Left Conservatism: The Future?
From the 2024 Postliberalism Conference
Over the coming days, we will be posting videos from Political Economy and the Good Life: The 2024 Postliberalism Conference, which took place on December 13–14, 2024, at the University of Cambridge. Many videos are already available, with more to come soon. If you are not yet a subscriber, be sure to subscribe to Telos Insights to receive updates when each new video is posted.
The following video is from plenary session 5, entitled “Left Conservatism: The Future?,” from day 2 of Political Economy and the Good Life: The 2024 Postliberalism Conference. This session was moderated by Jason Cowley, Editor-in-Chief of The New Statesman. The panel featured presentations from the following five speakers:
Phillip Blond, Director, ResPublica and author of Red Tory (2010);
Miriam Cates, GB News Presenter; Senior Fellow, Centre for Social Justice; former Conservative Member of Parliament for Penistone and Stocksbridge;
David Goodhart, Head of Demography, Immigration & Integration, Policy Exchange; author of The Care Dilemma (2024);
Dan Hitchens, Senior Editor, First Things; and
Katja Hoyer, Visiting Research Fellow, King’s College London, and author of Beyond the Wall (2023).
The 2024 Postliberalism Conference took place on December 13–14, 2024, in the McCrum Lecture Theatre, Corpus Christi College, University of Cambridge, UK. Co-sponsored by the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute, the Centre for Social Renewal, Energeia, and Plough, the conference brought together leading academics, politicians, policymakers, and journalists to explore the errors and excesses of liberalism and to conceptualize constructive alternatives to its worldview and to the dominant theoretical models that underpin it.
On day 1, our focus was on political economy, in particular the nature of the crisis of liberalism, the contradictions of capitalism, and a shift from globalization, the “knowledge economy,” debt and speculation toward national resilience, vocations and crafts, investment and production. The discussion also included new ideas about foreign policy and ecology with an emphasis on realist approaches to interests and the exercise of power.
Day 2 expanded our conversation to new thinking about politics, including virtue politics and left conservatism, but also how to combat the machine by re-humanizing technology, how to purse the good life in relation to our demographic and ecological crises, as well as how to renew the West in the face of Western self-hatred and hostile foreign powers.
Would you like to contribute to the conversation? Write to us to propose a response to any of the conference presentations.
Topics: Beyond State and Market • The 2024 Postliberalism Conference