The Postliberal Moment Has Passed
A conversation with Thomas D. Howes on the rise, intellectual lineage, and quiet failure of a movement
A few years ago you couldn’t open First Things, attend a conference at a midsize Catholic university, or scroll through certain stretches of social media without encountering a fresh manifesto, symposium, or polemic devoted to some flavor of postliberalism. Patrick Deneen had declared liberalism a failure. Adrian Vermeule was building a vocabulary of “common good constitutionalism.” Sohrab Ahmari was founding magazines and breaking with old friends. Younger Catholics in particular including students, seminarians, and recent graduates were taking integralism out for an intellectual spin.
That moment has passed. Not collapsed, exactly, and not been refuted into oblivion. It has quietly receded the way intellectual fashions do once their internal contradictions begin to outweigh their rhetorical force. On the latest Acton Line, I sit down with Thomas D. Howes, co-author with James M. Patterson of the forthcoming Acton Institute book Why Postliberalism Failed, to talk through how the movement rose, what it actually claimed, and why its diagnosis, however penetrating in places, led so consistently into a an anachronistic cul-de-sac.
The postliberals were right that something is wrong. That much is worth conceding at the outset. Atomization is real. The hollowing out of mediating institutions is real. A managerial liberalism increasingly contemptuous of the human goods it was once thought to safeguard is real. These are not invented grievances. But diagnosing a sickness is not the same as prescribing a cure, and here the movement faltered.
Howes traces the genealogy with care. The intellectual furniture of contemporary integralism was assembled less in the Middle Ages than in the nineteenth century, by Catholic reactionaries pushing back against the French Revolution and its aftermath. They looked to a medieval order they imagined more than they remembered: a Christendom in which the temporal and spiritual swords were neatly coordinated, the prince a faithful son of the Church, and dissent a manageable exception rather than a constitutive feature of public life. That this picture mostly never obtained. Medieval politics was a chaos of competing jurisdictions. Kings excommunicated as often as popes coronated. That messiness was paradoxically its greatest legacy! Nostalgia rarely consults the archives.
Every modern attempt to embody this vision ended badly. Confessional states have a history, and the history is not edifying. They tend to produce, roughly in this order: sectarian persecution, civil war, secularization, and finally a population so wary of religion in public life that it cannot be coaxed back without enormous patience and labor. Acton, who saw the dynamic with characteristic clarity, observed that “whenever a single definite object is made the supreme end of the State, be it the advantage of a class, the safety or the power of the country, the greatest happiness of the greatest number, or the support of any speculative idea, the State becomes for the time inevitably absolute.” Make the state’s supreme end the Catholic faith, and you do not thereby protect the faith. You enlist it in the project of absolutism, and absolutism eventually devours its instruments.
There is also, as Howes emphasizes, an economic dimension to the postliberal project that often goes underexamined by its sympathizers on the right. The movement’s critique of markets, of “neoliberalism,” of the autonomy of civil society from state direction, very often converges with progressive critiques of the same. The instrument of choice is the administrative state. The faith that bureaucrats wielding the right metaphysics will produce better outcomes than free associations of free persons is a strange one to find among self-styled traditionalists, but find it one does. It is, in the end, the old technocratic temptation in cassock and surplice.
The alternative is not a glib endorsement of liberalism in its present American form. Acton’s liberty was never mere license, and the classical liberal tradition has resources for self-criticism that its postliberal critics seldom acknowledge. Wilhelm Röpke and F. A. Hayek both distinguished a true liberalism—organic, social, deferential to traditions and institutions—from a false one that is rationalistic, atomistic, and contemptuous of inherited goods. John Paul II in Centesimus Annus distinguished an economy ordered to the human person from one that reduces persons to economic functions. The serious work is not to throw the liberal tradition over but to recover its deepest insights, rooted in the dignity of the human person, the principle of subsidiarity, and the recognition that the good must be freely chosen to be the good at all.
Constitutional democracy and religious liberty are not, as some postliberals would have it, the Trojan horses by which secular modernity smuggled in its dissolutions. They are, rightly understood, the very conditions for the kind of public life in which faith can speak honestly, contend openly, and persuade without coercion. That is a patrimony worth defending and one that postliberalism, in its haste to bury liberalism, never paused long enough to inherit.
Listen to the full conversation with Thomas Howes on Acton Line:
Preorder Why Postliberalism Failed by James Patterson and Thomas Howes from the Acton Institute here.