James M. Patterson and Thomas D. Howes’s Why Postliberalism Failed argues that postliberalism’s rejection of individual agency, liberal democracy, economic freedom, and subsidiarity in favor of centralized Catholic authoritarianism has repeatedly produced repression, poverty, and political failure while contradicting modern Catholic social teaching.
For its tenth anniversary, Sarah Thomas reviews John Milbank and Adrian Pabst’s The Politics of Virtue. As the first and most theoretically sophisticated account of postliberalism, the moral vision presented in The Politics of Virtue tends toward a state coercion that disregards historicity and the knowledge problem, while the ambiguities of its civil economy model fail to reflect the dynamics of economic action.
Michael Chapman argues that reports of libertarianism’s death have been greatly exaggerated and that its ideas remain highly relevant today.
Maria and Jo Ann Cavallo examine the tension between totalitarian power and the strength of the human spirit in Jiří Menzel’s film Larks on a String.