Interview: Stefan Borg on Post-liberalism and the Return of the Common Good

A conversation with Stefan Borg about his new book, The Return of the Common Good: The Postliberal Project Right and Left.

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.

One of the biggest problems here is that the "professional managerial class," in the post-liberal story, becomes an incredibly broad category...

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...

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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.