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Contemporary politics is dominated by a liberal creed that champions ‘negative liberty’ and individual happiness. This creed undergirds positions on both the right and the left – free-market capitalism, state bureaucracy and individualism in social life. The triumph of liberalism has had the effect of subordinating human association and the common good to narrow self-interest and short-term utility. By contrast, post-liberalism promotes individual fulfilment and mutual flourishing based on shared goals that have more substantive content than the formal abstractions of liberal law and contract, and yet are also adaptable to different cultural and local traditions. The book apply this analysis to the economy, politics, culture, and international affairs. In each case, having diagnosed the crisis of liberalism, it proposes post-liberal alternatives, notably new concepts and fresh policy ideas. The book demonstrates that, amid the current crisis, post-liberalism is a programme that could define a new politics of virtue and the common good.

If Britain has become more secularised over the past century or so, it has to do with two distinct yet complementary developments: first, the expansion of both state and market in hitherto autonomous, more mutually governed areas (including education, health, welfare, the family, etc.). Second, the retreat of the Church from its traditional involvement in these social, charitable, education and cultural activities. Taken together, they help explain why the economy has been progressively disembedded from society and interpersonal relationships have been subsumed under either bureaucratic processes or commercial transactions (or indeed both at once).\ud \ud Crucially, state and market have increasingly converged and even colluded at the expense of civil society, i.e. the ‘complex space’ of intermediary institutions such as free hospitals, friendly societies, manufacturing and trading guilds or universities whose autonomy is upheld by the Church. The global ‘market-state’ has subordinated the sanctity of life, land and labour to abstract values and standards, reducing the dignity of the person to ‘bare individuality’ and the shared quest for the common good to the individual pursuit of either utility or happiness.\ud \ud Linked to the advance of secularism is the twin triumph of social-cultural and economic-political liberalism since the 1960s, which has coincided with the de-christianisation of Britain. Decades of liberalisation have certainly provided greater opportunities for many and afforded some protection against the worst transgressions upon the liberty of some by the liberty of others, especially given the growing disagreement about substantive notions of justice and the good life.\ud \ud However, socio-economic liberalism has also eroded the social bonds and civic ties on which vibrant democracies and market economies ultimately depend for trust and cooperation. Paradoxically, the two liberalisms have engendered a society that is simultaneous more interdependent and more atomised – tied to global finance that undermines the real economy and further fragments the United Kingdom. Following the global crash in 2008, we are left with a broken economy and a broken society.\ud Five years later, British politics has returned to the old orthodoxies, notably the secular liberalism of both left and right and the collusive convergence of state and market at the expense of civil society. Among the few exceptions are ideas and movements such as ‘Red Tory’ and ‘Blue Labour’ that have challenged the secular liberal consensus. Such paradoxical combinations are characteristic of the new post-liberal politics, which seeks to combine greater economic justice with an emphasis on interpersonal relationships, supportive of family loyalty without wanting to decree in what a ‘real’ family should consist.\ud \ud But as both Red Tory and Blue Labour struggle to gain traction with the mainstream of the Conservative and the Labour party or indeed with the public at large, the role of the Church in shaping a politics of the common good is increasingly coming to the fore. Catholic Social Thought has provided much inspiration to the post-liberal thinking of Blue Labour in particular, both in terms of rejecting the false opposition between state collectivisation and market commodification and in relation to concrete policy alternatives such as the ‘living wage’, caps on usurious interest rates, proper workers’ representation in firms, a vocational economy as well as robust regional banks constrained to lend within specific sectors and counties or cities, as Maurice Glasman has advocated. \ud \ud As the established Church with its unique parochial system, the Church of England is exceptionally well positioned to offer courageous leadership and translate perennial principles into transformative practices. Far from being a mere ‘super-NGO’ or the poster-institution and moral conscience of civil society, the Church of England is a polity in her own right that co-constitutes together with Parliament the shared public realm under the aegis of the monarchy. In this manner, the established Church has a particular duty to promote a sense of individual virtue and public honour on which a society governed by reciprocity or gift-exchange depends. The Church of England is indispensable to a new politics of the common good beyond the liberalism of both left and right that underpins the global ‘market-state’.

The Byzantine Empire is commonly associated with political absolutism, economic feudalism, and a State Church that simultaneously sacralised power and secularised religion. This, coupled with influence of Islam and oriental cultures, appears to explain how Europe’s East has been backward and reactionary, lacking Western virtues such as the distinction of religion from political authority, constitutionalism, the rule of law, a vibrant market economy and civil society – a free space between the people and the ruler. That is why Byzantium is synonymous with decadence, repression, and the arcane arrangements of an opaque bureaucracy. As such, the Byzantine legacy is thought to be singularly responsible for Eastern authoritarianism and autocracy that contrasts sharply with Western freedom and democracy. In modern times, so this narrative goes, the East was caught in the constricting shackles of imperial and clerical domination, while the West became the harbinger of Enlightenment emancipation. \ud \ud This essay contends that Byzantium is key to understanding the history of pan-Europe and to chart an alternative European project for the future. Far from being simply a decadent empire whose demise heralded the rise of progressive sovereign nation-states, I shall argue that the Byzantine Commonwealth preserved the heritage of Antiquity and represented an association of nations and peoples around a shared polity, culture, and faith. This legacy offers as yet unrealised resources to build a pan-European community that the post-Cold War project of liberal market democracy purported to provide but failed to deliver.\ud \ud Section 1 links the neglect of the Byzantine legacy to the myth of secular Europe and contends that the rise to power of secularism was neither necessary nor normative but instead historically contingent and arbitrary. Section 2 seeks briefly to re-tell the history of Europe in a manner that restores Byzantium to its rightful place, with a particular emphasis on the some of the religious and political aspects of the Byzantine settlement and on ways in which it shaped the countries that emerged from the Eastern empire. Section 3 argues that Europe remains a vestigially Christian polity and that Byzantium is key to this unique heritage. Section 4 turns to the contemporary situation and suggests that the model of the commonwealth – a voluntary association of nations and peoples – offers a better future than either a centralised super-state under the guise of modern federalism or a loose network of sovereign states which merely trade with one another.

This book seeks to retrieve metaphysics and reveals its theological nature. \ud It shows how ancient and modern conceptions of being in terms of individual substance fail to account for the irreducible, ontological relations that characterize all things. Those relations bind immanent, finite beings to each other and also to their transcendent, infinite source in God.\ud \ud As such, there is no abstract individuality that is somehow more primary than being in relation. Rather, the ‘individuality’ of a thing is both existentially and essentially its metaphysical positioning in relation to other things. In turn, the relational ordering of all things suggests a priority of relation over substance. That priority intimates a first principle and final end that is itself relational – the triune God of the Christian faith.\ud \ud To develop this argument, the book provides a close reading of the Neo-Platonist theology that we find in the works the Church Fathers and Doctors. The main figures are St. Augustine, Boethius, Dionysius the Areopagite and St. Thomas Aquinas. Common to them is the idea that the creative relationality of the three divine persons brings everything out of nothing into existence. God gives all beings a share of Trinitarian being in which the created order participates. Thus, the argument is that the doctrine of creation ex nihilo and the Trinity provide a better account of individuation than purely philosophical theories.\ud \ud In short, the book combines the theological ‘turn’ of contemporary philosophy with the re-hellenization of theology that Pope Benedict XVI and other theologians have defended. Based on a genealogical account from Plato to ‘postmodernism,’ the essay argues that the Christian Neo-Platonic fusion of biblical revelation with Greco-Roman philosophy produced a theological metaphysic that surpasses ancient and modern ontology.

This paper argues that the transatlantic secularisation debate lacks certain philosophical and theological concepts to make sense of politics and faith in the United States and Europe. The first part suggests that secularisation and de-secularisation theories are wedded to a secular perspective that essentialises religion. The second section links US religiosity to a post-Christian Gnostic spirituality that perpetuates the myth of American exceptionalism. The third section concedes that Europe is the most secularised continent but contends that it remains a vestigially Christian polity. What emerges is a paradox: the United States is more religious but less Christian than Europe.

This essay argues that modern sovereignty is not simply a legal or political concept that is coterminous with the modern nation-state. Rather, at the theoretical level modern sovereign power is inscribed into a wider theological dialectic between “the one” and “the many”. Modernity fuses juridical-constitutional models of supreme state authority with a new, “biopolitical” account of power whereby natural life and the living body of the individual are the object of politics and are subject to state control (section 1).\ud \ud The origins of this dialectic go back to changes within Christian theology in the late Middle Ages and the early modern period. In particular, these changes can be traced to Ockham's denial of the universal Good in things, Suárez's priority of the political community over the ecclesial body and Hobbes's “biopolitical” definition of power as state dominion over life (section 2).\ud \ud At the practical level, modern sovereignty has involved both the national state and the transnational market. The “revolutions in sovereignty” that gave rise to the modern state and the modern market were to some considerable extent shaped by theological concepts and changes in religious institutions and practices: first, the supremacy of the modern national state over the transnational papacy and national churches; second, the increasing priority of individuality over collectivity; third, a growing focus on contractual proprietary relations at the expense of covenantal ties and communal bonds (section 3).\ud \ud By subjecting both people and property to uniform standards of formal natural rights and abstract monetary value, financial capitalism and liberal secular democracy are part of the “biopolitical” logic that subordinates the sanctity of life and land to the secular sacrality of the state and the market. In Pope Benedict's theology, we can find the contours of a post-secular political economy that challenges the monopoly of modern sovereignty (sections 4–5).