Transliberalism: An Alternative to John Milbank and Adrian Pabst

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.