Liberalism is dying—again. The demise of liberalism has been announced many times in the past. In the wake of Donald J. Trump’s election to the presidency in 2016, Patrick J. Deneen asked Why Liberalism Failed (2018). R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr., editor of the American Spectator, declared “the death of liberalism” well over a decade ago—almost thirty years after he’d augured the “crack-up of liberalism.” Near the end of the 1960s—with Richard Nixon in the White House and the New Left in disarray—the political scientist Theodore J. Lowi confidently predicted The End of Liberalism (1969). During the 1930s—when the Great Depression caused millions to turn to fascist or Marxist movements—liberalism seemed to be headed for historical oblivion. (To George Dangerfield, the liberalism of the thirties was a walking cadaver; in his view, “the strange death of liberal England” had occurred in the 1910s.) As Samuel Moyn observes at one point in his short but incisive book, “liberalism…is routinely said to be in crisis or even over.”
Indeed, reports of liberalism’s death always turn out to be greatly exaggerated. Like the dying diva in an opera who rises to belt out yet another aria, liberalism always seems ready to expire—only to recover. Through the New Deal, American liberals stabilized the business cycle by instituting banking and financial reforms, creating Social Security, guaranteeing workers’ right to unionize and engage in collective bargaining, and establishing the first federal minimum-wage law. In western Europe, Social and Christian Democrats—liberals all—created welfare states of unparalleled scope and generosity. In other words, it was liberals, often derided as “Marxists,” who enabled what historians have dubbed “the golden age of capitalism.” A generation later, Great Society liberals passed unprecedented civil-rights legislation, created Medicare and Medicaid, launched a “war on poverty,” expanded access to higher education, and won new rights for women. Though often considered “out of touch,” contemporary liberals espouse many popular positions: a “living wage,” increased Social Security payments, making it easier for workers to unionize, a single-payer health-care system. At this writing, the Labour Party’s Keir Starmer (a liberal, really, not a socialist) is prime minister of Great Britain, the neoliberal Emmanuel Macron is president of France, and Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential candidate, is neck and neck with Trump.
And yet liberalism is under siege around the world. Much of the political energy of the past decade has emanated from “populist” movements and politicians disdainful of liberal values: Giorgia Meloni in Italy, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Marine Le Pen and the National Rally in France, Geert Wilders and the Party for Freedom in the Netherlands, and Viktor Orbán in Hungary, who has called his government an “illiberal democracy.” (American conservative intellectuals such as Deneen and Rod Dreher have sung hosannahs to Orbán, praising his flamboyant Christian religiosity and his support for traditional marriage and family.) Trump’s MAGA movement denounces liberals as traitors and perverts; his vice-presidential candidate J. D. Vance excoriates feminists and “childless cat ladies.” As Vance’s remarks demonstrate, right-wing populists exhibit venomous resentment of a vaguely defined “liberal elite” perceived as imperious in its meritocratic hauteur, decadent in its “tolerance” and secular sanctimony, indifferent to the pain inflicted by its economic policies and imperial adventurism, unconcerned about the impact of illegal immigration, and contemptuous of the mores and common sense of people without advanced degrees.
Liberalism is in crisis; whether or not it’s over is another issue. Are we entering a “postliberal” era? A motley roster of thinkers believe so: John Gray, John Milbank, Mary Harrington, Sohrab Ahmari, Adrian Vermeule. What would postliberalism mean or look like? If indeed liberalism is finally passing from the historical stage, perhaps it’s time to invoke Hegel’s lapidary adage that “the owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk”: we understand the meaning of an epoch only as it comes to an end. Is the liberal dispensation drawing to a close? Is the owl of Minerva flying once again?
What is—or was—liberalism? For Deneen, a professor of politics at Notre Dame, liberalism names a commitment to liberation from what are perceived as the restraints and oppressions of tradition and custom. Animating the emancipatory project of “progress,” liberalism extols the expansion of personal freedom, social mobility rather than fixed stations or estates, and incessant technological innovation and material prosperity. Moyn—a professor of history and law at Yale—shares this account but reformulates it as “the modern perfectionism of creative agency”; for him, liberalism denotes a faith in the capacity of human beings to make and remake themselves and the world for the better. Deneen’s lineage of liberalism is exclusively Anglophone: Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, John Stuart Mill, John Rawls. Moyn’s liberals hail from Britain, the Continent, and the United States, home of the “Cold War liberals” he considers traitors to the cause. We read of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Benjamin Constant, Alexis de Tocqueville (whose liberal credentials Moyn emphasizes against conservative attempts to enlist him), German idealists and Romantics, now-obscure figures such as T. H. Green, L. T. Hobhouse, and Bernard Bonsanquet, along with Isaiah Berlin, Hannah Arendt, and Americans such as Judith N. Shklar and Lionel Trilling. The differences in these intellectual genealogies matter. Deneen can find little if anything worth preserving in the liberal tradition, while Moyn’s more capacious narrative allows him to be more hopeful about its future—as well as about that of any “postliberal” successor.
All the same, these are both very broad and expansive definitions of “liberalism,” and I wonder if Deneen and Moyn are talking less about liberalism than about modernity or the meaning of “progress”—which suggests what a lot of contemporary discourse about “postliberalism” might really be about. One way to conceive of modernity is as a no-longer-so-new appreciation of both the mutability of nature (formerly understood as changeless and unalterable) and of the human capacity for individual and collective self-creation through art, culture, and technology. Once thought subject to the limitations of nature and the strictures of the gods, human beings, in this view, can fashion and refashion themselves and the rest of nature, and history is the story of our search for greater power and freedom to understand, master, and reshape the world.
This modern desire for what Francis Bacon called “enlarging the bounds of human Empire” frightens Deneen and exhilarates Moyn. Despite its claims to deliver us from the superstitions, tyrannies, and privations of the past, liberalism is, in Deneen’s view, destructive, amoral, ultimately nihilistic, and—sometimes subtly, sometimes overtly—authoritarian. Before modernity, he contends, “liberty”—self-rule and self-discipline of persons and peoples—entailed what he calls “guardrails” on personal freedom, constraints on our desires and passions that both enabled us to master ourselves through reason and protected us and others from the worst consequences of indulgence. The unbridled pursuit of fulfillment was seen not as freedom but as servitude. These “guardrails” derived from the experience of “countless generations of forebears,” took form in customs, folkways, and traditions, and endured through inculcation by family, government, and religion. By setting limits on our appetites, guardrails “foster[ed] conditions of flourishing for ordinary people,” Deneen holds, while curbing the rapacity of monarchs, aristocrats, and merchants. This “populist” element of premodern guardrails is crucial to Deneen’s argument, as it enables him to contend that restraints on freedom benefit rather than subdue the subaltern.
In Deneen’s telling, with the emergence of liberalism, “guardrails” came increasingly to be seen as oppressions, shackles that unjustly inhibited the free exercise of our minds, spirits, and bodies. Epitomized in Aristotle’s Politics and later baptized by Aquinas, the antique notion that economic life should be oriented toward the maintenance of households and communities rather than the unlimited accumulation of money and possessions gave way to the capitalist ideal of unfettered, profit-oriented markets in capital, labor, land, and goods. The belief that sexual life should be oriented toward marriage and reproduction yielded to the liberatory promise of sexual freedom and exploration. The conviction that political life should be oriented to the common good and conducted through a “mixed constitution”—an integration of the populace (demos) and the virtuous educated (aristoi), idealized by Aristotle and the Roman historian Polybius—bowed to the primacy of interests, culminating in the micro-obsessions of identity politics. In the advanced liberal capitalist world, Deneen claims, the old guardrails lie battered or demolished, and the wisdom of common sense forged over the ages has disappeared amid a tawdry pandemonium of avarice, lechery, and self-absorption.
The demolition of the guardrails did not begin from a revolutionary demos, Deneen argues, but rather from corrupted and delinquent aristoi; liberalism has, in his eyes, always been an elite project. Yet it’s on this point that it becomes clear that Deneen’s real subjects are modernity and progress. Although liberals (often grudgingly) accepted democracy in the nineteenth century, liberalism “is not an egalitarian political philosophy,” he asserts; it has been a project of elite emancipation from traditional restrictions and inhibitions. Liberalism has been a vanguard ideology, first of industrial capitalists eager to throw off moral and civic restraints on accumulation (“classical liberalism”), and now of university-trained and increasingly secular professionals and managers who dominate government, corporate business, education, science, technology, and the culture industries (“progressive liberalism”). Fired by faith in “progress,” these elites seek to topple what Mill once maligned as the “despotism of custom”—the adherence of common people to traditional ways of working, loving, and associating. Standing athwart the “instinctually conservative” mores of the demos, those Emerson cheered on as “the party of hope” pulverize every constraint, enshrining perpetual experiment and innovation as the norm. Hence the political revolution that, under classical liberalism, separated political from economic life and made it difficult to place reasonable restraints on the market; the technological revolution that uprooted artisans and continues to dispossess workers of manual and mental skills; and the sexual revolution that erodes traditional marriage and family and legitimizes abortion, same-sex relationships, transgender people, and even polyamory.
As Deneen tells it, today’s liberal elites attempt to enforce an unprecedented social libertarianism from their command centers in government and corporate bureaucracies, universities and public schools, courts, entertainment, and social media. Despite their ostensible opposition to hierarchy (which helps them conceal their own elite statuses from themselves), they are quick to assert their credentials and expertise; despite their meritocratic pretentions, they value “diversity, equity, and inclusion” over talent; despite their professed belief in science and rationality, they vilify anyone who questions the data behind, say, gender-affirmative care. They are supremely convinced of their righteousness, and they do not brook inquiry or dissent; despite their protestations of “tolerance,” they believe, like Mill, that “despotism is a legitimate mode of dealing with barbarians, provided the end be their improvement.” Apparently, contemporary liberals have deemed today’s demos “barbarians,” and to effect their “improvement,” they have embarked on a new kind of “despotism” through hiring policies, cancel culture, and “de-platforming.”
Deneen considers Marxism as another form of progressive despotism—which is how, in a book ostensibly devoted to liberalism, the real objects of his fear emerge: modernity and “progress.” Although Marxists often loathe liberals more than they do conservatives, Marxism is, in Deneen’s words, a “progressivism of the people,” a politics of progress that aims to liberate the entirety of humanity, not a wealthy or educated few. Most clearly in The Communist Manifesto, Marx called for revolution, not only against capitalism, but against any form of stability; when he observed that the dynamism of capitalist enterprise meant that “all fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, [and] all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify,” he was celebrating the fact, not lamenting it. But as Deneen points out, Marx and his epigones were never sure that the proletariat would accept the ideal of permanent revolution; if the workers did embrace revolution, it could just as likely be for conservative as for radical ends. Because of this “false consciousness”—a reluctance or refusal to embrace “progress” as defined by Marx—the people might be insufficiently revolutionary. Thus, as Lenin and the Bolsheviks realized, “progress required (yet again) the embrace of an elite class to take over the reins.” For both liberals and Marxists, the most obdurate obstacle to progress is the people.
The portrait Deneen draws of a haughty, moralistic, and secular professional-managerial hegemony shares a great deal in spirit with the work of the late Christopher Lasch—who described a “revolt of the elites,” their secession from a life shared with the less educated, affluent, and cosmopolitan—and with that of contemporary critics of liberal condescension such as the political theorist Michael Lind and the French sociologist Christophe Guilluy, who both recoil from what the latter dubs the “faux egalitarianism” of left-ish politicians and academics. Indeed, Deneen’s most incisive critiques skewer the phony egalitarianism of today’s neoliberal university, where DEI has become a “largely symbolic inclusion of designated disadvantaged groups into formative managerial institutions”—in other words, another form of “equality of opportunity,” one of the oldest and moldiest of liberal bromides, as it ratifies the competitive ethos, underwrites meritocracy (which your humble servant has himself skewered in these pages), and preempts criticism of elite universities and their role in preserving inequality. From the business school (with its underpaid janitors) to the English department (with its underpaid adjuncts), the beatific vision of the neoliberal university is a meritocratic techno-plutocracy whose ruling class features proportional representation in terms of race, gender, and sexuality. Although, as I’ll argue later, Deneen’s “postliberal future” fails to be sufficiently democratic, he rightly maintains that today’s liberal obsession with racial and gender identity winds up both bolstering the power of the professional-managerial elite and preventing the formation of a multiracial demos in opposition to their meritocratic overlords.
This neoliberal order is the largely unspoken target of Moyn’s attempt to rescue liberalism from despair. If Deneen considers liberalism malignant and unredeemable from the start, Moyn affirms its promise of liberation but seeks to rescue it from the doldrums in which it’s lingered since the Cold War. “Cold War liberalism was a catastrophe—for liberalism,” he writes in the book’s opening sentence. Not that liberalism before the mid-twentieth century was unblemished; through the European and American imperial systems, it was “entangled from the start with global domination,” and through its white Christian supremacy—exemplified in the French mission civilisatrice—it was “compromised to the core by its civilizational self-conception and racist parochialism.” Yet in spite of their complicity with these evils, liberals still shared an inspiring prospect for the human condition, holding “the broad view that history is a forum of opportunity for the acquisition and institutionalization of freedom.” Over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, liberals embraced democracy, extended suffrage to more men and women, questioned the efficiency and justice of free markets, and envisioned an “ethical state” that would foster the conditions for individual and collective flourishing by at least partially ending the separation of politics from economics. The renovation of liberalism around the turn of the twentieth century augured both the social democracies of Western Europe and the New Deal in the United States.
Rather than welcome these developments as vindications of the liberal creed, Cold War liberals became melancholy and dispirited. Not that they didn’t have excellent reasons to do so. Given two global wars, fascism, Soviet communism, the Judeocide, and nuclear weapons, one can understand why liberals would be daunted by the scale of the century’s horrors (and prospective horrors). But rather than look to the successes of the past as resources for renewal, Cold War liberals lost their progressive nerve, often repudiating the very faith in human agency and creativity that had energized their predecessors. In their view, the utopian hopes of Soviet Marxism belied the emancipatory goals of the Enlightenment and discredited any effort by an “ethical state” to regulate or socialize markets, while the blood-and-soil mythology of fascism stained the legacy of Romanticism.
In six vividly drawn intellectual portraits—of political theorist Judith N. Shklar, philosophers Isaiah Berlin and Karl Popper, historian Gertrude Himmelfarb, political philosopher and historian Hannah Arendt, and literary critic Lionel Trilling—Moyn examines the politically disabling gloom of Cold War liberals. They rewrote the history of liberalism itself, denigrating the Enlightenment’s trust in reason as a source of ideological fanaticism, and identifying Romanticism as a wellspring of fascist mythology. They rejected the inherited tradition’s faith in history as a tale of progress, holding that such a conviction ended inexorably in political messianism and terror. Cultivating disillusionment, they determined to be on principle “disturbed by ideological passion, frightened of risk, and indentured to stability.” Indeed, they practiced what Moyn describes as a “self-immunization from hope,” a determination on principle to forswear any grand dreams of social and political transformation. The key words of Cold War liberals were “maturity” and “realism”; they were the adults in the room, having put away the childish things that beguiled and misled their forebears. For this reason, they could usually generate only the most tepid enthusiasm for the liberation struggles of the postwar period. (Arendt, for instance, was wary of the civil-rights movement, and looked upon revolutionary uprisings in the postcolonial world as “derangement.”)
On a more fundamental level, Cold War liberals repudiated the confidence in individual and collective creativity that had marked liberal humanism, replacing it with a darker view of human nature that drew on psychoanalysis and Augustinian theology. Increasingly fashionable among intellectuals after the Second World War, Freud’s depiction of the human person as a combustible vessel of unconscious sexual and aggressive drives seemed to imply, to liberals such as Trilling, that “exacting self-management” was the highest and most realistic of our terrestrial hopes. For liberals amenable to Christianity, Augustine complemented Freud as a diagnostician of the human condition. Especially in the work of Reinhold Niebuhr, the last theologian to be a formidable presence in liberal intellectual life, Augustinian pessimism could be enlisted by disenchanted liberals to chastise “misdirected enthusiasm and disorderly passion”—i.e., hope for a better world.
Renouncing that hope, Cold War liberalism “collapsed,” Moyn asserts in his epilogue, into neoconservatism and neoliberalism. The suspicion of postcolonial regimes informed the neoconservative crusade to spread liberal democracy through military adventurism; the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were, Moyn would probably agree, the legacy of liberal imperialism. Meanwhile, by exalting individual freedom while leaving the welfare state undefended, Cold War liberals set the stage for the neoliberalism of Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, whose indictments of the “ethical state” as a bastion of serfdom emboldened right-wing governments to reduce social spending, break labor unions, and deregulate markets. Neoliberals have not only attempted to insulate the market from democratic control; they have tried to make all life into a market—something their classical predecessors never thought imaginable. In the United States and Western Europe, liberals are now in disarray, unsure how to confront the social, political, and ecological repercussions of the neoliberal capitalism endorsed by almost every liberal, “socialist,” or social-democratic party. Cold War liberals paved the way, Moyn suggests, for the crisis of their own tradition.
What is to be done? Deneen calls for “regime change”: “The peaceful but vigorous overthrow of a corrupt and corrupting liberal ruling class” and the construction of a “postliberal” regime that preserves existing political institutions while suffusing them with a “fundamentally different ethos.” Who will dismantle the liberal regime? Pointing back to the “mixed constitution” idealized by Aristotle, Polybius, and Aquinas, Deneen envisions an alliance of common people with an “elite cadre” of virtuous intellectuals who will restore the “common good political tradition” and plant new guardrails to govern and channel our desires. He calls this alliance “aristopopulism.” Although Deneen claims that this aristopopulist postliberalism “cuts across current political parties,” he nonetheless sees it as “a new right” that combines cultural conservatism (support for traditional religion, marriage, and family) with a “pro-worker” economic program that includes encouragement of domestic manufacturing, paid leaves for parents, “a family-supportive wage,” government funding for trades, and student-loan forgiveness for graduates who pursue careers in teaching, public service, or religion.
Deneen devotes more space to the aristoi than to the demos. It will be resolutely “conservative” in his view, but not like the “Conservatism, Inc.” that goes by the name today. (Deneen dismisses most contemporary conservatives as junior-varsity liberals.) Genuine conservatism is rooted in the “common sense” of the many and the erudition of the few; as “the classical and Christian tradition of the West,” it constitutes “the accumulation of human experience over time, consonant with the unchanging nature of the created order itself.” Like Plato’s philosopher-rulers, the aristoi “give voice to the nature of the good itself”; unlike them, they articulate the good in terms of Christian theology—which, for Deneen, is unmistakably (but never explicitly) Roman Catholic in character. (He concludes the book with a meditation on the Jesuit Jean Daniélou and “politics as a place for prayer.”) “Every political order rests on certain theological assumptions,” Deneen declares, and so his imagined aristoi would only be more open than the current liberal regime about their theology.
Deneen’s critics have pointed to passages like this as evidence of his complicity with Catholic “integralists” such as Harvard’s Vermeule who openly desire a theocratic state. I don’t read Deneen as stumping for an America ruled from the Vatican. (He also distances himself from the “national conservatism” of Yoram Hazony and R. R. Reno.) Deneen’s postliberal regime resembles more the Catholic social democracy advocated by Ahmari (whose Compact is one of our more scintillating periodicals). Still, even if, like me, you’re sympathetic to Deneen’s critique of a complacently secular, meritocratic, capitalist liberal order, there’s plenty to find unsatisfying or unsettling in this book. Take the “guardrails” and “common sense” that he takes to be so perspicuous, distilled from the “accumulated experience” of “countless generations of forebears.” Deneen and other conservatives may well dismiss as tiresome the objection that many, many people had no part to play in the accumulation and articulation of this “common” experience—women, non-whites, the list could go on—but that makes it no less valid or forceful. (Chesterton’s “democracy of the dead” has always had a very limited suffrage.) Deneen’s “pro-worker” economic platform, while it would certainly cut into the profit margins of most small or corporate businesses, would also do little to disturb the logic of capitalist property relations—the source, we need to be reminded, of the insecurity, indignity, and impoverishment that workers face. (I expect little of substance to come from an allegedly “pro-worker” Republican Party, and especially from the likes of a surly, resentful, and misogynistic opportunist like Vance, whose blurb graces Deneen’s book.)
What also troubles me is what Deneen doesn’t—or perhaps doesn’t dare—say. Take his aristoi, for instance. How will these aristoi be chosen? If, as Deneen asserts, political society rests on theological foundations, will entry into the new elite be determined by theological orthodoxy? To which orthodoxy will they be held? Presumably, if Deneen is being honest, it would be Roman Catholic; but then will Eastern Orthodox, Protestants, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, and Hindus be excluded? And that’s not to mention the growing legion of “nones” among Americans under thirty. What institutional relationships will exist between the aristoi and the demos? Will there be checks and balances of some kind? As for “traditional marriage and family,” is Deneen calling for a kinder, gentler patriarchy? If so, should limits be placed on women’s access to education, employment, and suffrage, given that these foster independence and equality? Does Deneen want to recriminalize same-sex conduct? Does he really want gays to march back into the closet—or perhaps be marched back there? Deneen poses none of these rather obvious questions—nor, I suspect, would he want to answer them if pushed, because he knows that, once his postliberal vision was given definable features, the demos might well reject it. (A majority of Republican voters, for example, now favors same-sex marriage.) All of which is to say that aristopopulist postliberalism has no anchor in the social, political, and religious realities of twenty-first-century America.
Moyn doesn’t call for the eradication of the liberal “regime,” but neither does he offer an unambiguous affirmation. Though impatient with the high-minded disillusionment of Cold War liberals and exasperated by the Cassandran hysterics of their contemporary heirs—whose political discourse in the age of Trump is little more than “a torrent of frightened tweets and doomscrolling terror”—his own view of the liberal future seems uncertain and indecisive. Still committed to the expansive confidence that marks (most of) the liberal tradition, Moyn insists that it possesses resources for surpassing the limits of Cold War liberalism. Indeed, he writes, we must “reinvent liberalism beyond the terms we have known” and “imagine a form of liberalism that is altogether original.” But at what point would this reinvention and reimagination transform liberalism into something else—something postliberal, perhaps? Moyn appears to anticipate this question and to provide the beginning of an answer. “It matters less that we preserve and rescue traditions,” he muses, than that we “reconfigure them beyond their limitations for the sake of our collective future.” If liberalism as we know and have known it is neither immortal nor indivisible, then if we go truly beyond it, Moyn suggests, any postliberal future must bear within it what was best in liberalism. Even if there would be a “regime change,” any postliberalism worthy of the name would not simply negate the liberalism that preceded it. Rather than beguile us into some reactionary elysium, it must, Moyn insists, include what is invaluable about “progress”: a faith that we can act creatively and collectively for the good. The end of liberalism would not augur the end of a commitment to progress.
Progress is a faith that many intellectuals have forsworn, or at least claim to have renounced. In this view, faith in progress is an embarrassing heirloom of the Enlightenment, disproven by the disasters of the twentieth century. But perhaps we should conceptualize much of modern cultural and intellectual history, not as a battle between “progress and its critics,” as Lasch put it, but as a conflict over the meaning of progress. Surely the abolition of slavery, the (still incomplete) empowerment of women, the extension of popular education, the prolongation of longevity, etc., are all evidence of…well, progress? Curmudgeons who rail about progress should be asked if they’d like to revoke these developments. (If they would, we shouldn’t let them.) One really shouldn’t have to keep insisting that a great deal of good has come from the social, political, sexual, and technological revolutions of modernity—revolutions which, yes, have brought other problems in their wake—but we’re now apparently at a point where the obvious does have to be restated.
It’s often religious intellectuals like Deneen who lament the depredations of liberalism, progress, and modernity; but as Moyn points out, Christianity was a major part of the intellectual and spiritual provenance of liberalism. “Nineteenth century seers of progress”—Constant, Tocqueville, Hegel, and many others—“regularly stressed the Christian lineage of their commitment to meaning in history,” he writes, “and they were right to do so.” Because Christianity is a faith whose veracity depends on events that are claimed to have occurred in historical time, and because it assumes a unilinear, eschatological temporality in which our actions can prefigure the Kingdom, history becomes a venue in which human agency can make a difference, for good or for ill. Therefore, as Moyn intimates, Christian theology can play a significant role in clarifying the nature of “progress”—and therefore either in recasting liberalism or in formulating a postliberal successor. Liberalism has never been entirely secular; indeed, Moyn even asks if liberals “ever did—or whether we can today—credibly render [the idea of progress] in secular terms.” Perhaps not; but then the urgent question, at least for Christians, is whether it can be credibly rendered in religious terms.
If, as I’ve suggested, “progress” and “modernity” are the real issues behind much of the “postliberal” discourse, then we should ask ourselves if an alternative modernity is possible, with an alternative conception of progress. Because of his greater moral and intellectual generosity, Moyn is the more valuable interlocutor for Christians eager either to reconstruct liberalism or to venture beyond liberalism without falling prey to the delusions and resentments of integralism or religious nationalism. Once we’ve accepted the wisdom of modernity—that human beings possess the capacity for “creative and empowered free action,” as Moyn describes liberalism, and that history is “a forum of opportunity for the achievement and exercise of that ability”—then our contribution to any postliberal moment is to explore new possibilities in the Christian political imagination, rooted in a reimagined and revitalized theological humanism.
Christianity has for far too long been seen—by Christians as well as by secularists—as a doleful wisdom of resignation. Especially in its Augustinian forms, it has bewailed this world as a vale of tears in which our frail human nature, so twisted and disfigured by our intractable sinfulness, renders impossible and unimaginable any radical transformation of the world. Convinced that “original sin” has so crippled our souls and hearts that we are imprisoned in “total depravity,” this theological anthropology borders on despair and forecloses in advance any avenues of visionary political action. Exemplified in Niebuhr’s Cold War liberalism, it can become, for both liberals and conservatives, a sonorous and mannered stoicism, a pious acquiescence in the status quo that masquerades as “maturity” and “realism.”
A Christian postliberalism would challenge this “realism” as mere submissiveness to the given, and remind us that we are not “totally depraved” (an especially preposterous and insidious calumny); we are, as the Psalmist knew, only a little lower than God. “There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal,” as C. S. Lewis once wrote; “It is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit—immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.” A Christian postliberalism that imagines and enacts an alternative modernity with a different standard of progress should start from this truly subversive claim. Its theological humanism would complement the doctrine of original sin with a robust assertion that men and women are the image and likeness of God, persons capable of individual and mutual self-fashioning within biological, social, and ontological limits. It’s on this point of limits that Christian postliberals would have to take issue with Moyn’s celebration of “the modern perfectionism of creative agency.” When does the human capacity for self-fashioning turn us into something inhuman? Should liberals welcome the transhumanist apotheosis of machinic transfiguration? Is the “Singularity”—the merger of the human body with digitalized technology—the omega point of modernity? Is “progress” to be measured by a technological sublime?
To answer these and other questions, Christian postliberals would draw less from Augustine and Aquinas—the gloomy Guses of inherited guilt, predestination, and infernalism—and more from figures such as Gregory of Nyssa and Nicholas of Cusa. Gregory’s eloquent and ferocious condemnation of slavery is one of the most extraordinary moral documents of antiquity, and he rooted his call for abolition not in a political metaphysics of rights but in theosis, an eschatological vision of humanity fully restored to its divinity. (“For how many obols did you value the image of God?”—a question that could well be posed to Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk.) Nicholas, whose work is witnessing a long overdue and hopefully permanent revival, is perhaps the theological avatar of a Christian commitment to innovative, democratic agency: the first theologian to explicitly contend that all governance stems from the consent of the governed, he also wrestled with the problem of how an evolving, multifarious universe, pliable to the art and technics of culture and civilization, could still be a manifestation of the divine.
Nicholas’s modern concern with humans as the makers of their world should inform a postliberal engagement with political economy. Modernity’s conception of progress has been, for the most part, resolutely quantitative—with a “technocratic paradigm” of sheer money and productivity—and so Christian postliberals must work for an end to capitalism, which constructs markets and property to be vehicles of endless accumulation. Although social-democratic and New Deal liberals put guardrails, as it were, on capitalist markets and property, the historic liberal concern with individual freedom has always made it difficult for liberals to justify any guardrails on acquisitiveness. Even where liberals have invoked religion to modify capitalism, they never dared to fundamentally alter the nature and logic of the system. As the Tory radical (and postliberal inspiration) John Ruskin once observed, “I know no previous instance in history of a nation’s establishing a systematic disobedience to the first principles of its professed religion.”
A Christian postliberal left should revisit, not only Ruskin, but William Morris, R. H. Tawney, G.D.H. Cole, Lewis Mumford, and Theodore Roszak, as well as a variety of roads not taken on the Left: guild socialism, syndicalism, council communism, anarchism, and corporatist forms of social democracy. What unites these disparate visions of a postcapitalist world is an aspiration to reunite political and economic life (guild socialists, for instance, wanted to substitute representation by guilds or trade unions for representation by region) and an artisanal ideal of workers’ control over production that abolishes the class distinctions among work, skill, and management. Labor movements should study this history to cultivate a far more ambitious politics.
Is liberalism dying? If history is any guide, maybe not; but just as all nations and empires are evanescent, ideas perish, wither, or transmogrify. Liberalism has shown a remarkable capacity for self-criticism and renewal, but every tradition has parameters beyond which it ceases to be what it is. Perhaps under the pressure of multiple crises—the chasm of class inequality, political upheaval, ecological ruin—liberalism will undergo a metamorphosis so profound as to become something else. Perhaps a new modernity, drawing on religious traditions once thought obsolete, is waiting in the wings. The owl of Minerva sits poised on its branch.
Regime Change
Toward a Postliberal Future
Patrick Deneen
Sentinel
$30 | 288 pp.
Liberalism against Itself
Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Time
Samuel Moyn
Yale University Press
$20 | 240 pp.
This article was published in Commonweal’s hundredth-anniversary issue, November 2024.
