We need to return to a politics of virtue

Why, since the 1970s, has liberalism become so virulent? And why is it inclined to break down, or to drastically mutate, as we now see?

In answer to the second question, liberalism involves a series of separations between different social aspects that have to be kept artificially apart, and yet which remain in tension, and can ultimately not be kept apart at all. 

In each case what one sees is an initial separation of powers, followed later by the illegitimate capture, in liberal terms, of one power by another, and eventually by a fusion of powers which collapses their separation altogether. At this point, the always lurking oligarchy of liberalism is fully exposed to view, and a mass protest against this oligarchic order tends to happen. 

First, there is the overriding tension between the absolutely sovereign state and the individual. Does the contract between such individuals really precede the state, or must the state already be in place for the contract to be possible? Liberalism is then drawn at once towards an international order of pure economy beyond the nation state, besides a legality of unmediable rights without distributive justice, and yet equally towards a tyrannic trumping of all rights through state surveillance, albeit at times in the claimed interest of sustaining the non-interference of one person with another.