See New Polity magazine, Issue 3 for a sample chapter from the book.

“Schindler’s magisterial The Politics of the Real is a metaphysically realist rejection of the liberal order as an ersatz Catholicism. Anyone who recognizes our fundamental need for a just political order after the collapse of liberalism should read this book.”

— C. C. Pecknold

Associate Professor of Systematic Theology at the Catholic University of America

“David Schindler here manages to raise the critique of liberalism to an altogether new level of sophistication. Secular thinkers must attend to the theological dimension of his analysis if they are fully to understand our current secular circumstances.”

— John Milbank

Emeritus Professor of Religion, Politics, and Ethics at the University of Nottingham and
Visiting Professor at the Edith Stein Institute of Philosophy in Granada

"Liberalism is on the defensive. The past few years have seen the emergence of various “postliberalisms” and even a resurgence of Catholic “integralism.” The notion that liberalism and justice, let alone liberalism and Catholicism, are compatible has finally lost its credibility—even lip service to it is no longer required. The postliberal discussion is shifting from “what’s wrong with liberalism” to “what’s true about politics”—to the question of what exactly must displace liberalism. But the answer to this question must not be another (essentially liberal) policy prescription. Liberalism’s vision of the world must be replaced by another one, a broader one that can explain liberalism but cannot be explained by it.

In The Politics of the Real, D. C. Schindler squares up to this daunting task, shifting the discussion to its definitive metaphysical foundation: the modern reversal of the priority of act over potency; the modern privileging of empty possibility over flourishing perfection. This reversal is the root of modern error—and re-prioritizing act is the basis for the alternative.

What does this amount to? Schindler unpacks modern formulations of nature, freedom, property, rights, religion, and politics, demonstrating how liberalism gets each completely wrong. This does not mean, though, that liberal societies get nothing right. Even the most liberal nation, being real, is participating at some level in true politics, in spite of itself. That is, liberalism is not just mistaken but delusional: it does not know what it is really doing. So Schindler’s explanation of what liberalism is is at the same time an explication of true politics: in his words, “the politics of the real.” This alternative is not a tweaking of liberal politics. It is not a matter of redirecting states to some better project or to pursue some better end. It is a matter of turning liberalism upside-down, of re-prioritizing act over potency, of understanding that life is always in the real and that nature is only natural when encultured.

And Schindler enters contemporary postliberal debates directly. He argues that Christian politics is not a mere tweaking, either: not merely politics aimed at Christian ends, and not a reunion of Church and State in some asymmetrical alliance of command and submission. Rather, the temporal power is concerned with all of man’s life under the aspect of the business of living in the world, while the spiritual authority is concerned with all of man’s life under the aspect of the universe’s ordination to fulfillment in God. They do not govern different spheres. Instead, they share with each other what they are: so that temporal power moves deeper into the real, becoming fully truth-bearing and goodness-bearing—becoming authority.

Schindler shows that liberalism is wrong, not because it has simply “relegated God to the private,” but because it has inverted the world: giving us power without authority, in what becomes a closed, necessarily totalitarian, horizon. Here, nothing else can be done with the transcendent God but to find a quiet little place to keep him, harmless and out of the way. When we let God out, a cosmic hierarchy of act—of participation in Being Himself—explodes into view. And this changes everything. A true integralism, a true postliberalism, moves politics back into a cosmos that is itself analogically ordered to participation in the life of God. With The Politics of the Real, Schindler has elevated the postliberal conversation.

— Andrew Willard Jones

Director of Catholic Studies at Franciscan University of Steubenville
and author of Before Church and State