The Telos-Paul Piccone Institute, in association with the Centre for Social Renewal, Energeia, and Plough, presents:
Political Economy and the Good Life:
The 2024 Postliberalism Conference
December 13–14, 2024
McCrum Lecture Theatre, Corpus Christi College, University of Cambridge
About the Conference
What will replace the liberal order that is unraveling? Neither populist revolutions nor technocratic restoration can offer a postliberal vision of the good life and human flourishing. This conference seeks to reclaim postliberalism by charting an alternative to both an empty centrism and an atavistic ethnonationalism. The postliberal vision we explore combines economic transformation with social reconciliation. Beyond the emptiness of liberalism, our politics orients freedom toward the common good. It supports the social solidarity that begins with the family but extends beyond it to larger “families” of belonging—communities, free associations, countries, and the family of nations.
Our economic vision seeks to reconcile the estranged interests of capital and labor in a negotiated settlement anchored in stronger state capacity and a greater involvement of local government and civic bodies. Linked to this is a renewed partnership between government, business, trade unions, and communities to break with neoliberal market globalization and central state nationalization in favor of a more communitarian, corporatist model. We need an ecological politics that reconciles humanity with the natural world, rather than the post-human vision of progressive environmentalism.
Social reconciliation means that we reject extreme identity politics and the culture wars in favor of renewing the sphere of shared meaning—a recognition that individual fulfilment depends on mutual flourishing. Against a culture that is by turns tiresomely priggish and obtusely crass, we uphold complex connections between religion, knowledge, art, popular belief, and folk tradition. Our cultural vision values social virtues, conviviality, inherited craft, and the pursuit of the good life.
The 2024 Postliberalism Conference took place on December 13–14, 2024, in the McCrum Lecture Theatre, Corpus Christi College, University of Cambridge, UK. Co-sponsored by the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute, the Centre for Social Renewal, Energeia, and Plough, the conference brought together leading academics, politicians, policymakers, and journalists to explore the errors and excesses of liberalism and to conceptualize constructive alternatives to its worldview and to the dominant theoretical models that underpin it.
On day 1, our focus was on political economy, in particular the nature of the crisis of liberalism, the contradictions of capitalism, and a shift from globalization, the "knowledge economy," debt and speculation toward national resilience, vocations and crafts, investment and production. The discussion also included new ideas about foreign policy and ecology with an emphasis on realist approaches to interests and the exercise of power.
Day 2 expanded our conversation to new thinking about politics, including virtue politics and left conservatism, but also how to combat the machine by re-humanizing technology, how to purse the good life in relation to our demographic and ecological crises, as well as how to renew the West in the face of Western self-hatred and hostile foreign powers.
Would you like to contribute to the conversation? Write to us to propose a response to any of the conference presentations.
To see the full conference program, please click here .
Conference Videos
We have posted videos from all of the conference panels as well as the two keynotes on both Telos Insights and our YouTube page.