Why post-liberalism failed

A genealogy and critique of a Marxist heresy

The epigram of John Maynard Keynes on the staying power of ‘academic scribblers’, ‘defunct economists’, and yesterday’s political philosophers on the minds of ‘practical men’ may be applied to many on the British Right. Nigel Farage is a ‘pound-shop Thatcherite’; Britain is a country suffocated by ‘neoliberal dogma’; Third World immigration is the inevitable by-product of capitalism and its love of lucre: these commonplaces form the boilerplate political analysis of many a fledgling ‘based’ political commentator and wannabe Lotus Eaters guest.

In this case, the intellectual influence, whether known or unknown, is post-liberalism; the ‘academic scribblers’ from whom these clichés ultimately derive are the philosopher Alasdair Macintyre and the venerable Labour peer Maurice Glasman. The dead hand of post-liberalism has subverted many intelligent young men and women who may otherwise be called to the Progressive Right, but are instead left cast on the rocks, muttering sweet nothings about the ‘politics of third places’ and ‘that sense of place’. To exorcise the ghost of post-liberalism from right-wing discourse is to save these mute, inglorious Miltons. Like the Nazarene, I cast the demons out into swine.

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The post-liberal credo holds that modern liberal society, characterised by anonymous market transactions and bureaucratic procedure, is unable to nurture the kind of relationships that enable genuine human flourishing. Individualism is a corrosive influence, flattening out local cultures and inevitably leading to atomisation. The liberalism of Hobbes, Locke, and Rawls, which conceives of politics in terms of the consent-giving, rights-bearing individual, serves as the theoretical justification for this individualist culture and therefore must be abandoned. Liberal theory denies the importance of communal bonds — some chosen, some not — to psychological wellbeing. Man is most fulfilled in small communities where shared practices and traditions can meaningfully be maintained. The post-liberal political project, simply put, is to foster these kinds of communities, and thereby lessen the atomising and deadening effects of modernity.

It should be evident from this short description that post-liberalism takes itself seriously as an intellectual and social movement. The aim is not simply to give some ideological colour to an otherwise bland policy programme; it is no less than to wrestle with the demons of modernity and cure souls. Essays written by post-liberals are generally light on policy, but abound with learned references to philosophical movements. Among the philosophical influences on post-liberal thought, the moral philosopher Alasdair Macintyre is arguably the most significant.

In After Virtue (1981), his most celebrated work, Macintyre would argue that there is a crisis of meaning in the modern world. This is a consequence of modern moral philosophy being in a state of confusion. He traces the origins of this state of confusion, by way of the Enlightenment and the Reformation, to nominalism, a fairly technical position in mediaeval philosophy which denies the reality of universals. To overcome this crisis of modernity, we must reject moral developments influenced by the nominalist turn — and with it, most Enlightenment thought — and attempt to resurrect the Aristotelian tradition, which thinks about morality in terms of the virtues. For Macintyre, the virtues can only be cultivated in face-to-face, ‘thick’ communities. It is for this reason that atomisation ought to be opposed.

Macintyre’s criticism of the Enlightenment allows post-liberals to present themselves as ideologically idiosyncratic, belonging to neither the Right or the Left, an ideological division which (as they will no doubt remind you) emerged during the French Revolution. In particular, the post-liberals position themselves against mainstream left-wing politics, mostly hrough their communitarian ethos and ostensible support for vaguely ‘dark’ policies more associated with the Right, especially on social issues. This is epitomised by the meme ‘Fund the NHS, hang the paedos’.

However, despite this self-identification, upon closer inspection, we can see that post-liberalism seems to be a straightforwardly left-wing ideology. Through an intellectual biography of Macintyre, I wish to argue that this is because post-liberalism bears the unmistakable imprint of a distinctly socialist intellectual heritage.

By the end of the twentieth century, Marxism had ceased to be the main intellectual tradition of the Left. This fact owed itself as much to the Soviet response to the Hungarian uprising of 1956 and the Prague Spring of 1968, Khrushchev’s ‘Secret Speech’, and Yeltsin’s discovery of supermarkets, as it did to any intellectual upheavals in the republic of letters. That said, at least in the English-speaking world, there were a number of important developments that had undermined Marxism on the intellectual level. It had gradually become accepted that there was no scientific basis for socialism. With the exception of a few crackpots, Marxian economics was by this point widely considered to be debunked, due to the implications of the marginal revolution, which had transformed mainstream economics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This had resolved the many paradoxes concerning ‘value’ that had plagued not just Marx — for whom the matter of ‘value’ was central — but all the other pre-marginalist economists as well. Additionally, philosophers of science, such as Karl Popper and Imre Lakatos, would argue to great effect that because historical materialism — Marx’s supposedly ‘scientific’ account of society and history — was inherently unfalsifiable, it was mere pseudoscience; more akin to astrology or psychoanalysis than physics or geology.

However, instead of rejecting leftism tout court, most disillusioned Marxists would latch on to other left-wing political movements. For many, the only valuable and non-discredited element of Marx’s thought was his Rousseau-like philosophical anthropology. It would be these insights into ‘alienation’ and ‘species-being’ that would help to form the core of their later ideological pursuits. This was the path taken by many proponents of ‘human rights’ and ‘international law’.

Macintyre was one of these quondam Marxists, gradually drifting away the movement in the late ’60s, before criticising the ideology itself in later works. And yet, despite this past, he is assumed to fit neatly into conservative thought. This is due to lay readers’ general ignorance of his Marxist personal background, and — for those who are aware — to lazy inferences from his Thomism and a clumsy attempt to place him into an academic debate between ‘liberals’ and ‘communitarians’ that was ongoing when After Virtue was first published.

Most scholarly analysis of Macintyre’s work ignores his Marxist period, relying upon After Virtue and his later work as the basis of their interpretations. In effect, his earlier Marxist writings, when they are discussed at all, are treated as mere juvenilia; works of a prolonged adolescence irrelevant to understanding his mature thought, which should be read by none except the most dedicated of biographers.

This hermeneutical approach — splitting a writer’s oeuvre into early and mature work, and identifying a single text that constitutes a decisive break between these two periods — mirrors the one taken by Althusser in his famous interpretation of Marx, identifying the latter’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 as the ‘critical juncture’ between his Hegel-inspired juvenilia and his mature writings. Whether Althusser’s interpretation of Marx’s thought is indeed accurate need not concern us here; however, what is clear is that this approach falls well short when reading Macintyre. Whilst Marx was only twenty-six when he wrote the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, Macintyre was fifty-six when After Virtue was first published. We are asked to assume a very, very extended period of immaturity.

Moreover, Macintyre’s Marxist period was not just an intellectual dalliance. No: he was active on the radical-left on a practical and organisational level. Starting out as a dues-paying member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, he would later become a member of two Trotskyite cells: the Socialist Labour League, and the International Socialists. A contemporary in the former remembered Macintyre as ‘…full of enthusiasm; he spoke at meetings, sold papers, wrote articles and pamphlets’, noting that ‘Macintyre joined the minority faction of which [Brian] Behan was leader… the alternative at which he and other members of the faction stood, was the setting up of an open revolutionary party’. In addition, he wrote extensively for socialist publications like the New Left Review, with the (incomplete) Alasdair Macintyre’s Engagement with Marxism: Selected Writings 1953-1974 running at over four-hundred pages. He would remain deeply engaged in radical-left activism until 1968, the year of the Prague Spring, when he would resign from the editorial board of the journal International Socialism. By this time, he was nearly forty years old.

In his disillusionment with the old institutions of the radical-left, he was merely following the path of hundreds of other British Marxist intellectuals during the Cold War; think, for instance, of E.P. Thompson, Christopher Hill, and Eric Hobsbawm. The vast majority of these people, however, indisputably remained on the Left despite their break with Communism (or at least with Communism of the Soviet variety). Most of them continued to call themselves ‘Marxists’, albeit often in an increasingly loose sense, and many were involved in the establishment of new radical-left institutions to replace the ones they had abandoned. Can we say the same of Macintyre?

I do, of course, concede that a flirtation with Trotskyism is a blemish on the biography of several right-wing intellectuals. James Burnham, author of the influential The Managerial Revolution (1941) and an editor of the National Review, was a former Trotskyite; as (infamously) was Peter ‘the Hitch’ Hitchens. I also accept that Macintyre’s Marxist past does not in itself prove post-liberalism’s socialist intellectual heritage. It is true that Macintyre’s thought moved in a very different direction from most of the other former Communists, who were usually busying themselves developing postmodernism and relativism, which (at least outwardly) could not be more different from Macintyre’s project in virtue ethics.

After his withdrawal from socialist activism, Macintyre would explicitly criticise Marxism in his mature works, including in After Virtue. These criticisms are taken as evidence that Macintyre moved fully away from Marxism specifically, and had no residual sympathies to socialism more generally. However, whilst both Burnham and Hitchens would entirely repudiate their Trotskyite pasts, Macintyre’s rejection of Marxism was nowhere near as complete. A closer analysis of the mature Macintyre’s critique of Marxism suggests that he did not make the clean break with socialism that many commentators often seem to imply.

Macintyre’s criticism of Marxism is twofold. The first rests on the boilerplate claim that its emphasis on a revolutionary cadre inevitably leads to despotic bureaucracy, a view he shares with people as diverse as Peter Kropotkin, Leszek Kołakowski, and James Burnham. His other critique is somewhat more unique. It rests on the accusation that ‘…secreted within Marxism from the outset is a certain radical individualism’, stemming from the Enlightenment tradition that Macintyre characterises Marx as being part of. Elsewhere, he would state that ‘Marx and Engels were both blind to the extent to which their own thought not only has the marks characteristic of a bürgerlich [bourgeois] theorising, but was distorting in a characteristically bürgerlich manner’, and that therefore a socialist society would recreate many of the flaws that Marx finds in capitalism.

In other words, his criticism is directed only at Marxism as a positive political project, not as a negative critique of capitalism. Macintyre retained his faith in this anti-capitalist critique. He states this explicitly in the prologue to the third edition of After Virtue, writing that ‘…although After Virtue was written in part out of a recognition of those moral inadequacies of Marxism which its twentieth-century history had disclosed, I was and remain deeply indebted to Marx’s critique of the economic, social, and cultural order of capitalism and to the development of that critique by later Marxists.’ Indeed, throughout his mature writings, Macintyre maintains a strong hostility to the market economy and capitalism, believing them to be key drivers of individualism.

Moreover, Macintyre’s decision to withdraw from Marxist politics was not a result of a Damascene Conversion involving a total rejection of socialist principles, but derived from concerns regarding tactics. In several essays published just before he would withdraw from socialist activism, Macintyre would reveal a profound scepticism that bourgeois society can ever undergo a large-scale transformation, departing from the Marxist belief in the inevitability of socialist revolution. This doubt derives from the fear that capitalist exploitation would not, on its own, radicalise the working classes, as Marx predicted. Instead, Macintyre feared that the affluence of consumer society would inoculate the proletariat from any revolutionary feelings, requiring any successful resistance to be small-scale and localised. In ‘After Virtue and Marxism: A Reply to Warsofsky’ (1984), Macintyre would clarify this point, writing that ‘…any systemic political action of a conventional kind involves a commitment to the dominant social order of the present which I reject… [F]or I do not see any prospects of overthrowing the dominant social order… The grounds for hope lie in that from the pre-modern past which has survived the worst that the dominant social order of modernity has been able to visit upon it.’

With this framing in mind, much of the political content of Macintyre’s mature thought can be understood as an attempt to practise socialism in a world where capitalism has become hegemonic. Macintyre (somewhat cryptically) acknowledges this framing in After Virtue, writing that ‘…a Marxist who took Trotsky’s last writings with great seriousness would be forced into a pessimism quite alien to the Marxist tradition, and in becoming a pessimist he would in an important way have ceased to be a Marxist. For he would now see no tolerable alternative set of political and economic structures which could be brought into place to replace the structures of advanced capitalism. This conclusion agrees of course with my own.’

The understanding of Macintyre as a philosopher whose thought is still rooted in a rejection of capitalism through a ‘revolutionary Aristotelianism’ (a term that Macintyre has used to describe his own thought) is now mainstream in scholarly circles, displacing the previous conservative reading. However, this reinterpretation has had little impact outside academia, with many lay readers remaining convinced that he is an ally of the Right, or at least leans that way.

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So far, this essay has concerned itself with attempting to provide a genealogy and classification of Macintyre’s thought, without engaging in any criticism of said thought. There is a great deal of continuity between Macintyre’s Marxist and post-Marxist periods, with many of the insights of After Virtue at least partially developed whilst he was still a Marxist. For instance, we do not have to speculate too much to see how the young Marx’s writings about ‘alienation’ would inform Macintyre’s mature critique of the modern world, long after he rejected Marxism.

And yet, I do not want to offer a simple genealogical argument here; namely, that since Macintyre’s critique of the modern world has a Marxist origin, it must therefore be wrong. Quite apart from anything else, the idea of ‘alienation’ is not even uniquely Marxist: Hegel, Weber, and St. Paul have all diagnosed the modern world as ‘alienating’. More importantly, what is wrong with Macintyre’s claim that the modern world is alienating is not its provenance, but that it is incorrect; that in fact, as J. Sorel argues, it is a communitarian ethos that defines contemporary Britain, not ‘individualism’ or ‘neoliberalism’. What is wrong with modernity is not that it is alienating, but rather the suffocating fog of obligation and community.

Evidence for Sorel’s thesis is plainly visible in contemporary Britain. Britain, we are reminded, is a country where a governing party ran for re-election seeking a mandate to conscript England’s youth into corvée labour, and where the state shut down the economy by an act of fiat and barracked people in their homes for two years over a bad case of flu. These facts alone disprove the claim that we are suffering from a ‘tyranny of negative freedom’, as the theologian John Milbank and political scientist Adrian Pabst argue, or the claim that the British economy is best characterised as ‘neoliberal’ and predicated on an especially ruthless and mercenary variant of capitalism.

The other post-liberal claim, that we suffer from an excess of individualism, is also quickly proven false via a cursory examination of modern Britain. As has been noted by others, the state is increasingly unwilling to mediate directly with many of its subjects and has proven reluctant to directly police a select set of ethnic and religious groups without the consent and approval of unelected and self-appointed ‘community leaders’. This policing approach is the necessary consequence of the idiom of communities and stakeholders now endemic in public life and which is informed by the communitarian notions of the ‘Big Society’ and the Third Way. Far from suffering from too much individualism, Britain appears to be governed by the communitarian dogmas that post-liberals advocate.

Understanding the socialist heritage of post-liberalism can help us detect a fundamental flaw with it: that it is ahistorical. As a Marxist, Macintyre had ingested a particular understanding of English history. Even after he would formally repudiate Marxism, he would maintain these historical views, which would go on to warp post-liberalism. It is these historical views which form the core of the socialist heritage of the ideology. In his Marxist period, Macintyre endorsed a materialistic understanding of English history, arguing that industrialisation in the nineteenth century was a profound rupture to English society which disrupted the sensibilities that governed English social life. In Secularisation and Moral Change, a series of lectures delivered in 1964 and published in 1967, he would claim that ‘…the homogeneity of pre-industrial life is, of course, easily exaggerated, but the sharpness of the transition from the values of pre-industrial society to the values of life in the Industrial Revolution can scarcely be exaggerated’.

After Virtue is evidently not a work in the tradition of historical materialism. After all, Macintyre blames the rise of individualism on William of Ockham’s rejection of the reality of universals, not the invention of the spinning jenny and the steam engine. This is because the most significant historical influence on Macintyre’s mature thought is not Marx, but The Great Transformation (1944), a classic of socialist history written by the Hungarian Karl Polanyi. In ‘After Virtue and Marxism: A Reply to Warsofsky’, Macintyre would acknowledge that the historical account he provides in After Virtue was profoundly indebted to The Great Transformation.

According to Polanyi, English society had undergone a social revolution between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, progressing from a communal peasant society to a society defined by market logic. For Polanyi, English society only became individualistic as a result of this transformation. Liberal philosophers and classical political economists legitimised this transformation by arguing that individualism was the natural state of man, the proverbial Smithian homo economicus, rather than something that had emerged relatively recently. Accordingly, unchosen relations of kinship and neighbourhood were held to be unnatural fetters on freedom. The influence of Polanyi looms large in After Virtue. There is a studied hostility towards modernity, with a preference towards the mediaeval. Individualism is held to be something that emerged relatively recently to Western civilisation, with liberal philosophy emerging as its theoretical justification.

Whether influenced by Polanyi or Marx, Macintyre’s understanding of English history is profoundly confused. The individualism of nineteenth century capitalism was principally an extension of pre-existing sensibilities in English society, rather than an outside force that profoundly disrupted the old moral order. As the historian Alan MacFarlane points out, ‘It was Smith who was right and Polanyi who was wrong, at least in relation to England. “Homo economicus” and the market society had been present in England for centuries before Smith wrote.’ By this, MacFarlane implies that, at least in some sense, the yeoman farmer would have recognised himself in the twentieth-century City stockbroker, and that the mediaeval wool merchant would have felt at home in Victorian Manchester. Like his industrial descendants, the fourteenth-century wool merchant was a calculating businessman, who thought in terms of profit and loss, truck and barter, risk and reward. He bought low and sold high, extended credit when prudent, and built commercial networks spanning from the Cotswolds to Florence.

Even ordinary people had little in common with the ‘hobbit’ peasant of the post-liberal imagination. Whether or not such people existed elsewhere is question for another time (though even outside of Europe, there seems to be strong evidence that most peasants were in fact far closer to homo economicus than post-liberals would like to imagine). However, what we do know is that the pre-industrial English did not live in a communal society in the sense understood by Polanyi and Macintyre, bound in the same place for several generations; instead, as MacFarlane reminds us, geographic and social mobility was relatively normal. Families would typically stay in a parish for a few generations before going elsewhere. While there is room for debate on the degree, our forebears were — on the whole — freedom-loving, mercantile, materialistic, and generally hostile to religious superstition.

This kind of ahistorical sentimentalism is endemic in post-liberalism. Of course, the post-liberals are hardly unique among political theorists in their ahistoricism. Many doctrines will create an imagined idea of the past, which they then aim to ‘recreate’ in the present. For republican theorists like Machiavelli and Rousseau, this was Rome, or the Helvetic tribes; for post-liberals, this imagined past is a pre-industrial England of strong communities, shared moral frameworks, and face-to-face relationships. However, while both are examples of bad history, the crucial difference is that while the former is at least informed by real aspects of Western civilisation, the latter is simply antithetical to it.

To give another example of post-liberal ahistoricism, in Why Liberalism Failed (2018), a classic of the genre, the American political theorist Patrick Deneen claims that the 2008 global financial crisis partially stemmed from the displacement of mortgage lending from ‘thick’ cultural contexts to high finance, writing that ‘…the near collapse of the world economy in 2008 was, above all, the result of the elimination of a culture that existed to regulate and govern the granting and procuring of mortgages. This activity was historically understood as consummately local, requiring relationships that developed over time and in place.’ He goes on to praise the Amish for their decision to eschew insurance.

Needless to say, such arguments reveal a profound misunderstanding of financial history, relying more upon the fuzzy feelings engendered by It’s A Wonderful Life than upon a cool analysis of the facts. The truth is that lending and insurance have long operated through the market mechanism, with institutions like Lloyd’s of London existing since the seventeenth century. Moreover, the very high rate of bank failures in the United States (as compared to the United Kingdom) during the Great Depression was precisely because of the more ‘local’ character of American banks, which left them highly vulnerable to local shocks; by contrast, the larger banks (which dominated in Britain), with their many branches over a much bigger geographic area, could more easily spread risk.

That was the ’30s, but nor is there much reason to believe that the kind of institution that Deneen seems to be praising — namely small-scale S&Ls (‘savings and loan associations’, effectively the American equivalent of a building society), as well as unit banks — are especially structurally sound today. After all, in the ’80s and ’90s, fully one-third of S&Ls in the United States failed due to the inability of fixed-rate mortgage lending to adjust to higher interest rates after the Volcker shock. This wasn’t directly as a consequence of their small scale per se, but it strongly suggests that localised financial institutions are not inherently and systematically more resilient to shocks than national or global ones, as Deneen seems to claim.

These are just two examples, but I might have given countless others. The closer you look, the more obvious it becomes that in post-liberal readings of history, sentiment will always triumph over reality. The past that they wish to return to never existed; or, at a minimum, never existed in this country.

In summary, post-liberalism fails because it misunderstands the past it purports to recover. Its proponents wish to recreate the worst characteristics of village life: gossipy, parochial, suspicious. What seems like a novel political doctrine transcending the Left-Right divide is, in fact, heavily influenced by socialism, and was developed as one response to the failures of the twentieth-century radical-left. Those seduced by post-liberalism are not restoring an ancient tradition: they are advancing a political project that is fundamentally hostile to the English way of life, both past and present.

The Right should reject this sentimental ahistoricism, and embrace England's actual heritage: a nation of shopkeepers and merchants, philosophers and engineers, explorers and empiricists. It should remember that England pioneered both political liberty and industrial capitalism not by accident but by disposition. The individualism so despised by post-liberals was not an alien imposition upon English society; rather, it was an outgrowth of tendencies that stretch back centuries before the Industrial Revolution. Those who lament the decline of ‘community’ should acknowledge that the English have long preferred voluntary associations to unchosen relations of neighbourhood and kin. Those who condemn ‘neoliberalism’ should recognise that commercial society has been the bedrock of English prosperity and freedom for generations. The exorcism of post-liberalism from right-wing discourse is not merely an academic exercise but necessary to recover an authentic English political tradition.

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This article was written by Lucien Chardon, a Pimlico Journal contributor. Have a pitch? Send it to pimlicojournal@substack.com.

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