The Right's Co-opting of Post-liberalism

Milbank on the 2 kinds of post-liberalism

This is the English version of an interview between

John Milbank

and

João Giro

originally published in Portuguese in

Não É Imprensa

. And if you haven’t already, check out our Interintellect salon with John Milbank,

Shadi Hamid

, and Bill Cavanaugh on faith in a globalized world. [YouTube, Spotify, Apple]

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What’s post-liberalism? It's a term that's been gaining attention in recent years, particularly in political discourse. For instance, after JD Vance was nominated as Trump's vice-presidential candidate, it seemed to become a buzzword again. What does this concept really entail, especially in the context of contemporary politics?

Well, when it comes to politics, I think post-liberalism means at least two different things.

First, in an objective sense, it reflects a recognition that the liberal era may be coming to an end. By liberalism, I mean an attitude that regards the individual and individual choice as completely paramount. For a long time, across the political spectrum, liberalism has been the dominant attitude. For example, on the right, we've seen economic neoliberalism pushing to minimize the role of government, leaving markets to dictate not only economic outcomes but, in many cases, political processes too. On the left, liberalism has largely been expressed through an emphasis on human rights as the bedrock of political legitimacy.

One could argue that at least since the 1960s liberalism has enjoyed an almost uncontested domination, but now we’re seeing it challenged by various populist (and other) movements. There was a moment after the Cold War when some thought history had ended with the global triumph of liberal democracy—the idea that eventually, everyone would fall in line with it. But instead, what we’ve seen is communist China becoming a hybrid of communism and capitalism, regaining its confidence, while Russia has morphed into something more like a nationalist, authoritarian state—definitely not liberal democratic.

At the same time, the international liberal world order, which was enforced by the United States, has collapsed. For a while, after the Cold War, it seemed the U.S. could act as the global enforcer of this order in all perpetuity, but that turned out to be a very short-lived hope.

So, in this first sense, post-liberalism reflects the idea that we’re now living in an era where liberalism is no longer the uncontested framework—it’s being challenged by various forces.

The second sense of post-liberalism is as a positive philosophy. It’s not necessarily anti-liberal; it’s not wholly against individual freedom or the idea of individuals having the freedom to make their own choices. But post-liberals argue that this focus on individual freedom alone isn’t enough to sustain political, social, or economic order. I agree with John Gray, a leading post-liberal thinker, that the Hobbesian idea that you can generate order from the chaos of competing individuals doesn’t hold up in the long term. Instead, we need a degree of social consensus and cultural coherence. There has to be a shared sense of the common good, of goods that we can only pursue together rather than purely individually. And we also need some idea of what constitutes the genuinely good life for individuals.

In that sense, post-liberalism suggests that, while liberal ideas about individual freedom are important, they need to be supplemented by a deeper, more communal understanding of what binds society together.

So how does post-liberalism differ from the liberal focus on freedom of choice, equality of opportunity, or utilitarian goals like maximizing happiness?

Post-liberalism is asking for something deeper than just improving freedom of choice, promoting equality of opportunity, or else pursuing utilitarian goals like maximizing material happiness. If we focus solely on those aspects, two major problems arise.

On one hand, you risk drifting toward anarchy. The idea that the formal pursuit of individual freedom alone can create a stable order is a fiction. In reality, this often leads to control by small, hidden groups—what you might call cabals. I’d argue that this has been a feature of American history, where the vastness of the country, combined with the absence of clear, substantive goals, has left it vulnerable to control by shadowy forces. It’s something closer to the power structures you see in parts of Latin America, even though Northern Americans have been reluctant to admit this.

On the other hand, when negative liberty – freedom from interference – isn't enough to maintain order, we see an increasing reliance on utilitarian goals, which often means rule by so-called experts. These are people who think they are rational, educated, and therefore capable of making decisions for everyone else. But there are two problems here: First, this kind of impersonal governance often doesn’t work in practice. It doesn't take into account the concrete, lived realities of people, which can only be understood through direct, face-to-face interaction.

Second, because this expert-driven rule alienates people. They feel that they’re being governed by distant, out-of-touch oligarchies who are dismissive and condescending. This is compounded by the growing division between a small, wealthy elite—perhaps 20-25% of the population—who live in cities and work in finance or the digital economy, and the remaining 70-75%, who are stuck in declining rural areas, small towns, or the fringes of large cities. Many of these people are seeing their standard of living fall, their dignity eroded, and their work devalued by automation. This isn’t just affecting the working class; large sections of the middle class feel they’re being proletarianized, losing the sense of security and status they once had.

In this context, post-liberalism can be seen as a modern form of communitarianism. It prioritizes the concrete person in real, relational situations, rather than the isolated, atomized individual that liberalism often focuses on. Post-liberalism emphasizes that communities need to be organized around shared goals—collectively accepted aims that foster human flourishing.

It also insists that we need a strong sense of what the good life is, even if there’s always room for debate or local variation. Without that guiding idea, we’re left with nothing to strive for together. The good life includes things like conviviality, creativity, political participation, and philosophical and religious contemplation—pursuing what is good, true, and beautiful, if you will. An orientation to objective transcendence. These are not just private or subjective pursuits, as liberalism might assume; they’re objective goods that we can recognize and aim for together as a society.

How would you locate post-liberalism within contemporary political discourse?

I see post-liberalism as an alternative to both liberalism on the one hand and populism—especially so-called national conservatism—on the other. It’s certainly not aligned with the kind of politics Trump represents. From my perspective, it’s rather strange that the term post-liberalism has been co-opted by the political right in the United States. We see similar trends in Britain, France, and probably Italy as well. In contrast, most post-liberals are what you might call left conservatives—they tend to be economically radical and egalitarian, but also moderately socially conservative. Although that is certainly distinct from whether you happen to support parties of the political left or the political right.

To put it another way, post-liberals advocate for economic reforms that challenge neoliberalism while supporting traditional institutions like the family, without discriminating against those who don’t fit into that structure. There’s a recognition that unless we move away from economic neoliberalism, we won’t make progress on key cultural issues. I’ve argued before, along with many others, that the liberal right has dominated the economic sphere, while the liberal left has dominated the cultural sphere. A true transformation will only happen when the right moves beyond neoliberalism, and the left moves beyond cultural liberalism.

There are already signs of this shift. For example, many feminists are becoming uneasy about certain aspects of the trans movement and the broader consequences of sexual liberation for women, which historical data increasingly supports. There’s also growing discomfort with extremely liberal abortion laws and the pressures they put on women.

Overall, the evidence suggests that post-liberals are more in tune with what most people actually want—a combination of greater economic equality and a moderate degree of social conservatism. They certainly don't align with the extremes of "woke" culture, but they aren't entrenched in the neoliberal or nationalist-conservative frameworks either.

You’ve mentioned that post-liberalism is often linked to nationalism, but you've also expressed strong opposition to that association. Can you clarify your stance on post-liberalism and its relationship to nationalism?

I can’t emphasize enough how strongly I oppose any identification of post-liberalism with nationalism. In fact, I probably take a stronger position on this than many others who espouse post-liberalism. While I fully acknowledge the importance of national identity and its political expression, I think it's deeply misguided to view the nation-state as the solution to globalization. That kind of thinking is profoundly unreflective, because the nation-state itself has been tied to liberalism almost since Hobbes.

Even though institutions like the EU have evolved into defenders of neoliberalism and have often aligned with globalization, they still manage to impose some constraints on global forces. And if we're going to effectively resist international corporate power, or defend European civilisation, we need political formations that go beyond the nation-state. The challenge of democratizing these larger structures is crucial, but the idea that the solution lies in returning to nation-state sovereignty ignores the realities of today's world, besides being wrong in principle.

What we’re really seeing now is the rise of massive civilization states—the United States, China, Russia—and regions like Latin America, Africa, and Europe increasingly realizing that they must act as blocs to have any chance of resisting these powers.

I agree with someone like Jake Sullivan, especially in the brilliant speech he gave under Biden. What we need is a mutualist protectionism—an approach that doesn’t foster antagonism between states, but one that ensures cooperation. For me, that’s what post-liberalism is about in the sphere of international relations: creating guarantees between nations that limit socially harmful capital flows or population movements. A protectionism that simply pits countries against each other is not post-liberalism.

In whiggish histories of Christianity, there's often this idea that, from the beginning, Christianity established a clear division between the political and the religious—'give to Caesar what is Caesar's, and to God what is God's.' Some suggest that the liberal separation between church and state was there from the start. However, your perspective seems different. You’ve said that Christianity was, from the beginning, post-political. What do you mean by that?

What I mean by that is actually quite simple: Christianity, in a sense, invents the idea of a social space that goes beyond the political. This isn't the same as anarchism—it’s not saying that law or politics don't have a role, even from a Christian perspective. Rather, it’s about recognizing that there is something beyond the law, something more fundamental.

In Christian political thought, there was often a distinction made between the ethical and political laws of the Old Testament laws and the ceremonial or ritual laws, with only the former remaining in force after the coming of Christ. So in that sense, it’s true that secularization can be seen as a Christian outcome. But the issue I take with the Whiggish narrative is the assumption that you can draw a straight line from this early distinction to modern secularization.

If you look at pre-modern times and even beyond that, Christian thought always evaluated the legitimacy of political and legal systems based on whether they promoted the ecclesial realm. By that, I mean a realm that isn’t purely political but is more about the social and communal and religious life, one that aims for harmony, reconciliation, and cultural coexistence, besides the cultivation of liturgy and contemplation. The Christian perspective isn’t opposed to law but sees it as something to be used only when absolutely necessary—essentially, the law should support the development of a community of love, and of our love of God, which goes beyond politics.

The test for Christians, then, isn’t just about justice but about charity: does the political community encourage love? Does it foster something that transcends politics, which Christians believe is fulfilled in the worship of the God-man—in the realization of divine love through human relationships? If the secular realm works against this ecclesial vision, then it becomes unacceptable from a Christian theological point of view, because the ecclesial realm is seen as the fulfilment of the community of love.

As Tom Holland and others have pointed out, we’ve never really exited this ecclesial space. Even those who think they’ve left it behind haven’t. Wherever there is freedom and a pursuit of community, it’s essentially a continuation of this Christian, church-driven social space.

I believe that one of the key political realizations in recent years, especially through the lens of post-liberalism, is that there is no such thing as a neutral political space. For the first time, it seems people are really confronting the postmodern reality that the Enlightenment’s idea of an objective, 'view-from-nowhere' approach to politics is bankrupt.

Exactly, and that is a crucial point. Up until the 1960s, and even within the Catholic Church, the prevailing attitude was that though we were living in a post-Christian society, it was very clearly a post Christian context, in the sense that even agnostics and atheists were still adhering to something resembling Christian values. There was a general goodwill toward these non-believers because they were, in essence, carrying forward much of what Christianity had instilled in Western society.

We were relatively content with liberal democracy, believing it to be a framework that could continue to promote these values. But now, that assumption is deeply challenged. It’s no longer clear that without the influence of Christianity and the "church space," we can preserve the social fabric. Instead, we seem to be sinking back into what you might call a pagan politicization of the social sphere. We’re losing the distinction between the ethical and the legal, and alongside that, we’re seeing a profound erosion of respect for human life and its natural norms.

But the problem goes deeper still. More subtly, we are losing the sense of mercy and forgiveness that once permeated our society. Increasingly, justice is equated with vengeance, and there’s this growing expectation that victims must themselves carry out justice, which is now regarded as a right by many people. Concepts like zero tolerance policies and firing or ‘cancelling’ people for supposedly offending norms with regard to sex, race and gender—suggest that there can be no second chances and that minimum infringement is the same as maximum, because what matters is the shibboleth of a rule and not the exercise of substantive and continuous virtue. We're moving toward a rigid, deontological ethics where one mistake can cancel out an entire life of service. It's as if we're operating in some punitive version of real-time baseball: one strike and you're out.

All of this points to the fact that we cannot rely on civil society to exist in some neutral, apolitical space. It's no longer possible to assume that politics can be divorced from Church norms or Christian theological foundations. Without those norms, the entire moral structure and aesthetic sense and regard for truth that has evolved from them collapses. Some genuinely progressive developments like gender equality, which may have outstripped the Church’s own efforts, can be seen as a gospel outcome. And yet, without the theological intuition, sacramental mediation, and authority of the Church, even those gains are at risk of disintegration: we already see a huge increase in male violence and non-acceptance of female equality which results from its disembedding in the family and in mutual chivalric expectations between the sexes.

Another important realization here is that constitutional government, which many thought was simply a secular development, was actually far more influenced by a Christian settlement than we recognized. It’s built on Christian personalism—a sense that society isn’t made up of isolated individuals, but of people interrelated in different groups and associations: trade unions, businesses, civil society organizations, churches, and so on. This provided a form of corporatism that allows for a network of relationships to flourish.

Without this sense of the primacy of freely associating groups under the panoply of the ultimate free association which is the church, we have the increasing attempt to realise in practice an illusion of isolation. The resulting anarchy can only be mediated by a ruthless market and a centralising, authoritarian state, evermore tending to oligarchy. The aggregated mass of isolated individuals encourages populist protests against that, but also encourages a counter-oligarchy in which a few rich people like Berlusconi, Trump and Musk try to enlist this protest behind their own assumptions of dictatorial control.

There is in consequence deep metaphysical dimension to post-liberalism. It's about rediscovering the Christian vision that balances unity and personal relating—a sense of harmony in society that still respects the absolute uniqueness of each person. Christianity has always offered this dual vision, combining monism and personalism in a way that no other religious or metaphysical vision entirely has.

I think we must also be honest about what's happened in the West. We’ve exported the worst aspects of ourselves—liberal capitalism, technocracy, a shallow version of human rights. What’s happening now is that the rest of the world is rejecting the West because its surviving nobler aspirations (even in their liberal form) towards respect for the individual, the rule of law and democracy are seen as but hypocritical masks for Western attempts to extend its own brutal power, based on money, science and technology. The antidote to this can only be a return to the best version of the West, which stems from this Christian personalism, a fuller vision of human dignity and societal harmony. Other religions have approximated this in various ways, but I believe that without this Christian foundation, what we see is a dangerous regression. The West needs both to recover itself from within in order to defend itself and to counteract the exporting of the worst of itself with a return to and an improvement of exporting the best of itself.

I firmly believe that the only thing standing between us and either a tyrannical liberalism or a new form of quasi-fascism is a reassertion of Christianity at the heart of our political vision. Even non-Christians can often recognize the value in this vision and find their own reasons to support it. But without it, I fear for what comes next.

But how does that reassertion of Christianity differ from, say, the integralism one sees resurfacing in the US? Would you categorize your perspective as a form of integralism? They don't seem to advocate for the bottom-up vision of church authority that you propose; instead, they seem to perceive church authority as a mere earthly power.

That's an important question, and I've addressed this in some of my writings. In some respects, I find myself closer to integralists than to national conservatives, primarily because integralists at least acknowledge the primacy of the spiritual and tend to endorse a more internationalist outlook. However, where I believe they fundamentally err is in their embrace of a theocracy that conflates power with authority.

It's crucial to clarify that I do not view the Church as exercising a form of coercive power. The authority of the Church should not be equated with the mechanisms of state enforcement. The transcendent goals of Christianity, which politics should aspire to, must not be reduced to the power dynamics typically associated with institutional hierarchies, including the priesthood. The Church's role should be to guide and inspire moral and ethical action without resorting to any form of coercion or coercive domination.

So, while I appreciate the integralists’ focus on the spiritual and the transcendent orientation of society, I fundamentally reject any notion that the Church should wield power in a way that resembles secular legal enforcement. That kind of approach distorts both the mission of the Church and the essence of political authority, leading to the kind of problematic dynamics we often associate with fascism or authoritarianism.

Nor can we simply return to a Medieval order and nor would that be desirable. In the post-medieval era, we have developed a stronger sense of the importance of freedom, of variety, of independent reflective reason, and of dynamic, creative change in both natural and human history. All of these are actually rooted in developments already present in the Middle Ages, that was already to a degree ‘Faustian’ (as David Engels puts it) and so are themselves Christian outcomes. They need re-integrating back into a traditional (and ‘neo-medieval’ if you like) shared focus on the transcendent but inevitably and desirably a modern element of permitted questioning and tolerated plurality will remain.

That is interesting but it makes me think about those who are not persuaded by your views. That is, what about pluralism in a post-liberal society? For instance, I’m thinking of Andrew Willard Jones’s excellent book Before Church and State…

Absolutely brilliant book. It's a great book.

Yeah, you've endorsed the book, but one of the problems I have with it—despite generally liking it—is its selectivity. For instance, it barely touches on the relations between Louis XIV and the Jews, which were very questionable. There were serious contradictions in promoting a kingdom of love and Christian charity while also marginalizing Jewish people and burning Jewish books. So, I’d like to ask about this idea of a society of charity and the role of true, let’s say, personalist pluralism within it.

That's a really good question. I would say that nonetheless book is deeply inspiring, especially in its historical research and writing, because it does reveal a crucial point: there wasn't a strict duality between church and state during that time. This aligns with my view that although there is a distinction between power and authority, they are always intertwined – and it is clear that Andrew Jones broadly shares my attitude to integralism.

My main reservation about the book, which I think I may have shared with its author, is that it seems to overlook the Augustinian insight that the church transcends the political realm. The medieval perspective often embraced a Gelasian idea of collaboration between two powers, but it sometimes lost the understanding that even the best political arrangements are inherently flawed and can be dubious in the end, because it lost the Gelasian sense that the political as coercive remains to a degree outside the church. Indeed it remains to a degree both pagan and Old Testament, if one can put it that way. The Middle Ages lost the sense that the OT ‘legal’ dimension is at once integrated and yet ‘alien’, even if necessary, as alien – as Luther later put it, even though he distorted the Augustinian legacy in another way.

In Augustine's thought, there isn't, all the same, a simplistic notion that the Church can never use coercive power; rather, there's a hugely cautionary approach regarding it. By the high Middle Ages, this sense of unease about the use of coercive power had diminished. This is evident in events like the Crusades and the actions of the Templars. While one could argue that the Crusades originated as a defensive war (but then often inflicted gratuitous horrors) the notion of monks engaging in military actions should have raised more ethical concerns than it did at the time, even if one cannot reject the idea outright. In that respect, Hegel’s later critique holds some truth.

I agree with scholars like Robert Markus who suggest that the early Church emphasized the necessity of free assent to religious commitments, a principle that seemed to fade during the Middle Ages. There wasn’t enough authentic pluralism, and the era often sought to impose a somewhat monolithic Christian vision, notably with regard to eschatology, which was problematic.

For me today, the vision of pluralism isn’t a wholly liberal one. It doesn’t extend to groups like Satanists, for example. But I do see potential for dialogue and analogy with traditions such as Buddhism, where there are meaningful parallels in the questions asked and the answers provided. This allows for a richer, more nuanced pluralism that acknowledges the limitations of political power while promoting a society rooted in charity and authentic commitment.

I wanted to provoke you on this with the help of Charles Taylor. In his talk A Catholic Modernity, he teases Christians about their relationship with modernity, suggesting that in many ways, the modern project has fostered Christian values—like charity and tolerance—in ways that Christendom never did. Do you agree with him? It seems to me that part of being post-liberal, and not anti-liberal, is recognizing some of the values of liberalism. Taylor acknowledges this, mentioning secular organizations like Doctors Without Borders, which embody these values. But he also reminds us that modernity gave rise to horrific things like Nazism and concentration camps. What’s your take on this?

That’s a really important point. I think, first of all, many of these developments aren’t entirely secular, as I’ve already indicated. A lot of what we see happening continues to be ultimately rooted in Christianity. As Franz von Baader, a notable 19th-century Catholic thinker, pointed out, Christianity played a crucial role in the birth of the corporation and the idea of voluntary association. Even when these organizations stop being explicitly Christian, that underlying energy persists.

I agree with Taylor that the essence of creative projects based on love—what I call the “free creativity of love”—is already present in the Gospels. In a way, post-Christianity is foreshadowed within Christianity itself. The Gospels emphasize a kind of freedom of spirit, as demonstrated by the life and teachings of Christ, which were often ambiguous and symbolic.

But while I appreciate Taylor’s insights, we must counter the assumption that secularization will necessarily lead to a benign form of post-Christianity. What we see now is a world that, as it distances itself from biblical knowledge and Christian practices, becomes more brutal and less forgiving. The absence of a strong respect for life and human life as such helps give rise to a concerning obsession with identity—whether it be a hyper-individualism that tends to the transhuman or the sinister group identities that right-wing extremists exploit.

All the same align with both Tom Holland and Charles Taylor in recognizing that certain values have sometimes be better realized outside the church. This is because the spirit of free creativity is itself deeply embedded in Christianity, evidenced by the diverse movements and orders of the Middle Ages which as already suggested was already marked by a notably ‘western’ free ambition, reaching both upwards and outwards.

However, the optimism surrounding secularization—an idea championed by figures like Bonhoeffer and Tillich and multiple others—no longer seems plausible to me.

As those great writers who have handled the Faust myth (Marlowe, Calderon, Goethe) have in different ways implied, our dynamic and creative drive in imitation of the Triune, Creating and Incarnating God has escaped its original vision and context, like the sorcerer’s apprentice trying to handle his master’s magic without the key to that magic – to refer to another work of Goethe, so brilliantly recreated by Walt Disney in Fantasia!

We need now to try to achieve a final synthesis, as again David Engels has suggested: to re-situate the ‘Faustian’ within the liturgical carapace of universal guidance of the social, economic and political by the reach for transcendence. The alternative will probably be a further breakdown of our civilisation at the hands of oligarchy and tyranny. Since the same and worse decadence now afflicts also other civilisations – China, India, Islam, Russia (if she is really apart) – one cannot tell what would then come next. Arguably, there has never before in history existed a global and multiple decadence all at once.