Interview: Matt Sleat on Post-liberalism and the Common Good, Modernity, and Liberal Perfectionism

Matt Sleat discusses post-liberals' conception of the common good and their political aims, post-liberalism's conflation of liberalism and modernity, and a liberal path forward.

Matt Sleat, thank you for joining us and congratulations on your new book, Post-Liberalism! I want to begin with a simple question: how do you define post-liberalism? You lay out a definition on page ten of the book, and I want you to walk our readers through that. But I am also curious if and how your definition differs from that offered by others, either within post-liberal works themselves or in the secondary literature.

Thank you for your interest in the book. It’s very much appreciated.

For the purposes of the book, I define post-liberalism as one strand of the contemporary New Right characterized by two features: First, a complete and wholesale rejection of liberalism—understood as a politics that has at its heart a commitment to maximizing individual freedom of choice—in all its forms, and which it takes to bear sole and exclusive responsibility for all the various ills of modern society; second, a belief that the current failed liberal order ought to be replaced with an alternative politics centered around a notion of the common good. We can further say that the post-liberal vision of politics is perfectionist (in believing that it is the role of politics to help guide people towards living well—to “legislate morality,” as the post-liberal thinker Adrian Vermeule puts it), statist (the state has a central role in directing people towards true human flourishing, including intervening in the market), confessional (the state should recognize the truth of Christianity, and which then gives substance to the notion of the common good), and elitist (politics unavoidably means being governed by an elite—what really matters is that you have the right elite, i.e. those with post-liberal values).

The post-liberal vision of politics is perfectionist, statist, confessional, and elitist.

Now, I should be clear that I do not offer this as a definition of post-liberalism per se. There are people who describe themselves as post-liberals who are not well captured by this definition, most notably British post-liberals such as John Millbank, Adrian Pabst, Philip Blond, John Gray, and others. These thinkers are better understood as wanting to correct what they take to be the worst excesses of liberalism rather than reject it outright, and to that extent they do want a world that is meaningfully different from the status quo but which it would be wrong to describe as illiberal or totally non-liberal (for that reason I personally think post-liberalism is not necessarily a good description of their own position but that’s up to them). They also tend not to want to center the state in their political theory. So, there are those who also call themselves post-liberals, yet who do not fit this definition. And then there are those whom I intended this definition to capture— specifically the American and Catholic post-liberals such as (most notably) Adrian Vermeule, Patrick Deneen, Sohrab Ahmari, Chad Pecknold, and Gladden Pappin.

In truth, despite their being some overlap between these two groups of thinkers, I am not convinced there is a way of thinking about post-liberalism that captures all those who travel under that label. The religious, philosophical, and political heritage of the American and British variants of post-liberalism are too distinct, and certainly the American post-liberals—who are the newer kids on the block—seem to have adopted the term without much in the way of concern for how what they are advocating does or does not connect with the earlier British version. It makes more sense, for this reason, to talk of post-liberalisms rather than post-liberalism, but even then, I am not completely sure what it is they would share to meaningfully make them variations on the same post-liberal theme.

One could go the opposite direction from me and define post-liberalism in a highly capacious way to include populists, national conservatives, and others—as Paul Kelly does in his Against Post-Liberalism: Why ‘Family, Faith and Flag’ is a Dead End for the Left. I do not think that way of thinking about post-liberalism gets anything wrong as such. I just do not think it is very helpful in the sense that it subsumes too much under the label and so, again, we lose that which I think is really distinctive and important about the position of the post-liberals themselves (and, possibly, of all the various other positions subsumed under the description).

Moreover, my interest (unlike Paul’s) was in the right-wing version of post-liberalism, both because I was interested generally in the question of the intellectual foundations of contemporary conservative politics and what post-liberalism tells us about that, and because post-liberalism represents one of the ideological components of the MAGA coalition. Indeed, J. D. Vance has described himself as “of the post-liberal right,” and so we are literally one over-strenuous golf swing away from a post-liberal in the Oval Office. The current moment gives a certain urgency, I think, to understanding post-liberalism as it features in American politics, and for that reason a narrower focus suited my project. Ultimately, we carve things up in particular ways to suit our purposes. There is nothing inherently wrong with that as long as we are explicit about what those purposes are.

My hope, though, is that the post-liberals I am particularly interested in exploring in the book would recognize my definition as a fair characterization of their position. It is intended to reflect and capture their own self-understanding.

I want to stay for a moment on this notion of the common good, which is the beating heart of the post-liberal project. Talk to us about the genealogy of this concept that post-liberals draw on and, more interestingly in a way, how post-liberals depart from one another on what the common good entails. If all post-liberals agree that we need a politics of the common good, they cannot seem to agree on exactly what that means for all of us. Can you help us think through the common good and various post-liberal interpretations thereof?

Despite the common good being, as you rightly say, at the heart of the post-liberal project, the post-liberals say maddeningly little about what they mean by it. And I mean that both conceptually (what is a common good?) and in terms of its content (what is the common good?). The first thing to probably say is that the common good is introduced by the post-liberals as an antinomy to what they see as the central commitment of liberal politics, i.e., the maximization of individual freedom. And so, at some general level, a focus on the common good is intended to correct what post-liberals take to be liberalism’s false individualist ontology and anthropology, replacing an atomistic view of independent individuals with some more socially embedded or relational notion of the human condition, and its false ethical outlook that puts individual rights prior to duties towards others or leads us to give priority to the satisfaction of our individual wants and desires at the expense of more social goods.

But that is obviously very vague and does not get us too far (even if we accept, as we shouldn’t, that this represents a fair interpretation of liberalism). And we do not need to travel much further before we start seeing major disagreements between the post-liberals. Let me mention two—one conceptual, the other more substantive.

The first disagreement revolves around whether the common good is the good common to all individuals or whether it is the good of society which then also happens to be the highest good for all individual members of that society. These are the positions of Patrick Deneen and Adrian Vermeule, respectively. Clearly, if you hold something like Vermeule’s position, you’ll need to grant society an independent existence which is not just the aggregate of all the individuals within it. Society is a real thing, with real qualities. You will also need to reconceptualize the relationship between society and the individual, which Vermeule does in a way that gives the former a sort of moral priority over the latter. Individuals will flourish only if they are living in societies well-ordered in relation to the common good.

Deneen, however, seems to remain more tethered to individualism. The common good, for him, is something more like the sum of the conditions necessary for individual flourishing, recognizing that certain goods can only be pursued and realized collectively. That obviously recognizes that there is an irreducibly social dimension to the good (who would really deny that?). But the common good is the good of all individuals qua individuals, not the good of society, which also happens to be the highest good of all individuals. This is a big difference philosophically, but it also matters a great deal politically. For if society has ontological and moral priority, then what rights or liberties individuals have is contingent on what we think is necessary to realize the common good at the social level. No conceptual space exists in Deneen’s account for such collectivist thinking. If we are to judge post-liberalism on its own terms, as the attempt to escape the ontological individualism it attributes to liberalism, I think we have to say that Vermeule’s common good does a better job.

The other disagreement worth drawing attention to, we might say, is a disagreement about what the common good is. And here there is a relatively sharp divide between the American and British post-liberals. The Americans tend to be explicitly objectivists about the common good. There is an objectively and universally right way of living. And they are more than happy to tell us what goods are necessary for human flourishing. Deneen, for instance, lists these as “family, community, good work, an equitable social safety net supportive of these goods, constraints upon corporate power, a culture that preserves and encourages order and continuity, and support for religious beliefs and institutions” (Regime Change, 152). Though they might insist that the common good is not some fixed, timeless blueprint for all societies to follow, and that it needs a certain sort of interpretation and adaptation by the envisioned post-liberal political elite to fit the particular context, they are still rather clear that there is nevertheless some fundamental truth about how we should live.

The Brits, however, tend to say things like there needs to be “a plural search for the common good” (Pabst), implying that it is something that we somehow arrive at through inquiry, discussion, and so on. We might call this “bottom-up” as opposed to the Americans’ “top-down” view, and it may be more amenable to anyone squeamish about the idea that there might be an objectively right way for us all to live. It would seem to allow for the people to have at least some sort of say in the matter. Yet the British post-liberals still want to say that there are things the common good does and does not contain (it cannot include support for euthanasia or unbridled capitalism, as Pabst said at a recent conference I attended).

Which is why, in the end, I must admit that I find the British version a little more baffling in this particular regard. “Search” implies looking for something that is out there in reality. So, are the people trying to get to the right answer about what the common good is? In which case, what are the processes and procedures for doing that? And how do they know if they’ve found it or not? Can’t people reasonably disagree about the common good? Can they be wrong?

And whereas the American post-liberals are clear that political authority stems from governing in accordance with the common good, not from the people, this British version muddies the water considerably. Because authority would seem to come from the search for the common good rather than from the common good itself, that does make it sound like authority is in some sense democratic and, in that sense, given by the people. In which case I’m not sure why we’re not just back with liberalism (unless you really want to insist that liberal individuals are genuinely concerned only with their own interests, but then that just looks straightforwardly empirically implausible). All of which smacks of the sort of difficulties one gets in when you attempt to ground a politics in an objectively true account of human flourishing while wanting to resist some of the more anti-democratic directions in which that drags you. (I don’t want to imply that resisting this isn’t possible, only that I’m not convinced these thinkers manage to pull it off).

You claim in the book that barring a few exceptions, post-liberalism is mostly a phenomenon of the political right. I have a couple of questions on this point. The first is this: why has this been the case, in your view? This is something we at the Illiberalism Studies Program have been thinking about for some time: this question of why the left, which has historically been a muscular challenger of the liberal order, has been disassociated from and unable to capture the energy of the most vigorous intellectual challenger of liberalism today. What might explain this? Might it have something to do with the fact that post-liberalism is, as you explain, typically a kind of political theology? Or is it something else?

This is a very good question, and I am not sure I have a good answer to it. One thing I might want to push back on is the idea that post-liberalism does represent a “vigorous intellectual challenge” to liberalism today, as you say. I think we need to distinguish between the substance of post-liberalism and the noise it has created. Post-liberalism undoubtedly caught the imagination of the political commentariat, and there are good, legitimate reasons for that. It clearly does represent one set of ideas swirling around in the heady ideological MAGA brew and has its advocates in positions of real power. But if we really look at the theories themselves, as I seek to show in the book and as I’ll say a little bit more about shortly, I am just not that convinced we are looking at something as intellectually serious as might be made out.

Either post-liberalism is something like, in Deneen’s case, a continuation of a certain sort of socially conservative Christian politics that has hardly been unfamiliar to American politics for decades, and so does not represent anything particularly new or radically challenging to liberalism. Or post-liberalism is a more full-blooded and genuine challenge to the liberal order. But when it takes that mode, like in Vermeule’s work, it becomes driven more by an irate, passionate fury against liberalism that ends up detaching it so far from reality that I do not think it deserves to be taken seriously as a political theory. It’s more like fantasy at that point. Indeed, I think a lot of the New Right could be described in that way. And while fantasies undoubtedly have a sort of causal force in politics in mobilizing and directing the people’s more negative emotions, this is not the same thing as a genuine intellectual challenge.

I think we need to distinguish between the substance of post-liberalism and the noise it has created. Post-liberalism undoubtedly caught the imagination of the political commentariat, and there are good, legitimate reasons for that. But if we really look at the theories themselves, I am just not that convinced we are looking at something as intellectually serious as might be made out.

A good example here would be the notion of the common good. As I just said, given the importance of the concept to the post-liberals’ alternative vision of politics, it is woefully undertheorized. What they say about the common good would not get through peer review if sent to an academic journal. But this does not necessarily matter if what one is doing is attempting to make a political intervention. And I think it is important to recognize that this is what the post-liberals are trying to do. Academics are not their audience; understandably so if you really want to change things. Now, you might then point to people like Hayek and Habermas and say that they wore their broader theories lightly when engaging in public interventions, though we knew that the ideas were better developed in their wider work. Deneen and Vermeule are not in that category (I do not mean this pejoratively; diminishingly few belong in that category with them). They just haven’t done the sort of sustained and serious intellectual work that this would necessitate.

The post-liberals have been noisy, to be sure. And they have their advocates. So it is an important topic for us to understand today. But I am not sure there will be a chapter dedicated to post-liberalism in a future book on the intellectual history of the right; let me put it that way.

The second question on this point concerns the figures you chose as case studies. You discuss in detail the theories of two American, right-wing post-liberals: Patrick Deneen and Adrian Vermeule. Three-part question here. First, why did you choose these figures and not others? Second, can you tell us in brief about the respective projects of Deneen and Vermeule and how they differ from one another? And finally, what do these figures tell us about post-liberalism as a whole? I am particularly interested in this notion you develop vis-à-vis Vermeule of “fantasy politics.” Is post-liberalism as such a kind of fantasy politics?

I chose to focus on Vermeule and Deneen for a few reasons. One was that they are essentially the two talismanic figures of American post-liberalism. I am assuming that they are not quiet household names, but when commentators have tended to talk about post-liberalism, they have tended to mean either or both of these. It also happens that both are political theorists and wrote about post-liberalism in ways that, although other academics were not always their intended audiences, could nevertheless be reconstructed as something like full political theories. If you want to understand post-liberalism, therefore, these seemed like the right people to look at.

The projects of Deneen and Vermeule are more different than I think is often appreciated, and certainly than I appreciated when I started researching for this book. At a very general level, they both want a society directed towards or guided by the common good, but what that actually means in practice is not something they agree on much about. Maybe the easiest way to distinguish between the two is to recognize that Vermeule’s is a transformative political project, while Deneen’s is a continuation of how he understands and diagnoses modern society.

Vermeule recognizes that there is little support for post-liberalism today. Most people are too corrupted by liberalism and the liberal elite to know what is really good for them. They must be brought to see what is good for them. Their beliefs and values must be changed through the use of political power (to be grasped via non-democratic means) and the law, so that they are better aligned with what will bring them true human flourishing (the common good). We must be transformed. And when we are, we will come to recognize that we have been brought to the light and thank our post-liberal rulers for having delivered us from moral error. Deneen, on the other hand, believes that “the people” already know what the common good is. They are already post-liberal. Indeed, they are crying out for post-liberal rulers to take the place of the current corrupt liberal “elite” who have been imposing their false values upon them for so long. What is needed, therefore, is a change in our ruling elite, but only so that they are brought in line with the post-liberal values that the people already share. The point is to give the people what they already want, not change what they want.

Once you think politics no longer needs to be bound by people’s actual beliefs and values, as Vermeule does, then essentially your imagination is free to go wherever it wants. People, actual people, become nothing but abstractions, and the effects on them are inconsequential. Vermeule’s wholehearted embrace of Catholic integralism as a realistic political project should be understood in that context (it’s worth mentioning that there are other integralists—most notably Thomas Pink, who did the real theological legwork that has underpinned the recent revival of integralism—who would deny that integralism is viable today).

Commentators often think post-liberalism is synonymous with integralism, but it really is not. Deneen is absolutely not an integralist, for instance. But Vermeule is. And integralism is basically the idea that the Church should have authority over the State, at least in the pursuit of humans’ spiritual ends. Again, details are sparse as to what he thinks such an integralist society should look like. Other leading integralists have made it quite clear that it would not support religious pluralism, that people would have different social and political rights according to which religion they follow, their sexuality, or whether they were born out of wedlock—all in all, highly illiberal. To be clear, Vermeule never explicitly supports any of this. But he does not, unlike most of the other post-liberals, distance himself from it either.

To bring this round to the point about fantasy politics: Vermeule shrugs off claims that integralism is highly unrealistic in highly pluralistic societies like America by saying that once the right people get their hands on the levers of power, they will use that to make people more supportive of post-liberalism. However, what integralism also requires is that the Church is willing to do its bit, so to speak, by wanting to literally get involved in the ruling of countries. And to say that the Catholic Church has neither the appetite nor capacity for that would be an understatement. But Vermeule is entreating people to act as if the Pope were there just waiting for integralists to take over the US government so he can start governing citizens’ souls, which is so far removed from reality that I think we are in the realm of literal fantasy.

But, in general, I think all post-liberalism is guilty of a certain sort of wishful thinking of one sort or another. In Deneen’s case, the notion that the people are already committed to post-liberal values is a quite blatant case of projection bias. To be fair, this is something that many people fall foul of, including liberals themselves. But it is obviously false, even, it should be said, among his fellow Catholics. But the reason why I think this really matters is that, to varying extents, all the post-liberals are guilty of trying to wish away certain features of the modern world which, from their perspective, look either morally objectionable or an obstacle to the realization of the one true faith, but that simply will not go away without a great use of violence and coercion.

Another question follows on nicely from this and leads us into what makes your book unique and useful. Namely, that it offers a sustained and intellectually rigorous critique of post-liberalism as well as a vision for liberal renewal. This differs from other recent works, such as Stefan Borg’s, that take a more neutral stance. But to the point, it seems to me that if post-liberalism is a form of fantasy politics, it is because post-liberal politics are based on philosophical misappropriations. You develop this point throughout the book, claiming, for instance, that post-liberals subsume every social ill under the banner of liberalism, a banner they have defined very precisely. You call this post-liberalism’s tendency to “(mis)represent liberalism.” For me, the most captivating critique you level is that post-liberals misidentify, or do not understand, the true object of their own critique, which is not liberalism but modernity itself. Can you walk our readers through these misrepresentations and misidentifications and the problems they cause?

Sure. I think it’s important to recognize the political strategy that is in play here. Post-liberals purposefully look to reduce our current political moment to a binary choice between either liberalism or some non-liberal alternative. Taking all the nuance or detail out of the argument quite clearly works to their favor (a strategy populists employ with great effect also). Hence, they insist that there is really no difference between, say, classical liberalism and more recent identitarian forms of liberalism.

Not only are they variations of the central liberal commitment to maximizing individual freedom, there is an inevitability (one of post-liberals’ favorite words) to all this: having successfully removed all barriers to the individual will in the economic, social, or political sphere, liberal politics would eventually turn its focus to eradicating unchosen biological fetters also. Once politics is reduced to this binary choice, the next step in the strategy is to so thoroughly discredit liberalism that the public has no real alternative but to embrace the non-liberal option. Which is why, with obvious implausibility, the post-liberals are so keen to maintain that every main issue confronting Western societies today—social, political, economic, environmental, spiritual—has been caused by liberalism’s commitment to maximizing individual freedom. No one’s reputation is coming back from that!

Unsurprisingly, in the attempt to make good on this charge, post-liberals are forced to make some pretty outlandish historical claims. Chief among these is, as you mention, this notion that all of the main historical changes that we usually attribute to modernity and the dawn of the modern age were actually creations of liberalism. That is despite the fact that liberalism in any meaningful sense did not enter the picture until the early 19^th century. The effect of this, however, is to essentially engorge liberalism with so much meaning and causal significance that it essentially obscures the extent to which many features of modernity developed quite independently of liberalism and, furthermore, how liberalism itself is best conceived as a response to those changes (Edmund Fawcett’s book on liberalism is very good on this, incidentally). By this route, liberalism effectively becomes synonymous with modernity in the post-liberal mind. No historical or conceptual space exists between them.

To give you an example: One specific charge Deneen levels at liberalism is that it was responsible for the eclipse of the classical notion of freedom, the revival of which is a central pillar of the post-liberal political vision. On the classical—essentially Aristotelian—account, freedom is self-government, the rational direction of one’s actions towards virtue and the good and in keeping with our essential telos. Yet part of what happens with the shift to the modern scientific or mechanistic worldview is that the notion that nature contains fixed ends or teleologies is abandoned. That entire metaphysical picture upon which the classical notion of freedom relied no longer made any sense. Now, Deneen blames liberalism for this. But as several writers have shown, Charles Taylor maybe chief among them (and a fellow Catholic, for good measure), the challenges to that metaphysical view came from several different directions, including developments from within Christian theology itself. Liberalism had nothing to do with it. And yet liberalism—and liberalism alone—gets all the blame.

Aside from being historically inaccurate, this tendency to elide liberalism and modernity creates severe difficulties for the post-liberal analysis of contemporary politics. The way I’d put the point is like this: Liberalism is optional for us in the sense that there are clearly other forms of living together politically that we could adopt. For those who think America is descending from a liberal democracy into authoritarianism, that would be the shift from one form of modern politics to another, for instance. I do not mean to imply here that our political arrangements are merely a matter of individual or collective will, as if we have a huge degree of discretion in deciding which political arrangements we live under. Only that there are different ways of living together in modernity. Clearly, modernity is not optional for us in the same way.

The main features of the modern epoch—individualism, capitalism, the state, secularization, urbanization, bureaucracy, etc.—are something like fixed points in our social and political landscape. We can imagine societies without those features, not least because we know a great deal about how humans lived together in pre-modern societies. But it is important to recognize that when we do so, we are not doing the equivalent of imagining what America would be like were it to descend into authoritarianism but rather imagining societies that are at a more fundamental level not ours. No doubt a time will come when human societies are no longer characterized by these features. But in several cases, we do not have very good ideas as to how we could plausibly live without them, nor, barring some cataclysmic event, how we would make the transition to those sorts of societies. That you do not get to choose your historical conditions is just part of the human condition.

Treating modernity and liberalism as synonymous therefore leads the post-liberals to seriously underplay just how momentous the task is they set themselves, leading them to believe that the shift from liberalism to post-liberalism will be no different in kind from the shift that any liberal democracy has taken to a different political arrangement (or vice versa) over the last couple of centuries. But what they are envisioning requires something radically more transformative than that, something closer to a total overhaul of our entire metaphysical worldview and historical condition. We might say this just demonstrates a lack of self-understanding on post-liberals’ part, but it is a dangerous ignorance which leaves them blind to the level of disruption—including almost certainly the use of coercion (and with it possibly violence)—that would be required in the transition and maintenance of a post-liberal society in conditions of modernity.

I should say that this is one area where I think British post-liberals, such as John Millbank most notably, have a serious advantage over their American counterparts. Because he does recognize that the battle post-liberalism must fight is not just political in a more mundane sense of getting your hands on the levers of power but genuinely involves the overturning of centuries of theological and metaphysical error (as they see it) and the institutions and practices built upon them. We need to be “differently modern,” as he puts it. I do not agree with this, needless to say. But it has the significant virtue of properly identifying the nature and scale of the enterprise in which it is engaged.

I want to linger here for a moment and think about how we might assess post-liberalism symptomatically. You are obviously of the view that post-liberalism has myriad flaws, and I tend to agree with you in many cases. But if we think about post-liberalism merely as a symptom and not a solution, we of course must ask the following: a symptom of what? What do you think post-liberalism tells us about our recent history and our contemporary moment? Do we lose sight of the illness, so to speak, when we focus too intently on the symptom?

I certainly think it is true that defenders of liberalism have spent a disproportionate amount of time criticizing their opponents for not having viable alternatives, and not enough reflecting on whether liberal politics—or, more likely, a radically reimagined version of liberal politics—might still have the solutions to our problems. There is a chance—maybe even a good chance—that neither liberalism nor its challengers have good answers.

But in terms of what post-liberalism might tell us about our contemporary moment, there are a few things I would maybe highlight. One is the exhaustion of the Thatcherite/Reaganite version of conservatism. We shouldn’t overstate this. Despite a few symbolic gestures here and there, neither the U.S. Republican nor U.K. Conservative parties—nor Nigel Farage’s Reform party for that matter—have shown the will or inclination to divorce themselves from the old political economy. Yet, where there was an instinctive and ideological skepticism about the state and a strong preference for small government, the right has come, if not to love the state, certainly to become more comfortable with it—and with executive power in particular. This is in part because the right has also grown impatient with the fact that their long-term “culture first” strategy—whereby politics is downstream from culture, so change the culture in a more right-wing direction and political power will be easier to grasp—has failed to deliver. Not only have the left managed to keep winning, but they have (according to the standard New Right narrative) shown themselves adept at using that power to further the goals of the left and oppress those who reject them.

The political right is now willing to follow suit in harnessing the power of the state to their ends. This is big state conservatism. That is a considerable ideological change, unthinkable even only a decade or so ago. In that regard, I think post-liberalism was somewhat pushing at an open door in arguing that the aim must be to seize political power directly, but they have been an important voice in articulating different strategies for how the right might do that.

So, on the one hand, I think there is a certain flux on the right today, and the emergence of post-liberalism is a manifestation of that. More importantly, I think you can also see post-liberalism as above all else a politics of unity. It is against the separations of liberalism—state/religion, personal/private, market/politics, nature/culture—and re-articulates a familiar conservative theme that simultaneously laments some lost harmony ruined by modernity and yearns for a society in which these different parts of human life can be brought back together via a focus on the common good. The right has these romantic moments from time-to-time, and you can see how it would appeal in times when people feel their lives are becoming too fractured, be it in wanting to better connect their spiritual beliefs to the public sphere, worrying that the power of economic forces have left them with no meaningful individual control, or where the despair at what they perceive as the decline of public and individual morality.

My own view is that these separations are either (following on from my answer to the previous question) features of modernity that we are going to find largely inescapable, and so the hankering for unity is largely a practice in nostalgia for some apparently simpler pre-modern world before modernity splintered all asunder, or they are features that, if we somehow managed to do away with them, we would very quickly come to regret their absence.

This, in a way, leads us to the positive contribution of your book. In the penultimate chapter, you attempt to recover and reactivate the legacy of a “perfectionist” liberalism. What do you mean by perfectionist liberalism here, and how does it differ from a non-perfectionist liberalism? What are the roots of this tradition and, more importantly, how would its recovery respond to the challenge posed by post-liberalism? In a word, is there a future for liberalism today?

That last one is a question that I believe liberals need to take more seriously than they have. One feature of much of the liberal response to its challengers over the past decade or so has been a certain sort of complacency—as if all that is needed to get us back on the liberal track is to remind people of what have been seen as some of its traditional political virtues (checks and balances on power, the rule of law, individual rights, etc.). Not only do I think that that fails to recognize the nature and scale of the problem, but I also think that it assumes that today is sufficiently like the past, that the social conditions necessary for a distinctively liberal politics are still with us. And for me that is a genuinely open question (and the topic of my next research project).

But to say something about perfectionism. Generally speaking, perfectionism is a politics that is grounded in a very specific moral account of the good life and which takes the (or one of the) main objectives of politics to help guide people or provide the conditions necessary for them to live such lives. The contrast here is usually with the liberalism of moral neutrality, one which is not justified in relation to any particular moral vision of the good nor seeks to promote or protect any such vision. John Rawls’ theory is the exemplar of a morally neutral liberalism, and his influence on the field has meant that this has been by far the dominant approach. Joseph Raz is a pretty lone figure in having defended a perfectionist liberalism (though Alexandre Lefebvre’s excellent Liberalism as a Way of Life is a notable recent addition also). It would be wrong to infer from that, however, that perfectionism has always been something of a minority sport within liberalism. Indeed, as Helena Rosenblatt convincingly shows in her A Lost History of Liberalism, the vast majority of liberals in the tradition have been perfectionists obsessed (as she puts it) with questions of individuals’ moral character. Moral neutrality is a relatively much more recent position for liberals to take, though its dominance in the field of Anglo-American political theory has obscured that to many friends and foes of liberalism alike.

Post-liberalism is a form of political perfectionism. It is concerned with the conditions for living the good life, i.e., the common good. Some have therefore worried that as a response to post-liberalism, attempting to take a neutral position on questions of the good is just not going to cut it. This is a theme of Samuel Moyn’s Liberalism Against Itself and Alan Kahan’s Freedom From Fear: An Incomplete History of Liberalism, for instance. Both think liberalism needs to return to its perfectionist roots. For them, a morally neutral liberalism is an emaciated liberalism—one that denies itself the sources of the vitality and vibrancy of liberal politics when it is at its radical and transformative best. And at least then liberalism will be debating with its opponents on the same ground—what is the best way for us to live.

It is certainly true that if we go back to the last great perfectionist moment in the liberal tradition, that of the so-called New Liberals of T.H. Green, L. T. Hobhouse, and J. A. Hobson at the end of the 19^th century and into the 20^th, then we certainly do see an example of how some highly imaginative developments in the moral basis of liberalism led to its successful ideological rejuvenation. Theirs was a liberalism that advocated for state intervention to protect individual freedom, alleviate poverty, and provide social welfare, all in the name of ensuring that each person was able to fully develop their moral character, and often through an explicit focus on the common good. The birth of the welfare state in Britain, through the introduction of old age pensions, was an achievement by the then Liberal Party that was in large part made possible by the New Liberals’ reimagining of what it might mean to live well as a liberal. And yet, despite all that, it seems premature to simply assume that a perfectionist liberalism would prove to be as equally ideologically fertile ground for reimagining liberal politics today.

Indeed, and as I argue in that chapter of my book, I think there are good reasons to suspect that many of the social conditions that made New Liberalism possible—such as an optimism regarding the possibilities of the state, the almost zealous faith in progress, and a belief that science would ultimately uncover the ethical basis of human life in favor of liberalism—simply do not exist anymore. If we are to be perfectionist, therefore, we’ll need to do so on our own terms (if it is possible at all). Beyond these gestures to liberalism’s past, little energy is being put into thinking through what that might look like.

I want to close with the question we always close with, which concerns the title of our program. Your book obviously takes up the question of post-liberalism, but I am curious how you think about illiberalism. Does the concept have explanatory power or is it somehow flawed? In your book, you seem to place post-liberalism, illiberalism, and even anti-liberalism on a spectrum. At a minimum, you make them converse with one another. You say, for instance, that “post-liberalism is most interesting…when it is determinedly attempting to develop an anti-liberal vision.” You say elsewhere that Patrick Deneen’s post-liberalism does not slide into “full-blown illiberalism.” Can you talk to us a bit about how you distinguish between these terms, how they relate to one another, and why some may be more dangerous from your perspective than others?

It is tricky with Deneen. I think there is, as I said before, a gulf between what he says and how he says it, with the rhetoric and hyperbole often somewhat running away with him and making his position sound more extreme than it often actually is. In that sense, I think he bears some of the blame for how some liberal commentators have read him, as a dangerous authoritarian. But if we focus on what he is actually advocating, then certainly there is much there that liberals are not going to agree with—especially his socially conservative stance on abortion, gay rights, the traditional family, and so on—but I do not think any of those, individually or even collectively, are enough to qualify one as illiberal. That would put the bar for illiberalism very low.

For instance: He says in Regime Change that he thinks America should introduce what he calls a “moral media.” Characteristically, very little detail is then provided. And if that meant something akin to how Orbán used the media in Hungary to delegitimate political opponents, then there certainly is reason to be worried. But he does not say that anything like that, and from the little that he does say it seems that he has in mind a return to something like the media culture of the 1950s and 60s, with less cursing, sex, blasphemy, drugs, and general vice on show. It is a peculiarity of the American legal system that it treats pornography as a dimension of the hallowed freedom of speech, but the right to make and consume pornography feels like a strange place to want to cut the distinction between liberalism and illiberalism.

Or take freedom of religion. He laments (in Regime Change again) the separation of church and state as one of the most fateful consequences of liberalism. Which might lead you to anticipate that he is about to propose some sort of reunification à la integralism. But that isn’t what we get. Instead, we get some vague discussion about the need for religion to be included in the public sphere. Again, that could mean a million things. If Deneen is against religious pluralism, he does not say it. So, I found myself engaged in a somewhat strange defense of Deneen against some of his critics. He certainly wants a more socially conservative culture, but unless we think only very recent Western societies have come close to being truly liberal and so anything beforehand has been illiberal, then it seems implausible to me to think he should be classed as authoritarian.

It is that space between conservatism and authoritarianism that I think I was most interested in. Post-liberalism is often written off as authoritarian by its critics, and while I certainly think that’s a fair accusation to make against someone like Vermeule’s politics, I am not so convinced that it deserves to be applied to Deneen’s. Deneen is, to my mind, fully consistent with a certain strand of conservative thinking in the United States. Maybe it has never been quite mainstream, but the basic thought that religion needs to play a greater role in political and social life seems recognizably conservative but not necessarily authoritarian. I did not end up exploring this as much of this as I’d initially intended to, but part of my worry is that liberals’ response to Deneen demonstrates that they may have lost the capacity for proper political judgement.

They see someone saying something about the need for religion in politics and they instantly think we must be talking about the top-down coercive imposition of some conception of the good life upon a recalcitrant people. Authoritarian alarm bells start ringing. Maybe this is an effect of the fact that liberals have encountered so few genuinely anti-liberal proponents over the past several decades that they find it harder to recognize the difference between a conservative and an authoritarian. And as we’ve entered an age where challenges to liberalism are no longer excluded from polite society, liberals have started to see authoritarians everywhere. Distinctions matter in politics, as Hannah Arendt told us. And if liberals cannot tell their real enemies from those who might better be thought of as political opponents, then they have little chance of knowing how to address them.

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Matt Sleat is Professor of Political Theory at the University of Sheffield. His latest book Post-Liberalism (2026) is out now from Polity Press.