What is postliberalism? And why does it matter?

The second question is easier to answer than the first. Up to the last couple of years, the distinctions and debates swirling among a handful of mostly Catholic or Catholic-influenced scholars and theorists could easily be ignored – and largely were, to the point where such debates could go on ad infinitum, without resolution.

Now, fairly suddenly, before any fully agreed-upon definition has asserted itself, postliberalism is everywhere – or at least everywhere in the highly online world of opinion journalists and would-be public intellectuals. This has been fueled by a number of factors – growing discontent with the liberal paradigm of progress, populist electoral successes, the “illiberal democracy” of figures such as Hungary’s Viktor Orban – but perhaps above all by the U.S. Vice-President Elect JD Vance, with his connections among the originating circle of Catholic theorists and self-characterization as postliberal.

As Catholics, this matters especially to us because postliberalism arose (or rather is still arising) in our intellectual backyard, as it were, and is not without genuine connections to Catholic social doctrine – most specifically as regards the excesses of contemporary neoliberal-globalist capitalism. At the same time, postliberalism is also entangled with all manner of problematic Catholic-adjacent fringe viewpoints – not only the unfeasible and never truly feasible attempt to reverse modernity in toto, but also and more relevantly integralism, which proclaims the necessity, for the good of souls, of work toward an established Catholic church and a confessional state wherever possible, or at least the piecemeal application of the power of the state in support of the good as known through revelation, beyond what is known through the natural law.

In the 20th century, some proportion of this vision was realized in Austria (briefly) under Dollfuss, (most problematically) in Franco Spain, (most democratically) in Ireland under de Valera, and (perhaps most enduringly) in Salazar’s Portugal; none of these states (excepting Ireland, if only in a purely formal sense) still perdures, and it is no accident that, in Spain and Ireland especially, the Church (implicated in great wrongs of the state as it was) is intensely and publicly resented by a high proportion of the populace. In today’s world, this maximization of the culture-war impulse would not only contribute to an already increasingly open, public (and at least somewhat understandable) anti-Catholicism, but would also be a trap for the Faith theologically and spiritually, a back door to the kind of notional and unmoored civic Christianity that is likely to prove even more dangerous to souls than the original prototype to which it aspires. Thus, to the extent that postliberal movements may become a vehicle, either for integralism or for an undead civic Christianity, postliberalism is a serious issue for the Church.

As for an actual attempt to define postliberalism, perhaps we need first to ask ourselves: What is liberalism?

In a recent article, Protestant scholar Brad Littlejohn chose an interesting and (I think) fruitful path to a definition; mapping the characteristics of liberalism onto the Aristotelian four causes, he maintains that liberalism proposes materially a society of individuals who are definitionally free and equal, formed by a consent to the rule of law which governs ruler and ruled alike, effected through a non-coercive culture of persuasion, to the end of maximization of personal choice as regards both means and ends – or, as Littlejohn somewhat tendentiously puts it, freedom without virtue.

As one might deduce from these propositions, Littlejohn’s objections arise only in the analysis of finality; a Catholic perspective, I suggest, would have more material objections. Unsurprisingly for a son of the Reformation, Littlejohn looks at the individual as the heroic protagonist of faith, conscience, and morality alike, standing before God like Luther at the Diet of Worms, as opposed to the adherent of the clan or tribe (or church?); this contrasts pretty sharply to the relationality-centered approach of most Catholic theology, to say nothing of the ontological, reified relationalities discussed by perhaps the most radical theologian ever to be condemned as a hidebound conservative, Benedict XVI né Joseph Ratzinger. In his most recent encyclical, Dilexit Nos, Benedict’s successor put it in simpler terms:

[T]he heart makes all authentic bonding possible, since a relationship not shaped by the heart is incapable of overcoming the fragmentation caused by individualism. Two monads may approach one another, but they will never truly connect. A society dominated by narcissism and self-centeredness will increasingly become “heartless”.

Yet whatever disagreements obtain, Littlejohn has done a real service toward clarifying the question at hand. We can identify by building on his analysis an individualist metaphysics and freedom understood as maximal choice of means and ends as trouble spots in the liberal worldview, while non-coercion and sovereignty limited by justice are key achievements.

So, that much in hand, we must once more ask the question. What is postliberalism, anyway?

Seven years ago, Notre Dame political science professor Patrick Deneen published a book entitled Why Liberalism Failed. The book garnered respectfully qualified disagreement from many liberals, including Barack Obama (who included it in his 2018 year-end reading list), while strongly influencing certain New Right politicians, among them, most obviously, the aforementioned Vice President-elect.

If we focus exclusively on metaphysical issues, the thesis expressed in the word “postliberalism” is promising; Enlightenment liberalism (the worldview underlying almost all contemporary political thinking in the West, whether liberal or conservative in name) rests on a virtually indefensible foundation: that humans are “radically autonomous in a State of Nature,” as Deneen puts it. This great error, which runs through Hobbesian pessimism, Rousseauian romantic optimism, and Cartesian rationalism, culminates in the Enlightenment liberalism of the British Empiricists, precisely inasmuch as it had by then become the presumptive anthropology of early Modern philosophy. Deneen recognizes this; as he frankly states, “Liberalism’s break with the past was founded on a false anthropology.”

This is no mere theoretical error; even persons of good will, disposed toward virtue, need an awareness of our essential, primordial relational interconnectedness as human persons, lest they become trapped in an isolated cycle of fruitless “good works” that “merit” more than they accomplish; Pope Francis writes in Laudato si’, 219:

[S]elf-improvement on the part of individuals will not by itself remedy the extremely complex situation facing our world today. Isolated individuals can lose their ability and freedom to escape the utilitarian mindset, and end up prey to an unethical consumerism bereft of social or ecological awareness. Social problems must be addressed by community networks and not simply by the sum of individual good deeds. This task “will make such tremendous demands of man that he could never achieve it by individual initiative or even by the united effort of men bred in an individualistic way. The work of dominating the world calls for a union of skills and a unity of achievement that can only grow from quite a different attitude”. [cited from Romano Guardini] The ecological conversion needed to bring about lasting change is also a community conversion.

From the standpoint of a response to the liberal Enlightenment’s ontological individualism, there is a pressing need to get beyond the liberal error which has so warped the self-understanding of modern and postmodern humanity. I would like to present my own view of the postliberalism we need, by citing a few passages from a work I greatly respect, through which an argument seems more or less to unfold itself.

Liberalism:

…fosters the illusion that society is composed of free, equal, and independent individuals who can choose to associate with one another or not. It obscures the very real facts of dependency for everyone when they are young, for most people at various periods in their lives when they are ill or old and infirm, for some who are disabled, and for all those engaged in unpaid ‘dependency work.’’’

Some might bristle at this:

Adult individuals, the critics hold, don’t want to be seen for moral purposes as enmeshed in relationships they did not choose, such as being the child of certain parents or a person brought up with a certain religious heritage; rather, they see themselves as individual, rational moral agents, and they expect to be so regarded for moral purposes.

Yet:

When we think of ourselves as very young or very old, highly dependent on others, seriously ill or under heavy medication, or ignorant of the relevant factors on which policy is decided, it might sometimes be more suitable to imagine how we would wish to be treated by those who would care about us if we were children, rather than to imagine what we and others would choose from the even more remote and inappropriate position of the fully independent, self-sufficient, and equal rational agent.

Taken together, these arguments lead to a devastating conclusion:

Thinking of society’s members, then, as if they were fully independent, free, and equal rational agents obscures and distorts the condition of vast numbers of them at the very least and has the effect of making it more difficult to address the social and political issues that would be seen as relevant and appropriate if these conditions were more accurately portrayed and kept in view. The liberal portrayal of the self-sufficient individual enables the privileged to falsely imagine that dependencies hardly exist, and when they are obvious, to suppose they can be dealt with as private preferences, as when parents provide for their infants. The illusion that society is composed of free, equal, independent individuals who can choose to be associated with one another or not obscures the reality that social cooperation is required as a precondition of autonomy.

It should be noted that every citation in the last four paragraphs comes, not from Deneen nor from any other recognized postliberal theorist, but from feminist philosopher Virginia Held’s 2005 book The Ethics of Care. By comparison, mainstream postliberalism, while recognizing liberalism’s feet of clay on the metaphysical level, hardly seems ready to apply much more than a shoe-shine cloth to them.

A real preferential option for the poor and a thorough scouring of the margins, such as would follow on a serious response to Held’s points, would yield more than a logically incisive argument. It also would justly claim a great measure of moral authority. Deneen, for his part, has chosen a different way: the glorification of traditional Western institutions, formal and informal – the nuclear family, the church, the home town into where you are born, live, and die.

That vision, however much it may have to recommend it, describes a set of highly contingent circumstances, some relatively recent in provenance, others which were arguably an historical aberration to begin with. Deneen must also be aware, as practically all of his critics note, that hardly any of the general populace is choosing, and few could even imagine choosing, to live as he proposes. While this lack of popular uptake for Deneen’s vision in no way proves him wrong, it leaves him on far shakier ground than would a direct address to the false philosophical anthropology he identifies.

Could the world Deneen calls for be restored? Who knows?—and even less can one say if it would be a good thing to do so. What is clear is that a substantive answer to the confusion in our self-understanding would leave us with a very different social, political, and cultural world – but one which might not necessarily take a form even recognizable to us, much less to our grandparents.

Perhaps Deneen’s critique of liberalism is something of a stalking horse, and his prime objective is the promotion of what he calls “practices fostered in local settings, focused on the creation of new and viable cultures, economics grounded in virtuosity within households, and the creation of civic polis life” – what would seem to me a kind of highly enlightened late feudalism. Perhaps, indeed, the whole postliberal project, as Deneen proposes it, is for him no more than an attempt to retcon a very specific kind of society that he had in mind from the first. I do not know Deneen personally, nor can I claim any kind of genuine expertise regarding his oeuvre. What I can say is that, for Deneen, we must revise our self-understanding to bring about specific goods, foster certain virtues, and achieve deliverance from the unhappiness of contemporary life; I would contend that we must revise our self-understanding – that is, our self-understanding as free, rational choice agents acting on our own behalf, in our own interest – because it is demonstrably false. Deneen discusses a series of moral, cultural and political issues, while devoting relatively little discussion to the fundamental metaphysical problem.

For it is self-evident that infants, children, the sick elderly and the handicapped are not choosing to live as they do. They cannot be asked why they do not opt out of the liberal social contract: they can’t, no more than they can opt in. They are the innocent victims of contemporary liberal society, who owe their lives and their protection (if they have any) to the largesse of choice agents from inside the social contract. And I am not using the word “victim” lightly; a society that equates the essence of personhood, of humanity, with individual, free, rational choice agency will soon enough, mutatis mutandis, lose the ability to see those lacking such privileges as human persons. To use Held’s term, they become, at best, “private preferences” – a term which seems, to me at any rate, better suited to house pets.

Which brings us to the bottom line: Just as culture is upstream of politics, philosophical anthropology is upstream of culture. Any culture that is to survive or develop, must do so in the light of two radical questions: What do we think we are? And, far more critical: What are we?

What we think we are is fairly obvious, if you look around (and perhaps within): we think we are stakeholders, participants in the social contract, agents in an elaborate minuet of choice and consent, engaged in the pursuit of happiness like a pack on the hunt. We hunger for experiences – and for experience management: the maximization of pleasure, the minimization of suffering. We long for the good life.

As for what we are: the least among us would have told us that, were we but willing to listen. Yet the old, the young, the sick, the challenged – they are not just the least among us. They are us. This is who we are. Perhaps not over the whole of our lives, but always, just beneath the surface: the vulnerability, the helplessness, the need for care, never further off than a stroke, a heart attack, a call from the oncologist, a reckless driver, a patch of ice, a few loose clumps of amyloid tangled up in the brain.

And, ironically enough, this is where the culture war issues return with a vengeance – not because anyone is advocating for a confessional state, but inasmuch as there is only one power that allows us to brush off childbirth, the helplessness of infancy and early childhood, sudden or grave illness, aging, debility, physical pain, cognitive loss – the whole messy, risky, painful, humiliating predicament of bodily life. That power is death – and abortion, euthanasia, and MAID (medical aid in dying, which is to say medically and legally enabled suicide) are the handmaids of death in shielding us from the vulnerability and loss of control characteristic of life. Unsurprisingly, it is exactly the innocents – infants and small children, the disabled, the sick elderly – whose right to life under the social contract comes with a caveat. We wish to see ourselves as choice and consent agents; these little ones scandalize us, for we catch a glimpse of ourselves in their eyes.

Let us take this opportunity and look again on suffering – without scandal, without the weapon of death in hand to overcome it – let us look, and repent.

Image: Pixabay, Alexa’s Fotos (AI-generated)