Post-liberalism is all the rage on the American right, finding a common cause between legal theorists like Adrian Vermeule and Patrick Deneen and rising political stars like J.D. Vance, the serving vice president.
In the UK, on the other hand, the movement has been pioneered by left-wing thinkers seeking to return lost working-class voters to the Labour Party and return the party itself to its non-urban, communitarian and patriotic roots.
In Against Post-Liberalism: Why ‘Family, Faith and Flag’ is a Dead End for the Left (Polity, 2025), Paul Kelly explores this post-liberal strain and concludes that it offers "capitalism without social mobility".
"Liberalism is not everything but it’s not supposed to be," he writes. "It doesn't give an account of the meaning of life or the point of the universe. What it does offer is a way of negotiating social change and, hopefully, of ensuring that the burdens of that change fall reasonably equitably on everyone across generations. It looks to the future. It does not lock us into some nostalgia for a world gone by or frustrate our engagement with a future of necessary change".
Paul Kelly is Professor of Political Theory at the London School of Economics.
Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Advisors, who writes and podcasts at 242.news.
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