Sometime in the mid Eighties, not long after he published the seminal text of post-liberal philosophy After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, Alasdair MacIntyre and I had lunch in Oxford. I asked him whether there was a contemporary example of a society that was not corroded by individualism. “Rajasthan,” he replied. I was unpersuaded. A society like the one he imagined in the north-west of India, in which individuals were embedded in an all-encompassing social order, has not existed in Western countries for centuries, if ever. After finishing our meal, we walked over to Wadham College and sat together on a bench under a tree in its garden. We talked, in all, for nearly four hours. Then, exasperated by my scepticism, he got up and left, turning on his way with a parting shot: “I will pray for you.”
This impressive performance foreshadowed MacIntyre’s subsequent intellectual development. He spent the rest of his life fleshing out a version of the ethics of Aristotle, transmitted to the modern world through the Roman Catholic Church to which he converted in 1983. He died, at the age of 96, in May of this year. Looking back, I see that our conversation crystallised my doubts about the doctrinal anti-liberalism he preached in After Virtue.
Reading the book when it first appeared in 1981, I was struck by its political thinness. A diagnosis of the ills of individualism that invoked Benedictine monasteries and small Scottish fishing communities offered little useful guidance for modern urban-industrial societies. Of course, this was hardly surprising: the book is an avowed critique of the modern world. But MacIntyre began as a Marxist, publishing a short study Marxism: An Interpretation in 1953 and participating in New Left debates until well into the Sixties. Karl Marx never imagined it would be possible to roll back modern development. In 1853, he described British imperialism in India as a progressive force: by constructing railroads and other innovations, it disrupted the “stagnation” of village life. Whatever one may think of Marx’s communist utopia, he understood that revisiting an idealised past is an exercise in futility.
Some 40 years on, these suspicions have been confirmed. Post-liberal visions of a seamless social order have proved as illusory, and in practice as divisive, as the progressive hyper-liberalism that has led us to our present pass. The identity politics of the right aiming to restore a homogeneous culture and the left’s project of conferring rights on minority groups are equally destructive. Liberalsocieties are now in a condition of advanced and possibly terminal decay. Liberal individualism was an accident of history, and never a universalisable way of life. But if there is a future for the societies in which it once prevailed, it is in renewing not rejecting liberal values. For countries such as the UK, radical illiberalism is a dead end.
Post-liberalism can refer to many disparate sets of ideas. Anti-modern traditionalism and Catholic integralism, Nietzschean elitism and Anglo-futurism, ethnonationalism, left-conservatism and majoritarian populism are some of the varieties on display. Despite their differences, they can all be understood as corroborating MacIntyre’s disquieting suggestion in the first chapter of After Virtue. He asks the reader to envision a world in which science has been destroyed in a cultural backlash. When efforts are made to revive it, what emerges is a cargo cult, mimicking scientific traditions without understanding their methods or purpose.
MacIntyre’s unsettling suggestion is that this is the condition of modern moral discourse. People talk – or shout – about “justice” and “rights”, but the central concepts of ethics no longer have any determinable meaning. Emotivism – the theory proposed by philosophers such as AJ Ayer, in which moral judgements are expressions of feeling with no cognitive content – has become the way we live.
The situation today is worse than that posited in MacIntyre’s thought experiment. Science has followed the trajectory of ethics. In key branches of inquiry, the pursuit of knowledge has been subordinated to political projects in which feelings are the final authority. Biological sex is denied because it is supposed to deny the ability to choose one’s gender. Social science is devoted to uncovering hidden structures of domination – racist, heteronormative and the like. Class inequalities, which Marx recognised as social facts, hardly feature here. Oppression is a subjective experience, the refusal of society to recognise and privilege a self-defined identity.
If rampant subjectivism is the pathology of our time, pursuing an imaginary prelapsarian idyll will not solve our problems. Western civilisation has always been ridden with conflict. The scholastic synthesis of Jewish revealed religion with Greek rationalist philosophy was never stable. Medieval Europe was racked by antinomian heresies and savage wars of religion. A harmonious pre-modern way of life is the stuff of legend.
Nor is individualism a peculiarly modern phenomenon. As the anthropologist and historian Alan Macfarlane showed in The Origins of English Individualism(1978), a fluid, mobile society existed in this country from the 13th century onwards. Enclosures in which common land was expropriated enhanced the power of the property-owning classes, but pre-industrial society was not made up of Arcadian villages. Ironically, the working-class street communities that formed around the factories and workshops in the Midlands and the north in the late-18th and 19th centuries were spin-offs from industrial capitalism. Torn down in Labour clearance schemes, decimated by Thatcherite economics and finished off by bourgeois-environmentalist deindustrialisation, they cannot be resurrected. For us, individualism is a historical fate.
As a former Marxist, MacIntyre should have understood that the maladies of modernity are the result of technological and economic change abetted by state power, and are not simply a consequence of shifts in ideas. Yet he was right in thinking that liberal philosophy facilitated the dissolution of a liberal way of life. Astutely, MacIntyre recognised that Friedrich Nietzsche – regarded by illiterate progressives as a counter-Enlightenment reactionary – represented a logical endpoint of the Enlightenment project. After “the death of God”, the human good is living as you choose to live, a freedom Nietzsche insisted can only be exercised by a superior few. (A version of this view is promoted in the writings and posts of Bronze Age Pervert, the pseudonymous internet personality, who celebrates an archaic Greek world of piracy, predation and misogyny.)
But Nietzsche was prefigured by a canonical liberal, John Stuart Mill. Sections of his On Liberty (1859) read like the fantasy of the Übermensch seen through a bien-pensant prism. For Mill, progress meant promoting a higher type of human being that displayed “individuality”. The goal for everyone was to realise themselves as unique personalities. Transmitted through the Bloomsbury intelligentsia and resonating in the cultural revolution of the Sixties, self-realisation has become the core liberal value. Human beings must be able to make of themselves whatever they wish. Hyper-liberalism is Nietzsche for the masses.
In practice, things are more complicated. Our ultra-individualists are gripped by an insatiable need for collective belonging. It is not enough to be free to love whomever you want; you must be recognised as a member of a group with specially protected rights. Fighting racism does not mean equal treatment but positive discrimination for favoured minorities. The proliferation of identity groups is not only a demand for status and resources, but therapy. For many, autonomy means anomie – the lack of a stable identity. Self-realisation is difficult when you have no self to realise. Solidarity with selected victims gives purpose to lives that are otherwise empty of meaning, and a sense of identity is discovered in the madness of crowds.
Hyper-liberalism has not produced MacIntyre’s dystopia – a chaos of free-floating individuals. Instead, society is being segmented into exclusionary communities. Multicultural diversity is proving to be a process of what we might call quasi-milletisation. Under the rule of the Ottoman empire, each religious community or “millet” – from Armenian Orthodox to Jewish communities – had its schools, marital arrangements and daily observances under its own laws. The leaders of the millets – mullahs, rabbis, priests – acted as intermediaries with the imperial authorities. Millets were based on religion not ethnicity, so migration from one to another was possible – but only by conversion. Autonomy was collective, not individual.
The Ottoman model has been praised as a regime of toleration, and so it was compared with medieval Christendom. But pluralism of this kind does not safeguard anyone who does not belong to one of the protected communities. In the variant that has evolved in Britain, thousands of white working-class girls subjected to industrial-scale rape by ethnically networked gangs have been let down by the justice system. Christians face expulsion from their professions for voicing their beliefs. Muslims and other immigrants face threats of attack when peaceful protests are hijacked by agitators. As the hideous attack on a Manchester synagogue on 2 October demonstrated, Jews are now targets of murderous assault when they gather to practise their faith. Post-liberal Britain risks descending into what the 17th-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes described as a state of nature, with an enfeebled state unable to prevent catastrophic breaches in civil peace.
In Post-Liberalism: Studies in Political Thought (1993), I argued that “contending projects for the political protection of cultural identity… each of which seeks privileges and entitlements that cannot in their nature be extended to all” were creating “a new Hobbesian dilemma”. Reasserting the authority of government as the guarantor of peace, as conceived by the author of Leviathan (1651), the first and greatest liberal thinker, was the overriding imperative.
The kernel of truth in liberalism was a type of individualism – not the crypto-Nietzschean cult of self-realisation, but one which accepts that, left to themselves, individuals are weak and vulnerable creatures. In Leviathan, Hobbes’s conception of the state rested on the consent of those it offered to protect. This is what made him a liberal – and the most incisive critic of what currently passes as liberalism. Dismissing any idea of divine right, he also rejected Platonic rule by philosophers – an idea crudely and unwittingly parodied in progressive thinking. For Hobbes, the office of government is not to make human beings more rational or more virtuous, but to protect them from the ever-present danger of anarchy. The truth in post-liberalism is not dissimilar: human beings need shelter from the anarchical forces of the global market, including mass immigration. The error is in thinking safety can be found in communities.
Hostility to the modern state is a fatal flaw in post-liberal thinking. In societies divided by religion, MacIntyre’s monasteries risk being sacked. Unless they are shielded from foreign competition, his small fishing communities will be ruined. There is peril from despotic powers, not just of military invasion but the disabling of essential services by cyberwarfare. In any world containing Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Xi Jinping’s China or a millenarian Iran, returning to neo-medieval communalism is a non-starter. The same is true of reviving the liberalism of the 19th and 20th centuries, an offspring of European (and later, American) global hegemony, now in steep retreat following the implosion of the “rules-based” international order.
Britain is responding with the construction of a security state. Organisations associated with terrorist activity – such as Palestine Action, the neo-Nazi Maniac Murder Cult and the white supremacist Russian Imperial movement – have been rightly proscribed. Incitement to violence, from whatever quarter, must be rigorously suppressed. Internet censorship of the kind permitted by the recently passed Online Safety Act, on the other hand, will strengthen the forces it seeks to curb. Conflating peaceful protesters against mass immigration with the far right can only help legitimise it. The disruption that goes with the sudden appearance in residential areas of hundreds of young males, many of them from illiberal cultures, is real, growing and felt across society. A digital ID scheme will do little to improve border control while facing opposition from those who fear it as the prelude to more invasive control of everyday life. A security state that brands an emerging British majority as potential criminals is programmed to self-destruct.
The unending small-boats saga shows government defaulting on one of its most basic functions. One reason is chronic underfunding of the police, courts, prisons and armed services inherited from Cameron-Osborne austerity. The deeper difficulty is a fundamentalist ideology of rights, which in prioritising legal fictions over social and political facts is itself a species of subjectivism. As MacIntyre wrote: “The truth is that there are no such things as rights, and belief in them is one with belief in witches and unicorns.” Slowly, and then quickly, regimes that attempt to enforce these figments at the expense of public order forfeit legitimacy. The risk is not of civil war – British society is too fragmented for that. In France, civil strife may end with an authoritarian Sixth Republic. The risk for us is ungovernability.
Of all European countries, mainland Britain has been among the least afflicted by Völkisch nationalism. There have been outbreaks of xenophobia, such as the “yellow peril” backlash against Chinese immigrants that provoked the 1905 Aliens Act. But until the unprecedentedly large inflows of people in the Tony Blair to Boris Johnson era, successive waves of newcomers – such as Huguenot refugees from France in the 17th and 18th centuries, Irish families escaping the 1840s famine, Jews fleeing pogroms in eastern Europe in the 1880s, and the Windrush Generation of Commonwealth immigrants – were absorbed and most prospered. Enoch Powell lost his gamble on a politics of white identity. Demonising popular resistance to continued large-scale immigration could reanimate that ugly spectre.
Few now expect a Keir Starmer-led government to survive until 2029. An early general election precipitated by fiscal crisis is not impossible. Reform would most likely be the biggest beneficiary, even though Nigel Farage has now admitted his party’s proclaimed programme to date was fiscally unsustainable. The true danger of a Farage government is that his policies are undeliverable. There is zero chance of stopping the small boats in weeks or of implementing deportations on the scale he has proposed.
If a Reform-led government collapses under the weight of its empty promises, trust in democratic politics will be damaged irreparably. More extreme forces like those that manifested themselves in the mass demonstration orchestrated by Tommy Robinson in London last month will grow in strength. Riven by ethnic and sectarian divisions and insurgent movements of the far left and right, Britain could fast become a failed state.
In these conditions, post-liberal fantasies of cultural restoration are a distraction. In any realistically imaginable future, this country will continue to encompass a variety of faiths and values. Not only in Europe but throughout the world, the age of large-scale migration is over. But there can be no going back to the monocultural nationhood of the past. The issue is not how to integrate minorities into an overarching culture, but how ways of life that will remain divergent can cohabit in some sort of modus vivendi.
The way forward is to constrain communities rather than to entrench them. Everyone should be subject to a rule of law enforced equally on all. Nobody should be denied freedom to exit their community or subjected to coercion by other communities. The tyranny of minorities in stifling free expression should be firmly resisted. Individual liberty must be reasserted against the invasive claims of collective identity. But can the political will be summoned to bring about such a radical change in direction?
We all know the quotation from Lampedusa’s The Leopard, where the prince’s nephew Tancredi says: “If we want things to stay as they are, things must change.” A more pertinent quote – since things are not going to stay as they are, whatever anyone wants – may be an observation the prince himself makes: “The Sicilians never want to improve for the simple reason that they think themselves perfect. Their vanity is greater than their misery.” The same is true of our progressive ruling classes. Their self-love is greater than their love of power. Blinded by their subjective certainties, they are preparing the ground for their own extinction.
The downfall of liberalism will not open a path to any Rajasthan of the imagination. Post-liberalism had another fatal flaw: most people in this country do not want to live in integral communities. The world they have lost is one in which they could rub along together, forming families and communities along the way. If what Hobbes called “commodious living” cannot be reinvented by a strong state, our future will be a war of all against all, fought out not between individuals but identity groups – a life that might not be solitary or necessarily short, but will be nasty, brutish and certainly poor.
John Gray: Why I am not a post-liberal. Hobbesian liberalism is the only way to rescue British society
The New Statesman. The Weekend Essay. 18 October 2025