Postliberal Politics: The Coming Era of Renewal

The third development is a stronger emphasis on bounded polities and national sovereignty. Free movement of capital has weakened the power of labour while the free movement of people without national economic development has put pressures on wages and hit workers.

Liberty is not freedom from obligations or freedom for selfish interests but a freedom of care for oneself and for others. Individual fulfilment based on personal autonomy has to be balanced with mutual flourishing. Equality is not sameness but a respect for the basic and integral dignity of everyone: their body, mind and soul.

On current evidence, the reimagining of liberalism is not about to happen, as most attempts either buy into the liberal premise that the economy trumps culture, which ignores the importance of mutual recognition, or else accept the primacy of the individual and negative liberty, which ends in the individualism that has destroyed any prospects of sh

‘Everything can be measured, and what gets measured gets managed’, as the motto of the management consultancy McKinsey goes. Governance by number extends this from the sphere of economics to the realm of politics and social life. Such a conception fundamentally changes the nature of politics as praxis. If, as the Prussian general and military theor

Every person has a natural and intrinsic obligation to study how to procure his happiness; but the political body is made of persons; therefore the entire political body and each of its members is obligated to do his part, i.e. all that he knows and can do for common prosperity, as long as that which is done does not offend the rights of the other

the state disembedded from the ties of society subordinates the social to the joint rule of the economic and the political.

The fundamental problem with this approach is twofold: first of all, that it considers formal rules to be more fundamental than informal norms and, second, that the purpose of politics is supposedly to impose rules rather than reflect norms.

Each of these developments is consistent with principles of liberality like pluralism, tolerance and generosity, and yet none of them are reflected in contemporary liberalism.

All agree that liberal ideals of freedom, equality, the rule of law, representative government and individual rights can only be defended with the help of social virtues such as fraternity, duty, loyalty, humility and honour.