A Guide for the Uncurious: On Post-Liberalism

Perhaps the most devastating review I have ever encountered is Allan Bloom’s 1975 review of John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice. Published in the American Political Science Review, the flagship journal of my esteemed discipline, Bloom systematically dismantled Rawls’s highly influential work. At the end of his essay, Bloom inserts the knife and twists. “The greatest weakness of a Theory of Justice,” he writes, “is not to be found in the principles it proposes, nor in the kind of society it envisages, nor in the political tendencies it encourages, but in the lack of education it reveals.” Rawls, charges Bloom, fundamentally misinterprets nearly every thinker relevant to his argument.

The essential problem, in Bloom’s diagnosis, is that Rawls comes from a school of thought “which thinks it invented philosophy.” By closing himself off to necessary conversation partners, Rawls imprisoned himself. In Bloom’s terms, “The most essential of our freedoms, as men and as liberal democrats, the freedom of our minds, consists in the consciousness of the fundamental alternatives.” The alternatives to liberal democracy are to be found in words of the greatest minds of the philosophical tradition. As Bloom puts it, these minds need not constitute “the last word” on political matters, but any serious attempt at a new word must grapple with them. Bloom concludes: “[Rawls’s] method and the man he wishes to produce impel me to think that Nietzsche—abused by Rawls, although not culpably because ignorantly—might provide a more appropriate title for this book: A First Philosophy for the Last Man.”

Bloom’s essay came to mind while reading Matt Sleat’s new book, Post-Liberalism. Sleat, a political theorist at the University of Sheffield, offers an interpretation and critique of post-liberal thinkers who have gained attention in recent years. Focusing primarily on Patrick Deneen and Adrian Vermeule, with nods to John Milbank, Sohrab Ahmari, Adrian Pabst, and others, Sleat writes as a committed liberal explaining—and judging—these dissidents. While the book has moments of clarity, it is ultimately frustrating and unpersuasive. If I were to add a subtitle, it would be Post-Liberalism: A Guide for the Uncurious.

The book opens descriptively, outlining post-liberalism’s basic commitments. To Sleat’s credit, he distinguishes among factions and does not conflate post-liberals with national conservatives—a mistake many commentators make. For Sleat, post-liberalism rests on two core commitments. First, a rejection of liberalism and its emphasis on autonomous individualism. Second, the primacy of the common good. This second commitment entails four features: post-liberalism is “perfectionist” (aimed at virtue), “confessional” (the state should endorse Christianity), “statist” (the common good requires a strong, interventionist state), and “elitist” (it seeks to replace a liberal elite with a post-liberal one).

This is mostly fair, if debatable at the margins. Sleat then presents liberalism as post-liberals allegedly see it: a doctrine of radical autonomy, hostile to unchosen obligations. Classical liberalism, he argues, begins with economic individualism and matures into a progressive concern for social autonomy. The result, post-liberals claim, is mass disengagement, civil society’s decline, and a culture of narcissism that threatens democracy itself.

Sleat perceptively picks up on a post-liberal tendency that I also noticed in my review of Patrick Deneen’s Regime Change. Post-liberals often treat liberalism as an all-purpose explanation for modern pathologies, an omnipresent and wholly malignant force with which no compromise is possible. He also rightly criticizes Deneen’s tendency to assume that ordinary citizens share his moral and religious commitments, as well as his habit of making sweeping claims with scant citation.

But Sleat soon commits similar errors. Early in the book he abandons scholarly detachment altogether. His post-liberals become caricatures—no less than liberals are to post-liberals. Post-liberalism, he claims, is so “preposterously simplistic” that it “barely deserves to be taken seriously.” One wonders, then, why this book exists at all. He accuses post-liberals of intellectual dishonesty, of having “no real interest in being truthful.” We even get the tired “they want to go back to a 1950s that never existed” trope. Only his Britishness spares us a Leave It to Beaver reference.

But who is being unserious here? The critiques of liberalism that post-liberals make can all be found in the work of the quite liberal Alexis de Tocqueville. But Tocqueville, precisely because he is a friend to liberal democracy, does not idly flatter liberal democracy. Like post-liberals, Tocqueville is concerned that the strong commitment to equality in democracy will lead to a kind of individualism. To be sure, Tocqueville’s use of the term individualism, which he essentially coined, doesn’t quite mean the kind of autonomous individualism we discuss today, but he was concerned about a lack of public spirit and a concomitant withdrawal from public life. Like the post-liberals, Tocqueville believes that family and religion are important public goods that help mitigate the worst aspects of an excessive love of equality and individualism. It is no accident that Tocqueville begins his discussion of the nature of the liberal American regime with a discussion of the Puritans. Tocqueville believes that democracy has something to learn from aristocracy’s dedication to beauty and creating civic or religious projects of enduring value. Tocqueville, like Patrick Deneen if not all post-liberals, is dedicated to local government and is anxious about the enervating tendencies of centralization.

Sleat defends liberal John Stuart Mill from accusations of crude individualism. Mill, says Sleat, makes a distinction between higher and lower pleasures. Sure, but in Mill’s rejection of authority and custom does he not undermine any guidance as to how to make good choices and pursue higher pleasures? That’s what Tocqueville would say.

But Sleat, like Rawls, seems fantastically uninterested in the history of political philosophy. Perusing his bibliography, there is hardly a title published before 2000, with Mill one of the exceptions that prove the rule. Sleat’s liberalism seems to begin and end with what twenty-first century left-liberals really like. The “fundamental individual rights” to be defended by liberals include “access to abortion procedures, the recognition of same sex marriages, the right to a free press, the ability to self-identify as whichever gender one chooses, or the production and consumption of pornographic material.” Is there a single eighteenth or nineteenth century liberal in favor of any of these other than free speech? Sleat frets over the “authoritarian” Orbán regime in Hungary due to its support for “traditional” marriage (scare quotes provided by Sleat) and banning same-sex adoptions. Any regime that does not swallow the sexual revolution completely—i.e., every regime to exist prior to roughly 1975—is, apparently, authoritarian.

Sleat warns us that post-liberalism “hankers for moral leadership, for the ruling elite to govern according to a thick notion of what makes for human flourishing and to encourage all people toward living lives of virtue.” You mean like that noted post-liberal George Washington in his Farewell Address?: “Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens.” Washington would also appear to be too authoritarian for Sleat’s taste.

“Freedom…is not our natural condition. Humans need to learn how to be free.” This is Deneen’s view, according to Sleat. But it’s also Aristotle’s view. Sleat doesn’t even ponder the possibility that this might actually be true. Sleat warns us that post-liberals believe “A freeman is a slave when he acts mindlessly according to his desires….and lacks any self-control.” Yet, this is Plato’s definition of a tyrant, one who is a law unto one’s self (i.e., autonomous). But considering this would require Sleat to think that the past has something to teach us, so he casually denounces the view and continues on.

In Seinfeld terms, Sleat “yada yadas” the history of political thought. Another example is his puzzling treatment of nominalism. Sleat essentially says that nominalist metaphysics has won the day so there is no reason to even consider realism. That is possibly true politically—though I doubt it—but that is not a philosophical view. Sleat doesn’t think it worth arguing whether nominalism is true; it is enough that it has become the dominant view. One cannot help but think of Bloom’s teacher, Leo Strauss, and the argument that liberal education “demands from us the boldness implied in the resolve to regard the accepted views as mere opinions, or to regard the average opinions as extreme opinions which are at least as likely to be wrong as the most strange or the least popular opinions.” Matt Sleat does not possess this boldness. Instead, he haughtily declares “the classical view of freedom, tied as it is to that pre-modern worldview, [is] no longer a live option for us.” But is it true? He is making a political not philosophical point, which is odd considering that he critiques post-liberals as political not philosophical.

Sleat has a similar blind spot regarding Catholicism. It has not escaped his notice that most post-liberals are conservative Catholics. Post-liberals are dismissed as grumpy Catholics; Catholicism, we are told, has nothing to fear from liberalism. At the same time, he lazily assumes that any Catholic republic would subjugate women “and various minorities.” In discussing the influence of Carl Schmidtt on Adrian Vermeule, Sleat asserts “liberals do not consider Catholics Schmittian enemies at all.” So why does John Locke exempt Catholics from religious toleration? One might also consider the work of Philip Hamburger on strict separationist jurisprudence in the United States, which Hamberger shows was strongly motivated by anti-Catholicism in an effort to marginalize Catholic institutions. And considering the above discussion of nominalism, Sleat might want to mention that nominalism certainly has not won the day in Catholic theology and philosophy. There is a reason why Thomistic theology is given pride of place in the Catholic Church. Sleat’s command of these matters might be a bit slippery, however, as evidenced by the fact that he calls Peter Leithart a Catholic intellectual. Nope.

Sleat perhaps gives the game away at book’s end when he attempts to lay out his own theory of “perfectionist liberalism.” Earlier he had chided post-liberals for “using state power to alter people’s beliefs and values in line with post-liberalism” Yet this is what Sleat wants to do. The whole idea of “perfectionist liberalism” is that liberalism should shed any pretense of neutrality and attempt to form people in the image of liberalism, which, after all, is precisely Deneen’s argument about liberalism’s ironic trajectory.

Sleat’s liberalism is all about having a view of the good (perfectionism) and pursuing it. It is a left-liberalism that rejects the idea of liberalism as being about “the protection of individual rights.” It says something about Sleat’s liberalism that Thomas Jefferson doesn’t make the cut.

We need to be aimed at the good, Sleat claims, but other than some ambiguous respect for the social good (common good?) he’s vague as to what that is. He quotes L.T. Hobhouse: “The good is something attained by the development of the basal factors of personality, a development proceeding by the widening of ideas, the awakening of the imagination, the play of affection and passion, and the strengthening and extension of rational control.” George Orwell would have a field day parsing this passage’s verbal gymnastics. All that is clear is that Hobhouse tells us nothing about what the good is, just how to achieve it. Sleat writes, “Social liberals believed that freedom was concerned with developing the more essential qualities involved in human flourishing.” Such as?

Sleat defends our social nature without any mention of family, church, or civic association. He seems oblivious to the reality that some of his “fundamental” liberal commitments, such as abortion rights and same-sex marriage, are defended on grounds of radical autonomy not social commitments.

Sleat asserts, “It may betray liberals’ lack of exposure to genuinely non-liberal challengers for so long that they see authoritarianism skulking in every alternative.” Sleat, who spots an authoritarian around every post-liberal corner, should perhaps look in the mirror. If a problem of post-liberals is their tendency to caricature liberalism, Sleat does the same with post-liberalism.

Post-Liberalism has a “gorillas in the mist” quality—except Dian Fossey actually wanted to understand gorillas, while Sleat seems barely interested in his subject. The book’s posture is anthropological condescension: look at these strange creatures; aren’t they odd? Readers hoping to understand post-liberalism will learn little. Those seeking its place within the tradition of political philosophy will be disappointed. Sleat writes as if political philosophy were invented in the twentieth century and nothing of consequence occurred before it.

In the end, Post-Liberalism fails not because it disagrees with post-liberals, but because it refuses to take them or the tradition they draw upon seriously. In fact, he doesn’t even take his own purported liberal tradition seriously. Like Rawls in Bloom’s famous indictment, Sleat writes as though political philosophy began recently and need not answer to the past. The result is a book that tells us far more about the anxieties and assumptions of contemporary liberalism than about the challenge post-liberalism actually poses.

Image Credit: George Caleb Bingham, “County Election” (1852)