Charles Péguy once distinguished between two historical times: a “period” when social life moves along in a steady groove, and an “epoch” when that groove crumbles and one needs to redesign human relations. We seem to be living in such an epoch. The traditional banisters of Western modernity—the Cartesian ego and human subjectivity—are increasingly receding and losing their self-evidence. With their crumbling, the sheet anchor of modern politics—individual liberty and its corollary of “liberalism”—becomes likewise questionable and subject to reassessment. What happens as a result is not so much a radical negation or antithesis, but a process of moving sideways, a transition to a different constellation in which traditional categories receive new subscripts and meanings. Such a change can be called a “paradigm shift”; Martin Heidegger speaks in this context of Verwindung (which means something like recovering from a wound).

The critique of modernity and its linchpin of liberalism has been a staple of Western thought for at least a century; but it rarely ushered in a basic shift. This was also the case in “post-modernism”—despite some bold and innovative forays into new terrains. Shunning half-hearted compromise, Milbank and Pabst venture forth in the direction of “post-liberalism” and a “politics of virtue” far removed from modernity's creed. In fact, their book inaugurates (or seeks to inaugurate) a new paradigm: opposing the emotive cultural version of the “Left” and the economic-political doctrine of the “Right,” it charges modern “liberalism” tout court with the “atomization” of society coupled with authoritarian interventions from above. “Post-liberalism,” we read in the introduction, heralds a new constellation which substitutes for “the dominance of market, state, and technocracy” the primacy of “society, culture, and interpersonal relations.” Discarding the notion of the political/social animal (Aristotle, Aquinas) and the quest for human flourishing, modern liberalism—today in a state of “metacrisis”—replaced them with the self-centered “pursuit of wealth, power and pleasure” which debases the nature of humanity. By contrast, a post-liberal politics of virtue seeks to fuse “greater economic justice with social reciprocity” and champions mutual “gift-exchange” as the principle to govern “both the economic and the political realms” (1–3).

Regarding the meaning of virtue ethics, the authors take a stand against the modern tendency to extricate ethics from ordinary human inclinations. In a broadly Aristotelian sense, virtue ethics concurs with “our spontaneous inclination to see goodness in nature.” Hence, for the authors, the ethical question is not “what should I do” in such and such a situation, but rather “what should I consistently be doing at all? What sort of shape might my life appropriately take” taking into account “my relationships to others?” (4). Elaborating on this point, Milbank and Pabst hold that virtue ethics is both more demanding than utilitarian consequentialism and “less moralist” than strict deontology (in the Kantian sense). As a practical endeavor, virtue ethics for the authors involves also a “politics of virtue”—though not in the sense of a mere bully pulpit of politicians. The crucial point, they argue (5), is that “there can be no human practice (which is always collective) unless we are aiming for the ‘good’ in some sense, and we have some idea how to recognize and pursue it.” Thus, virtue in politics is not “a kind of optional extra” foisted on concrete historical-political processes. A basic claim of their book, they add (5), is that contemporary politics mistakes the very nature of political “reality” by divorcing it from ethics. In the words of the Neapolitan Antonio Genovesi: “Virtue is not an invention of philosophers… [but instead] a consequence of the nature of the world.” Hence, virtue is not an accidental feature of politics, because the latter necessarily exhibits a “shared teleological purposiveness” and an “attempted architectonic of justice” (7).

The book applies the idea of a politics of virtue successively to the domains of politics, economics, culture, and international relations. The first part, broadly titled “Politics,” elaborates on the “metacrisis of liberalism” mentioned in the introduction. “By venerating an increasingly positivistic, amoral and supposedly neutral law,” the authors state (14), “liberalism has reduced politics to little more than managerial and technocratic bureaucracy”; thereby, it has “undermined the civic bonds upon which a vibrant democracy and a productive market economy depend.” A major culprit in this development has been liberalism's identification of freedom with “negative liberty” where the latter means “unfettered personal choice” devoid of responsibility. What is completely shunned by this negative conception is the role of “time, tradition, habit and formation, together with the gradualism and unfinished character of human growth.” Instead what is foregrounded is a “procedural conception of justice” and an “instrumental notion of reason.” The result is an inner contradiction: “By bracketing truth and goodness, liberalism does not so much liberate society from the ‘tyranny of the Good’” as impose a “new tyranny of freedom from mutual obligation” (18–19). Following a brief excursus into the history of liberalism and its different manifestations, the book returns to the defining quality of liberalism as such: the emphasis on egocentrism and the privileging of negative liberty (which ultimately allows liberal institutions to be “swallowed up” by the economy and technocracy, 45, 55). The section concludes with reflections on the “post-liberal alternative” which stress the importance of the “common good” (in the midst of ethical pluralism) and acknowledges its indebtedness to aspects of moderate (noncollectivist) socialism and to the ideas of “personalism” and “authentic corporatism” (69–84).

The second part zeroes in on the modern economy and especially on the present state of “capitalism” which, like liberalism itself, is in a “metacrisis.” “The late modern capitalist system,” the authors write (93), “so much depends on creating abstract wealth that it is increasingly less able to produce capital and genuine goods serving human needs. … Global finance uses other people's money to trade almost exclusively with itself.” Finance capitalism here emerges as basically unproductive, tending simultaneously to “abstraction” (from work) and “materialization” (in consumerism); while concentrating profit in a small elite, it reduces ordinary existence to a “state of nature.” By being unproductive, finance capitalism is also destructive of the ethical and symbolic qualities of market exchange; it leads not only to increased inequality but also to “economic stultification and devastation of cultural and ecological systems of reciprocal balance” (105). Departing somewhat from Thomas Picketty, the authors distinguish the present system's “meritocratic extremism” from the earlier market economy still “embedded” in society (Karl Polanyi). As an antidote, the market economy today “requires some re-embedding in a genuine social ethos [not only for ethical but also] for market economic reasons,” because such an economy promises to be “economically more profitable and socially more sustainable” (121–22). In a section attached to this part, the authors take aim at the failure of “neo-liberalism,” the “myth of embedded liberalism” (John Meynard Keynes), and the limits of the German “social market” model, while praising the “civil economy model” (as promoted by Antonio Genovesi and the legacy of Catholic social teachings).

Part 3 returns to the domain of politics, this time by focusing on the “metacrisis of democracy” arising from liberal extravagance. For the authors, democracy is best conceived as a continuation of the older tradition of a “mixed constitution”—which, however, is undermined by modern egocentrism and voluntarism: “One can only save democracy through paradox: by trying to restore, albeit in a more democratic way, a genuine ancient constitution, pivoted about shared telos and virtue” (183). For Milbank and Pabst, liberal democracy is poised “between the double void of two mere wills—that of the many [the people] and that of the one [executive],” while ignoring the “inextinguishable substantive space of loyalty and collective belonging” (185). Thus, liberal democracy oscillates between mob-like populism and hegemonic elitism; seen from a broader global perspective, far from promoting peace and prosperity, it is increasingly linked with “war, economic exploitation, and the decline of both local and high cultures” (187). Boldly pursuing this line of thought, the authors hold that “paradoxically, the real rationale for democracy is extra-democratic,” in the sense that democratic legitimacy arises not from individual or popular “will” but from the good judgment of “well educated” and “genuinely aristocratic” thinkers and leaders. Without this “extra-democratic” rationale, democracy is in danger of being identified with “a kind of mass tyranny” (191). As in the case of the economy, a section attached to part 3 deals with the alternative to liberal democracy called “mixed constitution” or “mixed government,” where mixture means the mediation of the “one” and the “many” by the “few.” The section elaborates on the advantages of constitutional monarchy (as exemplified in Britain), the role of the aristocracy (as embodied in the House of Lords), the value of “established religion,” and more generally on the need to “defend democracy non-democratically” (239).

An important section of the book is part 4 dealing with “culture” and its precarious contemporary status. The authors initially launch a sharp attack on the cultural decay occasioned by self-centered liberalism: evident in mechanical “impersonalism” and the disconnection of “naturalism” from ethical meaning and purpose. As an antidote, they turn to the crucial role of paideia and education. As they write: “For the perspective of [classical] paideia, if education was for the purpose of producing philosophic and political virtue, then inversely, politics was about producing virtuous citizens. Therefore, politics existed to further educative formation, at least as much as the other way around” (268). The centrality of formation militates against both atomistic individualism and state-controlled collectivism, the latter evident in “mass education” with its leveling effects. Lacking a “vertical” dimension and an apprehension of the “spiritual life,” liberal education is finally seen as a form of “post-humanism” (if not anti-humanism, 270). In an attached section, the authors comment further on the importance of formation, seen not just as an increase of factual information or logical acumen, but as a “psychic” or spiritual deepening. Psychic here does not just mean “rational” (in the Enlightenment sense) because “the rightful exercise of reason involves a pre-rational trust (pistis or faith) in the reasonableness of reality.” The model of genuine formation is found in Platonic paideia with its combination of anticipation and recollection (293).

The final part 5 returns to the political domain, this time on the level of international or global politics. Here liberalism surfaces chiefly in the hegemony of America. The authors cite Niall Ferguson to the effect that “the United States is the empire that does not speak its name. It is an empire in denial and this denial poses a real danger to the world” (316). As a liberal hegemony, this empire shares in the metacrisis of liberalism—which thereby turns into an “international metacrisis.” The crisis is manifest in the erosion of pillars of Western civilization, in the growth of international anarchy, and—simultaneously—in the upsurge of new national (and ethnic) populisms: “There is a growing populist backlash against the dominant forms of globalization and calls to retreat to narrow national self-interest” (320). Following a historical overview of the development and decay of international politics, the authors place hope for change in the “associationist” model of international order (“English School”) and in a “potential global European-based commonwealth” radiating out into the world (340). This idea of commonwealth is fleshed out in a concluding section pointing hopefully to an “emerging neo-medieval shape of international affairs” which favors a greater European role in global leadership. For the authors, commonwealth, seen as a virtue-based, covenantal association of countries and peoples, constitutes a viable countermodel to traditional empires. In their words: “The only pacifying course can now be the rediscovery of the political as the positive mutual quest for virtue, which can open up a realistic prospect of global order” (372). As they conclude: “Not only is a politics of virtue the alternative to liberalism… but it is also only an ethical alliance of forces which is likely to put this alternative into place” (382).

The Politics of Virtue is clearly an intellectual tour de force. It deals with all the major problems, crises, and metacrises of our time—and does so with intelligence and moral (not moralizing) passion. There surely is an urgent need for both qualities in our contemporary world, ravaged as it is by massive corruption, exploitation, ecological devastation, and the stark danger of nuclear holocaust. To deal with its multiple topics, the book marshals an enviable breadth of expertise, cutting across the usual barriers between politics, economics, psychology, anthropology, philosophy, and theology. One can only wish that academic border-crossing of this kind would become a more widespread habit. Needless to say, in my above account, I could only touch on some highlights of the book. Actually, the text is chock-full of valuable insights—sometimes provocative insights—on numerous topics. Here are just a few examples. In talking about Europe and the Atlantic alliance, the authors venture this statement: “Right now Britain and the European Union increasingly look like an economically constrained annex to the United States, which oscillates between isolationism and interventionism” (366). Likewise, in addressing the issue of ISIS and “radical Islam,” they favor a greater alignment of the West with the “Shi'ite crescent,” saying this course “should be adopted in cooperation with Russia, because neither Turkey nor Saudi Arabia nor the Gulf States are unambiguously opponents of ISIS” (379).

To be sure, good books—even excellent books—have drawbacks. One issue I have concerns style. Over long stretches, the presentation is very leisurely and discursive, sometimes becoming repetitive. Here, a stronger dose of rigor would have helped. Philosophically, given the focus on “virtue,” one would have liked to hear a bit more about the meaning of both “cardinal virtues” and “theological virtues.” Likewise, given the centrality of “virtue ethics,” one would have expected a more detailed discussion of its origin in Plato/Aristotle and its recent rejuvenation by such thinkers as Gadamer and Alasdair MacIntyre. Seen as the counterfoil to virtuous politics, liberalism is often treated in very summary fashion (sometimes bordering on caricature). Here, a more nuanced treatment of different kinds of liberalism—from Kant, Mill, and Bentham to Rawls, Dworkin, and Gray—would have been welcomed. On the same score, the subsumption of “civic republicanism” under the liberal aegis (36–41) seems facile and unpersuasive. Occasionally, the broad relevance of the politics of virtue seems hijacked by more local sympathies. This is manifest in the (Burkean) celebration of “mixed constitution” with its linchpin of (British-style) monarchy and aristocracy. The same accent surfaces in the discussion of the idea of “commonwealth,” again patterned strongly on the British model. One wonders how China, Africa, and Muslim countries would fit into this scheme. Generally speaking, the text often seems to speak with two voices (the two authors?), one more tradition bound and backward looking, the other more progressive or future oriented. The first voice revels in notions like “neo-medievalism” and “organic hierarchy” (192, 363); the other speaks of “humanitarianism” and the “widening of ancient civil liberties” (81). Fortunately, the two voices eventually do manage to converge. “Post-liberals,” we read at one point (81), reject both “reactionary nostalgia” and manipulative “utopianism,” while favoring “endless creative reshaping of traditional prescriptions and the reforming of habits.” Taking this phrase as its main tenor, one can only wish the book the largest possible readership.