Prodigal Child
Two new books critically engage with postliberalism, signaling a shift in political theory. The authors, Paul Kelly and Matt Sleat, offer differing perspectives on the implications of postliberal thought. While Kelly critiques postliberalism as a dead end for egalitarian politics, Sleat aims for constructive dialogue with liberalism.
- ▪Polity has released two books that critically engage with postliberalism, a once marginal political theory.
- ▪Paul Kelly argues that postliberalism represents a dead end for the left and egalitarian politics.
- ▪Matt Sleat seeks to facilitate dialogue by reflecting on the critiques posed by postliberals to liberalism.
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Record
| Original publisher | First Things |
| Canonical URL | https://firstthings.com/prodigal-child/ |
| Publication time | Mon, 18 May 2026 04:36:23 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-18T05:04:56.107Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-18T05:04:56.107Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | None |
| Cluster logic | Not yet clustered, or no peer story found in the clustering window. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Prodigal Child James R. Wood May 18, 2026 Share Article Against Post-Liberalism: Why ʻFamily, Faith and Flagʼ Is a Dead End for the Leftby paul kellypolity, 208 pages, $22.95Post-Liberalismby matt sleatpolity, 240 pages, $22.95 Something of a shift in the landscape is signaled when a press like Polity releases, almost simultaneously, two book-length critical engagements with postliberalism—a body of thought that just a decade ago would have struggled to earn a footnote in most political theory journals. And whatever the two new studies make of this school—rather little, in the end—they have at least grasped this much: The unquestioned hegemony of liberal political theory is over. The liberal case is now one that has to be made.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at First Things.
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