The 2024 Postliberalism Conference: Michael Lind on Pluralism and the Social Constitution

The Telos Press Podcast

In this episode of the TPPI Podcast, we present Michael Lind’s keynote address “After Liberalism: Pluralism and the Social Constitution,” from day 1 of Political Economy and the Good Life: The 2024 Postliberalism Conference. Lind is a leading academic, commentator, and bestselling author of The New Class War (2020). The panel discussion was moderated by Tom McTague, Political Editor of UnHerd, and it featured responses to Lind’s lecture from the following three speakers:

• Claire Ainsley, Director of the Project on Center-Left Renewal, Progressive Policy Institute; Director of Policy, Labour Party (2020–22); author of The New Working Class;

• Jon Cruddas, former Labour MP for Dagenham and Rainham; author of The Dignity of Labour (2021), and A Century of Labour (2024); and

• Adrian Pabst, Professor of Politics, University of Kent, and author of The Politics of Virtue: Postliberalism and the Human Future (2016, with John Milbank) and Postliberal Politics (2021).

The 2024 Postliberalism Conference took place on December 13–14, 2024, in the McCrum Lecture Theatre, Corpus Christi College, University of Cambridge, UK. Co-sponsored by the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute, the Centre for Social Renewal, Energeia, and Plough, the conference brought together leading academics, politicians, policymakers, and journalists to explore the errors and excesses of liberalism and to conceptualize constructive alternatives to its worldview and to the dominant theoretical models that underpin it.