Vera Rubin spent her career measuring the rotation of galaxies. When she began, the major observatories were closed to women. She pushed her way in anyway. In 1965, she became the first woman permitted to use the telescope at Palomar. By the 1970s, she had produced evidence that there is far more matter in the universe than we can see – the dark matter problem now central to physics. She lived a life no woman of her grandmother’s generation could have foreseen.
Lives like hers are what good societies make possible. Yet liberal democracies struggle to say what a good life is. Every government in the developed world targets GDP growth. But while prosperity is a necessary condition for living well, it is not a sufficient one. Denmark and the United States have comparable per capita GDP but diverge sharply on trust, mental health and life satisfaction. What money buys is not the same as what makes a life go well.
Preferences are no better a guide, because they are shaped by circumstance. For example, a woman raised in a society that denies her education may not prefer what she has no conception of. And a superficial conception of happiness misses that a meaningful life is built through effort, which may entail hardship. A teenager building mastery through frustrating practice may well rate her happiness lower than one scrolling through short-form video. But few people would call these equivalent lives.
Liberalism’s rivals have no such difficulty. Authoritarians promise order and national greatness. Socialists promise equality. Today’s post-liberal writers promise meaning and belonging through restored religious and civilisational authority – a life ordered to faith, family and place. Theologian R.R. Reno wants the strong gods – the binding loves of God, nation and truth – restored against the thin proceduralism that replaced them. Conservative political scientist Patrick Deneen goes further, arguing that liberalism corrodes the very goods it depends on, hollowing out the families, communities and traditions it cannot itself create.
Liberalism does indeed point nowhere in particular. Its answer – freedom – tells you what to protect, not what to do with it. Yet that silence is not emptiness. It reflects a limit its rivals deny: no one can know in advance the forms a flourishing life will take.
What we know and what we cannot
The case for liberal institutions begins with the distinction between the dimensions along which human beings flourish, and the specific forms their flourishing takes. The dimensions are what any life needs to go well, like the freedom to direct one’s own life and work with a point to it. The forms are the particular ways a life fills them in. Vera Rubin needed those same dimensions her grandmother did, but only Rubin became an astronomer. The dimension was work with a point to it. The form was astronomy. Her grandmother could not have foreseen that form, because the world that let a woman pursue it had not been made.
The dimensions can be stated with high confidence. A long tradition of inquiry keeps returning to them. Aristotle approached the question about the good life through the nature of the human animal. He argued that such a life consists in the active exercise of distinctively human capacities – reasoning about how to live, cultivating character, engaging in worthwhile activity with others. John Stuart Mill approached it from a political angle, arguing that freedom enables what he called “experiments in living” – a process through which individuals discover and develop their own capacities. Psychologists Edward Deci and Richard Ryan set out to study human motivation empirically. Across four decades of cross-cultural research, they identified three conditions without which people consistently fail to thrive: autonomy, competence and relatedness. Without any one of them, people languish.
These thinkers were separated by time and geography, but are connected nevertheless. Mill read Aristotle. Deci and Ryan represent a tradition that traces its idea of thriving back to the same source and borrow its word for it – eudaimonia. Across two and a half thousand years, thinkers working in sharply different settings – the contemplative Athenian, the Victorian individualist, the empirical psychologist of the late twentieth century – have nonetheless kept identifying the same underlying conditions. They imagined the forms differently and never reconciled them. Yet the dimensions beneath those forms held.
Human beings flourish along four dimensions: developing their capabilities, forming relationships that matter, engaging in work with a point to it, and directing their own lives rather than living by another’s plan. They do not flourish in passivity, isolation, dependence, or lives scripted by others – however comfortable.
That is what we know. What we cannot know are the specific forms the dimensions take in any actual life. The dimensions-and-forms distinction identifies the axes along which human lives develop or fail to develop. It does not say which capabilities a person should pursue, or in what sequence. It does not say whether meaningful relationships will be found in family, friendship, religious community, or professional vocation – or in combinations no prior generation could have imagined.
Preferences are no better a guide, because they are shaped by circumstance. For example, a woman raised in a society that denies her education may not prefer what she has no conception of. And a superficial conception of happiness misses that a meaningful life is built through effort, which may entail hardship. A teenager building mastery through frustrating practice may well rate her happiness lower than one scrolling through short-form video. But few people would call these equivalent lives.
Liberalism’s rivals have no such difficulty. Authoritarians promise order and national greatness. Socialists promise equality. Today’s post-liberal writers promise meaning and belonging through restored religious and civilisational authority – a life ordered to faith, family and place. Theologian R.R. Reno wants the strong gods – the binding loves of God, nation and truth – restored against the thin proceduralism that replaced them. Conservative political scientist Patrick Deneen goes further, arguing that liberalism corrodes the very goods it depends on, hollowing out the families, communities and traditions it cannot itself create.
Liberalism does indeed point nowhere in particular. Its answer – freedom – tells you what to protect, not what to do with it. Yet that silence is not emptiness. It reflects a limit its rivals deny: no one can know in advance the forms a flourishing life will take.
What we know and what we cannot
The case for liberal institutions begins with the distinction between the dimensions along which human beings flourish, and the specific forms their flourishing takes. The dimensions are what any life needs to go well, like the freedom to direct one’s own life and work with a point to it. The forms are the particular ways a life fills them in. Vera Rubin needed those same dimensions her grandmother did, but only Rubin became an astronomer. The dimension was work with a point to it. The form was astronomy. Her grandmother could not have foreseen that form, because the world that let a woman pursue it had not been made.
The dimensions can be stated with high confidence. A long tradition of inquiry keeps returning to them. Aristotle approached the question about the good life through the nature of the human animal. He argued that such a life consists in the active exercise of distinctively human capacities – reasoning about how to live, cultivating character, engaging in worthwhile activity with others. John Stuart Mill approached it from a political angle, arguing that freedom enables what he called “experiments in living” – a process through which individuals discover and develop their own capacities. Psychologists Edward Deci and Richard Ryan set out to study human motivation empirically. Across four decades of cross-cultural research, they identified three conditions without which people consistently fail to thrive: autonomy, competence and relatedness. Without any one of them, people languish.
These thinkers were separated by time and geography, but are connected nevertheless. Mill read Aristotle. Deci and Ryan represent a tradition that traces its idea of thriving back to the same source and borrow its word for it – eudaimonia. Across two and a half thousand years, thinkers working in sharply different settings – the contemplative Athenian, the Victorian individualist, the empirical psychologist of the late twentieth century – have nonetheless kept identifying the same underlying conditions. They imagined the forms differently and never reconciled them. Yet the dimensions beneath those forms held.
Human beings flourish along four dimensions: developing their capabilities, forming relationships that matter, engaging in work with a point to it, and directing their own lives rather than living by another’s plan. They do not flourish in passivity, isolation, dependence, or lives scripted by others – however comfortable.
That is what we know. What we cannot know are the specific forms the dimensions take in any actual life. The dimensions-and-forms distinction identifies the axes along which human lives develop or fail to develop. It does not say which capabilities a person should pursue, or in what sequence. It does not say whether meaningful relationships will be found in family, friendship, religious community, or professional vocation – or in combinations no prior generation could have imagined.
Why the forms cannot be prescribed
Nobel laureate Friedrich Hayek argued that the knowledge required to direct a complex social order is not concentrated in any mind or institution. It is dispersed across millions of individuals, embedded in particular circumstances, and constantly revised in light of changing conditions. Much of it cannot be articulated at all. His subject was economic order: prices communicate dispersed knowledge, and competition serves as a discovery procedure.
The same logic runs into the domain of human lives. The knowledge required to direct the forms of a flourishing life is not dispersed in the way market knowledge is. The planner who cannot know the relative value of steel and timber at least faces facts that exist somewhere, in someone’s hands. Whether a given person will flourish as a musician or an engineer is not a fact waiting in some other head to be collected. That knowledge does not exist anywhere yet, because it is made only in the living. No planner could gather it, because there is nothing yet to gather.
In 1800, no philosopher could have specified that software engineering, documentary filmmaking, or molecular biology would become profound expressions of human capability. In 1900, no one could have foreseen that a woman might flourish as a neurosurgeon, a startup founder, or an investigative journalist – not because women lacked the potential, but because the social forms enabling these capabilities had not yet been created.
Karl Popper argued that knowledge grows through conjecture and refutation. Theories are proposed, tested and corrected when their predictions are falsified by evidence and reason. The same logic applies to flourishing. Mill’s term, “experiments in living,” is not a metaphor. It describes the mechanism by which societies discover which new forms a flourishing life can take. When someone attempts a new form of work, a new kind of community, a new way of combining independence with obligation, and it fails, the failure is informative. Others observe and adjust. When it succeeds, the success is available for others to adopt and adapt.
Consider Wikipedia. Twenty-five years ago, it did not exist. Today, millions of volunteers contribute their knowledge, time and care to a shared encyclopaedia available to anyone with an internet connection. Many devote thousands of hours to articles read by strangers they will never meet. They argue, edit, correct and refine. No prior generation could have foreseen this form of cooperation. No central authority could have designed it. It is a form of human flourishing – disciplined, social, generative – that depends on the freedoms and infrastructures liberal institutions make possible.
What this means for institutions
Liberal institutions do not just happen to support human development. They protect the freedom on which the discovery of new forms depends.
The dimensions-and-forms distinction carries Hayek’s insight into the content of a life. Prices communicate information no planner could gather; competition turns up what none could foresee. Experiments in living do the same for human lives. The result is the stronger claim that liberalism is not one moral preference among others but the set of conditions under which a society can keep discovering new ways for its members to flourish.
The claim rests on how knowledge is distributed. A good scientific institution builds on its current knowledge while standing ready to revise it. Liberal institutions do the same thing for human flourishing. They protect the conditions it requires while remaining open to forms of flourishing no one could have foreseen.
Authoritarian regimes, even when they achieve economic growth, struggle to produce the broad discovery of flourishing. They can deliver prosperity. They can deliver science, too, where the state has chosen to value it – the Soviet Union built world-class physics. They can even produce a Vera Rubin, where her gifts happen to run through a channel the state values, or fails to notice in time. But they do not reliably deliver inquiry the state has not authorised – the open-ended search that turns up forms no plan foresaw. A liberal society does not need to know what Vera Rubin is for before it lets her become Vera Rubin.
Hungary is the case the post-liberals have most often pointed to as a model. During Orbán’s sixteen years in power, Hungary’s ranking in the World Press Freedom Index fell from the low twenties to 74th, among the worst in the European Union. A captured press is one of the first channels of unauthorised inquiry to close. So is a captured university: Orbán’s government moved most public universities into foundations run by boards of loyalists, with lifetime appointments and control over budgets, strategy and senior posts. The EU responded by cutting those universities out of its Erasmus and research-funding programmes. These are the institutions through which a society develops capabilities and tries out new ways of living – and the state had brought them to heel.
The young and educated felt the squeeze first. They left in large numbers, many to study abroad, with disillusionment with the country’s political direction among the drivers. Hungarians turned Orbán out in April 2026, but many of those who would have done the most with a freer country had already gone.
Where authoritarian rule is harder and longer, the damage outlasts the regime. In the former East Germany, places with the densest Stasi surveillance later experienced lower interpersonal trust, weaker civic participation, and poorer economic outcomes. Repression not only silenced people while it lasted. It damaged the habits through which free people later cooperate.
Two ways to close discovery
The same distinction that explains why closed societies fail also shows where open ones can go wrong. Two contemporary attempts to do better than liberal neutrality – one from outside liberalism, one from within it – would each, in different ways, threaten the discovery liberalism protects.
In Return of the Strong Gods, Reno calls for thick, binding loyalties – religious, national, civilisational – to be restored in place of liberal neutrality. Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed argues that liberal societies are failing because they lack binding commitments to religion, nation, or tradition.
Their diagnosis contains a real insight. Liberal societies can produce hollowness when they neglect the conditions for human development. The post-liberals’ strongest reply is to borrow the distinction the faith itself rests on: that they too ask only for an orientation, not a template. But an orientation does not survive translation into political authority. Held by believers, the command to love God and neighbour leaves the form of every life open. But as public doctrine, the same commitment acquires enforcers, and enforcers must decide what counts as fidelity.
That is how an orientation hardens into a template. The prescription fixes the forms of a flourishing life from above – through sacred authority or civilisational identity – when the forms can only be discovered, one life at a time. That is not a remedy for liberalism’s failures. It is a return to the closed society, where the forms of the good life are licensed rather than discovered.
A subtler challenge comes from within liberalism itself. Martha Nussbaum developed Nobel laureate Amartya Sen’s capabilities approach into a more prescriptive framework. Nussbaum identifies ten “central capabilities” every society should guarantee, from bodily health to affiliation – including self-respect and dignity – to control over one’s environment. These capabilities are not merely freedoms the state leaves alone, but entitlements the state must ensure. Sen himself refused to fix such a list, warning against building a mausoleum for a “fixed and final” set of capabilities and insisting that their selection belongs to public reasoning in each context.
Nussbaum’s capabilities are expressed as freedoms to do or be something. And she distinguishes capabilities from functionings. A citizen has the capability to practise a religion whether or not they ever enter a church; the functioning is the worship. That appears to keep her on the dimensions side of the framework.
Yet Nussbaum makes exceptions. Government, she argues, must actually treat citizens with dignity, rather than offer them a mere option of dignified treatment. A person stripped of self-respect cannot use the freedoms they nominally hold.
As Rutger Claassen has argued, Nussbaum’s own architecture makes some promotion of functionings hard to avoid. Some capabilities have to be trained, maintained or supported through real practices. That pressure can spread, and the capability metric does not by itself fix where it stops.
Nussbaum tries to forestall this by keeping her list abstract and revisable, its specification left to citizens, legislatures and courts. But once a capability is entrenched in law, that specification carries legal force. It acquires interpreters who must decide what securing the capability requires – the same move that, on the post-liberal side, hardens an orientation into a template. The form of the good can then be settled not by the person living it but by whoever holds the office.
Take affiliation. The right to “the social bases of self-respect and non-humiliation” is unimpeachable as an aspiration. But a constitutional guarantee is not an aspiration; it is an instrument, susceptible to interpretation. The same words could underwrite anti-discrimination law or a campus speech code. They could protect a dissenter from humiliation or silence one for causing it. The list does not decide which. The pen does. Entrench an open dimension, and you do not so much secure flourishing as put its meaning within reach of whoever holds the pen. A society doing that is no longer protecting experiments in living. It is licensing them.
The post-liberals confuse dimensions with forms, prescribing the forms directly. Nussbaum keeps the two apart but entrenches the dimensions – enabling others to fix the forms. The discipline the distinction demands is to do neither: leave the dimensions revisable and the forms open. Prescribe either, and the discovery process closes.
Liberal institutions keep the discovery open. They secure the conditions under which people find the forms of their own flourishing, without prescribing the forms themselves. That does not mean merely protecting formal freedoms and standing back. As I argued in Classical Liberalism Without Strong Gods, protecting formal freedoms while neglecting the enabling conditions for development produces the hollowness that the post-liberals correctly identify.
The right response is for liberals to attend to the ecology of liberalism directly. Schools should teach the history of liberal achievement, and museums and other civic institutions must defend it. The social safety net must relieve hardship without entrenching dependence. And civic associations must be nurtured to generate belonging. None of this specifies the forms a flourishing life must take. A school can develop a child’s capacities without prescribing what she does with them. That is the difference between cultivating a dimension and dictating a form. This is not optional maintenance. It is the price of the open society itself.
The good life, discovered
We know more about the good life than relativists claim and less than paternalists assume. The good life cannot be designed. But it can be discovered – and a life discovered is owned, not imposed. Creating the conditions for that discovery is the quiet genius of liberal institutions – the conditions in which a Vera Rubin can make a path that was not there before.
Roger Partridge is chairman and a co-founder of The New Zealand Initiative and is a senior member of its research team. He led law firm Bell Gully as executive chairman from 2007 to 2014. This article was sourced HERE
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