A Guide to a Muscular Liberalism
Liberals can articulate their values without trampling on rights.
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Every political tradition faces the question of what constitutes a good life. But only liberalism struggles so visibly to offer a straightforward answer. Authoritarians promise order and national greatness. Socialists promise equality. Post-liberal writers promise meaning and belonging through restored religious and civilizational authority—a life ordered to faith, family, and place.
Liberalism alone points nowhere in particular. Its answer—freedom—tells you what to protect, not what to do with it. Yet that silence is not emptiness. It reflects a wise limit: no one can know in advance the forms a flourishing life will take.
That beguiling silence takes one only so far, however. And in an era when liberalism is under assault from all directions, a more muscular liberalism may be called for—one that speaks up and claims what it is, or at the very least forthrightly articulates its vision of the plane on which a good life may take place.
The case for liberal institutions begins with the distinction between the dimensions along which human beings flourish, and the specific forms their flourishing takes. The dimensions are what any life needs to go well, like the freedom to direct one’s own life and to do work with a point to it. The forms are the particular ways a life fills them in.
If the forms are varied, the dimensions can, at this stage of human history, be stated with high confidence. A long tradition of inquiry keeps returning to them. Aristotle approached the question of the good life through the nature of the human animal. He argued that such a life consists in the active exercise of distinctively human capacities—reasoning about how to live, cultivating character, engaging in worthwhile activity with others. John Stuart Mill approached it from a political angle, arguing that freedom enables what he called “experiments in living”—a process through which individuals discover and develop their own capacities. Psychologists Edward Deci and Richard Ryan set out to study human motivation empirically. Across four decades of cross-cultural research they identified three conditions without which people consistently fail to thrive: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Stated another way, human beings flourish by 1) developing capabilities, 2) forming relationships that matter, 3) engaging in work that has a point to it, and 4) directing their own lives rather than living by another’s plan. Without those conditions being met, people, even in conditions of material comfort, languish.
That is what we know. What we cannot know are the specific forms the dimensions take in any actual life. The dimensions-and-forms distinction identifies the axes along which human lives develop or fail to develop. It does not say which capabilities a person should pursue, or in what sequence. It does not say whether meaningful relationships will be found in family, friendship, religious community, or professional vocation—or in combinations no prior generation could have imagined. And the claims about the good life rest on thousands of years of human experience—no metaphysical certainties required. That vested knowledge is at least some sort of a guide.
Why the Forms Cannot Be Prescribed
Nobel laureate Friedrich Hayek argued that the knowledge required to direct a complex social order is not concentrated in any mind or institution. It is dispersed across millions of individuals, embedded in particular circumstances, and constantly revised in light of changing conditions. Much of it cannot be articulated at all. His subject was economic order: prices communicate dispersed knowledge, and competition serves as a discovery procedure.
The same logic runs into the domain of human lives. The knowledge required to direct the forms of a flourishing life is not dispersed in the way market knowledge is. The planner who cannot know the relative value of steel and timber at least faces facts that exist somewhere, in someone’s hands. Whether a given person will flourish as a musician or an engineer is not a fact waiting in some other head to be collected. That knowledge does not exist anywhere yet, because it is made only in the living. No planner could gather it, because there is nothing yet to gather.
Karl Popper, Hayek’s frequent collaborator, argued that knowledge grows through conjecture and refutation. Theories are proposed, tested, and corrected when their predictions are falsified by evidence and reason. The same logic applies to flourishing. John Stuart Mill’s term “experiments in living” is not a metaphor. It describes the mechanism by which societies discover which new forms a flourishing life can take. When someone attempts a new form of work, a new kind of community, a new way of combining independence with obligation, and it fails, the failure is informative. Others observe and adjust. When it succeeds, the success is available for others to adopt and adapt.
Consider Wikipedia. Twenty-six years ago, it did not exist. Today, millions of volunteers contribute their knowledge, time, and care to a shared encyclopaedia available to anyone with an internet connection. Many devote thousands of hours to editing articles read by strangers they will never meet. They argue, edit, correct, refine. No prior generation could have foreseen this form of cooperation in this particular technology. No central authority could have designed it. It is a form of human flourishing—disciplined, social, generative—that depends on the freedoms and infrastructures (in this case the freedom of web exchange) that liberal institutions make possible. The forms are brand-new. But the underlying principles are age-old.
What This Means for Institutions
Liberal institutions do not just happen to support human development. They protect the freedom on which the discovery of new forms depends. The dimensions-and-forms distinction carries Hayek’s insight into the content of a life. Prices communicate information no planner could gather, but the system depends on a degree of stability and openness in a market. Competition turns up innovations that no one could foresee, but that hinges on an absence of authoritarian controls and a respect for the spirit of competition. More subtly, experiments in living do the same for human lives.
The conclusion of reflections like these is the claim—stronger than what many liberals are comfortable with—that liberalism is not one moral preference among others but the set of conditions under which a society can keep discovering new ways for its members to flourish.
The claim rests, fundamentally, on how knowledge is distributed. A good scientific institution builds on its current knowledge while standing ready to revise it. Liberal institutions do the same thing for human flourishing. They protect the conditions it requires while remaining open to emergent forms of technological and social flourishing.
Authoritarian regimes, even when they achieve economic growth, struggle to produce the broad discovery of genuine flourishing. They can deliver prosperity. They can deliver science, too, where the state has chosen to value it—for instance, the Soviet Union sponsored world-class physics. But they do not reliably deliver inquiry the state has not authorized—the open-ended search that turns up forms no plan foresaw.
Hungary has been constantly pointed to by the post-liberals as a model for their vision of a state. And there is much to learn from Hungary—but maybe not in the way the post-liberals intend. During Viktor Orbán’s sixteen years in power, Hungary’s ranking in the World Press Freedom Index fell from the low twenties to 74th, among the worst in the European Union. A captured press is one of the first channels of unauthorized inquiry to close. So is a captured university: Orbán’s government moved most public universities into foundations run by boards of loyalists, with lifetime appointments and control over budgets, strategy, and senior posts. The EU responded by cutting those universities out of its Erasmus and research-funding programmes. These are the institutions through which a society develops capabilities and tries out new ways of living, and the state has brought them to heel. The young and educated felt the squeeze first. They left in large numbers, many to study abroad, with disillusionment with the country’s political direction among the drivers. Hungarians turned Orbán out in April 2026, but many of those who would have done the most with a freer country had already gone.
How to Close Discovery
Hungary’s struggle speaks to the failure of the underlying philosophy of post-liberalism. In Return of the Strong Gods, R.R. Reno calls for thick, binding loyalties—religious, national, civilizational—to be restored in place of liberal neutrality. In Why Liberalism Failed, Patrick Deneen argues that liberal societies are failing because they lack binding commitments to religion, nation, or tradition.
Their diagnosis contains real insight. Liberal societies can produce hollowness when they neglect the conditions for human development, but the post-liberals have a fundamental hubris—a belief that the forms of human flourishing are known, that the process of “discovery” is really a flip to the answers in the back of the book. The post-liberals’ usual move is to invert liberalism’s premise in their attempt to reintroduce religion into the center of public discourse. They argue that they ask only for an orientation, not a template. But the problem is that a religious orientation does not survive translation into political authority. Held by true believers, the command to love God and neighbor leaves the form of every life open. But as public doctrine, the same commitment necessarily acquires enforcers, with the operations of the state intermixed with theology, and with enforcers determining what counts as fidelity.
That is how an orientation hardens into a template. The prescription fixes the forms of a flourishing life from above—through sacred authority or civilizational identity—when the reality is that the forms can only be discovered one life at a time. In the end, post-liberalism represents a return to the closed society, where the forms of the good life are licensed rather than discovered.
For liberals, the vital difference here is that liberal institutions keep the process of discovery open—there is no one right answer to be found by reading (or correctly interpreting) the right sacred book. On the other hand, meaningful liberalism is not relativism. The dimensions of flourishing are knowable through long human experience; the forms remain open to discovery. To be successful, liberals must fight to keep the currents of freedom flowing—whether a genuinely free market or the free exchange of ideas. Protecting formal freedoms while neglecting the enabling conditions for development produces the hollowness that the post-liberals are correct to decry.
With this more muscular conception in mind, liberals should feel empowered to attend to the ecology of liberalism directly. The distinction between dimensions and forms marks the line: liberals can cultivate the conditions for flourishing without trampling on essential rights. A school can develop a child’s capacities without prescribing what she does with them. That is the difference between cultivating a dimension and dictating a form. And this is not optional maintenance. It is the price of the open society—which, as Popper argued, requires constant vigilance to survive.
We know more about the good life than relativists claim and less than paternalists assume. A good life cannot be designed. But it can be discovered—and a life discovered is owned, not imposed. Creating the conditions for that discovery is the quiet genius of liberal institutions. Sometimes, though, the quiet genius needs to speak up and be heard.
Roger Partridge is a founder and senior fellow of The New Zealand Initiative and writes on public policy, constitutional law and liberalism. He publishes on Substack at Plain Thinking.
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This piece does a good job of deploying the classic liberal thesis - articulated by scholars like my mentor Ronald Dworkin - against the "post-liberal" crypto-religious obscurantism of scholars like Patrick Deneen and Robert George.
Without naming it, the author seems to be reaching for pragmatism as an epistemological and jurisprudential reference point - namely, the idea that the sensemaking pathway to "truth" lies through discovery, which is why free experimentation is so vital to human flourishing.
But is the proposed "muscular conception" of the liberal thesis as "muscular" as the author suggests?
The "dimensions vs. forms" distinction sounds a tad murky, quaint and not up to confronting the two main political-economic challenges before us: the growing inequality of social outcomes, nationally and internationally, and the threat of agentic displacement of humans by AIs.
Postliberalism promises to bring back "old-fashioned virtues" like honesty, yet when they get in power they deliver Trump-Orban levels of corruption.