Translated from German with the help of AI. The original is the authoritative version.

When Polity Press sent me two books on postliberalism for review at the start of the year, I was at first a little surprised. Time had somehow caught up with me: had Adrian Pabst not just in 2020 called out the „post-liberal moment"?

And yet, reading Matt Sleat and Paul Kelly, it quickly became clear that since that summer of 2019, which I spent with these forerunners of the much-invoked „vibe shift”, more time has passed than one would think.

And at the same time, somehow, not.

Because Deneen, Vermeule, and the rest, seen from today, look strangely fleeting, transient, and ultimately without consequence. Intellectually (and possibly soon politically too), postliberalism has just sort of … fizzled out.

It can hardly come as a surprise, then, that the odd philosophy professor turns up at the last minute to survey postliberalism in the form of taxonomies, conceptual analyses, and placements in the history of ideas. It reminds me a little of the moment when my barber asks me about Bitcoin again in the next bull run. Or put differently: is this Peak Postliberalism?

Kelly and Sleat would probably disagree vehemently with this diagnosis. Both treat postliberalism as a serious intellectual current that has to be met with analytical seriousness and conceptual care. That speaks for them. But that is exactly where the problem lies. Much of it feels like an over-intellectualisation of a phenomenon whose zenith and force have long since passed.

This does not diminish the quality of their analyses in the slightest. On the contrary. Both deliver helpful and often charitable readings of a movement that, in wide parts, is destructive and undercooked. But even their patience has limits. Paul Kelly offers not only a systematic presentation of the three faces of postliberalism (national populism, common-good communitarianism, and common-good absolutism), but also a precise deconstruction of its method: the strategic „unmasking” of liberalism through selective genealogies. Matt Sleat complements this on the analytical and intellectual-historical level. He shows wonderfully clearly how postliberalism constructs an almost Frankenstein-like caricature of liberalism as an enemy, one that goes far beyond the poltergeist of „neoliberalism”. Sleat then pins a simple category mistake on the postliberals: they simply confuse liberalism with modernity and hold it responsible for modernity’s unavoidable side-effects.

In short: both authors make important contributions to the conceptual placement of this movement. At the same time, one may ask whether they do not also fall into the trap of overrating their object of study. That would be understandable. The more intensively one engages with a subject, the more one tends to overestimate its relevance. One can then perhaps lose sight of the fact that, even though Adrian Vermeule is a Harvard professor, the probability that the US gets rebuilt as a Catholic theocracy because of his ideas is close to zero. Or at least about as likely as the chance that Amlinger and Nachtwey ever read Nozick and the rest.

The inclined reader will therefore tend to agree with the reading of Jan-Werner Müller: postliberalism is in the end little more than an elaborated „own the libs” by frustrated conservative university professors.

And if one speaks today with postliberal thought leaders, one quickly notices that little of the enthusiasm for a coherent intellectual project is present that Kelly and Sleat conjure up in their analyses.

Only weeks ago, at a conference, I asked Patrick Deneen himself whether he shared my thesis of a „Peak Postliberalism”. He dodged. He had said all he had to say on the topic and was now devoting himself to other things, like ancient Greece. He was, quote, not a „movement guy”. I take that as a polite farewell. In any case, it is not the sign of a particularly vital movement of thought.

The more obvious conclusion, therefore: Kelly and Sleat lend postliberalism more intellectual radiance than it ever had or wanted. For Deneen and the rest, it was never about a systematic critique of ideology or the further development of a common-good oriented communitarianism for the present. At the centre always stood the polemic against the supposed dominance of a Rawlsian left-liberalism at the universities, something that drove all these authors at a deeply personal level. And Orbán’s foot soldiers at the MCC were above all in the business of building a politically useful counter-narrative to liberal democracy.

A productive theoretical discourse, of the kind Sleat and Kelly reconstruct, never grew out of it. There is neither a successor generation of postliberal thinkers, nor a recognisable further development, nor a serious engagement with postliberalism on the liberal side. Precisely for this reason, postliberalism barely qualifies as a deep object of study. It looks much more like a politically motivated, hasty, and shoddily executed attempt at revolution, one that wanted to anchor the funeral hymn for liberalism above all narratively, in other words: metapolitically. But it was never really taken seriously, neither by liberals nor by postliberals themselves.

And precisely this shows up again, implicitly, in the closing chapters of both books at hand. There the authors quite unintentionally support my working thesis when they formulate their own answers to the postliberal critique. They do exactly what one would expect from left-liberal university professors: they return to the long-familiar, stale liberalism debates of recent decades, be it the missing liberal perfectionism (Sleat) or the necessity of a stronger economic egalitarianism (Kelly). The „postliberal moment” has passed these two thinkers by and is, in the end, at best used to put their old hobbyhorses back in the shop window in book form. The fleeting fashion has not really changed the shape of liberalism.

In that sense, the oh-so-traditionalist postliberalism is itself precisely what it despises: a hyperpolitical discourse phenomenon. Much attention, much outrage, much performativity, but no structural force at all and no change.

Thank god, one might say, in true postliberal fashion.