I have a critical comment about Becca Rothfeld's account of liberalism and postliberalism:
There is a robust tradition with cogent arguments concluding that state neutrality works only when most of us already have an understanding of and a taste for a common good. Often, these arguments go on to suggest that a vision of the good life is to be cultivated by religion.
But the real lesson of these arguments has begun to be recognized as this, that state neutrality works only when liberal subjects have a vision of the good life that has not been shaped or dictated by the market. The decline of religiosity and other non- or sub-political traditional inheritances is leaving a vacuum being filled by an unchecked consumerist monoculture that insidiously, but no less tyrannically, imposes its vision of the good life. It's becoming increasingly obvious that when the state — the neoliberal state — lets the market determine the values of the polity, it is not, in Rothfeld's words, "expressing respect for its citizens by allowing them to determine and pursue their own values."
The postliberals want to use state power to impose a particular vision of the good life. In this, a majority of us probably think, they should be resisted. But might we want to use state power to keep market logic from imposing its particular vision of the good life?
I have a critical comment about Becca Rothfeld's account of liberalism and postliberalism:
There is a robust tradition with cogent arguments concluding that state neutrality works only when most of us already have an understanding of and a taste for a common good. Often, these arguments go on to suggest that a vision of the good life is to be cultivated by religion.
But the real lesson of these arguments has begun to be recognized as this, that state neutrality works only when liberal subjects have a vision of the good life that has not been shaped or dictated by the market. The decline of religiosity and other non- or sub-political traditional inheritances is leaving a vacuum being filled by an unchecked consumerist monoculture that insidiously, but no less tyrannically, imposes its vision of the good life. It's becoming increasingly obvious that when the state — the neoliberal state — lets the market determine the values of the polity, it is not, in Rothfeld's words, "expressing respect for its citizens by allowing them to determine and pursue their own values."
The postliberals want to use state power to impose a particular vision of the good life. In this, a majority of us probably think, they should be resisted. But might we want to use state power to keep market logic from imposing its particular vision of the good life?