A New Liberalism for a New Age?

Analysis of Nathan J. Murphy’s new political philosophy

When I was first approached to review a new political philosophy my instinct was to respond as I usually do: an appreciation for the offer and a kind rejection. Reviewing can seem highly synthetic if others misread our motivations – and it can also age terribly. However, as Britain sits in a deep crisis, the Substack has become a place to analyse fragmentation and investigate new political paths (of varied leaning) that could suggest a way out. For instance, I was one of the first to cover the emergence of the Looking For Growth group and its talent.

It’s with this in mind that I came to Nathan Murphy’s new work, Liberalism That Wins, with keen interest. In our current political climate we are starved of actual political thinking. The most notable breakthrough has been the abundance agenda, which itself may or may not be a way to discover a new politics. Its proposition is short and simple: build, build, build. For a British interpretation it consists of transforming an ‘austerity / inefficient state’ to ‘high state capacity / catalyst’ state. In essence it is a Liberalism that builds. And boy do we need to build.


But in this age of the hyperpolitical we also need wide-ranging fundamental ideas, theories, and propositions. We need new myths and group agreements on how we should live, and what the future of society should look like. We need a general re-politicisation of many things that were once considered ‘a given’ within our system. We essentially require a wider process of legitimising and re-legitimising our politics. What we tend to forget is that in order to do this we need an abundance of ideas.

System Failure

All pieces of political thinking have to start with an antagonist. For Murphy the enemy is evidently the decades of an uncontested post-war consensus. While parts of the 1940s welfare state, and the post-1980s market pivot, have brought sustained peace and increased living standards, together they have form an outdated mismatch of damaging taboos and partially defunct ideas. As Murphy lists, globalisation has produced ‘staggering inequality’ and ‘hollowed out industry and working-class communities’ while the reliance on ‘meritocracy’ has simply reinforced social stratification with ‘technocratic governance’ implemented to little success. Mass migration, one of the great conundrums of the crisis, has fundamentally ‘eroded the social consensus’. In short, the political playbook that elites have used to govern has caused ‘acute inequality, growing political instability, and the resurgence of illiberal ideas.’

But rather than lament the throes of capitalism, or attack the inefficient welfare scroungers, Murphy finds origins of our plight in ‘the failure of imagination, [and] the deep rigidity’ of our accepted ideas. Historically these rigidities, consensuses if you are so inclined, produced flourishing societies. But their very strength – that they were hard to change and thus could enact multi-decade progress – have created their own downfall. The insistence on decreasing state capacity and allowing capitalism to go unchecked, of ballooning welfare or huge increases of immigration without either the agreement or mechanics to support such change, stand out as the prime offenders.

What’s pivotal is many of these changes have, to a degree, happened ‘automatically’. The depoliticisation in processes such as finance, welfare, state capacity and immigration – in which each area was seen as a given for a modern, forward-looking 21st Century state – has in part caused the very collapse. It’s not just that the elites have allowed these changes to occur, but that they played an unthinking role in their functions. Rengaging the elite in foundational political thought (that also offers new ideas) is if anything the greatest challenge of the crisis period we are in. It is this, following his previous work The Ideas That Rule Us (2024), that Murphy seeks to begin change – a revolution in the head.

A New Grounding

Highstreet book shops are packed with the same books that all claim ‘how to fix the country’ or explain ‘why we are in such a mess’ – and all of them fail in their limited, technocratic and overly-insider lens. Not a single one has done anything to substantially improve political discourse. Compared to these vapid musings, Murphy takes a step back and seeks to address a rethink through first principles.

After a weighty voyage into the waters of scientific and political research, Murphy depicts four innate human instincts:

The first is Fairness – where ‘people intuitively recognise when something is manifestly unfair. Fairness is an instinctive human trait that emerges early in life and plays a crucial role in maintaining social harmony.’ Second, Cooperation – which is ‘deeply embedded in our biology [...] as a result of our evolutionary dependence on sociality, the brain is wired for human cooperation.’ In addition we are Caring – as ‘even the most complex forms of human empathy are scaffolded on simpler, evolutionary emotional systems which remain closely linked to social bond and caregiving.’

And lastly, possibly the most politically significant, is Group-preference. As Murphy illustrates this is because it:

‘likely originates from kin selection, the evolutionary mechanism that favours cooperation among close relatives. Early humans survived in small, tightly interdependent groups where mutual support was critical. As societies expanded, these bonds extended beyond immediate family through the use of shared identities - such as culture, ethnicity, or nationality - a phenomenon anthropologists call “pseudo-kinship.’

Its group-preference which essentially validates the ability for humans to be fair, to cooperate and to care – in particular empathy. Only by maintaining a level of group-preference and coherence can the activating positive feedback loop of these behaviours occur. In many ways it is the search for social-political culture that replicates these incentives that is at the heart of this work.

But it is politics which must act as the harbourer of such a society; ‘political systems gain legitimacy when they align with our evolved moral preferences.’ Designing a system that supports and validates these beliefs is where political thinkers and politicians should start, argues Murphy.

At this point, one may fairly ask, where is competition accounted for within this theory? Murphy’s answer is that it sits outside the group – groups are an evolved instinctual trait because they offer a competitive organising force. Politics is a sliding scale between intra-group competition and internal-group cooperation.

Historically, family groupings – of bloodlines and dynasties – offer an interesting practical application of this idea. The smallest unit of human organisation used monarchical power to form the kingdoms, and later, nations, which we live in today. In order to achieve this the family needed levels of internal group fairness, cooperation and caring in order to produce a competitive set of members that could beat rivals. It’s not to say historical families were abundant with care and fairness, obviously there was not much emotional understanding from medieval Dads. Fratricide and patricide were also rife practices. Instead, it is to understand that the family began as the first trusted grouping in which these innate preferences were common, before expanding to the relations between the wider population.

The same can be said, as Murphy argues, for modern nations – our entire state and organising systems need to be grounded in innate preferences in order to achieve a skilled and competitive set of humans that can compete with others.

»» You can buy Nathan Murphy’s new book, ‘Liberalism That Wins’, here on: Amazon eBook, Amazon Paperback, Apple Books and Google Books. ««

Implications of the Innate

The first contemporary political question this triggered for me is of our meta-group – the national myth. Is this where the theory could be first deployed? In many ways Murphy offers a route for many ranging from right to left who desire collective, national groupings. What should unite this broad group is their obvious aversion to the two disruptive groups of our time: those that don’t believe in borders, and those that believe borders must reinforce absolute ethnonationalism. The experiment in open borders has failed in this country, while the policies of 19th century ethnonationalism created ghastly consequences.

But the question is tricky, as Murphy told me in conversation, regarding group-preference:

‘How do you draw the line? What line should you draw? It doesn’t necessarily matter how you define your group – nation state or otherwise. But people essentially need a concept of who they are, what their place is and who they are to other people. The left dodges these realities. It’s partly because the political elites didn’t bother to listen for thirty years’

But even when one finds a new way to legitimise the national group, there remains a major disconnect between the innate preferences and our reality. The fairness elements of the state are defunct – for instance, to what extent is current inequality and wealth concentration ‘fair’? Does extortionate asset-growth determined by the lottery of life and postcodes represent fairness?

The caring functions of the state and political culture are also ripe for revaluation. How well does the NHS care for people with its crisis-fighting tendencies rather than prevention form? We still continuously dodge the social ‘care’ question. And does the current welfare policy actually care for people?

And on cooperation, it has become less accepted that cross-political projects, ideologies and common ground are helpful to our country. Division in discourse, perpetuated but not caused by algorithms, is a new norm – a persistent side-effect of disillusionment with a political class, and state, that has been seen to abjectly fail. Political division seeps into culture – creating a negative feedback loop in which the innate desires to cooperate are suppressed.

Finally on competition – if the core preferences and functions that they elicit are mismatched or broken, are we really a competitive group / state? Are the British people really in a position to compete with other groups? Beyond the statistics of growth, there are also many elements ranging from the social-cultural to the aesthetic to living standards which suggest otherwise.

Triggering Debate

The other implications of theories such as Murphy’s could be found in the reinvigoration of forgotten political strands and the discovery of new ideas. Creativity is vital to a flourishing political culture. Liberalism may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but there is a space for a radical, new liberalism that incorporates several cross-ideological strands – while also having a grounding in first principles.

John Rawls, much maligned and misunderstood, offered the first spurt of this in the 1970s with his Theory of Justice. If one is tracking historical ideological change it is around the 40-50 year mark that works of major philosophy end up in the political spheres. But Rawls’s predominantly abstract nature has ensured a multi-decade ignorance of his ideas. It is, at the end of the day, a theory. However there are real potencies in the work that offer avenues for a rebirth of Liberalism. Daniel Chandler’s recent reappraisal of Rawls (Free and Equal, 2023) was a first step – but what this ideology needs is application and greater aggression.

It might be overly pigeonholing to suggest that Murphy allows a rediscovery of Rawls’s Original Position through scientific rather than social means, but it is the feeling I came away with. In many ways it also mirrors Rousseau’s early attempts in Origins of Inequality to find evolutionary explanations for political structure. However, rather than Rousseau’s botched scientific basis, Murphy nails a convincing, well written and brilliantly researched grounding. For a 100-page shot into the political sphere this work is definitely worth a read – and one which will hopefully trigger deeper thought in those that read it.

Only through broader ideological debate, with both practical application and engagement with those in politics, can these theories reach beyond into the multi-decade change that previous political cultures and consensuses have fostered. It will be exciting to see whether Murphy’s ideas, along with other new groups and works, can inspire this.

»» You can buy Nathan Murphy’s new book, ‘Liberalism That Wins’, here on: Amazon eBook, Amazon Paperback, Apple Books and Google Books. ««