The last year has seen a spate of books analyzing and critiquing the political movement known as “post-liberalism” (see, e.g., Matt Sleat, Post-Liberalism, 2025; Stefan Borg, The Return of the Common Good, 2026). As such, Paul Kelly’s recent book represents a timely contribution to a critical debate among both scholars and real-world political actors. Kelly presents an innovative analysis of post-liberalism as a “trinitarian” movement comprising populist, communitarian, and theocratic “faces,” and he convincingly argues that post-liberalism has no clear answer to left-liberal worries about pluralism and inequality.

“Post-liberal” critics of liberalism include a broad range of voices—from Catholic neo-ultramontanists like Harvard Law School’s Adrian Vermeule to Christian socialists like the theologian John Milbank and defenders of populist nationalism like political scientist Matt Goodwin. But they unite around the claim that liberalism is, in some sense, reaching its simultaneous apotheosis and collapse. According to these critics, liberalism is to blame for (real or imagined) social pathologies as diverse as declining social mobility and a loss of trust in political institutions, increasing loneliness and family breakdown, epidemics of pornography addiction and opioid abuse, and spiraling deaths of despair. Typically, these post-liberal thinkers claim that the (purported) liberal commitment to radical individual autonomy has created an atomized society—one in which social capital and intermediary institutions decay in the face of individual emancipation from communal bonds and the expansion of the impersonal institutions of state and market to cater to individual desire. While differing over the details of what, exactly, should replace liberalism, all post-liberals think that a new political theory should place the “common good” front and center and downgrade the status of individualism.

Kelly’s book skillfully performs two vital tasks. First, it offers a new and innovative analytic framework for understanding post-liberalism as both an academic trend and a real-world political movement. And second, it provides an important critique of the movement from the perspective of “the left,” broadly defined.

Kelly argues that post-liberalism is best understood as exhibiting a “trinitarian” structure, with three distinct “faces or strands” that together constitute a single functional entity (pp. 14–15). As with the persons of the Christian Trinity, each face of post-liberalism has a distinct personality, but only when we analyze the strands together can we grasp “the full-force of post-liberalism’s aspiration to annihilate liberalism” (p. 15). As Kelly demonstrates, the adherents of each strand of post-liberalism deploy a distinct methodology in their critique: national populists offer a “genealogical unmasking of liberalism” as a ruling-class ideology (p. 30); “common-good communitarians” (p. 60) draw on philosophical anthropology to argue that liberalism’s individualist tendency is false to the reality of persons as always-already embedded in and formed by communal ties; and “common-good absolutists” (p. 89) deploy Carl Schmitt’s “political theology” to defend an ultimately unquestionable authority as the definer of the common good and to find “a justification of coercion that does not depend upon [either actual or hypothetical] consent” (p. 101).

The first “face” of post-liberalism Kelly unpacks is “national populism” (p. 17). These populists reiterate the familiar left-wing claim that the liberal emphasis on personal and market freedoms functions “as a mechanism for advancing the interests of capital” (p. 26). Yet post-liberal national populists diverge from leftist critics of neoliberalism in the stress they place on the harm liberal globalization supposedly inflicts on “church communities” and “small town culture” as the “citizens of ‘anywhere’” abandon their more rooted compatriots (p. 29). Thus, populist-sympathizing writers like David Goodhart and Patrick Deneen bemoan the “progressive ethics… prevalent in modern universities” (p. 39) for disparaging traditional values and norms and rationalizing a brutally competitive meritocracy that does nothing for “the people left behind” (p. 41). Kelly ultimately agrees with most scholars of right-populism that this is a “thin-centred” ideology unable to offer a coherent alternative to liberalism without “supplement” from an “appeal to a… substantive… moral order” (p. 51). He convincingly shows that national populism depends on an external normative source to offer an alternative to liberalism, as opposed to merely providing an “immanent critique” of liberal practices. This source, for Kelly, is post-liberalism’s second face: common-good communitarianism.

In his chapter on post-liberal communitarianism, Kelly outlines how a group of post-liberal thinkers partially distinct from the national populists have articulated a “covenantal philosophical anthropology” in which “the familiar web… of community and home” is a source of “moral and political authority” (p. 57). These thinkers draw, in a variety of ways, on natural law theorists like John Finnis and critics of modernity like Alasdair MacIntyre to ground a socially conservative conception of the common good oriented around “family, faith and flag” (pp. 58–59).

However, Kelly then argues that common-good communitarianism operates at too high a level of abstraction—that is, it relies on broad claims about the communally embedded nature of the self—to ground specific, detailed conceptions of human flourishing or of political justice with determinate implications for a “particular political agenda” (p. 85). Kelly claims that the only route out of “the problem of… pluralism,” which exists even between “ways of understanding the implications of faith…” as well as of family and patriotism (p. 89), is to appeal to “epistemic authorities” (p. 92) to whom individuals should defer in their moral and political judgments.

Yet Kelly’s own argument seems to operate at too high a level of abstraction here to fully succeed. While a commitment to common-good communitarianism as such is indeed too general to yield specific political conclusions without an appeal to authority, actually existing post-liberals are not (of course) committed to common-good communitarianism as such. They are committed to specific versions of this communitarianism. And a brief perusal of a work like Finnis’s Natural Law and Natural Rights (1980) will show that, whatever other problems may afflict his theory, an inability to yield specific ethical and political judgments is not one of them. Specific theoretical foundations for post-liberal communitarianism may, therefore, be able to avoid the problem of ethical and political indeterminacy that Kelly identifies.

Kelly’s final “face” of post-liberalism is “common-good absolutism” (p. 94), which appeals to an “extra-rational” validation of a monistic conception of the common good (p. 98). Many of the more radical post-liberals find this validation in the “anti-modernist political theology of pre-Vatican II Catholicism” (p. 111). This is perfectly accurate. But Kelly pushes his point too far when he claims that this political theology must ultimately appeal to “irrational decisions” (p. 113). Most authoritarian Catholics do not see the appeal to faith as “irrational,” but believe that reason itself can establish the rationality of deferring to revelation as interpreted by the Church. Schmitt may have been an irrationalist—but he was also (in Vermeule’s words—see “A Christian Strategy,” First Things, 2017) a “garden-variety apostate.” More orthodox Christians see faith and reason differently. Here, Kelly risks setting up a portrait of his opponents—as self-consciously obscurantist—in which they would fail to recognize themselves.

Kelly’s final chapter offers three substantive criticisms of post-liberalism. The first is that the national populists have misdescribed the supposedly liberal “ruling elite,” which is really continuous with the “traditional elite of wealth and power” and more neoliberal than liberal in any deeper sense (p. 154). The second is that post-liberal communitarians are “unwilling to address” questions around equality (p. 147), and that their social conservatism would in fact “replicate dominance, disadvantage and inequality” (p. 141). Kelly’s final criticism claims that post-liberal absolutism, with its “authoritarian response to liberalism” (p. 136), does not genuinely solve the problem of pluralism. This is fair enough, but if, as I have argued, this authoritarianism is supposed to be rationalistic, refuting it would require refutation of all the philosophical arguments the post-liberal absolutists offer for the rationality of their interpretation of Christianity and its political theology (and that would require a whole other book). Absolutists deny the “fact of reasonable pluralism” for reasons they think are entirely rational.

Kelly’s first two criticisms are persuasive, as far as they go, to readers who already believe that confronting inequalities is among the weightiest of political values. But as he concedes, this “is not an argument that will convince the most theoretically sophisticated post-liberals” (p. 125). Most political decisions involve value trade-offs. Post-liberals committed to their socially conservative conception of the common good—the trifecta of “family, faith and flag”—may respond by simply asserting that promoting these values is a more important priority than mitigating inequality. Ultimately, Kelly’s substantive argument is indeed intended “for the left” and those who accept its value hierarchy. Readers more sympathetic to post-liberalism will find their mileage varies.

Nevertheless, Kelly’s book offers among the most comprehensive and sophisticated theoretical analyses of post-liberal ideas that have been published to date. While I quibble with his characterization of post-liberal authoritarianism, the limitations to Kelly’s engagement with the technical minutiae of communitarian and natural law theories would have been difficult to avoid in a work with this admirable level of breadth. No future work on post-liberalism, whatever its theoretical or ideological perspective, can afford to ignore this book.