Comment of the Day

Goes to JosephFM (comment #5) to my earlier post on Philip Blond and Michael Sandel.

Chris wrote: The overarching extent of the market-procedural republic could easily incorporate a Blondian critique and metabolize it to its continued interests of expansion.

This is precisely why liberalism is such a hardy paradigm, and is WHY it’s so dominant – it mutates like influenza, absorbing memetic coding from every challenge to it, and moreover does so through an evolutionary rather than teleological process.

Not that there isn’t a telos to liberalism – definitionally, it’s “liberty” – just that history is not moving along a predefined path towards it, and there is broad disagreement on what it would actually consist of (which is why we modern mutations of liberalism fight amongst ourselves with such vehemence. )

Actually it seems to me that the appeal of certain strands of socialism comes from essentially hitting some of the republican notes in a way that could adapt to the secularism of postliberal societies.