The Brexit vote and Donald Trump’s victory in the Republican primaries are harbingers of a tectonic shift in Western politics, argue John Milbank and Adrian Pabst. Mainstream parties have converged in the centre while anti-establishment parties tend to combine a far-right stance on questions of identity and immigration with left-wing statism on welfare and the economy. We need to start looking at post-liberal alternatives that blend principles of reciprocity and mutuality with novel policy ideas.
The reordering of politics cannot be mapped according to the old opposition of left versus right because both are part of the same liberal logic that is now in question. Indeed, from the 1990s onwards both the centre-left and the centre-right have fused economic with social liberalism, notably financial and trade liberalisation coupled with a raft of equality legislation in pursuit of abstract ideals such as diversity and inclusivity. In neither case did mainstream parties consider how the privileging of minority interests might affect the rest of the economy or the majority of society.
Following the 2008 global credit crash and repeated civic breakdown (including urban riots from Los Angeles via London and Paris to Malmö), the liberal consensus is collapsing amid growing economic and cultural insecurity. In response, anti-establishment forces such as France’s Front National or the United Kingdom Independence Party have proffered an anti-liberal creed of nationalism and atavistic ethnocentrism. Crucially, the current crisis raises fundamental questions of ethics, which neither liberalism nor anti-liberalism can address: substantive rather than merely procedural justice; the common good instead of purely private profit or public utility; shared bonds based not on individual entitlement-claims but on more mutualist models of contribution and reward. Such questions are part of a new debate that can be described as ‘post-liberal’ – greater economic egalitarianism and an updated version of social, small ‘c’ conservatism.
Our book The Politics of Virtue: Post-liberalism and the Human Future provides the first comprehensive account of a post-liberal vision that spans politics, the economy, democracy and constitutionalism, culture and education, as well as international relations. We combine a more searching critique of liberalism and its founding premises of ontological individualism and negative freedom with a series of post-liberal alternatives that blend principles of reciprocity and mutuality with novel policy ideas. Our book shows that the unity of liberal thinking pivots about the primacy of the individual over all forms of human association and that allied to this primacy is the replacing of notions of substantive goodness or truth with the ultimate foundation of society upon subjective rights. Those rights are grounded in the will and artifice of the formal social contract, which has supplanted older ideas of covenantal relationships governed by a logic of gift-exchange. Taken together, the priority of the individual, subjective rights and the social contract imply that liberalism privileges progress (towards negative liberty) and ‘laws of history’ (entailing the necessary ‘rationality’ and, therefore, logical necessity of this progress) over tradition and contingency.
For this reason, liberal capitalism is fundamentally different from a market economy because the former engenders the relentless commodification of labour, land and life. It means that one buys, sells and trades without reference to tradition, association, duty or end, because things and people now lack intrinsic worth and their true value is their exchange value according to the iron law of supply and demand. The crucial point we make is that the capitalist economy rests not primarily upon a mode of production and exchange – the extraction of surplus value from labour and surplus desire from consumers – but rather upon financial speculation and material aggregation. Its indifference either to meaning or to natural variety, accordingly, renders capitalism first an iconoclastic system of destruction that de-sacralises nature and life before it is a system of production.
Thus the real alternative to empty liberal-cosmopolitan globalisation and anti-liberal nationalism is a post-liberal vision that can underpin a commitment to greater economic justice and social harmony with an appropriate political economy. Post-liberalism does not so much intend to offer mere compensation for the side-effects of global capitalism as to provide fundamental reforms which would begin to change the nature of the market itself by aligning the executive with the long-term interests of the company, its shareholders, employers and consumers. In this manner, the alternative to economic liberalism in capitalist countries such as the UK and the USA is not an overweening state but rather a more continental European system of company governance and ethos that favours mutual benefit over an Anglo-Saxon ‘winner-takes-all’ mentality. This model reflects the principles and practices of Catholic Social Thought and the ‘civil economy’ tradition, which our book synthesises and develops in novel ways by outlining a number of new polices and institutional reforms – for example, renewed guild-type structures to balance the interests of capital and labour, regional banks, technological trusts, vocational colleges and a system of mutualised finance to reconnect risk with reward.
Faced with the dysfunction of liberal democracy and the dominant system of liberal education, we also propose a renewed vision of the ancient ‘mixed constitution’ that combines the unifying role of the ‘one’ with the guidance and wisdom of the ‘few’ and the consent and participation of the ‘many’. Instead of maximising power and wealth, this vision is committed to the pursuit of ethos and excellence, in particular the formation of character as a more primary purpose of education and culture than the sole focus on social mobility so beloved of liberals.
And amid the breakdown of the liberal world order, we outline an ‘associationist approach’ to globalisation that overcomes liberalism’s oscillation between free markets and nationalist protectionism upheld by a single hegemonic power – Britain in the past, the USA at present and possibly China in future. By contrast with the liberal focus on the absolute sovereignty of national states and transnational markets as a response to the supposed original anarchy in both domestic politics and international relations, post-liberalism emphasises multinational associations where social and cultural ties shape our identity more than individual rights and economic contracts. We suggest ways in which the United Kingdom, Europe and the wider West can build true commonwealths of nations and peoples who are no longer enslaved to the liberal empire of market-states in the West, or the reactionary revisionism of state-markets in the East.
In short, libertarian liberals oscillate between abstract cosmopolitanism, economic globalism, and ethnic nativism all at once, while post-liberals seek to combine patriotism with an internationalist outlook – a vision of solidarity and conservation that is concerned with greater economic justice and with more cultural cohesion. Amid the current crisis of mainstream parties, post-liberalism can be the new centre ground of Western politics.
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Please note: a version of this post first appeared on the publishers’ blog at Rowan and Littlefield. The new book The Politics of Virtue: Post-liberalism and the Human Future, will be discussed on Monday 12 September 2016, 6.30-8pm in Committee Room 16, House of Commons. Among the confirmed panellists are Jon Cruddas MP, Lord Glasman, Jesse Norman MP, Barbara Ridpath and John Milbank. Numbers are limited, please RSVP to A.Pabst@kent.ac.uk to book your place.
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John Milbank is Professor of Religion, Politics and Ethics, University of Nottingham and Director of the Centre of Theology and Philosophy.
Adrian Pabst is Reader in Politics at the University of Kent and Visiting Professor at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Lille.
(Featured image: Jo Guldi CC BY 2.0)
This is an important work, the implications of which are surely wasted on a House of Commons that does not even understand the significance of its own name! Life is neither left wing nor right wing and therefore our whole political party spectrum is yet another broken compass like GDP. But it is unlikely to be corrected by turkeys (political parties) voting for Christmas. The space where people can freely discover their humanity, which is determined neither by the state nor the market, is Civil Society. Civil Society is designated by values that start with responsibilities not with rights and is central to a post-liberal political economy because reciprocal moral behaviours are the glue that hold society together. It’s time for an Alliance For Civil Society not as a political party but as a manifesto for independent candidates chosen by constituency primaries. Whether they are green, red, orange or blue, liberalists are wedded to their own separatist entitlement convinced of its meta-level status. But responsibilities come before rights or righteousness. It’s time to reimagine Britain based on conserving the sacred not corporations or political parties.
This reads a lot like warmed-up E.F. Schumacher, with an extra dollop of conservative Catholic social teaching thrown in for good measure.
The only good bits of it are those E.F. Schumacher already wrote over a half a century ago.
I had characterise the US presidential electoral battle between Clinton vacillating globalist nationalism ànd Trumps nationalist globalism. That is a phase in history of ideas reflecting aspirations of conflict national political and economic interest groups.do you call it tectonic change in western politics?
The history of mankind to this day may characterised as evolving out of dialectical relationship of strife for seizure and control of political power and use it as an instrument for furthering his or their own economic and political interests and changing autonomous economic powers combining with marginalised economic and political groups, often using some common denominator as an idealogical plank.
But all idealogy revolve around economic growth and it’s distribution legal or other entitlements over the instruments as well as fruits of economic positive or negative growth.
The ideas that àdvance the harmony of economic growth with political and economic justice to maximum number of populace will generally win the hearts of people to capture power.
But this may not run in a linear model and often proved to run on lines of ups and the common denominator some times in favour of growth and other times distribution as primacy element.
This is also true in globalisation phase as a macro dynamics. Economically rising countries advocating globalism, global trade and freedoms and countries falling behind race clamouring for protectionism and it’s acrimony nationalism over globalism.
Does the historical precedents that the country which has economic dominance and free trade idealogy also control global political power in international institutions like UN and it’s other wings? Like ancient Rome, imperial British nation or some thing up till US?
Those precedants may not a future guide. As already mentioned, if the peaceful transfer of power in a strife to global commanding political power is not peaceful and war as a necessary sequel as in previous precedants, the political dictatorships to quell the national disorders may become a rule where national and individual freedoms other than country or allied countries that commands others takes place.But it also proved that it does not lost longer before political power that accommodates national and individual natural liberties are restored.
Therfore the question that arises is whichpolitical institution that can accommodate the individual and national freedoms that also preserve and promote global economic growth?
Past precedants like national control of global freedoms have in the end ended in disorder and dictatorships and did not preserve and promote global freedoms.UN still suffering from national control of global freedoms
Excellent. Ive being doing similar work and have come to similar conclusions of distributism, ecologism, bioregionalism, deliberative democracy and global associationism.
If I could just share a recent post that argues for a needs-based system as opposed to a rights-based system which I achieved by separating conservatism from liberalism.
In what way or on what basis are humans equal?
Humans are equally God’s Creation.
Humans equally exist within God’ Creation.
Humans equally experience God’s Creation.
Humans equally have basic needs.
In theory, humans equally have the right to have their basic needs met, however in practice this is not the case due to resource scarcity and available resources therefore humans unequally have the right to have their basic needs met.
As such, justice is the mediation between equality and inequality and wisdom, temperance and courage help to make the important life-affirming and life-rejecting judgements that determines who will prosper and who will not.
In this respect, private property rights are not virtuous in themselves nor are they granted automatically by virtue of our human nature but simply reflect a liberal conception of social justice that is underpinned by an abstract autonomous atomic notions of individuality. To explain, God’s Creation is a family, it is a community and each human is an equal part in this extraordinary creation. Hence every human equally wishes to have their basic needs met in order to exist in this Holy experience with the liberty (health) to practice wisdom, justice, temperance and courage in order that God’s Creation is shared by all. Hence God’s Creation cannot be reduced to private property relations but can only remain a Commonwealth by which to ensure basic needs to are met with prudence, with fairness, with restraint and with fortitude. Therefore, whilst conservatism can support the right to self-preservation, it cannot support the right to private property.
It is in this conservative context as opposed to the liberal context that the cardinal virtues have their true meaning and application; that being when the virtues are applied to the fulfillment of basic needs which in itself demonstrates how human are equally God’s Creation, how humans equally exist as part of God’s Creation and how humans equally experience God’s Creation. Therefore rather than private property being a right, it is the fulfillment of basic needs that is right that springs from our God given human nature.
In truth, this is just a partial account of the true meaning of rights and justice. To be fully developed then the right to self-preservation and the application of the cardinal virtues to achieve this to the best possible degree must embrace the whole of God’s Creation, not just the human part. This is the truest and fullest meaning of a conservatism that is historically linked to tradition and an ancient past and one that still has relevance for our future.
Good luck with meeting at House of Commons. Be great if Theresa May was there.