The False Allure of the Pagan Right

"We are living in a postliberal moment. After three decades of dominance, liberalism is losing its hold on Western minds." So Matthew Rose begins A World After Liberalism, his compact but thoughtful and suggestive reflections on a series of "philosophers of the radical Right" who not only excoriated the liberal dispensation, but sketched the prospects for a future that repudiated liberal liberty root-and-branch. Rose’s reference to "three decades" of liberal dominance suggests that the liberalism he has in mind is the postmodern liberalism that came to the fore after the collapse of European Communism in the period 1989-1991. This is a liberalism with global pretenses that is at once post-national, post-Christian, and post-political, relativistic, transgressive, and moralistic.