For freedom to be preserved, it has to be constrained. Every nation and society has its own trade-offs between liberties and constraints. But only a transcendental and transnational authority can determine what freedoms must be universally respected.

“Conventional theology”, according to Theo Hobson, writing recently in The Tablet, has been “diminished by the reign of liberalism” and has “failed to develop a grand account of its civilisational purpose, incorporating the good of liberalism”.

“Liberalism” itself is a term with many meanings, some of them actively deceptive – as when “neoliberalism” is used to describe the financial globalisation of the 1990s, which had almost nothing liberal about it. Hobson wisely chooses not to pursue the question of definition in this respect. Instead, he perfectly reasonably equates what is generally called liberalism with holding to a fundamental principle of “individual liberty”. The concept of “individual liberty”, however, already embodies more than one potential source of confusion. First of all, it implies some primacy for the notion of the “individual”. But the idea that any thinking about social issues has to start from belief that individuals are primary and society secondary is the most fundamental error of all. Individuals do not make – let alone choose to make – society: society, in the general sense of that word (I shall deal with a more specific sense in a moment), provides the vocabulary which determines what it means to be an individual within it. It is not liberalism but individualism that is, in Hobson’s phrase, deeply rooted in the western thought of recent centuries, and that is no doubt – as Hobson says, following Adrian Pabst – the result of “a wrong turn in medieval metaphysics”.

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