature of liberalism’s progressive grammar.56 Having sketched out a synoptic approach to illiberalism, it seems appropriate to show its contributions to the genealogy of illiberalism, as the articulation of the plurality of grammars of liberalism on the historical-political and conceptual levels leads to confusion in the conceptualization of illiberalism.

Paradoxical Genealogies and Language Games

As Sajó and Uitz have already noted, “liberalism is a word with too many concepts,” so the conceptualization of illiberalism cannot escape a series of conceptual problems, some of which I have attempted to shed light on.57 This conceptual puzzle finds its most important manifestation in disagreements over the perimeter of the illiberal phenomenon, and by extension over its intellectual and political sources. Although there may appear to be a consensus on the political phenomena encompassed within the perimeter of illiberalism, such as right-wing populism, a comparison of the different grammars of liberalism employed by the authors shows that conceptualizations of illiberalism differ and that these overlaps may be fortuitous.

Thus, although the inclusion of the Hungarian regime in the illiberal perimeter seems self-evident given Viktor Orbán’s appropriation of the term “illiberal democracy,” it is not self-evident according to several grammars of liberalism. Like Singapore, simultaneously described as a liberal dictatorship by Zakaria and an illiberal democracy by Bell, the political transformations in Hungary and Poland are subject to contradictory readings. For Furedi and Anne-Marie Le Pourhiet, these political transformations do not call into question the liberal nature of the Hungarian and Polish regimes.58 On the contrary, they argue that the constitutional reforms in Hungary and Poland have enabled resistance to a progressive illiberal liberalism that has replaced the true liberalism of the Western tradition. In symmetric opposition, these political transformations have been described by Zakaria and Holmes as the resurgence of a conflict between democratic populism and liberal constitutionalism. This approach—which grants a form of majoritarian democratic legitimacy to political actors claiming illiberalism—is itself contested by authors such as Jan-Werner Müller, who view these transformations through the prism of the opposition between democratic liberalism and authoritarian illiberalism.59 Each of these conceptualizations of illiberalism is based on a particular grid of interpretation of the liberal tradition, which determines a certain grammar of liberalism and anti-liberalism.

Here, I believe that these divergences can be explained by comparing the genealogies of illiberalism on which they are based. Above all, the study of these genealogies reveals the existence of under-studied elements that create blind spots as to the sources of contemporary illiberal phenomena, thus helping us to understand the paradoxes of certain conceptualizations of illiberalism. For the editors of the Routledge Handbook of Illiberalism, the illiberal perimeter stretches from Catholic fundamentalism to critical race studies, while Hayek and Robert Nozick are described as traditional liberals.60 However, as we have seen, this delimitation of illiberalism is not only contested but also reversed in other works. Thus, according to Freeden, Hayek is not a liberal, while for Wendy Brown, the illiberal phenomenon is rooted in the theories of neoliberals.61 Finally, we might note that for Furedi, the nudge theory proposed by the free-marketers Cass and Sunstein is illiberal because it is in line with the interventionism of new liberalism, that is, the version of liberalism critical of capitalism.62 The political and intellectual history of “liberalism” and “anti-liberalism” thus appears as a “heap of spare parts” that can be assembled according to several grammars of liberalism to forge a concept of illiberalism.63

Yet, it is possible to inform the different conceptualizations of illiberalism by comparing the delimitation of the illiberal phenomenon with its supposed intellectual and political sources. To put it another way, although the way in which one labels a phenomenon or tradition is always questionable, which can create the illusion that the concept of illiberalism is infinitely elastic, this does not result in a theoretical impasse, as it is possible to compare the genealogy of illiberalism one adopts with the intellectual and political sources of the illiberal phenomenon one has delimited.

Thus, if we look for example at Zakaria’s conceptualization of illiberalism, which today constitutes a major reference for illiberalism studies, we can see that he defines liberalism in a way that is meant to be faithful to classical liberalism, meaning that it is associated with individual freedoms, political constitutionalism, and the free market and is opposed to democracy, which is associated with the tyranny of the majority.64 Illiberalism is therefore a latent drift within any democratic regime, which can only be prevented by the safeguards of constitutional liberalism. This grammar of liberalism (and illiberalism) is itself shared by Orbán and Jarosław Kaczyński, whose claim to illiberal democracy is based on the opposition between their electoral legitimacy and the “legal impossibilism” embodied in the constitutions inherited from the post-communist transition, which has retrospectively validated Zakaria’s narrative.65

Yet this grammar of liberalism and the interpretation of the liberal tradition on which it is based, which is widely shared, does not explain why Zakaria considers the Singaporean regime to be a liberal “dictatorship” and why this same regime is cited as a model by Orbán.66 Since the Singaporean model is based on an authoritarian model that prioritizes economic growth over adherence to the separation of powers and respect for fundamental rights and freedoms, it can only be considered liberal if political liberalism is regarded as accessory (or even non-liberal, or illiberal). Consequently, if we include Orbán’s Hungary within the perimeter of illiberalism and consider that the Singaporean regime is indeed a model for Orbán’s Hungary, illiberalism seems to find one of its sources in theories favoring economic development to the detriment of political liberalism and representative democracy. Paradoxically, Zakaria’s conception of liberalism thus seems partially consistent with Orbán’s vision of illiberalism, illustrating the confusion caused by the overlapping of different grammars of liberalism.

Historically, the grammar associating liberalism and the free market—in which Hayek is one of the main intellectual references—has been used to present liberalism as opposed to democracy and the tyranny of the majority.67 After the Second World War, this critique was even extended to representative democracy, with the electoral opportunism of parliamentarians being held responsible for the advent of the welfare state, which threatened property rights. Hayek and Thatcher thus regularly invoked the defense of classical liberalism and constitutionalism from the majoritarian and egalitarian excesses of representative democracy, while considering the Pinochet regime in Chile liberal. Accordingly, this grammar of liberalism, characteristic of the end of the Cold War, was used by Zakaria to conceptualize illiberalism and to draw a distinction between liberal dictatorship and illiberal democracy. However, this grammar of liberalism is based on a strategic fixation of liberal historical and political tradition that is incompatible with the inclusion of Orbán’s Fidesz, Jair Bolsonaro’s Partido Social Liberal, or Trump’s Republican Party within the perimeter of illiberalism. Indeed, as observed by several papers in monographic and comparative studies on their election to office, we are witnessing an alliance between national-conservative populism and neoliberal capitalism:68

Signaling a process of political change, the rise of the nationalist and nativist radical right is increasingly fueling brazen attacks on the various institutions, rights and values [undergirding] constitutional liberalism across the West. Amongst others, these include attacks on checks and balances, where legislatures and judiciaries are subject to power-hungry executive branches, along with wider societal counterpowers, including independent academia and media.
. . .
Yet (the threat of) political illiberalization unfolds in a specific context of advanced neoliberalization, where (as of writing) economic ruptures remain mundane. What is foremost observed is the rise of political—not economic—populism across the West.69

From a genealogical perspective, this alliance is also consistent with the appropriation of Schmittian theses by neoliberal schools of thought in their advocacy of the concentration of power in the hands of the executive.70 For supporters of the free market, the concentration of power in the hands of the executive is the best guarantee of the proper functioning of the market, as evidenced by the fact that constitutionalism is compatible with authoritarianism, since its primary purpose is to only safeguard the rights and freedoms necessary for a free-market economy.71 According to Zakaria, liberalism is closely linked with capitalism, while illiberalism necessarily implies its questioning in favor of socialism.72 However, this grammar of liberalism hides the importance of debates between “liberals” over the place of capitalism within liberalism and the concrete organization of the market economy, one of the manifestations of which is the use of the notion of crony capitalism as anathema.73

For instance, the Reagan-Thatcher model of governance is commonly associated with a form of economic ultraliberalism, as neoliberals defend the free market in their grammar of liberalism. However, this grammar is contested both by libertarians, that is, free-market advocates who reject liberalism, and by “progressive” liberals. For the latter, the conservative revolution of the 1980s led to the advent of a paradoxical and predatory interventionism based on market deregulation, privatization of public services, and support for big corporations through supply-side policies and the undermining of antitrust policies.74 Consequently, far from leading to the minimalist state advocated by libertarians, the coming to office of “neoliberal populists” led to a strengthening of the state. Indeed, the dissonance between the use of liberal grammar to defend the free market and its concrete political consequences was noted by Friedman himself, who went so far as to describe the Thatcher-Reagan governments as “socialist.”75

Finally, we have also seen the emergence of an “anti-globalist” fringe among free-market advocates, which denounces multilateral and regional free-trade agreements in favor of less “bureaucratic” bilateral agreements.76 If we agree that this is the model adopted to varying degrees by Brazil, Hungary, and the United States, then it is difficult to include the anti-globalists in the illiberal perimeter without considering neoliberalism as one of its intellectual and political sources.77

How much circumspection one shows in the face of the alliance between neoliberalism and right-wing populism—and how one labels it—depends on the grammar of liberalism one employs. Describing the neoliberal nature of illiberal “governance,” for example, is fraught with terminological discomfort, due to the superimposition of the ideological concepts of liberalism, illiberalism, and neoliberalism. Indeed, it seems contradictory to define policies pursued by illiberal governments as neoliberal if neoliberalism is defined as ultraliberalism advocating the reduction of state interventionism. By contrast, for Wendy Brown and other authors conceiving neoliberalism as at odds with liberalism, the existence of a link between the free market and illiberalism seems more coherent, even logical.

I believe that the main contribution of the linguistic approach to illiberalism—and, more specifically, of the notion of a language game—is to shed light on certain typically overlooked aspects of the genealogy of political phenomena labeled as illiberal. The superimposition of different grammars of liberalism helps to dissect conceptualizations of illiberalism and the interpretations of the anti-liberal tradition upon which they are based. Paradoxically, the critical use of the concept of illiberalism (or liberalism) does not guarantee the existence of an ideological opposition with the political adversaries it designates. So, regardless of whether it was labeled liberal, ultraliberal, or populist, the conservative revolution of the 1980s was conceived as a coherent whole, even as Reagan criticized liberalism and Thatcher claimed it. With the term illiberalism now being reclaimed by political actors, it seems appropriate to maintain a certain distance from the claims of political actors—including intellectuals defending a normative approach—by questioning their affiliations with illiberalism or liberalism.

Nevertheless, maintaining this axiological distance is rendered more difficult by the performative nature of these language games, as the terms used by political actors become labels by which they can be identified. For example, transitology and the process of exporting the model of Western democracy associated with the Washington Consensus and shock therapy have been defended in the name of liberalism. This association, which illustrates the success of the redefinition of liberalism by the currents defending the free market, was embraced even more easily because it corresponded to a classic, albeit contested, grammar of liberalism. So, we cannot ignore the fact that denouncing liberalism and claiming illiberalism can be a reaction to this process. The resulting language game implies that according to certain grammars resulting from a specific historical and geographical context, the liberalism that is “claimed” by intellectuals or political actors does not correspond to the liberal ideology described by Freeden’s morphological approach.

Conversely, this entails that certain claims of illiberalism and certain criticisms of liberalism do not imply a questioning of liberal ideology. Some claims and criticisms of liberalism are therefore mutually consistent (and politically expedient) because they mobilize the same grammar of liberalism, but this grammar is not necessarily compatible with liberal ideology. Ivan Krastev and Holmes’s diagnosis of the rise of illiberalism is a perfect illustration of the language game resulting from the performative success of the neoliberal redefinition of liberalism.78 For them, liberalism is responsible for the advent of illiberalism, because the shock therapies and the conditionality mechanism imposed on Central and Eastern European states wishing to join the European Union are the result of the hegemony of liberal ideology. Their conceptualization of liberalism is therefore consistent with the “grammar” used by illiberal intellectuals and political actors, but not with liberal ideology itself. Yet this conceptualization of liberalism, shared by Zakaria, also implies blind spots with regard to the illiberal phenomenon and its parentage by neoliberalism (or free-market conservatism).

Conclusion

In this article, I have mobilized a linguistic approach to political theory—that is, an approach concerned with the uses of concepts and not directly with their essence—in order to apprehend the conceptual puzzle affecting the characterization of illiberalism. The use of tools from the philosophy of ordinary language, such as the notion of language game, has served to give us a synoptic perspective on my object of research. Indeed, a comparison of the different approaches and conceptualizations of illiberalism reveals the existence of several grammars of liberalism backed by different interpretations of the liberal tradition.

Comparing these different grammars has enabled me to reveal the contested nature of liberal historiography and to sketch out the ideological roots of this conflict within the currents claiming to embody liberalism. These comparisons have highlighted the implications of these conflicts, namely, that certain grammars of liberalism are contradictory, or even mutually exclude each other from the liberal perimeter. In fact, certain conceptualizations of illiberalism—or anti-liberalism—both in normative political theory and in scientific literature, include in the illiberal perimeter what is considered liberal within other grammars. We can thus observe the existence of a language game in which it is possible to describe certain phenomena as liberal or illiberal, depending on the grammar of liberalism employed.

In a second stage, this article sought to deepen the implications of this observation by superimposing different grammars of liberalism, political phenomena included within an illiberal perimeter, and their genealogy. This overlapping suggests that certain conceptualizations of illiberalism are inconsistent because the delimitation of the illiberal perimeter they propose is incompatible with the grammar of liberalism they employ. In my view, these contradictions are partially imputable to the performativity of the language games I have mentioned, that is, to their appropriation by political actors. Consequently, some of the intellectual and political sources of phenomena labeled as illiberal are necessarily paradoxical, because they are usually considered liberal.

Although necessarily open to question due to the plurality of grammars of liberalism, the genealogical study of illiberalism allows us to distance ourselves to some extent from the claims made by intellectuals, writers, and political figures claiming or denouncing illiberalism.