Liberalism heralds individual liberties but, ironically, effectively facilitates disempowerment, fragmentation, and resentment. As the state expands—in order to protect and advance individual liberty—its depersonalized bureaucracy and globalized market become increasingly powerful forces to which isolated individuals must submit. Today’s populist and nationalist movements suggest that liberalism is failing in certain significant respects—not because it has betrayed its own principles, but because it is being true to itself and is now experiencing the contradictions and absurdities inherent in its inner logic.

A liberal believes in liberty, right? Well, of course. It’s there in the name. But what if the liberal quest to expand our liberty is actually eroding our liberties? That’s the argument Patrick J. Deneen—associate professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame—makes in Why Liberalism Failed, a persuasive contribution to the ongoing political debate in North America.

How and why is liberalism failing? Primarily because liberalism, as a centuries-old political philosophy, is rooted in a defective understanding of the human person. Liberalism ignores the person’s rootedness in local communities and their myriad customs and influences, replacing that rootedness with an inordinate allegiance to state and market, the instruments of our supposed liberation.

As Deneen sees it, the United States as a whole was established on liberal principles, and these have developed over the past nearly two and a half centuries in ways consistent with liberalism’s underlying presuppositions but inconsistent with a healthy social fabric. However, the overwhelming dominance of liberalism has been masked by the recent superficial polarization of the national political landscape into two factions.

Indeed, our most vociferous conflicts have pitted classical liberals, with their affection for a free market and small government, against progressive liberals, who view government as an instrument for the expansion of individual autonomy. Our immersion in this intramural debate disguises the reality that we’ve already settled the question of regime. Despite our supposed differences, we agree that liberalism is the optimal political arrangement for humanity. Our principal disagreements are thus over means and not ends.

In what way then has liberalism failed? If we’re all so apparently supportive of its goals, why does Deneen judge that it has failed to deliver on its promises? Because its failures are directly related to its successes—because of liberalism’s emphasis on the autonomous individual caught between state and market, it minimizes and even subverts institutions and associations that are irreducible to the wills of state and individual.

Liberalism’s failures are directly related to its successes.

Liberalism heralds individual liberties but, ironically, effectively facilitates disempowerment, fragmentation, and resentment. As the state expands—in order to protect and advance individual liberty—its depersonalized bureaucracy and globalized market become increasingly powerful forces to which isolated individuals must submit.

Today’s populist and nationalist movements suggest that liberalism is failing in certain significant respects—not because it has betrayed its own principles, but because it is being true to itself and is now experiencing the contradictions and absurdities inherent in its inner logic.

Deneen divides his argument into seven chapters and a conclusion. In “Unsustainable Liberalism,” he admits that “[n]o other political philosophy had proven in practice that it could fuel prosperity, provide relative political stability, and foster individual liberty with such regularity and predictability” (21). This has been a significant part of liberalism’s appeal in a world plagued by poverty and tyranny. It is true, as well, that liberalism has drawn on a pre-liberal inheritance that has kept it going but that it is incapable of renewing. Because liberalism’s individualism has been nurtured by resources rooted in communal traditions, and because individualism does little if anything to foster community, it’s living off a constantly depleting store of social and cultural capital.

Patrick Deneen argues in this provocative book that liberalism is built on a foundation of contradictions: it trumpets equal rights while fostering incomparable material inequality; its legitimacy rests on consent, yet it discourages civic commitments in favor of privatism; and in its pursuit of individual autonomy, it has given rise to the most far-reaching, comprehensive state system in human history. Deneen warns that the centripetal forces now at work on our political culture are not superficial flaws but inherent features of a system whose success is generating its own failure.

In “Uniting Individualism and Statism,” Deneen argues that, while classical and progressive liberals are busy wrangling over individual autonomy and expansive government, we fail to recognize that these two realities exist in a mutually reinforcing relationship. Because of liberalism’s emphasis on the autonomous individual suspended beneath the state, it minimizes and even subverts society’s other associations and institutions. Once individuals are liberated from cultural norms and social ties, they no longer have reliable networks and associations to support them. Thus, the state is the institution to which they must look.

Then we come to “Liberalism as Anti-Culture,” in which Deneen observes that both classical and progressive liberals wish to undermine culture’s normative and formative role in society. They want to undermine local cultures and their attendant social norms, replacing them with a pervasive anti-culture. Local cultures remain in bits and pieces, held together by ideological consumerism. The subversion of these localized associations and norms deemed obstacles to individual autonomy ironically make the individual submissive to a heavy apparatus of abstract, depersonalized federal law.

Those addressing the relationship between liberalism and our current predicament can hardly ignore the influence of technology, and Deneen is no exception. While many observers rail against technology, assuming that we’re somehow slaves to its imperatives, in “Technology and the Loss of Liberty” Deneen understands that we shape technology in accordance with our own central convictions. Moreover—and this is where Deneen is likely to court controversy—he believes that even the American republic that the founders fashioned in the 1780s is a powerful technology designed to liberate us from the need to be virtuous and encourages us to become self-seeking individuals at the mercy of our own desires. The Constitution joined with modern technologies to undermine community and to subvert our capacity for self-governance.

Much as past political philosophers, beginning with Plato and Aristotle, have focused on education as a crucial element in the life of the polis, Deneen tackles the plight of the universities in “Liberalism against the Liberal Arts.” In its crusade against cultural norms, liberalism has overturned the very educational tradition—the liberal arts—that fostered its ascendance. It overturns the liberal arts by minimizing the civilizational norms and traditions that the liberal arts once studied, and in their place it fosters a pseudo-multiculturalism that effectively homogenizes education. Liberalism transforms the humanities, causing students to focus on identity, oppression, and grievance. But more than anything else, it minimizes the significance of the humanities, signaling to students that the only truly legitimate areas of study are economics, business, and the STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) disciplines.

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