Postliberalism: a gateway drug for Integralism

It is perhaps not without significance that the term 'postliberal', now so common in political theory and commentary, originated in theology.  Amidst much contemporary debate over the meaning of postliberalism in the political sphere, we should then return to those original theological sources in order to discern the term's meaning.  In the Foreword to The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age (1984) George Lindbeck counselled:

all the standard theological approaches are unhelpful.  The difficulties cannot be solved by, for example, abandoning modern developments and returning to some form of preliberal orthodoxy.

Similarly in the Foreward to the German edition, Lindbeck observed the opposition "on the right" to the book's thesis:

preliberalism seems safer than postliberalism.

Such concerns have been reflected in influential statements of political postliberalism.  In Red Tory (2010), Phillip Blond explicitly rejected anti-liberalism:

Now by this [i.e. his critique of contemporary liberalism] I do not mean to support a politics that is extreme or reactionary or kitsch.  I am in part appalled by the legacy of modern liberalism precisely because I take myself to be a true liberal.  I believe in a free society, where human beings, under the protection of law and guidance of virtue, pursue their own account of the good in debate with those who differ from them and in accord with those who agree.  

Similarly, Adrian Pabst in Blue Labour: Forging a New Politics (2015) stated:

Blue Labour's post-liberalism is neither nostalgic nor reactionary ... Blue Labour needs to demonstrate that its critique of liberalism is not a mere cry of anguish and anxiety against the inexorable advance of liberal modernity.

Nick Timothy in his recent Remaking One Nation: The Future of Conservatism (2020) distinguishes "moderate, essential liberalism" from destructive "ultra-liberalism", defining the former as "the tenets that make liberal democracy, free societies and market economies function".  Therefore, "it is not essential liberalism that is driving the crisis of liberal democracy, but ... ultra-liberalism".  As a result, the postliberal conservatism envisaged by Timothy cannot be anti-liberal:

In accepting the tenets of the essential liberalism ... conservatives can find themselves on the side of liberals as they defend our core freedoms and the institutions that protect them.

All this would suggest a healthy relationship between postliberalism and a liberal order: a refusal to go down the road of anti-liberalism and of rejecting civic liberal norms.  Against this background, postliberalism could be understood as a project seeking to reconnect the civic liberal order with its roots.  As Timothy has stated:

the more we see the full extent of the crisis of Western society, it becomes clearer that liberalism has always depended on those very institutions and traditions and ways of life it attacks.

This understanding has a venerable pedigree.  It echoes Burke's insistence:

the only liberty I mean, is a liberty connected with order, and that not only exists with order and virtue, but cannot exist at all without them.

It is the insight articulated by Tocqueville that "the first political institution of American democracy is religion".  It recalls that the Christian humanism of Maritain contributed to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and that Martin Luther King's Letter from a Birmingham Jail quoted Augustine and Aquinas against the evil and injustice of segregation.  Postliberalism, then, is a means of renewing, refreshing and reforming the liberal order by returning to the wells from which it sprung, one of these wells being Christian theology and philosophy.

However, there has been another emerging strain of thought within postliberalism, in which hostility to the liberal order is all too evident.  The Politics of Virtue by John Milbank and Adrian Pabst (2016), for example, was an explicit rejection of the liberal order:

as we have shown, it is not possible to recover a 'more humanly credible type of liberal thinking' (as John Gray claims) since none such is, or could possibly be theoretically available.

Phillip Blond has also indicated an anti-liberal turn in recent statements, with his praise for the governing parties in Poland and Hungary, and a seeming rejection of civil rights as an expression of justice and righteousness, of the good:

We might also note the participation of Integralist Adrian Vermeule in a Respublica (the leading UK postliberal think-tank) seminar on the future of postliberalism.  This does raise the rather unsettling prospect of postliberalism being a gateway drug for Integralism and its inherently anti-liberal vision. We get a sense of the extent and seriousness of Integralism's hostility to the liberal order when we consider Vermeule's advice on how Roman Catholics should participate in liberal societies:

parliamentary institutions, when conceived not as part of a system of estates but as sovereign representative bodies, embody an essentially liberal-discursive set of principles. Rallying to, participating within, parliamentary democracy might then indeed have a pernicious suborning effect.

But even within liberal-democratic political orders there are always institutional forms that long predate liberalism, that have no necessary connection of principle to liberalism, and that will certainly survive liberalism’s eventual disappearance. One candidate for such an organizational form — and there are others as well — is bureaucracy, which has flourished in nonliberal regimes from Sung China to Salazar’s Portugal.

What is the ecclesial significance of this?  In this age during which the liberal order is experiencing turmoil, challenged by other hostile visions of the social and political order, political theology should assume a particular significance in the Church's life and witness.  What ordering of our social and political life coheres most with and its best oriented to the justice and righteousness of the City of God?  What social and political ordering is most suited to human flourishing in light of the Christian proclamation of creation and redemption?

Bitter 20th century experience should have taught Christians that aligning with anti-liberal visions and espousing anti-liberal political theologies profoundly undermines the Church's witness, not least because of the denial of human dignity and the perversion of the Christian proclamation into ideology.  In the words of Czech Roman Catholic theologian Tomáš Halík:

It is good that we live in a democratic society; I do not yearn for a ‘Catholic state.’ Were there an attempt to make a state ideology out of faith, I would probably be the first dissident - in the name of faith and liberty.

This is not to deny the depth of the crisis facing the contemporary liberal order, a crisis precipitated by its rejection of the very sources which gave it birth and sustained it.  This, however, identifies what should be a purpose of contemporary political theology: renewing the liberal order's orientation to the City of God, and deepening its experience of justice and righteousness.  In other words, pointing the liberal order to the wells from it sprung, including the Christian proclamation, the rich legacy of Christian philosophy, and the vision of Christian humanism.

I have identified with political postliberalism for over a decade, not least because of Radical Orthodoxy's critique of the liberal order.  I believed that it offered the substance of a meaningful political theology for such a time as this.  Past months have shaken this confidence.  Seeing the liberal order assaulted by both Trumpism and the Hard Left, the re-emergence of anti-Semitism, the ghoulish memories of nationalism and communism again stalking our political discourse, has led me to a renewed, chastened understanding of the goodness of the liberal order.  My concern that postliberalism has increasingly become allied with Integralism - a political theology surely repugnant to the Anglican tradition - has confirmed the conviction that it is time to say farewell to postliberalism.

I conclude by turning to Red Tory philosopher George Grant, whose work is shot through with the influence of Hooker and the Anglican experience.  In his English-Speaking Justice (1974), Grant declared:

Liberalism in its generic form is surely something that all decent men accept as good - 'conservatives' included.  In so far as the word 'liberalism' is used to described the belief that political liberty is a central human good, it is difficult to deny that they are liberals.  There can be sane argument concerning how far political liberty can be achieved in particular times and places, but not concerning whether it is a central human good ... the institutions and ideas of the English-speaking world at their best have ... affirmed that any regime to be called good, must include political liberty and consent.