Post-liberalism
The Core Argument
Post-liberalism is both a diagnosis of, and an alternative to, liberalism. It is constituted on the belief that liberalism is first of all a coherent philosophy and not simply a political tradition, and that its problems are not incidental but structural and inevitable—they are therefore unmanageable from within liberalism itself. Post-liberals argue that liberalism begins from an anthropology that conceives of the person as an entirely autonomous individual, prior to and independent of any given community. From this premise flows its characteristic institutions: individual rights-based law, a free market economy, and a sense of neutrality, which informs not only liberal procedures but also the ethos of the state, which refuses to intervene in the competition between visions of the good life.
Post-liberals contend that liberal philosophy is not just mistaken but socially corrosive. By dissolving familial, local, religious, and traditional bonds, liberalism separates the person from sources of meaning and communal morality, leaving them exposed to the unmediated power of the market and the state. Paradoxically, an ideology that aims to maximize individual freedom produces a kind of unfreedom: the person is atomized and dependent on large, impersonal institutions that they cannot meaningfully shape or exit.
Post-liberalism’s stated goal is to recover a political imaginary organized around the common good rather than individual rights, defined by thick communitarian bonds rather than procedural neutrality, and shaped by pre-liberal moral frameworks drawn particularly from Aristotelian virtue ethics and Catholic social thought. Almost all post-liberals are in broad agreement when it comes to the diagnosis of liberalism. In the prescriptive realm, however, there are deep disagreements and diverse opinions abound.
Some post-liberals are more critical of the state as such, while others are warmer on the state and the prospects of taking state power and wielding it towards post-liberal ends. Some post-liberals see the common good as objective and therefore immutable, while others see the common good as something plural, something that is contextually arrived at through inquiry and discussion. While nearly all post-liberals agree that religion is foundational for a recovery of the common good, they disagree on how integrated the state and religion should be, how exclusionary religious society should be, and so on. Beyond these examples, many more differences emerge between various post-liberal thinkers and traditions.
Post-liberalism’s temporal grammar is ambiguous, suggesting in its prefix post- a certain futurity, but likewise in its content a kind of nostalgia. In the end, much of post-liberal theory bridges this gap through restorationism, which seeks not just to gaze wistfully at the past but to restore some of the past’s virtues in a truly novel present after liberalism. The balance between futurity and nostalgia is a constant site of contestation for post-liberalism, and the possibility of being able to both recreate and overcome the past a constant challenge. But this is part of what makes post-liberalism unique among contemporary political imaginaries: it is a critique of the present that derives its content from the pre-modern past and aspires to a future organized on those principles. It is both radically transformative and radically conservative.
Philosophical roots
The most significant philosophical precursor to today’s post-liberalism is Alasdair MacIntyre, particularly the MacIntyre of 1981’s After Virtue. There, MacIntyre argued that modern moral philosophy is incoherent because it retains the vocabulary of virtue and obligation while having abandoned the teleological framework, the account of human nature and its proper ends, that alone gives those concepts their meaning. Without it, moral discourse degenerates into “emotivism,” in which personal preference is dressed up as rational argument. His proposed remedy was the recovery of community-based practices through which virtues could be cultivated and a shared understanding of the human good maintained.
MacIntyre himself, however, resisted co-optation by any political movement, and several scholars have argued that his philosophy does not map cleanly onto today’s post-liberals. MacIntyre himself explicitly rejected the attempted co-optation of his thought by the post-liberal-adjacent Rod Dreher, in the latter’s book TheBenedictOption (which draws inspiration from the final sentence of After Virtue). Most importantly, MacIntyre held that pre-modernity offers no ready-made blueprint for political life, a position at odds with much contemporary post-liberal scholarship, which tends to be more straightforwardly restorationist.
The theological strand of post-liberalism runs through John Milbank, whose 1990 Theology and Social Theory ambitiously challenged the secular foundations of modern political thought. Milbank argued that liberalism’s self-presentation as a neutral framework was false, that it in fact concealed a set of specific ontological commitments, including a particular vision of the individual, of society as contract, and of reason as secular and autonomous. These, Milbank held, are not neutral premises but contestable claims, and ones that systematically crowd out religious and communal ways of knowing.
The most widely read intervention is Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed, which received praise not only from the illiberal right but across the political spectrum, including former president Barack Obama. Deneen’s thesis is that liberalism has not failed despite its successes but because of them: the more completely liberalism realizes its own logic, expanding individual choice, dismantling traditional institutions, and replacing local community with market and state, the more it destroys the social preconditions on which liberal order itself depends. To the extent that Deneen here offered any prescriptions, they were premised on a sense of withdrawal from liberal society and a localism intent on building out small, local post-liberal communities that could wait in the wings as liberalism undid itself. His follow-up, 2023’s Regime Change largely moved away from this localism and toward a more explicitly political program, calling now for the formation of a new “aristopopulist” elite that could take control of the state and its apparatuses and wield them towards restoring the common good.
In the United Kingdom, John Milbank and Adrian Pabst’s The Politics of Virtue offers the most systematic post-liberal program, advocating for what they call “conservative socialism”: the recovery of associational life, civil economy, and a politics of the common good rooted in Catholic and Anglican traditions. This strand overlaps with the Blue Labour movement associated with Maurice Glasman, who argues that the Labour Party abandoned working-class communities by embracing a cosmopolitan liberalism that privileges markets and mobility over place, family, and solidarity.
The most pessimistic variant comes from Rod Dreher’s The Benedict Option, which favors strategic withdrawal over political reconstruction. Dreher’s vision here is an even more radical version of Deneen’s argument in Why Liberalism Failed. Dreher counsels Christians to disengage from mainstream secular culture and build resilient local communities on the model of Benedictine monasticism, waiting out liberalism’s collapse rather than seeking to redirect it.
In America, the most provocative figure is Adrian Vermeule, a Harvard legal scholar whose Common Good Constitutionalism argues that American constitutional law should be reoriented away from both originalism and living constitutionalism, and toward a classical legal tradition that explicitly aims at the common good. Vermeule is explicitly a top-down thinker: he sees the administrative state as a potential instrument for ordering society toward substantive ends, moral or otherwise. After his conversion to Catholicism in 2016, Vermeule’s long-standing work on the administrative state began to work in tandem with his budding Catholic integralism, the view that the political order should ultimately be subordinated to spiritual authorities like the Church. While his Catholic integralism is not made explicit in works like Common Good Constitutionalism (for knowledgeable readers, it can be seen as implicit), it is made explicit in his contributions to magazines and blogs like First Things and The Josias.
Please cite this article as Ethan Sarwer and Aaron Irion, “Post-liberalism.” Vivatopia: The Lab of Political Imaginaries, September 2026.
To Know More
Borg, Stefan. The Return of the Common Good: The Postliberal Project Left and Right. Routledge (2025).
Deneen, Patrick. Why Liberalism Failed. Yale University Press (2018).
Gray, John. The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism. Picador (2024).
Gray, John. “Why I Am Not a Post-Liberal.” New Statesman. October 18, 2025. https://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2025/10/how-to-save-british-liberalism
Ikenberry, G. John. “Review: Postliberal Politics: The Coming Era of Renewal.” Foreign Affairs. February 22, 2022. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/capsule-review/2022-02-22/postliberal-politics-coming-era-renewal
Milbank, John, and Adrian Pabst. The Politics of Virtue: Post-Liberalism and the Human Future. Bloomsbury (2016).
Pabst, Adrian. Postliberal Politics: The Coming Era of Renewal. Polity (2021).
Sleat, Matt. Post-Liberalism. Polity (2026).
Vallier, Kevin. All the Kingdoms of the World: On Radical Religious Alternatives to Liberalism. Oxford University Press (2023).
Vermeule, Adrian. “Integration from Within.” American Affairs 2, no. 1 (2018). https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2018/02/integration-from-within/
