Abstracts

Conservative Traditions in the Age of Brexit

In the period 2015-20, British politics was dominated by the question of whether the UK should remain or leave the European Union. The Conservative Party was sharply affected, disrupted and, once again, riven by the subject of Europe. Brexit was a decentring phenomenon for the British state (Beech, 2020); for the party in power; and for its executives. This paper argues that in spite of Prime Ministerial resignations, parliamentary gridlock, the establishment of new minor parties and unprecedented cultural tumult, the Conservative Party demonstrated its ideological breadth. Unlike its great rival - the Labour Party - who embarked upon the narrowing of traditions (Beech, 2021), the Conservative Party, under immense pressure from internal struggle and disputation, proved to be sufficiently pliable. Or, put another way, a broad church.

Phillip Blond

Post-Liberalism, Nationalism and Internationalism.

Post-liberalism is rightly associated with a critique of liberal universalism and its erasure of place, particularity and cultural distinction. As a result, it appears to find a natural affinity or home with and within nationalism and its associated parameters. But whilst this revulsion at liberal hegemony and the imperial enforcement of partisan its ideology is understandable, it does not follow that a coherent post liberalism should be relegated to a purely nationalist response. In addition, many (though not all) post-liberals are religious, so the question bifurcates into can either secular or religious post-liberals be coherently nationalist?

I do not mean to deny that post-liberal nationalism exists (it obviously does) but does it do so in a philosophically coherent fashion or does it betray some fundamental tenant of a more foundational and cogent post-liberal position?

I will argue that nationalism cannot be post-liberal as it is a liberal position. The essence of liberalism is a self-sufficient and unbounded individualism and nationalism is but this paradigm written at a collective scale. So understood there is little post-liberal about nationalism. Indeed, nationalism I will contend is an entirely liberal derivation.

Post-Liberals I contend must recognise and resist the coincidence of modern State formation with language or ethnic homogeneity. Liberalism is autarky, post-liberalism is communitarian and relational. At the level of the state this reduces to a conflict between the good for me and the good for all. To fail to articulate the common good is to repeat purely liberal assertions that deny the existence of such. Over and against any ethno-state formation post-liberalism must embrace a wider, more universal or rather more imperial civilisational project. Not to do so ensures that the Hobbesian formulation of a war of all against all is transferred from the individual to the state level, with inter-state conflict guaranteed. This after all is the message of the Church and indeed is the Christian political project.

Dr Chris Fear (profile)

The Two Faces of Conservatism

In a previous publication I have described the ancient theory of a political “dialectic” between liberals and conservatives, and explained what it tells us about conservative theory and practice, especially where the intergenerational transmission of institutional liberties is concerned.
In this paper (which takes its name from John Gray’s The Two Faces of Liberalism, 2000) I discuss some of the attempts of political theorists and historians to describe a “dialectic” within the conservative tradition of political thought, and within the practices of the English/British Conservative party in particular. I argue that:
1. the “two faces” of conservatism—and indeed of the Conservative party—are still best understood as based on what Michael Oakeshott calls “scepticism” and “faith”. However…
2. conservative “scepticism” should be understood more in terms of prudence, while conservative “faith” (its prescriptive “eudaimonic” face) should be centred upon the success criteria of a human life that are traditional, (partly) nationally specific, centred on personal advancement within established institutions, and (pace Oakeshott) inegalitarian. Further, that
3. the peculiarly conservative idea of a successful life gives conservatives a psychological and (therefore) an electoral advantage over liberals and socialists; and that
4. the Conservative party will continue to succeed, including in the increasingly “post-liberal” climate of the twenty-first century, so long as it understands (i) which of its “two faces” to show to each of the two distinct electoral bases that it now has following the 2019 general election; and (ii) how to draw on its eudaimonic tradition to develop a coherent conservative programme of “restoring” the institutions of personal advancement as a means to fortifying its new working-class support base.

Mary Harrington

Welcome to Actually Existing Post-Liberalism

'Post-liberalism' is generally used to describe a political stance that is broadly right-leaning on social issues and more left-leaning on economic ones. That is, one that embraces a more activist state willing to make explicit interventions in the name of moral norms even if these impose some limits on individual limits or the activities of the market.

But while the right is now embroiled in a debate over the merits of this stance, particularly in the US, the most salient post-liberal turn is not among conservatives but progressives. Faced with pandemic, most Western governments abandoned classical-liberal conventions and embraced overt forms of authority ordered to moral norms, a shift that has been eagerly embraced by a progressive elite and that is now spreading beyond Covid mitigation measures. It is resisted only by an eccentric and officially reviled coalition that includes at best a subset of conservatives.

The 'post-liberal' faction among conservatives is ambivalent on these developments. The shift has been welcomed by some in structural terms, but is ordered to moral norms inimical to the broadly conservative (and usually Christian) values usually associated with ‘post liberal’ politics. I will draw examples from Covid-era biopolitics, and the emerging contest over marketising human reproduction, to show that this 'actually existing post-liberalism' amounts to a doctrine of all-out war on relationships, that hacks at the roots of what it means to be human.

If what we call “post-liberal” politics is to be anything other than a wishful gloss on emerging dystopia it has to reckon more frankly with what it does and does not share with its now-ascendant other: post-liberal progressivism. This in turn means abandoning liberal-era political battlefields that have been rendered obsolete, and embracing a new pragmatism in terms of where political agency actually lies in the 21st century.

Kevin Hickson (profile)

The Conservative Right: Past, Present and Future

Since the 1970s the right-wing of the Conservative Party of the United Kingdom has been synonymous with free-market economics. However, this had not always been the case, indeed historically the Conservative Right, just as much as the Left, had been sceptical of free-market ideas. The paper will argue that economic liberalism has over-reached itself and created a number of problems which the state has to address. But alternative ideas held historically on the Conservative Right may be relevant once again. The paper will start by outlining the conception of the Conservative Right which I have developed in my own scholarship before going on to show the relevance of several of its ideas for contemporary Conservative politics as it faces challenges such as the environment, Brexit, Covid and the new electoral coalition after the 2019 General Election. Finally it will ask what prospects such a rethought Conservatism has.

Dr. David Jeffery (profile)

U-turn if you want to: What evidence for the post-liberal turn in British Conservatism?

Post-liberal thinking has been swirling around Britain’s main political parties since the global financial crisis. The Labour Party flirted with it under Ed Miliband, before retreating back into its liberal comfort zone but a more serious engagement with post-liberalism has taken place within the Conservative Party, and among associated thinkers.
Both Theresa May and Boris Johnson have been labelled post-liberal, and were described as challenging the pre-Brexit status-quo of social and economic liberalism. However, most of this analysis has been done by the commentariat, who often use post-liberalism in a vague and varied (and pejorative) manner.
In this talk I will explore the extent to which post-liberal thought has actually permeated the Conservative party, by analysing the policy platforms of candidates in the 2019 leadership election, the policy proposals of various Conservative-aligned pressure groups, and exploring the demand for post-liberal policies among Conservative voters.

Prof. Eric Kaufmann

Toward a Liberal Post-Liberalism

I argue that an effective and ethically sound post-liberalism cannot abandon procedural liberalism. We must distinguish between what Isaiah Berlin terms ‘negative’ and ‘positive’ liberalism. A negative liberal framework of individual rights and protections is vital to the good society. What is not are prescriptive ‘liberal’ ideals such as cosmopolitanism, avant-garde modernism or ‘Critical Social Justice’ (what I term cultural socialism). These have all been slipped in through the back door and labeled ‘liberalism’ but are in fact versions of positive liberalism that have become coercive, violating negative liberalism. A postliberal political programme must respect fundamental liberties and the quasi-autonomy of courts. Rather than imposing a set of values or pining for theocracy or autocracy, postliberals need to focus on penetrating the organizational layer of institutions that stands between government and society. This means intensively regulating, say, universities, public broadcasters or oligopolistic tech firms, to ensure that they are upholding free speech and political non-discrimination. It means focusing on shaping the school curriculum. Shortcuts like abolishing tenure or cutting funding are deceptive and ineffective. Instead, regulation needs to get into the complexities of cultural content and definitions of terms such as racism and harassment. A strong policy network of sympathetic intellectuals and talented individuals needs to be cultivated to fill public positions so as to check their drift toward cultural socialism. This can all be done without violating the fundamental precepts of negative liberalism.

Kit Kowol

The arteries of our Party are stiffening as the result of the infusion of blood that is foreign to the true nature of Conservatism': Conservatives against liberalism and lessons from the Second World War

During the Second World War a loose coalition of journalists, authors, landowners, historians, and MPs engaged in one of the last concerted attempt to rid the Conservative Party of what they saw as the baleful influence of liberalism. Sharing the argument that totalitarianism was the product rather than negation of individualism they worked within and without the Conservative Party to develop their own self-consciously ‘Tory’ alternatives to both liberalism and socialism. Bringing to life these lost Tory visions for Britain’s postwar future—from the hyper-modern corporatism of the Tory Reform Committee to the back-to-the-land dreams of the Kinship in Husbandry via the proposals by future foreign secretary, R. A. Butler, to establish a new ‘Christian Civilization’—the paper examines the different ways they tried to solve the ills of modern society while still preserving a distinctly English way of life. Examining their understandings of liberalism, their relationship with the Conservative Party, and their postwar legacy the paper asks what contemporary post-liberals might learn from their wartime forbears.

James Orr

In the Wake of the Great Unwindings: Christianity and the Future of Postliberalism

Despite Christianity’s accelerating collapse as an institutionally significant force in the United Kingdom, the most invigorating visions of the country’s future in recent years have been grounded in explicitly theological diagnoses of liberalism’s ills. This paper argues that what animates postliberalism’s distinctive blend of radicalism and conservatism are Christianity’s lode-bearing commitments to human dignity, fallibility, and reciprocity as aspects of a single metaphysical reality. Postliberalism’s theological pedigree protects it not only from atavistic and libertarian renditions of conservatism, but also from progressivism’s reductively quantitative versions of egalitarianism and, in particular, its socially corrosive embrace of identity politics. Second, by uniting the particular and the universal, Christianity enables postliberalism to acknowledge the legitimacy of the right’s lament for the loss of custom and place alongside the left’s yearning for global moral consensus. Finally, it holds in balance the right’s recognition of human fallibility with the left’s faith in human possibility. For all that, though, an obvious objection arises: how can theology underpin policy in a plural polity, especially at a time when the prestige and competence of Christianity’s institutional actors have disintegrated beyond repair? Integralist proposals are as implausible as the idea that there is any prospect of returning to an authentically Christian vision of international order. Amidst the great unwindings of liberalism and institutional religion in the United Kingdom, I propose that a theologically grounded postliberalism should ally itself to secular but sympathetic fellow-travellers and diffuse itself through society via coordinated but decentralised networks of actors spread across the country’s institutional landscape to inaugurate its bracing vision of the common good.

Daniel Pitt

Oikophilia: Towards a Post-liberal Conservative View of the Environment

In this talk, I will outline what a post-liberal conservative view of the environment could be. According to Castellano (2011) environmentalism ‘is usually affiliated with liberalism’, it has also been equated within ‘woke’ politics. In may seem Prima facie that such as ideational view is implausible. Nevertheless, I will argue that a post-liberal conservative view of the environment not only plausible, but it is also a coherent ideational view and is distinct from liberalism and wokeism. To do this, I will draw on key historical and contemporary conservative thinkers such as Edmund Burke, William Wordsworth, Wendell Berry, Roger Scruton and Adrian Vermeule. I argue that the post-liberal conservative view is based on seven core principles which are: (1) oikophilia, (2) trusteeship, (3) localism (that builds outwards and upward in concentric circles), (4) intergenerational obligations (5) piety, (6) embeddedness and (7) prudence. Moreover, I will argue that such ideational view leads to a clean and green bundle of policies that is underpinned by a coherent governing philosophy.

Aris Roussinos

Post-liberalism or post-conservatism? Redefining Toryism for a post-liberal era.

Liberalism has not served the Conservative party well: even as the party wins successive elections, it has found itself unable to translate electoral success into a meaningful political programme, and conceded so much ground to its opponents that its long-term survival is now in doubt. Trapped within mid-20th century orthodoxies, British conservatism has conserved little of value, and is now living on borrowed time. How can the party reform itself, and the British state, to defend the values which Conservatives profess to believe in a deteriorating domestic and international situation? The answer lies not in critiquing a failing liberal order from the sidelines but in meeting the challenges and seizing the opportunities created by the current moment, a period of great and historic change. When there is nothing left to conserve, conservatives must steel themselves to rebuild.

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