# Politics and the Order of the Good A Review of John Milbank and Adrian Pabst’s The Politics of Virtue **URL:** **By** Sarah Thomas **Published:** October 7, 2026 --- 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. “Instead of peace and prosperity worldwide, liberalism is increasingly associated with war, economic exploitation and the decline of both local and high cultures,” John Milbank and Adrian Pabst write in _The Politics of Virtue: Post-Liberalism and the Human Future_ (Bloomsbury, 2016).[1](#_edn1) Though not an original observation, also articulated by Samuel Moyn’s critique of Cold War liberalism’s legacy of militarism and neoliberalism,[2](#_edn2) this assessment has informed the “crisis of liberalism” discourse over the last ten years. Since 2016, influential theories of postliberalism have arisen in Western societies. With both leftist and rightist variants, its theorists share a dissatisfaction with classical liberalism in theory and practice. This unrest drives a reorientation of politics around claims about the common good. Neoliberalism has subsumed all human activity to the logic of the [market](https://www.libertarianism.org/videos/what-libertarians-mean-free-market), the leftist critique maintains, turning citizens into consumers rather than democratic agents. Meanwhile, political liberalism’s procedural neutrality promotes secularity at the exclusion of religious voices, the rightist critique avers, while it fails to cultivate a virtuous citizenry that seeks the good in community. Milbank and Pabst’s contribution in _The Politics of Virtue _is conceptually distinctive and worth revisiting a decade after, given continued debates on liberal crisis. Both are philosophical theologians with additional expertise in political theory and metaphysics. Among postliberal theories, their work remains the most intellectually sophisticated—and demanding. Reaching almost 400 pages, _The Politics of Virtue_’s sources include virtue ethics; classical, [republican](https://www.libertarianism.org/encyclopedia/republicanism-classical), and liberal political theory; Catholic social teaching; and the economic and political theories of Karl Polanyi and Edmund Burke. Politically, the authors’ vision eschews leftist or rightist categorizations in coming closest to Christian democracy, though this consonance is underexplored in their work. The book’s genesis is liberalism’s “metacrisis.” Though liberalism confidently grounds itself in a program of rights and contracts, Milbank and Pabst argue, it cannot provide the security, prosperity, and flourishing so many desire. Instead, “the only genuine alternative is a post-liberal politics of virtue that seeks to fuse greater economic justice with social reciprocity.”[3](#_edn3) This politics organizes itself around the common good, ordered to [positive liberty](https://www.libertarianism.org/encyclopedia/positive-liberty), or freedom as agency, rather than [negative liberty](https://www.libertarianism.org/essays/excursions/negative-positive-liberty-part-2), or freedom as non-interference. As such, its conception of the political is classical rather than contractarian, sustained by the virtues of a society governed not by contract but by gift—the generosity of human relationships, something Milbank and Pabst find suppressed by liberalism’s design. In developing their virtue politics, Milbank and Pabst argue for a primacy of the social over the political and economic. Founded in this account of human existence, they argue that liberal societies must be renewed through a shared vision of the common good, rather than restricted to the liberal reign of procedure or the neoliberal valorization of economic incentives. This renewal of the political would, in turn, transform the economic into a kind of “civil economy” that furthers relational experiences of gift over mere transactions. _The Politics of Virtue_ excels mainly in the depth of its research. The book is synthetic rather than exegetical, compelling in developing a new school of thought. By reconciling disciplines as distinct as the theory of social democracy and the classical tradition of virtue ethics, the work transcends reductive categorizations. That said, due to the book’s intellectual ambition, several tensions remain. While Milbank and Pabst see humans as fundamentally relational, they fail to discern that humans are also historical beings who seek what is individually good for them, which undermines their vision of a society ordered to universally timeless goods. Milbank and Pabst’s moral vision also does not require a role for the political. Virtue ethics is arguably a matter of personal formation rather than political order, so its development could be confined to the private realm. Hence, virtue need not require a postliberal polity that seeks the good together. Similarly, given the reality of the [knowledge problem](https://www.libertarianism.org/knowledge-problem) as articulated by F. A. Hayek, the state cannot determine the highest goods of human existence, which could vary for persons based on history and context. And the state’s promotion of moral excellence among the citizenry can drive a coercive [paternalism](https://www.libertarianism.org/articles/why-libertarians-should-take-paternalism-seriously) at odds with the negative freedoms most enjoy—and take for granted—in liberal societies. Finally, the authors’ idea of a civil economy faces tensions, as they wish to affirm a qualified form of a market economy while simultaneously denying the legitimacy of capitalism as a social order. Though this distinction is helpful, as most conflate the two, more clarity could have resulted from engaging Karol Wojtyla (Pope John Paul II)’s encyclical _Centesimus annus _(1991) in addition to the authors’ strong focus on Polanyi’s work, which reckons with just this tension. Milbank and Pabst’s civil economy model further fails to specify how the logic of gift would be sustainable given the dynamics of economic action, while neglecting to engage Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI)’s comparatively more nuanced account of gift in _Caritas in veritate_ (2009). ### The Primacy of the Social The vision of _The Politics of Virtue_ is grounded in what the authors describe as the primacy of the social: “The social is more basic than either the political or the economic because human society—beyond the nature-culture divide—binds together material reality with symbolic significance.”[4](#_edn4) This sociality informs a metaphysical anthropology where the human being is fundamentally relational, in contrast to what Milbank and Pabst see as a liberal anthropology devoid of relation. The primacy of the social contrasts sharply with [globalized](https://www.libertarianism.org/encyclopedia/globalization) liberal hegemony, the authors argue, which prizes the political and economic over the social. In doing so, liberalism leads to centralization, wealth inequality, and commodification, where “the neglect of the social is the neglect of the substantive.”[5](#_edn5) Indeed, “People may be free and equal in theory and even before the law, but in practice, the grossest inequities and inhibitions of the freedoms of the many pertain.”[6](#_edn6) In failing to uphold justice, Milbank and Pabst maintain, this dynamic inhibits the human subject from realizing their fullest personality. Accordingly, Milbank and Pabst’s postliberalism “defends individual rights in personalist terms,” rather than communitarian terms, “which regard the individual not in isolation, but as the most basic rung in a subsidiarist vision that is in continuity with older ‘distributist’ notions.”[7](#_edn7) Invoking core themes of Catholic social thought, [subsidiarity](https://www.libertarianism.org/encyclopedia/subsidiarity) recommends action at the most proper level rather than the level of the state, while distributism refers to an economic vision that reconciles private property with wide ownership of assets. Though seeming to affirm liberal tenets like a skepticism of concentrated state power and its challenge to the person, the authors’ occasional invocations of personalism are underdeveloped. More engagement with the personalist anthropology of Norris Clarke S.J., a touchstone on the subject, would have been ideal. For Clarke, the human being is substance-in-relation. But being an individual, or what classical thinkers term “substance,” precedes relation, he maintains, while substance is fulfilled in relation.[8](#_edn8) Clarke’s personalism retains a priority of individuality that still affirms relationality, while Milbank and Pabst’s vision instead sacrifices individuality—and with it, individual rights—for a romanticized vision of relation that extends to the political. “If human beings are naturally political, social and gift-exchanging animals, they need to cultivate habits of personal and communal living that sustain the polity, society and the economy.”[9](#_edn9) Yet this metaphysical anthropology is reductive in focusing solely on relationality. While human relationality is indisputable, Milbank and Pabst fail to recognize that humans are also historical beings. For instance, Karl Rahner derives the historicity of the human being from an analysis of human freedom. “Historicity is found in us because we are essentially free, self-subsisting personalities” who strive to self-realize in space and time—the province of history.[10](#_edn10) If human existence is historical and not just relational, that would seem to invalidate Milbank and Pabst’s project of organizing politics around objective goods that endure. ### Reconceiving the Political: Moral Excellence and Flourishing In a philosophically rich remark that links metaphysics to politics, Milbank and Pabst state that “contemporary politics is failing because it mistakes the very nature of the realistic—this being finally coincident with the ethical.”[11](#_edn11) They point to the [Hobbesian](https://www.libertarianism.org/encyclopedia/hobbes-thomas) logic of liberalism, which fails to discern reality’s directedness toward the good. Since liberalism leaves substantive questions of the good to the private realm rather than appreciating their comprehensive outlook, it is ultimately not neutral. More specifically, Milbank and Pabst argue that liberalism’s neutrality through the objectivity of fact and procedure drives the rule of the material, an ultimate “logical and historical tendency to mutate into utilitarianism.”[12](#_edn12) This [utilitarianism](https://www.libertarianism.org/article/utilitarianism-challenge-justice) aspires to the will to power, they contend, rather than an authentic recognition of who persons are. It also subjects citizens to [biopolitics](https://www.libertarianism.org/articles/book-review-foucault-and-liberal-political-economy), as the liberal priority of self-ownership over one’s life still depends on the constitutional-legal system. But this assessment would seem to contrast with natural rights and contractarian defenses of liberalism, which deny utilitarianisms that seek to maximize overall well-being. Speaking largely of liberalism as an abstraction rather than a concrete reality, Milbank and Pabst argue that liberalism’s materialism fails to grasp that “genuine value requires the weight of objectivity and the glimpsed seriousness of the Good.”[13](#_edn13) The goodness of being underlies their political vision, which contrasts with the reign of procedural justice and technical reason. Objective truth and the good, founded in what is real, “draw our desire but do not force it,” so they can create a “more generous” kind of toleration ordered to truth and goodness than can the formalism of technical reason.[14](#_edn14) Given this appreciation for what is good, liberal societies need to “subordinate . . . political contract to reciprocity or gift.”[15](#_edn15) For Milbank and Pabst, this can be achieved by restoring the classical idea of a mixed constitution or even a constitutional monarchy, governed by elites in virtue who work together, rather than through mere separation of powers, to serve their citizens’ good. But if liberalism has corrupted society, it is unclear how virtuous elites would come to power—something with which the authors fail to reckon. Milbank and Pabst’s program, they claim, would renew democracy, which requires “universally objective and transcendent standards of truth . . . even if these are never fully known and always deeply contested.”[16](#_edn16) This argument reveals a tension. The authors concede that universal goods may not be fully discernible, while still organizing politics around them. But if human existence is historical, these goods are contingent rather than perennial. Given that what is good for each person’s self-realization varies with context and history, virtue ethics is limited to personal formation rather than the political. As such, Milbank and Pabst’s vision of the good need not require the state. The authors gesture at a response to this tension when they maintain that “‘virtue’ is not an isolated formal principle, but a realised and tested habit over time—and political truth consists in the exercise of the right set of virtues.”[17](#_edn17) But this appeal to the “right set of virtues” assumes that the state can determine what these objective goods are, in tension with the knowledge problem. And Milbank and Pabst seem unaware, too, failing to specify which virtues matter. Similar proposals which prioritize positive liberty, like John Rawls’s primary goods and Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen’s [capabilities](https://www.libertarianism.org/columns/capabilities-approach-libertarianism), face the same issue. Furthermore, in envisioning the state investing in citizens’ moral excellence, Milbank and Pabst’s program tends toward a paternalism that coerces, rather than respecting the negative liberty most enjoy and take for granted in Western societies. The problem with this is that the very virtue Milbank and Pabst want the state to cultivate among citizens cannot be coerced if it is to be authentic and free. ### The Civil Economy Related to their relational vision of the human being and politics, Milbank and Pabst develop a theory of the “civil economy” rooted in their distinction, with [Karl Polanyi](https://www.libertarianism.org/blog/karl-polanyis-battle-economic-history), between a market economy and capitalism. This distinction is notable; the two are often conflated. For the authors, liberalism’s individualistic bias tends toward a culture of mistrust, so it is inimical to a genuine free market economy sustained by initiative, risk, and creativity. In valorizing the individual over social trust, capitalism thus exists “in contradiction to the economic as such and to a market economy in its purest sense.”[18](#_edn18) More specifically, they explain, capitalism has unjustly disembedded the economy from society, a critique first advanced by Polanyi. For Polanyi, “man’s economy, as a rule, is submerged in his social relationships.”[19](#_edn19) Accordingly, though Milbank and Pabst do support a qualified role for markets, they reject capitalism as an institutionalized social order, especially in its neoliberal form. In prizing society, they argue that economic activity should be directed toward what is good for people, which they support by distinguishing between speculative value and real value. Speculative value, central to the capitalist order, lacks a connection to real goods in being merely nominal and tradeable for profit, so Milbank and Pabst argue that it cannot serve the human good. But due to their idealistic priority of what is immediately real and therefore good for society, they fail to reckon with the necessity of equities, which is how persons save for retirement and how publicly traded firms raise capital. In place of the capitalist model driven by speculative value, Milbank and Pabst contend that “ethically construed markets may be also economically more profitable and socially more sustainable,”[20](#_edn20) informed by Antonio Genovesi’s civil economy and by their reading of Adam Smith on the priority of concrete real wealth over abstract notional wealth. This mediating position is nuanced, a kind of “third way.” Indeed, the authors describe their mutualism as transcending both statism and the free market. But they distinguish it from [ordoliberalism](https://www.libertarianism.org/encyclopedia/ropke-wilhelm-1899-1966), or the philosophy of the social market economy, which they think still interprets the state’s role along market lines. Instead, the state’s role is “not to engender growth as a purely quantitative sum, but the real wealth of human flourishing in every dimension . . . an encouraging and rewarding of virtuous behavior.”[21](#_edn21) Empirically, this devaluation of growth exists in tension with states’ universal priority of [growth in GDP](https://www.libertarianism.org/encyclopedia/development-economic) since World War II, where growth was seen as essential for flourishing. Milbank and Pabst thus seem to construct a false dichotomy between growth and flourishing. But their emphasis on flourishing is not communitarian, either, where this latter philosophy strongly esteems community relations at the expense of market logic. For Milbank and Pabst, communitarianism “does not take seriously enough the possibility that market activity can have a proper _telos_ and that virtuous behavior is compatible with both just returns to the individual and social benefit.”[22](#_edn22) This economic proposal never fully develops. It is unclear why Milbank and Pabst have retained a role for markets at all, given their frequent elevations of gift and critique of what they see as the social market economy’s outsized focus on economic considerations. It could be that they recognize the efficiency of markets in generating wealth and high living standards, while refraining from conceding ground to liberal capitalism. On this score, Wojtyla’s ideas in _Centesimus annus _(1991) could have enriched their analysis. Wojtyla similarly tries to retain positive aspects of a market economy within a moral framework, while Milbank and Pabst seem to discern an amorality to most accounts of market economies. As Wojtyla writes: > If by “capitalism” is meant an economic system which recognizes the fundamental and positive role of business, the market, private property and the resulting responsibility for the means of production, as well as free human creativity in the economic sector, then the answer is certainly in the affirmative, even though it would perhaps be more appropriate to speak of a “business economy,” “market economy” or simply “free economy.” But if by “capitalism” is meant a system in which freedom in the economic sector is not circumscribed within a strong juridical framework which places it at the service of human freedom in its totality, and which sees it as a particular aspect of that freedom, the core of which is ethical and religious, then the reply is certainly negative.[23](#_edn23) But Wojtyla’s text is never engaged, making the economic aspect of _The Politics of Virtue _insufficient. Certainly, it is commendable that Milbank and Pabst retain a role for markets, as many social democrats do. Yet they fail to specify why markets are still needed beyond the gift-exchange that they find so compelling. And their vision of gift, though humane, reveals a utopianism that does not grasp the nature of economic action. How is an economy driven primarily by gift rather than the contracts and markets that define trade sustainable, especially if we accept Adam Smith’s insight into the [invisible hand](https://www.libertarianism.org/videos/adam-smith-invisible-hand) of self-interest? Ratzinger in _Caritas in veritate_ (2009) offers a more nuanced account. “Economic life undoubtedly requires contracts, in order to regulate relations of exchange between goods of equivalent value,” he recognizes. “But it also needs . . . works redolent of the spirit of gift.”[24](#_edn24) Indeed, “both the market and politics need individuals who are open to reciprocal gift,” which suggests the work of personal formation over state action.[25](#_edn25) Yet, as with their neglect of Wojtyla’s writings, Milbank and Pabst do not engage _Caritas in veritate _beyond a cursory recognition that it “developed and extended” the civil economy model.[26](#_edn26) Putting aside differences in Catholicism and the authors’ Anglicanism, this omission was significant. Finally, the authors’ bourgeois perspective tends to unduly dismiss economic desiderata like growth, which they deny for its liberal tendencies in favor of an aesthetic outlook. Aligned with the dichotomy they draw between growth and flourishing, Milbank and Pabst argue that “the basic assumptions of modern liberal economics occlude from view a basic part of our exchanged, produced and consumed reality—a range of goods that vary in qualitative intensity and satisfy our souls just because they fulfil our creative talents and natural desire for beauty.”[27](#_edn27) Yet this anthropology of _homo economicus _speaks realistically to the drivers of economic action, while Milbank and Pabst’s perception of growth as limited to consumption fails to appreciate its urgency for the global poor. ### Conclusion John Milbank and Adrian Pabst have advanced a theoretically ambitious case for postliberalism, warranting a review a decade on. Both synthetic and original, Milbank and Pabst’s proposal seeks to orient politics around the common good, and the economy around gift, rooted in the primacy of the social. While this vision is humane, it fails to account for human historicity and the knowledge problem. These realities constrain the possibility of states determining what is universally good for citizens, which tends toward a paternalism that sacrifices the freedoms most enjoy and fails to see in virtue ethics the personal rather than the political. Meanwhile, though their synthesis excels in its conceptual reach, Milbank and Pabst neglect to engage key encyclicals by Karol Wojtyla and Joseph Ratzinger, which would have enriched their case for the market economy’s primacy over capitalism and for the importance of gift in the economy. Instead, they rely largely on Karl Polanyi’s ideas, while refraining from reckoning with the dynamics of economic action or clarifying the persistence of markets in their program despite their elevation of gift. In envisioning a society that seeks the highest goods together, Milbank and Pabst’s project fails to preserve the good that matters most: negative liberty. ## Endnotes [1](#_ednref1). John Milbank and Adrian Pabst, _The Politics of Virtue: Post-Liberalism and the Human Future_ (Bloomsbury, 2016), 187. [2](#_ednref2). Samuel Moyn, _Liberalism Against Itself _(Yale University Press, 2023), 5. [3](#_ednref3). John Milbank and Adrian Pabst, _The Politics of Virtue: Post-Liberalism and the Human Future_ (Bloomsbury, 2016), 3. [4](#_ednref4). John Milbank and Adrian Pabst, _The Politics of Virtue: Post-Liberalism and the Human Future_ (Bloomsbury, 2016), 77. [5](#_ednref5). John Milbank and Adrian Pabst, _The Politics of Virtue: Post-Liberalism and the Human Future_ (Bloomsbury, 2016), 69. [6](#_ednref6). John Milbank and Adrian Pabst, _The Politics of Virtue: Post-Liberalism and the Human Future_ (Bloomsbury, 2016), 69. [7](#_ednref7). John Milbank and Adrian Pabst, _The Politics of Virtue: Post-Liberalism and the Human Future_ (Bloomsbury, 2016), 87, 210. [8](#_ednref8). Norris Clarke S.J., _Person and Being_ (Marquette University Press, 1993), 14. [9](#_ednref9). John Milbank and Adrian Pabst, _The Politics of Virtue: Post-Liberalism and the Human Future_ (Bloomsbury, 2016), 141. [10](#_ednref10). Karl Rahner, _Hearer of the Word_, trans. Joseph Donceel (Continuum, 1994), first published in German in 1941, 112. [11](#_ednref11). John Milbank and Adrian Pabst, _The Politics of Virtue: Post-Liberalism and the Human Future_ (Bloomsbury, 2016), 6. [12](#_ednref12). John Milbank and Adrian Pabst, _The Politics of Virtue: Post-Liberalism and the Human Future_ (Bloomsbury, 2016), 249. [13](#_ednref13). John Milbank and Adrian Pabst, _The Politics of Virtue: Post-Liberalism and the Human Future_ (Bloomsbury, 2016), 250. [14](#_ednref14). John Milbank and Adrian Pabst, _The Politics of Virtue: Post-Liberalism and the Human Future_ (Bloomsbury, 2016), 19. [15](#_ednref15). John Milbank and Adrian Pabst, _The Politics of Virtue: Post-Liberalism and the Human Future_ (Bloomsbury, 2016), 210. [16](#_ednref16). John Milbank and Adrian Pabst, _The Politics of Virtue: Post-Liberalism and the Human Future_ (Bloomsbury, 2016), 228. [17](#_ednref17). John Milbank and Adrian Pabst, _The Politics of Virtue: Post-Liberalism and the Human Future_ (Bloomsbury, 2016), 236. [18](#_ednref18). John Milbank and Adrian Pabst, _The Politics of Virtue: Post-Liberalism and the Human Future_ (Bloomsbury, 2016), 121. [19](#_ednref19). Karl Polanyi, _The Great Transformation_ (Beacon Press, 1944), 46. [20](#_ednref20). John Milbank and Adrian Pabst, _The Politics of Virtue: Post-Liberalism and the Human Future_ (Bloomsbury, 2016), 122–3. [21](#_ednref21). John Milbank and Adrian Pabst, _The Politics of Virtue: Post-Liberalism and the Human Future_ (Bloomsbury, 2016), 137. [22](#_ednref22). John Milbank and Adrian Pabst, _The Politics of Virtue: Post-Liberalism and the Human Future_ (Bloomsbury, 2016), 8. [23](#_ednref23). John Paul II (Karol Wojtyla), _Centesimus annus _\[The hundredth year\], sec. 42 (Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1991). [24](#_ednref24). Benedict XVI (Joseph Ratzinger), _Caritas in veritate_ \[Charity in truth\], sec. 37 (Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2009). [25](#_ednref25). Benedict XVI (Joseph Ratzinger), _Caritas in veritate_ \[Charity in truth\], sec. 39 (Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2009). [26](#_ednref26). John Milbank and Adrian Pabst, _The Politics of Virtue: Post-Liberalism and the Human Future_ (Bloomsbury, 2016), 147. [27](#_ednref27). John Milbank and Adrian Pabst, _The Politics of Virtue: Post-Liberalism and the Human Future_ (Bloomsbury, 2016), 133.