Challenges for Post-liberalism: Can We Have a Politics of Virtue with God on the Bench?

Abstract

Brian Griffiths’ chapter presents a careful analysis of the book The Politics of Virtue: Post-liberalism and the Human Future by Milbank and Pabst together with a serious response to their criticism of liberalism. In a nutshell, the author discusses the claim that liberalism is in a meta-crisis by presenting both the complexity of the different versions of this doctrine and the inescapable relationship with surrounding culture. Many of the negative observations of Milbank and Pabst, according to Griffiths, can be traced back to this very background. There is therefore convergence on the existence of the crisis of liberalism, but at the same time, disagreement on the causes of this crisis as they are traced back to the cultural dimension external to liberalism itself. This is the essential point of divergence with the proposal of Milbank and Pabst, who consider intrinsic to liberalism itself those cultural elements, such as the libertarian drifts, which Griffiths considers external to it. Through a critique also of the civil economy approach, to which the authors of The Politics of Virtue refer as pars construens, Griffiths highlights the need for an authentically religious dimension, in order to avoid the negative drifts of liberalism itself. In this sense, the discussion on post-liberalism raises an authentically theological question, linked to the assumptions of the cultural context in which liberalism was developed and applied. This refers to what Pierpaolo Donati calls the theological matrix.