We Are All Postliberals Now!

Philip Pilkington examines the non-functional status of liberalism, and the descriptively operative reality of a postliberal view of political orders.

We are all postliberals now. Even the critics of postliberalism admit this by using the language of the postliberals – and then spend their time watching for cracks in the postliberal intellectual edifice. But at a basic level they seem unable to properly understand what the intellectual edifice is and what it encompasses. So, instead they tend to fall back on politics, imagining that for the past few years we have been living through some grand postliberal experiment and watching for political changes that might signal that this supposed experiment is coming to an end.

The confusion here is so deep that it reaches right down to the most basic definitions. The detractors of postliberalism seem to think that it is a positive political program – like communism or, dare I say it, liberalism itself. But even the term itself suggests otherwise: postliberal – it is defined by a sort of temporal negation. ‘Post’ is a Latin prefix meaning “after” or “following”. Here we might refer to “postbellum” as it is used in American historiography: it simply means the period after the American Civil War. Likewise, ‘postliberal’ simply means “after liberalism”. Postliberals do not really think in terms of postliberalism – that is, postliberalism as an “ism”. But rather they think in terms of postliberalism – that is, the historical-intellectual moment after liberalism.