Pursuing the Good Life: Nature, Demography, and Politics
From the 2024 Postliberalism Conference
This week, we will be posting the last of our 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. Catch up on the previous conference videos here. If you are not yet a subscriber, be sure to subscribe to Telos Insights to receive updates when we post new content.
The following video is from plenary session 7, entitled “Pursuing the Good Life: Nature, Demography and Politics,” from day 2 of Political Economy and the Good Life: The 2024 Postliberalism Conference. This session was moderated by Andy Scerri, Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, Virginia Tech. The panel featured presentations from the following five speakers:
Ian Marcus Corbin, philosopher at Harvard Medical School; Senior Fellow, Capita;
José Alberto Garibaldi, Director, Energeia Network and of the Learning by Doing initiative;
Tobias Phibbs, Deputy Director, Common Good Foundation; Head of Talent and Community, Civic Future;
Vidal Romero, Professor of Political Science, Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM); Co-Director, Centre for the Study of Security, Intelligence, and Governance; and
Robin White-Grove, Emeritus Professor, Centre for the Study of Environmental Change, University of Lancaster.
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