Postliberalism as ethos

This essay is a response to the first three articles of the special section on "Debating Postliberalism" in the previous issue of Telos.1 These essays, by Adrian Pabst, John Milbank, and Michael Lind, closely align to the extent that they constitute in my estimation a singular argument for a "postliberal pluralism." Milbank, Lind, and Pabst each start their articles with a brilliant and penetrating analysis of the genealogy and vicissitudes of liberalism. I endorse these analyses along with their vision of a postliberal path that saves what is good about liberalism from liberalism's own excesses. The determination of that path in the form of "pluralism" by all three seems to me, however, to outstrip their premises in ways that I am leery of following. My disagreement with Milbank, Lind, and Pabst is that, notwithstanding the correctness of their analyses and the appositeness of their practical proposals, their understanding of their own postliberalism amounts to something like a category mistake. By my lights, postliberalism is not truly a political but an ethical phenomenon, and I mean this both as a descriptive and a normative diagnosis, which is to say that this is both how the concept of postliberalism ought to operate and how it already does in practice. By this, I mean not merely to split hairs but substantively to dissent concerning postliberalism's present status and future prospects: where Pabst, Milbank, and Lind consider postliberalism a kind of new politics via fresh (or refreshed) policy directions, encompassing a reimagining of the purpose of politics, I argue that postliberalism should embrace its nature as a form of distanciation from politics as such.