Liberalism is in crisis; whether or not it’s over is another issue. Are we entering a “postliberal” era? A motley roster of thinkers believe so: John Gray, John Milbank, Mary Harrington, Sohrab Ahmari, Adrian Vermeule. What would postliberalism mean or look like? If indeed liberalism is finally passing from the historical stage, perhaps it’s time to invoke Hegel’s lapidary adage that “the owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk”: we understand the meaning of an epoch only as it comes to an end. Is the liberal dispensation drawing to a close? Is the owl of Minerva flying once again?
What is—or was—liberalism? For Deneen, a professor of politics at Notre Dame, liberalism names a commitment to liberation from what are perceived as the restraints and oppressions of tradition and custom. Animating the emancipatory project of “progress,” liberalism extols the expansion of personal freedom, social mobility rather than fixed stations or estates, and incessant technological innovation and material prosperity. Moyn—a professor of history and law at Yale—shares this account but reformulates it as “the modern perfectionism of creative agency”; for him, liberalism denotes a faith in the capacity of human beings to make and remake themselves and the world for the better. Deneen’s lineage of liberalism is exclusively Anglophone: Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, John Stuart Mill, John Rawls. Moyn’s liberals hail from Britain, the Continent, and the United States, home of the “Cold War liberals” he considers traitors to the cause. We read of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Benjamin Constant, Alexis de Tocqueville (whose liberal credentials Moyn emphasizes against conservative attempts to enlist him), German idealists and Romantics, now-obscure figures such as T. H. Green, L. T. Hobhouse, and Bernard Bonsanquet, along with Isaiah Berlin, Hannah Arendt, and Americans such as Judith N. Shklar and Lionel Trilling. The differences in these intellectual genealogies matter. Deneen can find little if anything worth preserving in the liberal tradition, while Moyn’s more capacious narrative allows him to be more hopeful about its future—as well as about that of any “postliberal” successor.