Britain's Postliberal Nation/State Paradox

Every form of belonging except, well, you know

I enjoyed this recent, provocative challenge to “postliberalism” from the always acerbic Pimlico Journal, one of the few Substacks I support financially. The essay is paywalled, but especially if you’re in Britain and interested in the youthful Right the publication is worth your consideration:

For those whose subscription budget is maxxed out, a brief summary. Why Postliberalism Failed rejects the “postliberal” turn in Anglophone conservative thought, as insufficiently conscious of its own debt to Marxism and as mis-diagnosing the problem in Britain. The author, “Lucien Chardon”, argues that far from being too atomised, the Britain is the opposite: too communitarian, a stifling, top-down, state-imposed postliberal unity out of keeping with historic English culture, and one that’s holding us back today from fixing any of our multifarious and nested national ills.

There’s much in Chardon’s analysis that deserves deeper discussion. In particular more needs to be said about the risk of romanticising the premodern era, in the course of critiquing where we are now. I also think younger rightists are correct to point out the obvious and widening gulf between the academic postliberalism of books and conferences, and the actually existing post-liberalism that has been ascendant since Covid-19.

This is centrally important, because Covid was the postliberal moment. Lockdowns landed differently depending on where you were, but specifically in Britain (Pimlico is British) I think it’s underappreciated just how far the experience of lockdowns, and the way these were justified here, radicalised a generation of young rightists against anything that smells even faintly of “communities”. Most of the new, young British Right is downstream of that experience, and that’s the context in which Chardon’s essay should be read.

There’s much to chew over in his argument. But what I found most thought-provoking was the way its critique of the purported excess communitarianism of post-liberal theory itself affirms a communitarianism of sorts. It does so implicitly, and the reason for this circumspection itself points to the most important tension, between post-liberalism in its theoretical forms and in its real-world practice, on a theme I’ve found myself returning to recently: the ontology of peoples.

Academic postliberalism challenges, among other things, the nation-state as a liberal entity - a critique which at least potentially invites unbundling its constituent parts: “nation” and “state”, which is to say peoples and governments. But for complex reasons, the same body of theory is more reluctant to grapple anywhere near as openly with the “nation” component as the “state” one. The result is, inevitably, that the “state” component ends up occupying most of the theoretical and, downstream of this, also the acceptable policy bandwidth. And this is in turn compounded by the reflexive individualism Chardon points to, in historic Anglophone cultures.

At least in the perception of young rightists, the net effect in Britain has been an actually existing postliberalism indistinguishable from its supposed antipole, liberalism, in working concertedly to dissolve nation in the name of state. And yet the same individualism also makes this politically very difficult to address directly, let alone propose an alternative.