Recently, we shared a word from Praxis Circle Contributor R. R. “Rusty” Reno, editor of First Things, on the definition of postliberalism, a movement increasingly picking up steam. Loosely defined, postliberalism is a response to “later-stage” Western liberalism’s problematic over-emphasis on freedom as the ultimate good for society. While in obvious opposition to postmodernism, postliberalism is a lagging, yet parallel movement, agreeing with postmodernists that modernity could be entering a new phase.
Postliberalists recognize freedom is a good, like light, water, food, salt, air, and shelter, but they emphasize that it is not an ultimate good. (Postmodernists do not recognize truth or ultimate goods.) To postliberalists, freedom is more a necessary condition along the road to reach life’s ultimate goods. In many ways, they see freedom as a neutral condition always filled by human beings with good and/or evil, depending on the worldview.
So, “worldview”: that explains Praxis Circle’s sincere interest in this relatively new movement.
In an effort to keep the dialogue going on this topic, we thought it would be helpful to present an abbreviated excerpt from an essay by economist and Praxis Circle Contributor Deirdre McCloskey. We do so below with Deirdre’s permission.
Deirdre has written extensively on liberalism, including the most recent publication Why Liberalism Works: How True Liberal Values Produce a Freer, More Equal, Prosperous World for All (2019)—perhaps in response to postliberalism proponent Patrick Daneen’s Why Liberalism Failed published just a year earlier. Here Deirdre makes the case for classic liberalism and the need to stay true to its core principles.
Liberalism was first articulated two-and-a-half centuries ago, particularly in the Anglosphere, and most particularly in Scotland and Massachusetts. When applied generally, —though always incompletely and always contested by “yon birkie ca’d a lord”—the true liberalism of people like Adam Smith and Abigail Adams had most gratifying results. The motto of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, founded in 1780 by dawn-time liberals, declares Sub libertate florent, “Under liberty they flourish.” They eventually did so flourish— not because of the alleged spoils from slavery, imperialism, statist economics, the nation state, or the course of the class struggle, and not even because of Enlightenment and science, which as often as not armed the state as much they gave scope to its subjects.
The turn was a new and fundamental personal liberty to venture. Steadily widening permission in liberalism to try out new ideas or new places or new work or new relationships, denied for millennia, caused innovation to explode. … Think of a constitution as the rules for a footrace, a nice or nasty one. Liberals by any definition have agreed since the 18th century that the ancient rules such as “Kings always win” or “Women always lose” are to be replaced in life’s footrace by rules of justice as fairness for all. Equality is the watchword, though not the old equality of slavish oppression under our betters—betters exempted from the equality, their power naturalized. …
But attempts to apply such an equality at the finish line to larger groups have regularly failed, economically and then politically, at length even in many of the little intentional communities motivated by an egalitarian ideology. St. Paul heard that some Thessalonian Christians were refusing to work, in anticipation of an imminent Second Coming. Why work if the Messiah will divide the sheep from the goats tomorrow, or maybe next week? Why work if a very generous basic income is paid to you, extracted from other people’s work-product? Why cook if Mom will anyway? Common sense counsels taking a free ride, and a free lunch. To this St. Paul thundered, Margaret-Thatcher style, “He who does not work should not eat.”…
By contrast to hard socialist programs, the middle of the conventional political spectrum, recognizing in life’s footrace the impracticality and consequent evil for large groups of a Rousseauian, enforced equality of outcome, has promised instead since John Stuart Mill an equality of opportunity. Let us all begin the race together at the same starting line. Then it’s race on, yet prudence and justice are served. Splendid. No Cinderella is held back while her sisters race for the hand of the prince. Again, such an equality should and often does work well for small groups, such as families, or friends in the Cheers bar at 75 Chestnut Street in Boston, or the elite runners in the Boston Marathon lined up together at the start. By fair rule or loving custom, let us begin the race equally.
Yet liberalism of any sort claims also to be ethically cosmopolitan. A child born in South Sudan is of course in liberal and Abrahamic ethics to be valued equally with a child born in France. … The practical problem is that no compensation short of immediate emigration to Paris can put the South Sudanese child anywhere near the same starting line as the French child. … We indulge a foolish utopianism to believe it can, or pretending that our pathetic attempts at redistribution actually compensate for difference. Better to embrace diversity and benefit from it. …
To try to compensate by state action for all inequalities of opportunity, or even for some of the major ones of birth, in short, is a Romantic and utopian plan with no chance of even approximate fulfilment. … Every non-true-liberal liberal political philosophy slides down towards the statism of Plato’s Republic or of Hobbes Leviathan or of Marx’s dictatorship of the proletariat. “Inequality” and “externalities” have become all-purpose rallying cries among quasi-liberals. …
What, then, should be the true-liberal rule in the footrace of life? It should be an equality of permission, or allowance, or approval for a general right to do, to enter in the race as an adult. It should be what Adam Smith proposed in 1776 as “the obvious and simple system of natural liberty.” Wherever you start in the race, or wherever the betting might predict you will end it, under a liberal equality of permission you may, as the sporting British put it, “have a go.” … That’s what “competition” means. Competition is not, as imagined by many non-economists, a terrifying struggle red in tooth and claw, or even the zero-sum of a cricket match, but the positive sum of the permission to enter the race and to offer what you imagine is a better good or better service to customers. As the German philosopher of money, Georg Simmel, put it in 1900, economic competition is not a coercion but a seduction.
A liberal equality of permission, allowing people to proceed without let and hindrance, opposes therefore the anciently coerced or inherited hierarchies of gender or status or race or office, a top-down governing of the childlike women or slaves or, as Mill did in his day job, the Sub-continent’s subjects under British rule. If the liberty of permission is raised to a leading ethical principle, it makes for dignified people, though they begin the race ever so poor. Dignity is what people want above all. Riches are nice, but the man of independent mind sets aside envy and anger, and in self-respect he gets on with the footrace. …
The American economist John Bates Clark predicted in 1901 that in a liberal economy “the typical laborer will increase his wages [in real terms, allowing for inflation] from one dollar a day to two, from two to four and from four to eight. Such gains will mean infinitely more to him than any possible increase of capital can mean to the rich. . . . This very change will bring with it a continual approach to equality of genuine comfort.” The prediction was spot on, and achieved by spontaneous order, not by the state and its promise of freedom from want. The anti-liberal and envious and zero-sum and childish myths in practice don’t work. A true liberalism is the only adultism.
Let us as liberals, then, permit a dignified, adult equality of permission. Let us fear a larger and larger state. Let us put away most of the cudgels.
– Deirdre McCloskey, “Equality of Permission” (2024)
As Deirdre explains above, liberalism is “true adultism”—the freedom to “enter into the race.” Americans who pledge “liberty and justice for all” should all be on board with this definition of classical liberalism. There is no debate that the West has flourished economically from this classical ideology, among many other societal advances, and produced one of the freest societies known to man. Below is a clip from our interview with Deirdre expressing this:
But with the advent of this freedom and economic success, has the West gone morally bankrupt in the process? This is the question that many postliberals seem to be asking. As Rusty explained in his previous post, society is in need of “positive freedom toward the good.” We have severed freedom from the virtues necessary to uphold it and produce true human flourishing:
The consequences of abandoning these virtues are manifold: a mushrooming government, the family’s destruction, the degradation of life and the human body, an increasing, self-obsessed, and harmful individualism. Of course, two and a half centuries ago, the lion’s share of human beings in Europe and North America were Christians. In sum, we believe that the further we stray from the West’s Classic Judeo-Christian worldview, the greater the negative consequences of freedom become.
If history shows anything, it proves that human beings without guardrails are destructive. Our ideas and intentions can be good, but how we carry out those ideas always produce unintended consequences. Perhaps this is where we find ourselves today with classical liberalism.
In an effort to reject a hierarchical societal structure and create an equal playing field for everyone, we have left our human vices unchecked. While we have become incredibly prosperous as a nation in America, we’ve also developed a collective weight problem (“fat Americans”) and an Internet riddled with dehumanizing pornography.
It is said business exists to serve human needs. Should it serve evil human needs, or just good ones? Who decides? Do we need a social legal structure that provides more than our unfettered selves to produce a good society truly worth living in?
Perhaps we do need a hierarchy of moral values and social institutions to make a better way. Postmodernism, neo-Marxism, and identitarianism offer us little-to-nothing in morality or moral structure. In fact, quite the opposite. The is the Triple Alliance producing a central government, as in China, that seeks to own us, our children, and our property. We become degraded slaves.
Whether they’re the “bourgeois virtues” or something else, freedom alone is valueless other than as pure license, and it cannot serve as a singular moral or governmental foundation.
Let us then strive for the equality of permission, while being mindful of what we’re actually asking permission to do. Doing what we ought to do as defined by good American citizens (The People) is usually a good starting point and road forward.
