(Post-)Liberalism and its Critics

Matt Sleat (University of Sheffield) : "(Post-)Liberalism and its Critics"

Organisation : Nathalie Anna Champroux, Laurence Harris, Catherine Marshall, Stéphane Porion, Stéphane Revillet & Karine Tournier Sol.

Liberals have become well-practiced over the centuries in the art of claiming to have been misunderstood. In more recent times, it is their post-liberal and populist critics who they claim to have most egregiously misconstrued what liberalism is. This ‘misunderstanding objection’, as I call it, has been most fully and forcefully developed by historians of liberal ideas, who have adroitly (and rightly shown) that liberalism has taken a variety of forms over the course of its existence. As such, to equate liberalism per se with its more recent variants (Rawlsian political liberalism, neo-liberalism, or progressive identitarianism), as its post-liberal critics are wont to do, is not only anachronistic, it also (purposefully) obscures the fact that liberalism has successfully adapted to meet equivalent challenges in the past, and so keep open the possibility that it might do so again.

But how far does the misunderstanding objection get liberals, even when perfectly justified as a response? In this paper I want to suggest not very far at all. To do so I want to adapt a criticism of post-liberals that I make in my book (Post-Liberalism) and turn it back on liberalism itself. Drawing on insights from realist political thought, though familiar also from conservative thought also, I argue that political theories do not get to determine their own social conditions. There is always a prior question political theorists need to ask as to how far their ideas, theories, concepts, etc. make sense in light of a realistic understanding of existing social conditions. Post-liberalism fails to heed this ‘realist constraint’, but liberals have yet to even ask the question. Just as liberalism was able to successfully adapt to survive in the past, so, liberals too often assume, must the social conditions exist for it to do so again today. There is reason to be sceptical that this is necessarily the case.

Matt Sleat is Professor of Politics at the University of Sheffield in the School of Sociological Studies, Politics and International Relations. His work focuses on realist political thought, liberal philosophy, and international relations theory. He is the author of Post-Liberalism (2025) and Liberal Realism (2013), and editor of Politics Recovered (2018), with over 20 articles published in leading journals. In 2020, he received the Mid-Career Prize from the Britain and Ireland Association for Political Thought. He has held fellowships from the Leverhulme Trust and British Academy, and visiting positions at the Australian National University, Queen Mary University of London, King’s College London, and the University of Oxford. He is currently co-editor of the European Journal of Political Theory and previously co-edited Political Studies.