Final Sale Hours: Postliberal Best of 2022!

See how Postliberal Order shook things up in 2022!

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While you’re preparing to click that button, we thought we’d gather some highlights from the Postliberal Order gang. If you missed anything, now is your chance!

January

Adrian Vermeule—“Who Decides?”

The liberal ideal of law without living human authority, a machine that would run of itself, of social order without the “coercion” of some by others, is not merely fantastic; it is a conceptual and logical impossibility. Power and coercion may be shifted around, but not eliminated; power is conserved. The fantasy that no one or everyone can decide merely transfers power into the hands of landlords, corporate personnel departments, and social media monopolies.

February

Gladden Pappin—“The Postliberal Future of the Republican Party”

There’s a difficulty in U.S. politics: the Left focuses only on socialistic measures on society as a whole and the Right is more individualistic. This made America the place of the “American dream” where you can go and become rich through your own enterprises. But throughout Europe, and Latin America too, social conservatism has a long tradition and means of public support for people or families in need, and it’s definitely not something you should avoid as a conservative.

March

Gladden Pappin—“After the End of Globalization”

Postliberal analysis is neither merely hortatory nor merely evocative of some future policy platforms. Rather, postliberal analysis holds that emergent political conditions in the world involve the abandonment of liberalism. Liberalism has grown fragile and nervous, and the competition is on for ideologies and political systems to replace it. As [Larry] Fink’s observation indicates, the rapid collapse of liberal order in the wake of Russia’s invasion confirms rather than denies the point.

April

Patrick Deneen—“Liberalism as (De)Sadism”

This last stage of modernist and progressive revolution is especially visible today in the rise of “woke capitalism,” combining the radical individualism, anti-culture, and revolutionary overthrow of traditional institutions in contemporary corporate political power exercised not only against religious believers, but even sovereign political actors. These powers operate as an unofficial political regime, shaping the horizon of contemporary humanity while marshalling its resources and power of shaping perception to demolish political opposition.

May

Adrian Vermeule—“The Instruments of the Law”

Coercion is a spectrum, not an on-off switch, and the law uses a large and diverse set of tools to induce behavior desired by those who wield the tools. Sending agents of the state with guns to enforce orders is rarely how the law proceeds, and in some sense represents a failure of the system, a confession that the use of the other tools was insufficiently artful. At the same time, the agents-with-guns paradigm  causes the nonlawyer to overlook that actual coercion can be effected by a governing regime indirectly as well as directly, through the tacit encouragement of “private” groups wielding coercive force or intimidation tactics against disfavored third parties, whom the regime then more or less deliberately fails to protect, through the selective under-enforcement of law.

June

Chad Pecknold—“The Two Cities in June”

The promethean attempt to construct the self according to our deceptive gazes, through distortive mirrors, leads to much disorder and misrule in the soul and city alike. Divine providence permitted that June be celebrated by this city as “Pride Month.” We shall see the pride flag everywhere—it will be flown outside U.S. embassies, and in our big-box stores as the concurrent public authorities of state and market enforce a sort of “false integralism,” where we are asked to offer a pinch of incense to the court religion of the liberal empire.

July

Chad Pecknold—“Out of the Feverish City: Part One”

There is a profound similarity between the desires of the soul and the desires of the city. What makes each of the regimes unhappy or feverish is that they are essentially constituted by disordered desires in the soul—it is not only the question of “men who are like their regimes,” but also that regimes which are like their men.

August

Patrick Deneen—“Why Liberalism Can’t Limit Government”

Which regime, in fact, results in a genuinely “limited government”? Look around you. Right-liberals will tell you that the expansion of political power into every dimension of our lives is due entirely to the “Progressives,” who overthrew the pristine liberal arrangements of “limited government.” Yet in a scheme in which pursuit of my own “affairs” or “pursuits” is paramount, the government necessarily expands to meet the individual demand for ever-more perfected individual freedom.

September

Edward Feser—“Perfect World Disorder”

Worst of all would be a scenario where radical disorientation of this kind exists in all of these orders at once—where large numbers of individual human beings are in thrall to an ideology contra naturam, where the governing authorities of states and other large-scale social institutions impose this malign ideology from above, and where even many churchmen cease resisting it or even sympathize with it themselves. This would be perfect world disorder.

October

Gladden Pappin & Chad Pecknold—“A Kingdom Divided”

Hittinger is wrong because he has integralism exactly backwards. Integralism does not fuse the Church and the state. The Church affirms that there are two powers, not one. We therefore conclude that his argument has not been made—that his thesis is fundamentally misguided, out of touch with Catholic theology, jurisprudence, and the realities of being the leaven that pervades the world.

November

Patrick Deneen—“What Liberals Want”

Augustine recognized the deep continuity between libido dominandi expressed by the Roman imperium economically, militarily, and erotically. Today, most conservative Christians feel secure in their piety by condemning the latter, while progressive Christians (or their secular epigones) are self-satisfied to give the latter a pass while critiquing the former. . . . Heed rather to the first pre-liberal postliberal—Saint Augustine—and not those who recommend the manifold contemporary corruptions that were as familiar to Augustine as they have become ordinary for us.

December

Adrian Vermeule—“Skepticism and the State”

The problem is that skepticism about power, as an argument, is in a sense too powerful, too sweeping. It applies to all forms of power, whether “public” or “private,” whether expressed through state “action” or state “inaction,” whether expressed through statutes and administrative regulation or through the common law. Because power is ubiquitous, skepticism about power cuts in no particular direction. It applies everywhere, and thus applies nowhere.

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