Why Postliberalism Failed offers an indictment of one of the most consequential ideological movements reshaping American and European conservatism today. With leading politicians among its adherents and major conservative institutions captured by its agenda, postliberalism demands serious scrutiny and this book delivers it.
Drawing on deep historical research, the book traces postliberalism's intellectual roots to two traditions: an extreme papalism that subordinates all political authority to Church power, and a reactionary European tradition that explained liberal modernity through conspiracy theories blaming Jews and Freemasons for the downfall of throne and altar. These traditions fused into an ideology that powered authoritarian regimes across Europe and Latin America during the interwar years. These regimes, the actual embodiments of integralist aspirations, were marked by poverty, religious persecution, Nazi collaboration, and genocide.
Thomas D. Howes and James M. Patterson demonstrate how today's postliberals rely on these same poisoned wells. The postliberal vision of Catholic integralism, already repudiated by the Second Vatican Council, promises not a renewal of faith but empty churches and filled cemeteries.
Yet this is ultimately a book of hope. By exposing postliberalism's deadly history and intellectual bankruptcy, the authors present a compelling defense of the authentic American Catholic political tradition, one that has always found in the ordered liberty of constitutional republicanism not an enemy of the faith, but its surest protector.
From the Forewords:
"This book is written especially for those young Catholics who are still open to learning-who sense that something is wrong but are willing to be shown that illiberal church-state regimes are not the solution."
Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone
Archdiocese of San Francisco
"Postliberalism failed for a reason more fundamental than bad politics or bad history, though it has plenty of both. It failed because it lacks an adequate account of human nature and civil society."
Catherine Ruth Pakaluk
The Catholic University of America
Review :
"At a cultural moment when a growing number of religious voices advocate for the political and juridical supremacy of religious authority over democratic norms, this book provides a rigorous, illuminating critique. The authors meticulously dismantle the "integralist" attack on secular democracy, powerfully defending the liberal, constitutional state and its commitment to the Rule of Law and individual freedom. No one engaging in the debate over the future of liberal democracy can afford to ignore this book."
Martin Rhonheimer
President of the Austrian Institute of Economics and Social Philosophy
(Vienna, Austria)
Professor of Ethics and Political Philosophy
at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross, 1990-2020
(Rome, Italy)
"In 2026 many are the voices on the Right seeking to reconfigure or even jettison traditional American conservatism. In Why Postliberalism Failed, two young Roman Catholic scholars critically examine one such faction: militantly Catholic 'postliberalism' or 'integralism'-a political tendency they judge to be reactionary, authoritarian, and alien to the classically liberal/conservative American experience. Howes and Patterson's book is trenchant, comprehensive, and illuminating. Conservatives of all religious and political affiliations-and not just conservatives-should read this book and ponder its message."
George H. Nash
Historian
Author of The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945
"Patterson and Howes ultimately argue that today's postliberals have neither sufficiently read their history, nor have they adequately recognized how the policies they endorse must result in poverty and disillusionment for all common folk. Their book remains an indispensable shield for anyone seeking to reclaim objective judgment amid all the extremes surrounding us."
Adrian Patrick McCaffery, OP
Professor of Philosophy
at the Pontifical University of Saint Thomas Aquinas (Angelicum)
(Rome, Italy)
"Thomas D. Howes and James M. Patterson have written a powerful antidote to the intellectual poison of the so-called postliberal movement. Why Postliberalism Failed demonstrates in clear and lucid prose how and why postliberalism has more in common with the socialism of the Left and Right than it does with the ideas and institutions of the American Founding. I can't think of a more timely and needed book."
C. Bradley Thompson
Professor of Political Philosophy at Clemson University
Executive Director of the Snow Institute for the Study of Capitalism
"The authors lay bare the roots of 21st century postliberal integralism in 20th century integralist regimes and the roots of those 20th century regimes in French and European reactionary thought that sought to defend throne and altar by means of absolute monarchy and the invocation of a deeply antisemitic conspiracy theory. The authors also empirically demonstrate the abject failure of 20th century integralism in Europe and Latin America. And they show that the so-called liberalism of the founding and Constitution of the United States refers to a completely different phenomenon from that of the French Revolution and its progeny, such that criticism of the latter fails to come against the former. Why Postliberalism Failed is an exceptionally important book."
Paul R. DeHart
Professor of Political Science at Texas State University
Author of The Social Contract in the Ruins
