Renewing the West
From the 2024 Postliberalism Conference
Today we conclude our series of videos from 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 whenever we post new content.
Today’s video is from plenary session 8, entitled “Renewing the West,” from day 2 of Political Economy and the Good Life: The 2024 Postliberalism Conference. This session was moderated by 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 panel featured presentations from the following four speakers:
Tom Holland, historian and author of Dominion (2019) and Pax (2023);
Sebastian Milbank, Executive Editor, The Critic;
David Pan, Editor of Telos and Professor of German at the University of California, Irvine; and
Lola Salem, Post-Doctoral Fellow; Lecturer in Music, Oriel College, University of Oxford, and consultant (paper read by Susannah Black Roberts).
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