Influential figures in the orbit of the Labour Government are espousing the intellectual and political movement of post-liberalism. But, Matt Sleat argues, the British proponents of post-liberalism fail to spell out what a post-liberal politics informed by the common good would look like, while at the same time Labour’s direction towards cultural conservatism doesn’t quite qualify as post-liberal.

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Some claim to have spotted a drift of the Labour Party in the direction of post-liberalism — a current traced through the quiet revival of Blue Labour and the increased prominence of several of its high priests: most notably Maurice Glasman (Lord, founder, and lone British parliamentarian at Trump’s second inauguration), Jonathan Rutherford (now co-piloting Policy Exchange’s “Future of the Left“), and Adrian Pabst (political theorist and author of Post-Liberal Politics). Even Starmer’s Chief of Staff, the ever-elusive Morgan McSweeney, has been claimed by Glasman as “one of ours“.

What marks post-liberalism, gives it its glinting, counterintuitive edge, is its rejection of a great modern shibboleth: individual freedom.

So, is Labour becoming post-liberal? Or is it merely performing a tactical swerve in response to electoral gravity and pressure from the right? Because if this supposed post-liberal turn is to be more than a stretch-and-pose routine — lunging leftward on economics, reaching rightward on culture, all in step with Reform’s populist footwork — it has to cut deeper. It would need to signal a genuine shift in Labour’s philosophical co-ordinates.

What is post-liberalism rejecting?  

What marks post-liberalism, gives it its glinting, counterintuitive edge, is its rejection of a great modern shibboleth: individual freedom. Where liberalism genuflects before the solitary self — its desires, its rights, its exalted autonomy — post-liberalism swivels, sleek and severe, toward something older, more collective. The common good: not the individual in bloom, but the garden tended in common. Part of the post-liberal impulse comes from a flicker of revelation — or so its advocates would have us believe — that liberals, in their cult of the self, have missed something elemental. That man is not, in fact, an island, but an archipelago at best. That we are born into social webs, not vacuums.

This caricature of liberalism is as tired as it is untrue — a straw man propped up so long it’s begun to sag under its own absurdity. This isn’t to say that the relentless chase after individual freedom hasn’t helped birth some of modernity’s more exquisite miseries. It has. But to pin that on liberalism as such is misdiagnosis masquerading as insight. Post-liberalism is, strictly speaking, post-that. Whatever that might be — neoliberalism, libertarianism, the cult of the market, the gospel of the self. It defines itself against a ghost, a flickering ‘ism’ that’s never quite stood still long enough to be properly known.

The more arresting question, of course, is what this alternative political philosophy of the common good actually amounts to. British post-liberals bang the same drum as their American kin, despite the latter’s unmistakable drift into the ecclesiastical shadows of the hard right. Patrick Deneen and Adrian Vermeule — the movement’s strange double act — aren’t just outliers; they’re harbingers. And the contrast, when you stare into it, proves revealing.

What is post-liberalism’s “common good”?

American post-liberalism is perfectionist politics in evening wear. It proceeds from a polished conviction: that there is such a thing as the good life — not your good life, mind, or mine, but the good life — and that politics ought to pave the road to it. It doesn’t just govern; it guides, instructs, corrects. Less a referee than a conductor, coaxing the symphony toward harmony — or at least towards a score someone, somewhere, insists is beautiful. Vermeule, for his part, is perfectly frank: the common good, as he sees it, comes clad in robes — Roman, Catholic, and unmistakably pre-Vatican II. It’s not just Catholic in flavour; it’s steeped, saturated, swinging a thurible of incense from the altar of a stern, reactionary orthodoxy.

Say what you will about this vision of the common good — and there’s plenty to say — at least it knows what it’s about. No fog, no fudge. Once you’ve nailed down what the good is, the rest becomes a matter of application: a question of what it demands here, now, in this or that grubby corner of the world. Moral clarity, however dubious its content, has its uses.

When it comes to spelling out just what this elusive common good is, British post-liberal turn suddenly shy.

To be clear, the contemporary British post-liberals don’t buy that version of the common good. They claim common intellectual ancestors in the likes of Aristotle and Aquinas, and so too talk up the politics of virtue over the anarchy of freedom, and with no shortage of conviction. But when it comes to spelling out just what this elusive common good is, they turn suddenly shy. The rhetoric soars; the definitions, not so much. It’s all principle, no particulars — a map with no terrain.

And so we are saddled with mealy-mouthed phrases like the common good champions “participation, the negotiation of conflicting interests, the primacy of pluralism, and the goal of mutual interests”. Or “the good life emerges from the everyday experience of individuals and communities with different values who try to live together peacefully”. Both of which, oddly enough, sounds an awful lot like liberalism. No surprise, though. Unlike their American brethren, the British post-liberals have the good sense not to mourn the pluralistic nature of our societies or long for a return to some mythical, homogenous past (credit where it’s due). And so we circle back — inevitably, inescapably — to that most liberal of endeavours: finding a way to live together amid disagreement. Not a grand vision, perhaps, but a necessary one. Less a manifesto than a concession to the messy, plural reality we actually inhabit.

But here’s the rub: a perfectionism that refuses to take a stand on what constitutes the good is just intellectual window dressing. And without that firm commitment to the good, post-liberalism just doesn’t amount to much.

The point is simply this: if you’re going to talk about human flourishing, you’d better be clear about what kind of flourishing you have in mind.

Yet, out of such thin conceptual gruel, the post-liberals somehow manage to cook up some strikingly definitive conclusions. In the course of telling us what post-liberalism really is, Pabst helpfully informs us that it stands firmly against the excesses of “mass abortion, uncontrolled immigration, [and] ‘transgender religion’”. Which does rather suggest that lurking behind all the talk about pluralism and peaceful coexistence is a decidedly less pluralistic sense of what the good life and the common good look like — and more to the point, what it emphatically doesn’t. Which isn’t a criticism, exactly — any serious perfectionism must draw lines somewhere. The point is simply this: if you’re going to talk about human flourishing, you’d better be clear about what kind of flourishing you have in mind. And, hardly incidentally, how far you’re prepared to go to head off any rival visions that don’t sing in tune.

Labour’s cultural right-wing turn isn’t post-liberal

Granted, under Starmer Labour has edged rightward on the cultural front – waving the flag with newfound enthusiasm, striking a firm pose on illegal migration, and allowing itself to be all but hauled by the collar by the Supreme Court on trans issues. But on the rest of the post-liberal wish list — abortion, the valorisation of the traditional family, a reverent nod to Christianity as the West’s civilisational spine — Labour remains defiantly incurious. 

Stepping back from woke-progressivism doesn’t mean you’ve stepped into the arms of post-liberalism. It might just mean you’ve stepped aside — and kept walking.

Economically, the government has been busy — no denying that. The Employment Rights Bill, a renationalised rail network, the creation of GB Energy, and the usual promises of infrastructure largesse. Active, yes. But on the deeper questions posed by post-liberals — how to breathe life back into towns hollowed out by globalisation or sketch a credible path to reindustrialisation — there’s a resounding hush.

Even if we concentrate on the shifts that have taken place, can they, in any serious sense, be described as post-liberal? Has it all been stirred by some grand, perfectionist vision of the good — a moral telos, gleaming faintly on the hill? That feels like a stretch, and then some. Stepping back from woke-progressivism doesn’t mean you’ve stepped into the arms of post-liberalism. It might just mean you’ve stepped aside — and kept walking.

Post-liberalism is often framed as a marriage of economic intervention and social conservatism. If one squints, tilt your head just so, one might recognise Labour in this description. But while this understanding of post-liberalism is not wrong, exactly — it is a case of mistaking the waves for the currents, the surface chop for the deeper drift. Post-liberalism is not a style or stance; it’s a reimagining of the political project itself — an effort to shift the centre of gravity toward a morally substantial vision of the common good, and with it, a richer and specific account of human flourishing. What’s propelled Labour since it took office last year — or, if one is feeling less charitable, what’s buffeted it — has less the look of philosophical reorientation than of tactical reaction. As long as this is the case, any semblance of a post-liberal turn within Labour will be more apparent than real. 

All articles posted on this blog give the views of the author(s), and not the position of LSE British Politics and Policy, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Image credit: lev radin on Shuterstock

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