"There is ultimately no 'non-integralist' position."

"Political philosophy may be its own science with its own principles, as scholastics like to say, but these principles rest on the often unstated conclusions of 'higher' and more fundamental sciences. Contrary to the conceits of liberals and Marxists alike, political philosophy is never really first philosophy. It presupposes natural philosophy, metaphysics, and ultimately a theology or atheology, whose assumptions will in turn inform the juridical order. In this respect, there is ultimately no 'non-integralist' position. One wearies of repeating this point to liberals who take refuge in a distinction between liberal practices and institutions and liberal ideology—a distinction that perfectly expresses liberal ideology. It is as if institutions just happened and were not the embodiment of human purposes and did not presuppose judgments about the nature and meaning of human existence. The claim that political order exists principally to protect natural rights presumes contestable metaphysical and theological assumptions which are no less operative for being denied, as critics of liberalism have shown time and again. To neglect the speculative horizon for liberalism is simply to assume the theology of the secular without argument. In the light of the Christian mystique, liberalism appears as the political form of a Christianity that has lost its faith and doesn’t even know it."

     Michael Hanby, "For and against integralism," First things no. 301 (March 2020):  47.