We Are All Postliberals Now

Well before the election results of November 2024, a growing number of thinkers had concluded – many despairingly, some joyfully – that liberalism had reached its high water mark, and was receding as the consensus political commitment across the West. But putting aside the defenses or critiques of the theory of liberalism, most actors had ceased to be practicing liberals well before the rise of Trump, Brexit, and right populism. The Left had abandoned core aspects of liberal practice in what it believed to be a defense of substantive liberal goods, evinced especially in speech codes, cancellation, and willingness to abandon democratic outcomes unfavorable to liberalism in favor of a politics dominated by biased liberal institutions, experts, and bureaucrats. The Right’s neo-liberalism was electorally defeated in favor of economic populism and an increasingly influential form of neo-Nietzschean reaction. If liberals exist, they are largely a spent political force. We are now in a time of contesting post-liberalisms, portending a turbulent political future in which “going back” to the liberal consensus is not an option.

This event is sponsored by the McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society.

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Bios:

Patrick J. Deneen is Professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame. Prior to joining the faculty of Notre Dame in 2012, he was Speechwriter and Special Advisor to the Director of the United States Information Agency (1995-1997), Assistant Professor of Politics at Princeton University (1997-2005), and Tsakopoulos-Kounalakis Associate Professor of Government at Georgetown University (2005-2012). His teaching and writing interests focus on the history of political thought, American political thought, religion and politics, and literature and politics.

Jennifer Burns is an Associate Professor of History at Stanford, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, and a faculty affiliate of the Stanford Civics Initiative. She has authored biographies of Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman, and has written widely on American history, with a focus on conservatism, economic ideas, and politics. Courses that she teaches at Stanford include American Intellectual History Since 1900, Thinking About Capitalism, and College 102: Citizenship.

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