Refreshing or killing the roots? The contradictions of Postliberalism

A recent interview with thoughtful post-liberal thinker Adrian Pabst - published on the Together for the Common Good site - provides an interesting example of the limitations and contradictions of postliberal thought.  The interview is significantly entitled 'How Christian is Postliberalism?'.  This should alert us to the importance of theological and ecclesial consideration of postliberalism because it is indeed being presented as a renewal of a Christian tradition of political thought.

What is perhaps most striking about the interview is Pabst's admission that all is not well within postliberalism.  His insistence that "the post-liberal alternative is emphatically not authoritarian populism" and the reference to "some self-styled post-liberals" immediately alert us to this.  He then distances himself from those postliberals in the United Kingdom and the United States who have explicitly presented the governments of Poland and Hungary as expressions of postliberalism:

The ruling parties of Poland and Hungary, which have fostered a climate of impunity for virulent nationalism and anti-Semitism, are not exactly paragons of Christian democracy. A truly postliberal party or government is yet to emerge.

Nor is this critique limited to the politics of eastern Europe:

In short, certain versions of post-liberalism have gone too far in their critique of liberalism. They have promoted a politics that is antiliberal and antimodern, animated by a reactionary desire to roll back the new rights of minorities, and to return to social and political exclusion along the axes of race, sex or class. 

The recognition that "certain version of post-liberalism" (note, it is not denied that these are indeed expressions of postliberalism) have become antiliberal, antimodern, and reactionary - and it is difficult not to think of the Integralists at this point - is an important warning of the dangers of postliberalism.  This, then, should give Christians and the churches pause for thought before embracing postliberal political thought as a means of identifying and renewing the common good (more of which below). As Pabst himself notes, such antiliberal and reactionary politics fundamentally compromises key Christian commitments:

A true postliberal politics eschews crude forms of solidarity built on ethnic or religious homogeneity and instead embraces the pluralist heritage of ethical traditions forged in the nineteenth and the twentieth century – especially the body of work that is Catholic Social Thought and personalism.

In other words, it does seem that the ghosts of Petain, Franco, and Salazar - the latter recently explicitly praised for offering "a different kind of post-liberal order" - are gathering around certain sections of postliberal thought, profoundly undermining Christian political, cultural, and social presence and witness.

Another significant aspect of the interview concerns the relationship between postliberalism and liberalism.  Even the more modest and cautious expressions of postliberalism, free of Integralist and authoritarian fantasies, routinely appear to have a confused relationship with liberalism.  Is liberalism A Very Bad Thing?  Much postliberal rhetoric certainly seems to suggest so and Pabst is hardly free of this:

Common to these strands in liberal thinking is a relentless individualism that ends up abolishing the dignity of the person, fundamental freedoms and rights ... the isolated liberal individual ever-more becomes a bare atom.

On the other hand, Pabst points to another liberal tradition:

liberalism has a variety of forms. Some liberal traditions were shaped by Christianity, including the constitutionalist liberalism of E­dmund Burke and Alexis de Tocqueville who believed that faith and religious practice temper the human quest for absolute power.

With a diversity of liberal traditions, some of which - "including the constitutionalist liberalism" of Burke and de Tocqueville - are recognised as good and true, why does postliberalism persist with its characteristic and often rather silly polemical assaults on 'liberalism'?

This confusion is also seen in the genealogy of liberalism offered by postliberal thought, often reflecting the same weaknesses evident in the genealogies proposed by Radical Orthodoxy.  Pabst, for example, takes particular aim at Hobbes:

even older traditions of liberalism contain the seeds of liberal self-erosion and a slide back into an illiberal ‘state of nature’ that Hobbes captured well when he spoke about ‘the war of all against all’ (bellum omnium contra omnes) and life that is ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’.

Except, of course, that the state of nature is exactly what Hobbes regarded the state as protecting us from, nurturing and protecting a solidarity, a common good:

it belongs to the same chief power to make some common rules for all men, and to declare them publicly, by which every man may know what may be called his, what another’s, what just, what unjust, what honest, what dishonest, what good, what evil; that is summarily, what is to be done, what to be avoided in our common course of life.

Despite this genealogy, however, Pabst's emphasis shifts again.  It is not, we are told, the "older traditions of liberalism" that are the focus of postliberal critique, but "contemporary liberalism":

I will return to the best traditions of the West and how they are indebted to Christianity. For now, it is worth saying that since its emergence in the 1990s, post-liberalism has developed into a complex current of ideas that tries to identify the errors and excesses of what we might call ‘contemporary liberalism.’ By that I mean the social liberalism since the 1960s and the economic liberalism since the 1980s (sometimes referred to as ‘neoliberal economics’), both of which rest on the idea of individual emancipation – ‘freedom’ from the constraints of family, community, country, history and even nature.

It is here that postliberalism, we might suggest, has greatest significance, in the recognition that the contemporary liberal order has lost its roots in the philosophical, theological, and cultural thought which sustained and gave life to the liberal order.  A postliberalism which sought to renew the liberal order by means of recovering these roots - not least in Christian philosophy and ethics - would be a project worthy of theological and ecclesial engagement.  The problem is, however, that the 'genealogy of liberalism' offered by postliberalism fundamentally undermines such a project, damning liberalism from the outset.

Pabst does indeed seem to offer the possibility of a project of the renewal of the liberal order when he again turns to Burke:

Post-liberal thinking breaks with the liberal focus on individual emancipation by shifting the emphasis of the meaning of liberty to what Edmund Burke described as ‘social freedom’:

Liberty, Burke writes,

is not solitary, unconnected, individual, selfish liberty, as if every man was to regulate the whole of his conduct by his own will. The liberty I mean is social freedom. It is that state of things in which liberty is secured by the equality of restraint. […] This kind of liberty is, indeed, but another name for justice; ascertained by wise laws, and secured by well-constructed institutions.

Again, however, the confusions and contradictions of postliberalism are all too evident.  Burke, we recall, has been earlier described as a representative of "constitutionalist liberalism", one of those "liberal traditions ... shaped by Christianity".  But, of course, Christianity was by no means the sole influence on or foundation for Burkean constitutionalist liberalism: it cannot be placed entirely outside the 'genealogy of liberalism' condemned by postliberalism. By the very nature of its attack on the roots of liberalism, postliberalism itself becomes a reflection of the shallowness of the contemporary liberal order, hacking off the very roots which could renew and sustain the pluralism, tolerance, generosity, and liberties which that order once embodied and secured.

What, then, does postliberalism have to offer?  Despite the polemical assaults on 'liberalism' - old and/or contemporary - Pabst suggests something rather modest:

A democratic politics and a truly social market economy need ideas and practices of the common good and human dignity which faith communities can try to embody.

We might be forgiven for suggesting that this sounds quite like traditional Christian Democracy - itself, of course, a product of and fiercely committed to defence of the liberal order.  If that is perhaps too centre-right, it can be given it a left-wing expression:

Post-liberalism is not about to replace the old opposition of left vs right or newer binaries such as liberalism vs populism. But it has already reshaped British and Western politics by changing the political debate away from the pursuit of utopian visions towards the quest for things that matter to most people: families, a sense of belonging to places, traditions, relationships. Jon Cruddas for example, in his seminal book The Dignity of Labour, draws on Catholic Social Thought and ethical socialism to show that our fundamental human need for fulfilling work is central to a politics of the good life.

Such ethical/Christian socialism brings to mind the values of and sources which shaped Clement Attlee, who defended the liberal order against both Fascism and Communism.  

If - after the example of Konrad Adenauer and Clement Attlee, and in the tradition of Burke and de Tocqueville - postliberalism is, as Pabst at times suggests, to be a project meaningfully engaged in the renewal of the liberal order by restoring its philosophical and ethical roots, it not only must convincingly set itself apart from the illiberalism of the authoritarians and the Integralists - the broken cisterns of the 20th century to which some have returned - it must also significantly rethink its account of liberalism, ending its collusion with those who are cutting off the liberal order from its roots.  It is then that postliberalism could be a meaningful ecclesial and theological resource for a renewal of civic pluralism, tolerance, generosity, and liberties, grounded in philosophy and ethics which drink deeply from life-giving wells.