MATT SLEAT, a reader in political theory at the University of Sheffield, has written an academic but highly readable study of post-liberalism — a movement that is now increasingly high-profile with the prominence of figures such as J. D. Vance.
Sleat is realistic about the shortcomings of his own liberal tradition (evident in both Church and State). The fact that liberal ideas have held sway for so long makes them seem self-evident to their proponents, who have, in many cases, forgotten the basis of their own ideas and assumptions. Rather than analyse differing views, or make distinctions between them, they are often content simply to label their opponents as authoritarians (or, more crudely, “fascists” and “Nazis”). Sleat echoes language that we have sometimes heard in the Church of England: “learning how to disagree in a genuinely liberal manner may be a skill that liberals need to relearn.”
None the less, Sleat’s contention is that post-liberals misrepresent the liberal tradition, over-emphasising its effect on a Western society that, they claim, is “built by liberalism and liberalism alone”, and misattributing all society’s current ills to liberal ideas — as if ideas alone determined social outcomes. In Sleat’s depiction of it, liberalism is multi-faceted almost to the point of incoherence: among other divisions, “economic” and “social” liberals differ vastly on key questions.
Post-liberals, however, ignore such differences, assuming, for example, that all liberals believe that freedom simply means unconstrained choice, even though neither the great founding figures of liberalism — Locke, Kant, and Mill — nor many of their successors would have thought so.
In a chapter, “The Fantasies of Political Catholicism”, Sleat explores the work of the Roman Catholic legal scholar and philosopher Adrian Vermeule. Drawing on the Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt’s stark division of the world into friends and enemies, Vermeule offers “an anti-liberal politics of unrelenting intensity”. He argues for a form of “integralism” in which the Catholic faith transforms the state from within and becomes the basis for law and social policy.
Society, according to such a vision, would be ordered not around competing preferences and liberal values, but around a robustly theological conception of the common good. Its features would include respect for authority and for the importance of social groups and associations, pre-eminently the family, and a willingness to legislate for morality.
One problem, Sleat argues, with Vermeule’s programme is that the vast majority even of Catholics — including the Pope himself — are currently not amenable to it. Thus, realistically, it could be achieved only by a mixture of entryism into key institutions and maintained only by coercion — the prospect of which Vermeule, in Sleat’s depiction of him, seems worryingly ready to entertain.
It is significant that, in his description of them, both liberals and post-liberals are united by what Sleat describes as “perfectionism”: a developed sense that a strong, interventionist state can be a positive force for good, promoting the self-development and flourishing of all. Following St Paul and, indeed, Jesus, Anglicanism has traditionally been shaped by an Augustinian theology that sees the need for the state and respects its proper authority — especially when based on Christian foundations. But it is only in the city of God that the spirits of the righteous are made perfect (cf. Hebrews 12.23).
The Very Revd Dr Edward Dowler is the Dean of Chichester.
Post-Liberalism
Matt Sleat
Polity £15.99
(978-1-5095-6220-6)
Church Times Bookshop £14.39