Postliberalism
Postliberalism is an Anglo-American intellectual and political movement that emerged in the early 21st century as a critique of liberalism's dominance, contending that liberal emphasis on individual rights, procedural neutrality, and market freedoms has eroded communal bonds, moral order, and the pursuit of the common good.[1] Proponents argue that liberalism's internal contradictions—such as prioritizing negative liberty over substantive virtues—have contributed to social atomization, cultural decay, and institutional failures, necessitating a reorientation toward teleological politics inspired by pre-modern thinkers like Aristotle and Aquinas.[2][3] Key figures include Patrick Deneen, whose 2018 book Why Liberalism Failed posits that liberalism undermines the preconditions for its own flourishing, and Adrian Vermeule, who advocates "common good constitutionalism" to interpret law through integralist lenses rather than originalism. The movement draws heavily from Catholic social doctrine, emphasizing state intervention to foster family, virtue, and national identity over laissez-faire approaches.[4] Often associated with the "integralist" wing of conservatism, postliberalism seeks to wield state power proactively for conservative ends, as exemplified by admiration for Hungary's governance under Viktor Orbán, where policies promote natalism, restrict migration, and prioritize Christian cultural hegemony.[1][5] This practical orientation contrasts with liberalism's putative agnosticism toward ends, positing that politics must actively shape society toward objective goods like human flourishing within ordered communities. Controversies surround its perceived authoritarian tendencies, with critics labeling it a veiled form of illiberalism or Christian nationalism that risks suppressing dissent, though advocates counter that liberalism itself relies on unacknowledged coercion to maintain its order.[6][7] Despite its niche status, postliberal ideas have gained traction among influential conservatives, informing debates on reshaping institutions amid declining trust in liberal democracy.[8]
Definition and Core Principles
Defining Postliberalism
Postliberalism constitutes a critique of liberalism's core tenets, particularly its prioritization of individual autonomy, procedural neutrality, and market mechanisms, which proponents argue have engendered social atomization, cultural erosion, and unsustainable inequalities since the late 20th century. Emerging primarily among Anglo-American conservative intellectuals, it advocates transcending liberalism by reorienting political authority toward the common good—a substantive vision of human flourishing rooted in shared moral, communal, and traditional norms rather than expansive personal freedoms. This shift entails rejecting liberalism's anthropocentric individualism in favor of ordered liberty, where state and societal institutions actively cultivate virtues, family structures, and national cohesion over unfettered choice.[1][4] Central to postliberal thought is the diagnosis that liberalism, by design, dissolves intermediate institutions like family, church, and locality, replacing them with state-mediated individualism and corporate power, as articulated by Patrick Deneen in his 2018 book Why Liberalism Failed. Deneen, a political theorist at the University of Notre Dame, contends that liberalism's internal logic—elevating liberty as the highest end—undermines the cultural and social preconditions necessary for self-governance, leading to reliance on technocratic elites and hollowed-out democracy. Complementing this, Adrian Vermeule, Harvard Law professor, advances "common-good constitutionalism," which interprets legal traditions, including the U.S. Constitution, through natural law lenses to authorize robust governmental directives promoting moral goods like pro-natalism and subsidiarity, rather than libertarian constraints or originalist formalism.[9][10] Though often associated with Catholic integralism—seeking harmony between church and state—postliberalism is not exclusively theological; it encompasses secular nationalists and communitarians who prioritize realism in policy, such as protectionist economics and skepticism of globalism, to counter liberalism's purported universalism. Proponents like Deneen propose "regime change" via grassroots movements and elite replacement to embed these principles, warning that liberalism's failures, evidenced by declining birth rates (e.g., U.S. fertility at 1.6 in 2023) and rising loneliness, demand alternatives beyond reform. Critics from liberal perspectives, however, contend this risks authoritarianism by subordinating rights to illiberal ends, though postliberals maintain their framework aligns with pre-modern republican traditions emphasizing civic virtue over rights maximalism.[11][12]Key Tenets and First-Principles Critique of Liberalism
Postliberal thinkers argue that liberalism's foundational error lies in its anthropological premise of the autonomous individual, detached from communal ties and oriented toward perpetual self-creation rather than inherited virtues or a shared telos. This view, articulated by Patrick Deneen in Why Liberalism Failed (2018), posits that liberalism treats human nature as malleable and rights as antecedent to any common purpose, fostering a culture of expressive individualism that erodes the social preconditions—family, locality, tradition—essential for genuine liberty.[13] Instead, postliberals draw on classical sources like Aristotle and Aquinas to assert that humans flourish through ordered pursuit of the common good, where individual actions are directed toward collective ends like subsidiarity and mutual obligation, not isolated choice.[14] From first principles, liberalism's emphasis on negative liberty—freedom from interference—neglects causal realities of human interdependence, leading to unintended consequences such as institutional centralization and cultural decay. Deneen contends that by liberating individuals from binding norms, liberalism paradoxically expands state power to manage the resulting atomization, as seen in the U.S. federal government's growth from 2% of GDP in 1900 to over 20% by 2020, filling voids left by weakened intermediate institutions.[13] Postliberals critique this as self-undermining: procedural neutrality cannot sustain itself without substantive commitments to virtue, yet liberalism avoids such commitments to maintain pluralism, allowing relativistic forces to dominate public life.[15] Adrian Vermeule's common-good constitutionalism extends this by rejecting liberalism's proceduralist legal frameworks—whether originalism or living constitutionalism—as illusions that mask substantive judgments about the good.[16] He argues that all governance involves authoritative direction toward ends like family stability and moral order, and liberalism's feigned neutrality cedes ground to progressive impositions, such as expansive administrative states prioritizing equity over tradition.[10] Postliberals thus advocate redirecting state power explicitly toward the common good, informed by realist acknowledgment that power structures inevitably pursue visions of flourishing, whether acknowledged or not. This critique holds that liberalism's causal oversight—ignoring how unchecked autonomy fragments society—manifests in empirical trends like rising single-parent households (from 9% in 1960 to 23% in 2023 per U.S. Census data) and declining social trust, which procedural remedies fail to reverse.[17] In essence, postliberalism's tenets invert liberalism's hierarchy, subordinating individual rights to communal obligations derived from human nature's inherent sociality and teleological orientation, a position that diagnoses liberalism not as a neutral framework but as an ideology that, by design, dissolves the bonds it claims to protect. This first-principles reversal prioritizes causal realism—recognizing that freedoms without directing virtues yield disorder—over liberalism's optimistic proceduralism, urging reconstruction of authority around pre-political goods like religion and nation.[18]Historical Development
Theological and Philosophical Antecedents
Philosophical antecedents of postliberalism trace to the mid-20th-century revival of Aristotelian virtue ethics, which critiqued the emotivist foundations of liberal moral philosophy. Elizabeth Anscombe's 1958 essay "Modern Moral Philosophy" rejected consequentialist and deontological ethics dominant in liberalism, arguing for a return to virtues oriented toward human telos, influencing subsequent thinkers who saw liberalism as atomizing communities by prioritizing procedural neutrality over substantive goods.[3] Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue (1981) extended this by diagnosing Enlightenment liberalism's failure to sustain rational moral discourse, attributing it to the loss of teleological frameworks and proposing embedded practices within traditions as the basis for ethical life, a view that undergirds postliberal emphasis on communal flourishing over individual autonomy.[19] MacIntyre's Aristotelianism, fused with Thomistic elements, highlighted how liberal capitalism erodes virtues like justice and prudence, fostering instead bureaucratic managerialism.[20] Theologically, postliberalism draws from the narrative theology developed at Yale Divinity School in the 1970s, led by Hans Frei and George Lindbeck, as a response to liberal Protestantism's alignment with modern secularism. Frei's The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative (1974) contended that historical-critical methods fragmented scripture into propositional facts, diluting its role as a unifying story for Christian identity, thus paving the way for postliberalism's rejection of liberalism's rationalist individualism in favor of ecclesial communities shaped by tradition.[21] Lindbeck's The Nature of Doctrine (1984) formalized this "cultural-linguistic" approach, viewing doctrines not as descriptive truths but as communal grammars regulating belief and practice, critiquing liberal theology's experiential-expressivism that accommodated cultural relativism at the expense of orthodoxy.[22] Stanley Hauerwas complemented this by portraying the church as a counter-cultural body embodying pacifist virtues against liberal just-war rationales and state idolatry, emphasizing discipleship over accommodation to pluralistic neutrality.[23] These strands converge in a shared suspicion of liberalism's anthropological optimism—rooted in nominalist voluntarism from figures like William of Ockham (c. 1287–1347), which decoupled will from teleological reason—yielding a modern subject whose rights eclipse duties to the common good.[24] Thomistic natural law, as synthesized by Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) in Summa Theologica, provides deeper roots by integrating Aristotelian eudaimonia with divine order, prioritizing subsidiarity and the bonum commune over contractual individualism, influences echoed in papal encyclicals like Rerum Novarum (1891) that critiqued both socialism and laissez-faire liberalism.[3] This heritage equips postliberalism to challenge liberalism's proceduralism with substantive, tradition-bound norms, though postliberal theologians like Lindbeck explicitly distanced their work from direct political programs, focusing instead on intra-ecclesial reform.[22]Modern Political Emergence (1980s–2010s)
The political emergence of postliberalism during the 1980s and 1990s was primarily intellectual, rooted in critiques of liberal individualism that drew from theological and philosophical traditions emphasizing community, virtue, and narrative over autonomous reason. Postliberal theology, exemplified by George Lindbeck's The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age (1984), advanced a cultural-linguistic model of doctrine that rejected liberal experiential-expressivism in favor of communal practices and narratives shaping belief, influencing broader skepticism toward liberalism's secular rationalism.[25] This theological shift paralleled communitarian challenges to liberalism, such as Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue (1981), which diagnosed modern moral discourse as fragmented emotivism—a legacy of Enlightenment failures—and called for reviving Aristotelian teleology and tradition-bound practices to restore coherent ethics.[26] Similarly, Michael Sandel's Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (1982) critiqued John Rawls's veil of ignorance for presupposing an unencumbered self detached from constitutive communities, arguing that justice requires acknowledging embedded moral horizons.[27] These works laid groundwork for postliberalism by highlighting liberalism's atomistic tendencies, though communitarians like Sandel sought reform within liberal frameworks rather than wholesale rejection. In the 1990s, postliberal ideas gained traction through explicit theological engagements with social theory, notably John Milbank's Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (1990), which rejected secular paradigms—whether positivist, Marxist, or liberal—as ontologically violent narratives supplanted by a pacific Christian ontology prioritizing gift, peace, and communal participation over possessive individualism.[28] Milbank's critique positioned theology as a superior meta-narrative for politics and economics, influencing Radical Orthodoxy and foreshadowing postliberal prioritizations of the common good. These developments occurred amid broader disillusionment with neoliberal globalization post-Cold War, but remained largely academic, fostering networks among Catholic and Anglican intellectuals wary of liberalism's erosion of virtue and tradition. By the 2000s, postliberalism manifested in nascent political movements, particularly in the United Kingdom, where it sought to transcend left-right divides through relational and virtue-oriented alternatives. Maurice Glasman launched Blue Labour in April 2009 at a London meeting, advocating a Labour faction rooted in working-class conservatism, emphasizing family, faith, locality, and mutualism against both Thatcherite markets and New Labour's statist universalism.[29] Complementing this, Phillip Blond's Red Tory: How Left and Right Have Broken Britain and How We Can Fix It (2010) proposed a "progressive conservatism" empowering civil associations to counter state bureaucracy and corporate monopoly, drawing on distributist and guild socialist traditions to redistribute power via ethical markets and community ownership.[30] These initiatives, informed by earlier communitarian and theological critiques, marked postliberalism's shift toward practical politics, critiquing liberalism's dual failures in fostering inequality and cultural fragmentation while gaining influence in think tanks like ResPublica.[31] In the United States, similar stirrings appeared in Catholic social thought but lacked organized political expression until the 2010s.Post-2016 Crystallization and Influences
The election of Donald Trump on November 8, 2016, and the United Kingdom's Brexit referendum on June 23, 2016, served as pivotal catalysts for the crystallization of postliberal thought, exposing perceived fractures in liberal institutions and galvanizing critiques of liberalism's capacity to sustain social cohesion.[18][32] These events highlighted widespread discontent with globalization, elite governance, and cultural individualism, prompting intellectuals to articulate alternatives prioritizing communal bonds and substantive traditions over procedural liberalism.[33] Patrick Deneen's Why Liberalism Failed, published on February 13, 2018, by Yale University Press, marked a seminal moment in this consolidation, arguing that liberalism's antinomies—promoting liberty while eroding the cultural preconditions for self-governance—inevitably lead to its self-undermining.[34] The book gained significant traction, even earning a recommendation from former President Barack Obama in 2018 for its insights into societal loss of meaning, despite his disagreement with its conclusions, thereby amplifying postliberal arguments within broader discourse.[35] Deneen's work synthesized earlier philosophical critiques with empirical observations of declining social trust and institutional decay, influencing figures like Senator J.D. Vance, who drew on postliberal emphases on the common good in his political outlook.[10] Post-2016 influences included the resurgence of integralist ideas, particularly through Harvard Law professor Adrian Vermeule's advocacy for "common-good constitutionalism," which rejects liberal neutralism in favor of state action oriented toward classical virtues and natural law.[10] Vermeule's framework, gaining prominence around 2020, integrated Catholic social teaching with legal theory, positing that administrative power should pursue teleological ends rather than individual rights maximization.[36] This strand converged with political developments, such as admiration for Hungary's governance under Viktor Orbán since 2010, viewed by some postliberals as a practical model of balancing nationalism, family policy, and resistance to supranational liberalism, though critics note its authoritarian elements.[37] By the early 2020s, these theological, theoretical, and empirical threads had coalesced into a distinct postliberal order, challenging neoliberal economics and secular individualism with calls for ordered liberty under higher goods.[37]Ideological Components
Prioritizing the Common Good over Individual Autonomy
Postliberal thinkers contend that classical and modern liberalism err by elevating individual autonomy and negative liberty as the paramount political values, thereby eroding the substantive common good necessary for societal flourishing. This critique posits that liberalism's procedural emphasis on rights and consent atomizes communities, fosters self-interested behavior, and delegitimizes collective pursuits beyond voluntary aggregation.[27][38] In contrast, postliberalism draws on Aristotelian and Thomistic traditions to advocate a politics where the state actively promotes virtues, family stability, and communal bonds as integral to human telos, subordinating unchecked individualism to these ends.[39] Patrick Deneen, in his 2018 book Why Liberalism Failed, argues that liberalism's success in liberating individuals from traditional constraints has paradoxically depleted the cultural and institutional supports—such as religion, locality, and kinship—that sustain voluntary cooperation and moral order. He maintains that liberalism views human nature as malleable and self-defining, rejecting innate orientations toward the common good, which results in phenomena like declining birth rates (e.g., U.S. fertility falling to 1.6 children per woman by 2018) and widespread social isolation.[38][39] Deneen proposes remediating this through "regime change" via decentralized, tradition-respecting governance that prioritizes relational goods over autonomous choice, as elaborated in his 2023 follow-up Regime Change.[40] Adrian Vermeule extends this framework into jurisprudence with "common good constitutionalism," rejecting originalism and living constitutionalism in favor of interpreting law through the classical lens of Aquinas, where the state's aim is the bonum commune—a unitary, non-divisible welfare encompassing spiritual and temporal dimensions. In his 2022 book Common Good Constitutionalism, Vermeule asserts that individual rights are not trumps against state action but instruments subordinate to promoting virtue and suppressing vice, as seen in historical precedents like sumptuary laws or Sabbath regulations.[41][42] This approach, influenced by integralist thought, envisions the state as a moral agent capable of directing markets and culture toward ends like family formation, critiquing neoliberal individualism for commodifying human relations.[43] Proponents like Sohrab Ahmari further apply this to policy, arguing in debates since 2019 that liberalism's neutralist stance on the good life imposes autonomy as a coercive default, stifling communal projects such as urban planning for family-centric spaces or immigration controls preserving cultural cohesion.[44] Postliberals thus favor institutional reforms—e.g., empowering legislatures over courts to enforce common-good directives—over libertarian safeguards, warning that unbridled individualism correlates with empirical declines in trust (e.g., U.S. interpersonal trust dropping from 58% in 1960 to 24% by 2020 per General Social Survey data).[45][6] This prioritization, while rooted in pre-modern philosophy, responds to liberalism's observed failures in maintaining social capital amid rising inequality and anomie.[46]Integration of Religion, Tradition, and Virtue
Postliberal thinkers argue that liberalism's commitment to state neutrality toward religion undermines the moral foundations necessary for a just society, advocating instead for the explicit integration of religious truths—particularly those from the Christian tradition—into governance to orient politics toward human flourishing. This approach draws from classical natural law theory, as articulated in the works of Thomas Aquinas, positing that the state has a duty to promote the true religion as the basis for the common good, rather than treating faith as a private matter subject to individual choice. Adrian Vermeule, in his formulation of common-good constitutionalism, contends that legal interpretation should recover pre-liberal traditions, including canon law and scholastic jurisprudence, to enforce moral directives that align with divine order, such as restrictions on practices deemed contrary to natural law.[10] This integralist strand within postliberalism, evident in calls for the state to cooperate with the Catholic Church, rejects procedural neutrality as a covert imposition of secular ideology, arguing it erodes societal cohesion by privatizing transcendent sources of authority.[10] Tradition serves as the living repository of practical wisdom in postliberal thought, countering liberalism's emphasis on abstract rights and rational individualism with inherited communal practices that embed moral formation in everyday life. Patrick Deneen, in Why Liberalism Failed (published February 13, 2018), critiques liberalism for dissolving these traditions through state centralization and market expansion, which uproot individuals from local associations and erode the habits required for self-restraint and mutual obligation.[34] Postliberals propose revitalizing pre-modern customs—family structures, artisanal economies, and civic rituals—as bulwarks against atomization, viewing them not as relics but as tested mechanisms for sustaining order amid human imperfection. This retrieval of tradition aligns with a Burkean conservatism but extends it by subordinating innovation to the authority of historical continuity, ensuring political decisions reflect accumulated intergenerational insight rather than transient majorities or elite preferences.[34] Central to this integration is a revival of virtue ethics, inspired by Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue (1981), which diagnoses modern moral discourse as fragmented emotivism and prescribes recovery of teleologically oriented virtues cultivated within tradition-bound communities. Postliberals extend MacIntyre's framework politically, asserting that the state must foster Aristotelian-Thomistic virtues—such as prudence, justice, and temperance—not merely through negative liberties but via positive institutions that habituate citizens toward the common good over self-interest.[20] Deneen echoes this by linking liberalism's failures to its neglect of virtue-forming practices, proposing decentralized governance that prioritizes relational bonds and moral education over expansive autonomy.[34] In practice, this entails policies promoting familial stability, vocational training in traditional crafts, and religious observance as antidotes to vice-driven consumerism, with the measure of success being societal capacity for ordered liberty rather than unchecked choice.[20]Economic Critiques and Alternatives to Neoliberalism
Postliberal thinkers contend that neoliberalism, with its emphasis on deregulation, free trade, and market-driven allocation since the 1980s, has exacerbated economic inequality and social fragmentation by prioritizing individual choice and corporate efficiency over communal welfare.[47] Patrick Deneen, in critiquing the liberal economic order, asserts that it has empowered unaccountable elites through financialization and globalization, leading to wage stagnation for the working class despite aggregate growth; for instance, real median household income in the United States grew only modestly from $60,000 in 1980 to about $74,000 in 2022 dollars, while wealth concentration intensified.[48] [9] This framework, they argue, treats human labor as a commodity, undermining family stability and local economies in favor of transnational capital flows that hollow out manufacturing regions.[49] Such critiques extend to neoliberalism's failure to deliver promised prosperity for all, as evidenced by slower productivity growth post-1970s—averaging 1.2% annually in the U.S. from 2007 to 2019 compared to 2.8% from 1947 to 1973—and rising monopolization, where market concentration in sectors like tech has stifled competition.[47] Postliberals like Adrian Vermeule view this as a symptom of liberalism's subordination of economics to autonomous individualism, advocating instead for a "common good" orientation that integrates state authority to curb market excesses without resorting to socialism.[10] As alternatives, postliberals propose economies structured around the common good, drawing from Catholic social teaching to emphasize subsidiarity, vocational solidarity, and policies fostering widespread property ownership over pure redistribution.[27] This includes support for industrial policies, tariffs to protect national industries, and incentives for family formation, such as Hungary's model under Viktor Orbán since 2010, which combines market elements with state-directed investments yielding GDP growth of 4.9% in 2021 amid post-pandemic recovery, alongside fertility-boosting subsidies that increased birth rates from 1.23 in 2010 to 1.59 in 2021.[17] Deneen endorses "pro-worker" measures like antitrust enforcement and limits on offshoring to rebuild civic economy, rejecting both laissez-faire absolutism and central planning in favor of decentralized, virtue-oriented markets.[9] These approaches aim to restore economic practices aligned with human flourishing, critiquing neoliberalism's empirical shortcomings—such as the U.S. Gini coefficient rising from 0.40 in 1980 to 0.41 in 2022—without endorsing egalitarian utopias.[47]Realism in International Relations and Nationalism
Postliberal thinkers incorporate classical realism into their critique of liberal internationalism, viewing the global order as inherently anarchic and driven by state competition for power rather than cooperative institutions or ideological convergence.[50] This perspective, drawing from scholars like Hans Morgenthau and John Mearsheimer, posits that national survival and interests supersede universal values, rejecting Wilsonian interventions and multilateral constraints that dilute sovereignty.[50] For instance, postliberals endorse offshore balancing strategies, as seen in advocacy for withdrawing from protracted engagements like Afghanistan to focus resources on peer competitors such as China.[51] In foreign policy application, postliberal realism manifests in "America First" priorities, exemplified by the Trump administration's 2017-2021 approach of demanding burden-sharing from NATO allies and imposing tariffs to counter economic dependencies, thereby prioritizing domestic industrial capacity over global free trade norms.[52] This stance critiques neoconservative overreach, such as the 2003 Iraq invasion, favoring restraint unless vital interests are at stake.[32] Proponents argue that liberal orders, reliant on U.S. hegemony, foster free-riding by allies and invite revisionist challenges, necessitating a return to balance-of-power dynamics.[50] Postliberalism intertwines realism with nationalism by affirming the nation-state as the fundamental unit of political order, rooted in shared cultural, historical, and often religious identities rather than abstract individualism or cosmopolitanism.[32] This nationalism opposes supranational entities like the European Union, advocating sovereignty through measures such as immigration controls and economic protectionism to preserve communal cohesion.[53] Influenced by figures like Yoram Hazony, it draws on biblical and Anglo traditions to counter imperial universalism, as highlighted in the National Conservatism conference in Rome on February 4-6, 2020, which united advocates including Viktor Orbán and Giorgia Meloni.[32] In practice, postliberal nationalism seeks ecumenical Christian coalitions to reorient policy toward the common good, rejecting dual loyalties and prioritizing national independence from foreign ideological exports.[53] This framework informs realist foreign policy by defining interests through particularist lenses, such as countering China's manufacturing dominance via targeted industrial policies rather than indefinite alliances.[32] Critics within liberalism decry this as isolationist, but postliberals maintain it aligns with empirical great-power realities over aspirational harmony.[50]
Prominent Figures
Intellectual and Theological Contributors
Patrick Deneen, a political theorist at the University of Notre Dame, critiqued liberalism's foundational premises in his 2018 book Why Liberalism Failed, asserting that its pursuit of individual autonomy and market freedom has eroded communal institutions, family structures, and local self-governance, ultimately generating the conditions for greater state power and cultural decay.[54] Deneen proposes an alternative rooted in practices of restraint, mutual obligation, and tradition to foster human flourishing beyond liberal individualism.[55] Adrian Vermeule, a professor at Harvard Law School, developed the framework of common good constitutionalism in his 2022 book of the same name, drawing on Roman, continental, and English legal traditions to argue that the U.S. Constitution should be interpreted not through originalist fixation on founding-era meanings or progressive evolution, but as a tool for the state to promote moral virtues, subsidiarity, and the common good against liberal proceduralism.[56] Vermeule contends this approach aligns with pre-modern jurisprudence, where law serves teleological ends like justice and human excellence rather than neutral rights.[57] Sohrab Ahmari, a journalist and editor, has articulated a postliberal critique emphasizing the need for state intervention to counter corporate power's erosion of worker dignity and family stability, as detailed in his 2023 book Tyranny, Inc., where he attributes social fragmentation to unchecked private tyrannies enabled by deregulatory liberalism.[44] Ahmari advocates aggressive political strategies to prioritize working-class interests over libertarian market orthodoxy.[58] Among theological contributors, Chad Pecknold, a professor of historical theology at The Catholic University of America, integrates postliberal politics with Augustinian thought, arguing that liberalism's atomized individualism necessitates a faith-informed public order to cultivate virtues and counter secular disintegration.[59] Pecknold views postliberalism as extending Catholic social teaching by rejecting neutral pluralism in favor of ordered liberty oriented toward transcendent goods.[60] R. R. Reno, editor of First Things since 2011, has advanced postliberal theology and politics through the journal's platform, critiquing liberalism's postwar campaign against "strong gods" like religion and nation, which he argues has left societies vulnerable to nihilism and technocratic control.[61] In his 2019 book Return of the Strong Gods, Reno calls for reviving thick loyalties to faith, patria, and tradition to restore social cohesion against liberal dissolutions.[62]Political Practitioners and Advocates
Viktor Orbán, Prime Minister of Hungary since 2010, exemplifies postliberal governance through his advocacy for "illiberal democracy," which subordinates liberal procedural norms to national interests, Christian values, and demographic policies favoring traditional families.[10][63] Orbán's administration has implemented measures such as constitutional amendments centralizing power, media regulations aligning outlets with government priorities, and bans on gender studies programs in universities, actions that postliberal advocates in the West have cited as models for countering liberal cultural dominance.[64][65] These policies, including strict immigration controls and incentives for native birth rates, reflect a prioritization of communal solidarity over individual rights in migration and education.[66] In the United States, J.D. Vance, elected Senator from Ohio in 2022 and serving as Vice President since January 2025, has explicitly aligned with postliberalism, describing himself as part of the "postliberal right" influenced by Catholic thinkers critiquing liberalism's atomizing effects. Vance advocates for economic policies protecting industrial workers from globalization's harms, such as tariffs and reshoring manufacturing, while integrating religious ethics into statecraft to foster virtue and family stability over market libertarianism.[67][68] His 2024 vice-presidential campaign emphasized using executive power to dismantle corporate monopolies and promote pro-natalist initiatives, echoing postliberal calls for directing the administrative state toward the common good.[69][70] Josh Hawley, Senator from Missouri since 2019, represents another postliberal practitioner by championing antitrust actions against Big Tech firms for eroding community bonds and moral order, as outlined in his 2021 book The Tyranny of Big Tech. Postliberals have embraced Hawley's vision of a politics that enforces antitrust laws to curb elite influence and revives antitrust traditions prioritizing civic health over consumer welfare alone.[6] Hawley's advocacy for labor rights, including right-to-work repeal and union support conditional on community alignment, critiques neoliberal individualism while seeking to rebuild working-class solidarity through state intervention.[6] In the United Kingdom, figures like Danny Kruger, a Conservative MP since 2019, advance postliberal ideas through "common good conservatism," influencing party manifestos with proposals for active government in family policy, local empowerment, and skepticism toward deregulated markets. Kruger's 2020 report Agency in Government argues for civil servants prioritizing societal flourishing over neutral administration, aligning with postliberal realism in wielding state power for virtue-oriented ends. Maurice Glasman, Baron Glasman and architect of Blue Labour, promotes postliberal critiques from the left, emphasizing reciprocal obligations, immigration restraint, and vocational economies against both Thatcherite liberalism and New Labour globalism, though his influence remains more advisory than executive.[71]