Will the Real (Post-)Liberalism Please Stand Up?
The interminable liberalism debates need a new path forward
While on the front ranks of politics, the past few years have seen an ever-fiercer tug-of-war carried out in the familiar categories of Right-Left partisan mudslinging, behind the scenes, a rather different—though sometimes equally ugly—debate has been raging. Within the Right particularly, there has been a growing argument over “liberalism.” While until fairly recently, most conservatives identified themselves as “classical liberals”—committed to limited government, individual rights, free markets, due process, etc.—today an increasing number accuse liberalism of destroying the foundations of social, political, and moral order, and leading inexorably to libertinism and woke progressivism. Conservatism, on this account, must get far more radical if it is to conserve anything.
This “post-liberalism” really took off following the 2018 publication of Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed, along with Yoram Hazony’s 2019 Virtue of Nationalism, which similarly named liberalism as its bete noire, with its "vision of free and equal human beings, pursuing life and property and living under obligations that arise from their own free consent." It has finally burst into the limelight thanks to the nomination of J.D. Vance, one of post-liberalism’s highest-profile disciples, as vice-presidential candidate. (See Graedon Zorzi’s excellent synopsis of Vance’s post-liberalism in WSJ.)
Not all on the Right (much less those on the Left) have been happy with this turn, and some have denounced the postliberals as flatly “illiberal” and authoritarian, raising the specter of a coming regime “where rigged electoral systems ensure that political competition is minimal, the press is tightly controlled by an alliance between corporations and the state on behalf of the ruling party, national identity is defined in religious and ethnic terms, and cultural expressions are closely policed by the state to ensure compliance with that identity.”
But is this merely a war of words? As is typical in such debates, many of those on either side refuse to accept their opponents’ characterizations of them. Most “postliberals” insist they have no interest in overturning American constitutional order or rejecting fundamental freedoms and legal norms, while many liberals insist that they are just as interested in virtue, order, and community as their opponents. For several years now, I’ve grown frustrated with the sterility and theatricality of the debate, and kept waiting for someone to stipulate what exactly we mean by “liberalism,” so that we could at last have an intelligent conversation about its pros and cons. I finally got tired of waiting, and asked Yuval Levin if I could take my own stab. He graciously accepted my pitch, and the result is my new essay, “The Four Causes of Liberalism,” published this week in National Affairs.
To bring clarity to the (post-)liberalism debates, I proposed to make use of one of the oldest tools of conceptual clarification in the book: Aristotle’s “four causes.” If liberalism was a real thing, then we ought to be able to characterize its theory of political society from four different standpoints: in terms of its material cause (what political society is made out of), its formal cause (what political society is made into, or how it is structured), its efficient cause (what sets political society in motion or enacts change), and its final cause (what political society is for, what it is designed to achieve). Sure enough, in the literature we can find liberalism defined in each of these four ways: liberalism is a theory of political society built out of individuals rather than clans, tribes, or collegia; it conceives political society as held together through the rule of law, constitutionally separated powers, and consent of the governed; it operates through persuasion and free obedience rather than coercion; and it exists in order to maximize space for individual rights and preferences. Of course, liberalism’s friends tend generally to emphasize the second and third, while its foes concentrate their critiques largely on the first and fourth.
But does this analysis mean that liberalism is in fact a package deal? That one must concede radical individualism if one wants to have constitutional restraints? Or that one must champion a culture of coercion if one aspires to a politics of virtue? Well no, because liberalism is not a real thing. It is simply a bundle of practices and concepts that we have reified as an -ism, and then gone to war over (thankfully not yet a shooting war). At the close of the essay, I argue that we should get back behind liberalism to recover the original virtue of liberality—which, like all virtues, consists in moderation and is rooted in empirical observation, reflection, and practice. I conclude:
On a collective level, a liberal society was one that sought to progressively share the powers of government as widely as possible, and to give rights and freedoms to its citizens as much as it sustainably could without destroying the bonds of nationhood or creating a society of degenerate dependents or profligate libertines. This balance required a great deal of trial and error, and there is little doubt that the most recent trials of liberalism have ended in fairly egregious errors: rampant depression, anxiety, and addiction; declining life expectancies and birth rates; gender dysphoria; loss of cultural cohesion; and moral decay.
Although rationalist philosophers certainly added several tributaries to the overflowing river of liberalism throughout the past few centuries, liberalism was, at bottom, a great series of experiments making falsifiable empirical claims: that religion will flourish more under a regime of religious liberty than one of suffocating establishment; that commerce will flourish under freer trade; that knowledge will grow through more open debate. At some point, like many successful empirical doctrines, it hardened in many quarters into an ossified dogmatism. Some of its proponents seemed to think that more is always better, in defiance of everything we know of human psychology and the natural world. Such dogmatism is always the death of philosophies — and the death of the societies they animate.
If it is to live again, liberalism will have to reexpose itself to the light of investigation and experimentation. To this task, its critics have as much to contribute as its apologists. But to complete it, both will need to set aside the war of words and return to the study of history.
Read the whole essay here.
Newly Published
“Rethinking Immigration” (WORLD Opinions): My latest column proposes a basic analogy between the practice of adoption (at the family level) and welcoming immigrants at a national level. Both are praiseworthy acts of charity but not moral obligations, and must be prudentially evaluated on a case-by-case level. A family that rashly adopts without first taking good care of their biological children is likely to create bitterness and conflict—but this doesn’t mean they can simply renege on their obligations and send the adoptees back. So too with immigration.
“How to Think About Government”: The full audio from the second unit of my mini-course, “Faithfulness as Christian Citizens,” is now available. In it I offer nine basic theses for a biblical and historically-Christian understanding of where government comes from, why we need it, and how it is meant to operate.
“How to Think About Law”: The recording for the third unit of the course is also up. In it, I offer an inductive entry-way into the classical Christian way of understanding law as, in Richard Hooker’s words, “a directive rule unto goodness of operation.” What are eternal law, natural law, and divine law, and how do they have anything to do with human law as we experience it in political life? What should we do about an unjust law?
“Technology and Freedom: The Faustian Bargain of Modern Life”: The recording of my Collegium Lecture from New College Franklin is now up on YouTube. Watch it for a sneak preview of one of the chapters from my forthcoming book Called to Freedom: Retrieving Christian Liberty in an Age of License.
Coming down the Pipe
Review of Pufendorf, The Nature and Qualification of Religion in Reference to Civil Society (Commonwealth): I’ve been talking about this book for awhile here on my Substack, and it’s an important one—blasting apart many received narratives about the logic and priorities of early modern political thought (it’s way more Protestant than you’ve been taught) and the development of religious liberty (it’s way more Erastian than you’ve been taught. My essay will be coming out in Ad Fontes/Commonwealth soon!
“Puncturing the Myth of Equality” (Chesterton House): I’ll be doing a webinar conversation with the fantastic folks at Chesterton House (a Christian Study Center at Cornell University). You should be able to join remotely if you’re free next Monday evening at 7:30 PM. Full details here.
I have articles appearing in the upcoming issues of Ad Fontes and Mere Orthodoxy Subscribe to the print editions to be among the first to read them!
On the Bookshelf
This week I’ll give a much longer thought on just one of the books I’ve been reading, and just list the others without comment.
Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 (2012): I finished this book last night, and found it deeply, hauntingly moving, although Clark writes in matter-of-fact narrative prose without affectation or drama. It is the mark of a truly great work of history-writing that, even if you as the reader know how the story ends, you feel at every point that it could end differently. So it is here: I caught myself imagining over and over that maybe the great catastrophe would not happen after all, that Europe could be saved from suicide depending on how this conversation unfolded or that telegram was read. Two things particularly stuck with me that I wanted to share here:
1) In most conversations about just war theory, it is often implied or suggested that at most only one side in a war can ever fight justly. By definition, someone has got to be the unjust aggressor, right? Wrong. Clark’s book gives the lie to such simplistic moralism. Of the seven combatant nations Clark chronicles, all seven went to war sincerely convinced that they were acting defensively as a last resort—and for a majority of those seven (including both Central Powers), even with the benefit of hindsight, it is hard to gainsay them. Willful human evil is real, but the great tragedy of our condition is that we are forever fumbling in the dark, and even our best efforts often go so disastrously awry.
2) Simplistic moralists that we are, we have spent decades standing in scornful judgment over the interwar statesmen like Neville Chamberlain who cravenly allowed World War II to break out, or Philippe Petain who cravenly submitted to Hitler, seeking to avoid a repeat of the horrors of The Great War. More recently, it has become fashionable to question the “post-war consensus” and stand in scornful judgment over the liberal internationalist order designed to prevent a repeat of the errors of both world wars. Both stances are wrong. No one who really grapples with the magnitude of the disaster that Europe stumbled unwillingly into in 1914 can judge harshly those of later generations who tried to avoid making the same mistakes. Their solutions too were flawed, but so are all human strivings.
Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace (1869)
Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary (2009)
D.C. Schindler, Freedom from Reality: The Diabolical Character of Modern Liberty (2017)
Recommended Reads
“The Internet of Beefs” (Venkatesh Rao, Ribbonfarm): I just had the pleasure of teaching seminars for two days on “The Politics of Technology” for the Lilly-funded “Congregational Life in a Digital Age” program at Davenant House and this was one of the readings, which I had somehow never come across before. It is an astoundingly, profoundly insightful, no-holds-barred analysis of the dynamics of tribalistic conflict that dominate so much of online communications, and render the search for truth and cohesion so futile.
“The Rise of Antihumanism” (Matthew Crawford, First Things): This essay, also part of the Davenant program, I had read before but really enjoyed grappling with again. One of the things that Crawford gets at here to some extent and in his “Algorithmic Governance and Political Legitimacy,” and that Anton Barba-Kay also talks about, is essentially the idolatrous logic of digital technology. By that I mean this: when we make an idol, we make it in the image of certain human qualities, singling out those aspects of ourselves we consider most significant. The idol is thus an image of man, but a partial, distorted image. However, because it represents our ideal, we thus seek to conform ourselves to it, cutting down our humanity until we embody the idol. In the ancient world, idols were bodies without mind; ours are minds without bodies, and thus we find ourselves seeking to dis-embody ourselves and conform our rationality to machine rationality. (This isn’t all in Crawford as such, but these are thoughts inspired by Crawford).
“Conservatives Need to Reclaim FDR” (Aaron Renn): Great new Substack from Aaron Renn. There’s been a lot of chatter lately about the myth of Winston Churchill, and whether he deserves the position in our pantheon he now enjoys (my own take: mostly, yes, but there are distortions in our received narrative). Renn asks, “Why are we idolizing a foreign statesman in the first place? We had a fantastic wartime leader of our own.” Anathema to conservative ears, but Renn makes a compelling case about what we can learn from FDR even if we disagree with some of his policies.
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If you have any questions or comments or pushback on anything you read here today (or recommendations for research leads I might want to chase down), please email me (w.b.littlejohn@gmail.com). I can’t promise I’ll have time to reply to every email, but even if you don’t hear back from me, I’m sure I’ll benefit from hearing your thoughts and disagreements.