Michael Lind on After Liberalism: Pluralism and the Social Constitution
From the 2024 Postliberalism Conference
In this video, we present Michael Lind’s keynote address “After Liberalism: Pluralism and the Social Constitution,” from day 1 of Political Economy and the Good Life: The 2024 Postliberalism Conference. Lind is a leading academic, commentator, and bestselling author of The New Class War (2020). The panel discussion was moderated by Tom McTague, Political Editor of UnHerd, and it featured responses to Lind’s lecture from the following three speakers:
Claire Ainsley, Director of the Project on Center-Left Renewal, Progressive Policy Institute; Director of Policy, Labour Party (2020–22); author of The New Working Class;
Jon Cruddas, former Labour MP for Dagenham and Rainham; author of The Dignity of Labour (2021), and A Century of Labour (2024); and
Adrian Pabst, Professor of Politics, University of Kent, and author of The Politics of Virtue: Postliberalism and the Human Future (2016, with John Milbank) and Postliberal Politics (2021).
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