“Post-liberalism” is the inescapable watchword of our times. Turn to the comment section of any major English-language periodical, and chances are you will find at least one column, feature or review devoted to this phenomenon. Usually, the pieces in question concern a small coterie of mainly American and mainly Catholic writers who argue that many of today’s political, economic and cultural crises trace back to liberal ideology.
Atomisation, inequality, environmental degradation, identity warfare: these and related troubles, the post-liberals insist, aren’t distortions of the original liberal ideal, but its fulfilment. Liberalism’s irrepressible drive to maximise individual autonomy has paradoxically yielded hideous new tyrannies: from Big Tech and Wall Street despotism to the spread of involuntary suicide-by-doctor, and from widespread loneliness to declining life expectancy in once-dignified industrial places, such as the north of England and the American Midwest.
Subscribe to the New Statesman this summer - 2 months for only £2