Transliberalism: An Alternative to John Milbank and Adrian Pabst

Martin Schlag ()
Additional contact information
Martin Schlag: University of St. Thomas, Minnesota

A chapter in After Liberalism?, 2021, pp 63-82 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract Martin Schlag analyses the book The Politics of Virtue by John Milbank and Adrian Pabst. For Schlag, liberalism is not in a meta-crisis, even though it is in a deep crisis. For this reason, unlike Milbank and Pabst, Schlag denies that the only possible future is post-liberalism, because he believes that a purification from within the American tradition of liberal constitutionalism is possible, together with a transition to “transliberalism.” The question is, therefore, whether liberalism will have the strength to cure itself. The analysis in The Politics of Virtue is considered excessively negative, since it does not highlight the real progress that capitalism made possible historically compared to an exclusively agricultural economy. In a propositional key, Schlag points to the inherent limits of the Old Whig liberalism of the Enlightenment: the lack of heroic charity and the exclusion of the poor. As way forward, Schlag stresses the role of lay Christians in the middle of the world and the possibility that laypeople have to bring out from within the political-economic life itself the dimension of gift that founds our society even now. Unfortunately, secularism has overshadowed this element, but the negativity highlighted by Milbank and Pabst is not intrinsic to the American founding tradition of liberalism itself.

Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:sprchp:978-3-030-75702-1_4

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/9783030757021

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-75702-1_4

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Springer Books from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().