Adrian Pabst

I joined the School of Politics and IR at the University of Kent in 2009 as a lecturer in politics. My research is at the interface of political theory, political economy, ethics, and European politics.

After studying economics at Cambridge, European Studies at the LSE and political philosophy in Paris, I completed my doctoral dissertation on the philosophical question of individuation and the political problem of individuality at Cambridge. My first monograph, which is based on his PhD thesis and my post-doctoral research, is entitled Metaphysics: The Creation of Hierarchy (W.B. Eerdmans, 2012).

From 2007 to 2009, I held a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at the University of Nottingham. My post-doctoral research was on democracy, capitalism and religion with a focus on rival sources of sovereignty. This has led to a variety of articles and book chapters in leading international journals and edited collections, including a volume of essays entitled The Crisis of Global Capitalism (Wipf & Stock, 2011).

Ahead of the 2015 General Election I published a co-edited essay collection (together with Ian Geary) on Blue Labour: Forging a New Politics (I.B. Tauris, 2015), with contributions by Lord Maurice Glasman, Jon Cruddas MP, Tom Watson MP, Frank Field MP, David Lammy MP, Ruth Davis, Arnie Graf and Rowenna Davis – including a foreword by the former Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Rowan Williams. A second edition was published in late 2015 with a preface by me on why Labour lost the General Election and how it can win again, and a post-script by Lord Glasman on Labour under Corbyn.

Together with John Milbank, I have written a monograph that is entitled The Politics of Virtue: Post-liberalism and the Human Future (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016). Contemporary politics is dominated by a liberal creed that champions ‘negative liberty’ and individual happiness. The triumph of liberalism has had the effect of subordinating human association and the common good to narrow self-interest and short-term utility. By contrast, post-liberalism promotes individual fulfilment and mutual flourishing based on shared goals that have more substantive content than the formal abstractions of liberal law and contract, and yet are also adaptable to different cultural and local traditions. We apply this analysis to the economy, politics, culture, and international affairs. In each case, having diagnosed the crisis of liberalism, we propose post-liberal alternatives, notably new concepts and fresh policy ideas. Amid the current crisis, post-liberalism is a programme that could define a new politics of virtue and the common good.

Since 2008, I have been an associate editor of the journal TELOS and a Fellow of the Centre of Theology and Philosophy. In 2012, I joined the independent, non-partisan think-tank ResPublica as a Trustees, and in 2015 I was invited to join the Bord of Trustees of the James Madison Charitable Trust for the Study of Federal System.

For the past seven years, I have also written regularly for the comment and op-ed pages of The International Herald Tribune (now The International New York Times), The Guardian, The Moscow Times, The National, The Huffington Post, ABC Religion & Ethics and Les Echos.