This is a book for our political moment. As Doug Schoen (The End of
Authority, Rowman & Littlefield, 2013) warned us nearly a
decade ago, we are facing a wholesale lack of trust in our
institutions. This problem has deep roots within liberalism, and it
cannot be solved by tweaking the liberal paradigm, in which
different conceptions of the good exclude each other as well as a
nonexclusive common good. The essence of liberalism is contained in
the language of "values," which in politics serves as wedges to
divide people, as Jo Renee Formicola has shown (The Politics of
Values, Rowman & Littlefield, 2008). Scholars are beginning to
imagine a postliberal paradigm, preeminently John Milbank and
Adrian Pabst in their Politics of Virtue (Rowman & Littlefield,
2016). The liberal approach is nearing its end, yet at the moment
its tentacles seem impossible to escape. In no small part this
because its assumptions are embedded in our political language, in
the language of "values," as well as terms like "morality,"
"sovereignty," and "secular." Only a thoroughgoing survey, reaching
back to the early modern era, can uncover the nature of
liberalism's basic assumptions and diagnose its breakdown. This
book therefore complements and grounds critiques of liberalism such
as Patrick Deneen's Why Liberalism Failed (2018). This book does so
by questioning values language, building on Edward Andrew's The
Genealogy of Values (Rowman & Littlefield, 1995), the only
monograph on the topic in English. Central to liberalism is a
denial of a good that is qualitatively superior to individual
interest: individuals disagree about the good - they have different
values - and the state protects us from fighting each other. By
contrast, a postliberal political philosophy is able to understand
the common good as friendship and social trust, which are built up
by loyalty. The pursuit of "values" and of "morality" in liberalism
actually distorts and harms the common good as friendship: if I am
loyal to certain impersonal "values," that means I am not loyal to
you. Political thinkers have, however, systematically ignored the
phenomenon of friendship over the past five hundred years. No other
book on liberalism connects so many dots. The target audience is
graduate students and scholars. Topics covered along the way in
this work include the shortcomings of the concept of "sovereignty"
and the invention of "morality" as its supplement, the
inappropriateness of the distinction between the empirical and the
transcendental, the true nature of the secular and the sacred, the
necessarily symbolic expression of the common good, and the false
conceptualization of "religion" and politics.
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