Working Definition episode 14: Postliberalism, with Thomas Howes
In this episode, Thomas Howes and I discuss postliberalism. We talk about the relation between postliberalism and liberalism, whether postliberalism is best thought of as a political movement, the current-day and past thinkers who’ve become key to different branches of postliberalism, the values and principles that seem central to postliberalism generally, and much more. In short, we do some philosophy! I hope you enjoy it...TRANSCRIPT[The following transcript was generated by AI, so while it’s been checked over, it may contain small errors.]REBECCA: Hi, I'm Rebecca Lowe and welcome to Working Definition, the new philosophy podcast in which I talk with different philosophical guests about different philosophical concepts, with the aim of reaching a rough, accessible, but rigorous working definition.Today, I'm joined by Thomas Howes. Thomas lectures in politics and ethics at Princeton. He has a background in philosophy. He's the co-author of a recent excellent book, Why Postliberalism Failed. He has an upcoming book with Notre Dame Press, called Beyond Postliberalism. And today, yes, as you might have guessed, we're going to be talking about postliberalism. Thomas, thanks so much for joining me.THOMAS: Oh, thank you for having me on the show.REBECCA: So, I thought we'd start with a bit of a silly philosopher's question about the relation between postliberalism and liberalism. So, I'm wondering things like, could you understand what postliberalism is if you didn't know what liberalism is? So say you've just never heard of this thing, liberalism, could you get into getting what postliberalism is? To what extent is it parasitic on liberalism?THOMAS: Gosh, that's a really good question, and I guess one of the issues is identifying what liberalism is actually really difficult. [laughter] I think I mentioned to you earlier the… Wittgenstein has this concept of words as defined by family resemblance.REBECCA: Mm-hmm.THOMAS: And, you know, you can think of that like how in a family, Bob looks like Harry because of one thing, and then Harry looks like Karen because of another thing, and Karen looks like Susie because of another thing. But Susie, does she really look like Bob? Well, definitely not in the same way. You know what I mean? All that, right? So that's kind of how it ends up becoming with a lot of…. In philosophy, we can avoid that with clear definitions. But the problem is, when you're working with political movements, there's such an organic component to them that brings together many different people and different ideas under certain banners. So I don't know if it's actually helpful to give a, you know, a perfect definition of these. People will fight forever about what ‘fascism’ is. I think all of them make good arguments, and that maybe at the end of the day, there is a little bit of choice in whether you're going to call something ‘fascist’ or not. The best thing you can do is say it has similarities with the other things that people call ‘fascism’, right? Similar thing with liberalism. We see that — one of the postliberals that we address in the book is Patrick Deneen. And really, we're focused on these Catholic postliberals. We almost have to use an ostensive definition where we point to this clique of Catholic postliberals like Patrick Deneen, and Adrian Vermeule of Harvard Law School.Patrick Deneen's a political theorist at Notre Dame, and he wrote a book in 2016 called Why Liberalism Failed.REBECCA: Yes, which gives a little signal to the context of your book.THOMAS: Yes, that's right. That's right. So we're just teasing, right? [laughter] Some people got so mad about that title, and I was like, it was just a joke… REBECCA: It's funny to me, though, because this second book you're writing, Beyond Postliberalism. Because one thing somebody might say, if they were being super cynical is, like, look, you're trying to, on some level, there's some sense in which your book is trying to warn us against postliberalism.THOMAS: Yeah.REBECCA: You do a very nice job, for instance, of saying how postliberal instantiations have failed. Here are bad things about postliberalism. Yet, you’ve said it's failed! So does that mean we don't need to worry about it?THOMAS: Oh, yeah. Well, within the book — you know, it's supposed to be a provocative title. Within the book, we qualify what exactly we mean by failure. It doesn't always mean failing politically, at least as far as gaining power. But if gaining power ends up with outcomes that even your own moral worldview can't accept as moral, then I think that's a kind of failure, even if it's a political success. And I think that's what you see in a lot of the cases that we identify in the book. But back to Deneen, though. When he has his argument against liberalism, he connects people from Thomas Hobbes all the way to John Rawls and Barack Obama — and, as if this target is liberalism. So, as part of the same target are George Washington and James Madison and John Dewey, right? So, that's a similar issue to nailing down what liberalism is. And I think one of the criticisms that I had of his book, and it was a very rhetorically brilliant book. It was a diatribe, which are generally more fun to read than other academic works, at least for the general public especially. And he's also very good at identifying problems in contemporary society. And I think that's where a lot of the — what attracts people to the book is that he's not afraid to identify certain problems that maybe other people are afraid to mention. Like, with education, or with the expansive bureaucracies, and all these other things that we deal with today. But I think the big criticism that I had right away was it's too broad. I mean, you're attacking George Washington and James Madison at the same time as John Dewey, and that seems to me like too big of a target. And his narrative, that it all came from — the whole thing emerged from the seed of a sort of social contract theory from Hobbes. First, I don't find believable for historical reasons. I don't find it believable for philosophical reasons. But the idea then that John Dewey or, you know, one of the hot button issues for the postliberal right are some of these social issues today, dealing with wokeness, for instance.I don't believe that there's a necessary relationship between George Washington and wokeness. [laughter] I'm saying you can support George Washington and reject wokeness, right? And whatever wokeness is, too. That's also a family resemblance word probably as well. [laughter]So our target then is… But after Why Liberalism Failed, at the end of Why Liberalism Failed, Patrick Deneen has a pretty sensible solution. He says that we should just focus on local democracy.REBECCA: Yes.THOMAS: And at the end, people are like, well, what's so radical about that? It's like, no, it wasn't radical in its policy proposal! It was more radical that it engendered a sort of resentment against the American experiment. REBECCA: So I read a bit of the opening section, last night. I'd been meaning to read this book. Last year, we had a load of interns at Mercatus, and they were all reading this book because it's this big social phenomenon.THOMAS: Yeah. REBECCA: I think it came out, what, 2017 or something?THOMAS: I think so, yeah.REBECCA: But it seemed to have this almost, like, little set of resurgences.THOMAS: Yeah.REBECCA: And it was clearly going through one of these moments, last summer. And I think it's still around… THOMAS: I think it sold over 60,000 copies, which for an academic press is incredible.REBECCA: That is incredible. And he certainly is a, like you say, a rhetorical writer. He's very easy to read. I found the opening quite amusing in its treatment of liberalism. It does that thing of, "Hey, maybe liberalism's failed because it's illiberal!" I find this amusing. Liberalism can be many things, but liberalism can't be illiberal.THOMAS: Yeah, that's right.REBECCA: And then he also is sort o… This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit endsdontjustifythemeans.com
