Muñoz vs. Deneen: Whence Our Parade of Horribles?

For discussion…

A blog post by Rod Dreher brought my attention yesterday to a new critique of Patrick Deneen’s hard-hitting Why Liberalism Failed. I didn’t find the critique, by Deneen’s colleague Vincent Philip Muñoz, anything like a decisive blow. It’s a strong essay, but seems more a matter of pleading than dispassionate analysis of where we are at. Leaning on the Founders’ good intentions, it describes a ship that has already sailed, one replaced by a new ship built by new shipwrights who have fudged the original blueprints to match their new priorities. I do suspect that possibility of fudging was too much there in the Founders’ blueprints, but that the fudging was not inevitable. I also suspect the sleek new ship presently leaving harbor is not seaworthy.

Muñoz’s essay, then, though well worth reading in full, is not finally strong enough to dislodge Deneen’s arguments.

But one of the commenters on Rod’s post, using the pen name Haigha, weighed in as follows:

The burden is not on Muñoz to prove that liberalism does not inevitably lead to the contemporary parade of horribles; the burden is on Deneen to prove that it does inevitably lead there. His argument doesn’t come anywhere close to doing so. As an empirical matter, we have one single iteration of the Enlightenment and the subsequent history of Western civilization. There’s no compelling reason to think that if we had more iterations, the results would necessarily be this way. The United States was doing quite well, and was more liberal than it is now, until the early 20th Century. Who knows what would have happened if there had been no WWI, or if the conflation of women’s rights, sexual libertinism, and male-female sameness had been foreseen and stamped out early, or the conflation of science and atheism?

Since he obviously can’t prove his thesis empirically, Deneen is left with logic. Here, again, he fails by a mile. As Muñoz notes, the bad things that he claims are inherent in liberalism simply are not, as a logical matter. Take a look at this speech by President Coolidge. He explains the logic of liberalism properly understood, and how it not only is not incompatible with Christianity, but is in fact the most Christian system, because the Christian assertion of universal equal dignity necessarily leads to the conclusion that human interactions should be primarily consensual. The logical distinction between saying, “I have no right to prevent you from doing X”, and saying, “If X floats your boat, that’s great!”, is obvious and elementary. For Deneen to be right, he has to collapse that distinction, and he can’t.

I notice that Rod and Deneen both like to talk about global capitalism as if it’s something qualitatively different from what existed in the past. It’s not. Our economy was infinitely freer and more “liberal” in the Nineteenth Century. Global capitalism is just the result of advances in technology and wealth that enable us to engage in the specialization and exchange that make us rich on a much broader scale, and with more participants. Capitalism has advanced with technology, in spite of increasing statism, not because of it.

As for Casey, the Supreme Court is not, in fact, the authoritative interpreter of the Constitution. It has the indisputable final word only with respect to the disposition of individual cases or controversies where it has jurisdiction. The other branches need not respect a Court ruling that purports to strike down a statute on a blanket basis, or grant itself jurisdiction at the margins. And even if the Court were authoritative, that would not be remotely sufficient to establish that the Constitution is compatible with whatever the Court says, since the Court can obviously get it wrong.

Dreher: “For you conservative readers who believe that classical liberalism can be saved, I’m eager to know how you think that might be done, given the cultural realities of our post-Christian age.”

One of the reasons I’m attracted to this blog is that I have the same instinct that animates “The Benedict Option”: That the bulk of the population is too far gone, but that a smaller, core group might be able to keep the faith. If that’s true of orthodox Christianity, it may also be true of classical liberalism. Bring together those who understand that the equal dignity of men and women does not imply sameness; that “you may” does not imply “you ought”; that fences are generally there for a reason; that the scientific method neither is nor implies an ontology or a metaphysics; that we have unchosen duties. Teach those truths to each other and to our children. Build networks for cross-patronization and support. Gather geographically. In time, maybe even build up a great enough concentration to press for autonomy or independence.

In short, make classical liberalism part of the BenOp. There need be no paradox–Coolidge and the men he cites certainly wouldn’t have seen one.

My reply lower down the thread:

@Haigha gives the most concise, hardest-hitting critique of Deneen I’ve yet seen anywhere:

The burden is not on Muñoz to prove that liberalism does not inevitably lead to the contemporary parade of horribles; the burden is on Deneen to prove that it does inevitably lead there. . . . [We] have one single iteration of the Enlightenment and the subsequent history of Western civilization. There’s no compelling reason to think that if we had more iterations, the results would necessarily be this way. The United States was doing quite well, and was more liberal than it is now, until the early 20th Century. Who knows what would have happened if there had been no WWI, or if the conflation of women’s rights, sexual libertinism, and male-female sameness had been foreseen and stamped out early, or the conflation of science and atheism?

And:

[President Coolidge] explains the logic of liberalism properly understood, and how it not only is not incompatible with Christianity, but is in fact the most Christian system, because the Christian assertion of universal equal dignity necessarily leads to the conclusion that human interactions should be primarily consensual. The logical distinction between saying, “I have no right to prevent you from doing X”, and saying, “If X floats your boat, that’s great!”, is obvious and elementary. For Deneen to be right, he has to collapse that distinction, and he can’t. Exactly. This is certainly much better put than Muñoz puts it. If you have your own blog, Haigha, or write elsewhere, I’d love to know. In different forums, I’ve been trying to argue this last distinction to no avail for quite some time. Of course the answer is always: “If you don’t affirm us and agree with us as to what truth is, you are quite simply a bigot, your bigotry clearly comes from your religion, don’t you know about separation of church and state, you don’t belong in the public arena,” blah blah blah. Bland emotive assertions accompanied by no understanding of the separation clause. And yet, sadly, this understanding of the American project now gets a pass from tens of millions of Americans.

I fully agree with Rod and others here (cf. @pjnelson) that what we are witnessing is not a conflict between religion and secularism, but rather a conflict between different religions. On the one hand, orthodox Christianity; on the other, a new religion of the Perversely Desiring Self. What troubles me most in recent years is the fact that our elites and our courts are not secular enough. They are showing themselves adherents of a new religious vision, the Rainbow Cult, one with its own martyrology, its own rituals, its own sense of the divine. That divine is located not in any old desiring self, such as most of us, but rather in, let’s say, a teen drag queen who takes the moniker Divine, and who comes out “bravely” as intersex and gay at the same time. And if ze was ever rejected by ze’s parents or “backward” elements in ze’s community, all the better. Ze is already in this new cult a St. Sebastian on digital canvas, pierced by the arrows of normie evil.

One might not agree with me that Obergefell and what followed represents the rise of a new religion. But I’d ask: Would any other group besides our now worshiped LGBTQwerty tribe have been given the right to redefine an institution as fundamental as marriage? Because, in my view, they did not in fact “expand marriage rights”. What they did is redefine marriage. Would any other tribe have been able to do this, out of the blue as it were, after little more than a decade of rallying? I highly doubt it. It could only happen because of a certain something that the LGBT cause had picked up in the meantime. That something was a kind of religious aura, a Kool-Aid charisma that had already infected our culture on coast and coast (rather than from coast to coast, as the latter included a Middle America then still mostly unflooded by said Kool-Aid).

And this is why I wish our elites had stuck more to their secularism. That they had not become proselytes of a new cult.

But to return to the question of classical liberalism and its role in our present, Rod puts it like this:

Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that most Americans today were religiously engaged. Would that have stopped the kind of liberal economics that have eviscerated communities? Or the other cultural developments that have deracinated modern people? I don’t see how. Whether the Founders realized what liberalism was capable of or not, the fact is that the deepest principles of liberalism are antithetical to the kind of virtues necessary to sustain liberalism. It’s a paradox.

I think this is basically right, and so, regardless of Haigha’s brilliant critique, I still incline more toward Deneen’s argument as offering something essential. Which is not necessarily to say that we have any better choices at the moment than liberalism. Perhaps Haigha is right that we need to focus on developing Benedict Options for both the orthodox religious and for those who still support classical liberalism.

I’m aware that Haigha, in some respects, is presenting a position similar to Muñoz’s. But I’m interested especially in Haigha’s stress on the alternative historical possibility that American culture had foreseen the results of “the conflation of women’s rights, sexual libertinism, and male-female sameness … or the conflation of science and atheism,” as I’m also interested in the following: “The logical distinction between saying, ‘I have no right to prevent you from doing X’, and saying, ‘If X floats your boat, that’s great!’, is obvious and elementary. For Deneen to be right, he has to collapse that distinction, and he can’t.”

I’d be curious how Deneen himself would respond to these various critiques. Of course in his book he makes very clear that hatching any ambitious new political blueprint to replace liberalism would be dangerous and likely self-defeating. But what would he say to Haigha’s arguments? Further: Is there any value in a Benedict Option of classical liberalism, if only as a means to temper the excesses of late liberalism?

Check out my Idiocy, Ltd. and begin the long, hard reckoning.

Why Liberalism Failed: Patrick Deneen's 5th Thesis

[This is the last part of a 5-part essay on Patrick Deneen’s book Why Liberalism Failed. Return to part 1.]

5. Liberalism justifies and promotes an unsustainable relation to nature (plus Conclusion)

If in the interests of radical individual autonomy liberalism hollows out actual cultures, spreading anticulture, so also in relation to the natural world liberalism theorizes and promotes a kind of anti-nature. And again, not surprisingly, this novel theorization of nature is justified because, it is claimed, it will further human autonomy.

In the early modern period, European thinkers abandoned the medieval understanding of nature that saw it as a vast, mysterious book in which humans could read the laws and intentions of the Creator, replacing it with a more antagonistic view of nature as a force set against man, one he was called upon to defeat. Francis Bacon (whom Hobbes served as secretary) was one of the seminal thinkers in this shift.

[Science and technology are] arguably the greatest source of our liberation [from natural limits] and simultaneously the reason for our imperiled environment, the deformations wrought by our own technologies on our personhood, and deep anxiety over our inability to control our own innovations. The modern scientific project of human liberation from the tyranny of nature has been framed as an effort to “master” or “control” nature, or as a “war” against nature in which its study would provide the tools for its subjugation at the hands of humans. Francis Bacon--who rejected the classical arguments that learning aimed at the virtues of wisdom, prudence, and justice, arguing instead that “knowledge is power”--compared nature to a prisoner who, under torture, might be compelled to reveal her long-withheld secrets.

… Yet nature seems not to have surrendered. As the farmer and author, Wendell Berry has written, if modern science and technology were conceived as a “war against nature,” then “it is a war in every sense--nature is fighting us as much as we are fighting it. And … it appears that we are losing.” Many elements of what we today call our environmental crisis--climate change, resource depletion, groundwater contamination and scarcity, species extinction--are signs of battles won but a war being lost.

For the medievals, man was part of nature, but with the early modern rejection of Aristotle and natural law philosophy a space was opened up, man was theoretically "liberated" from the natural world, and a new human freedom was championed--a freedom from both 1) the natural environment and 2) anything that might be claimed as man’s essence. Over the ensuing centuries, this dual directionality of man’s freedom grew ever starker: he neither had to submit to the natural world around him, nor even conform to any given nature as man. This process has nearly reached an end point. Even as our negative impact on ecosystems is becoming impossible to ignore, in our academies the notion of a human nature is widely denounced as an oppressive “ideology” or "essentialism". Those denouncing the idea of a human nature claim to be doing so in the interests of oppressed non-Western cultures or marginalized sexual minorities, but the repercussions of their revolt are much wider in scope. One almost suspects that underlying their philosophical stance against essentialism may be something quite other than any desire to liberate oppressed groups. (Please pardon my short coughing fit here.)

Deneen relates this liberal shift against nature to perverse developments like transhumanism, a movement gaining ever more adherents and which insists that our nature as humans can be “remade” or “improved” and death defeated. Of course this latter demonstrates the same view of nature as malleable material that we see in modern approaches to the environment, the only difference being that here it is human nature that is to be remade according to individual wishes. And again, the same view animates or underpins recent movements claiming that sex is not essentially related to reproduction (as with much contemporary feminism) or that “gender identity” is not related biological sex (the LGBTQwerty movement’s current battle front). To take yet another example Deneen doesn’t mention, one might mention our virtual epidemic of cosmetic surgery, a practice once hidden and cause for embarrassment, now increasingly normalized. "I had some work done. Like the result?" The previous century's stigma against using pseudo-medical technologies to modify one's own appearance has become passé.

Under advanced liberalism, then, the person is no longer grounded in 1) a natural environment, 2) a particular biological sex, or even 3) the givenness of his/her own body in terms of appearance or the phenomenon of aging. That dystopian science fiction repeatedly takes up all these forms of disconnect proves that although this revolt against nature is deep and widespread, there is nonetheless a culture-wide awareness of a lurking “revenge of the repressed” waiting in our near future.

Again, our more philosophical critics will trace most of these developments to the early modern revolt against Aristotle and natural law. Enlightenment thinkers adopted this anti-Aristotelian stance whole cloth and, combining it with a stress on free markets and capitalist development, liberalism weaponized it, creating the new understanding of science. For our modern West, worshipful of this science, nature is no longer a Book to be read in service to insight and wisdom; it is rather to be unveiled and exploited in service to the need for new technologies and products, which allow us to live in ever greater “comfort”, this term often meaning mostly: ever greater distance from the soil and natural processes. And if these technologies and products are harmful to local environments where they are produced, a solution is at hand. With the development of transportation and the new mobility, the rough interchangeability of place, liberal elites externalize destruction of natural environments by simply 1) moving place, or 2) ensuring that the worst destruction occurs in undeveloped nations, where populations must suffer what they must, unable to defend their forests, land, or water.

Given this historical/technological context, it is again no surprise that dystopian literary and film visions of our future depict a ruling elite that is at least part-artificial in body, mentally and ethically deranged, and always disconnected from any specific territory. Actual territories, meanwhile, are depicted as polluted and barely sustainable, the proletarian or rebel denizens stuck in them living out hardscrabble lives and facing impossible odds against their rulers. The very popularity of this science fiction, as Deneen recognizes, proves that most citizens living in advanced liberal societies are well aware that liberalism is a false ideological veil that threatens to tear asunder any decade now.

Many of these topics have been widely discussed going back decades. What is powerful in Deneen’s presentation is 1) his linking of this current looming crisis with the original gestures of liberal thought, as well as 2) his observation that our deformations both of wider nature and, more recently, of human nature (transhumanism, radical feminism, the trans craze, etc.) have origins traceable to one and the same liberal shift in the understanding of nature, a shift formulated centuries ago.

Conclusion

“The end of liberalism is in sight.”

This is Deneen’s prognosis, based on a many-faceted analysis of the liberal project’s fundamental grounds as they work themselves out in Western societies. In my own reading, if I were to put it in a nutshell, Deneen argues that liberalism will fall because it is ultimately incompatible with one of the key constituents of human flourishing: culture.

Of course Deneen is not the first to recognize the problems of "liberal culture" outlined above. One thinker he nowhere cites, but who wrote compellingly on many of the same issues in the decades leading up to World War II, was Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana. What makes Deneen's book new and, I would argue, essential, is his brilliant analysis of the stark paradoxes at the heart of liberal theory, and what these paradoxes have wrought in terms of outcome. In review, here are the main paradoxes he treats: 1) that liberalism's failure is a result of its too thorough success; 2) that the Hobbesian "state of nature", though mythical in terms of its depiction of the human past, is nonetheless becoming a perverse reality through liberal fiat; 3) that radical individualism necessarily gives rise to increasing statism; 4) that the early modern "liberation" from nature coincides with our increasing enslavement to new masters: Economy and Technology. In laying out these paradoxes, Deneen seems to stress that it is their very character as paradox that makes it hard for us to recognize their fatal weight.

If Deneen is right in his prognosis, that liberalism is coming to an end point, what does he propose we do?

Here we come to what I see as another of the special virtues of his approach. Deneen manages to combine deep diagnostic insight on the fallout of liberal ideology with an equally deep theoretical humility as to possible remedies. He offers no grand blueprint of what might come after liberalism, and in fact cautions that any attempt to draw up such a blueprint would be premature and almost certainly self-defeating.

There are two reasons. The first is that there is much in the liberal order that we don’t want to abandon. Yes, although Deneen is unsparing in his critique of the excesses brought on by liberal ideology, he maintains a keen appreciation for liberalism’s successes over the centuries, citing many of the things avid liberals would also cite. The second is that he recognizes the totalizing threat of political blueprints per se, especially in our post-Enlightenment period. He suspects that those who would draw up a new blueprint in theoretical rejection of liberalism would only be bringing yet more of the disaster we have suffered already from liberalism’s competing ideologies, Marxism and fascism. This threat of falling into one despotism or another is clear in his mind as he suggests alternative ways our present may play out.

This denouement might take one of two forms. In the first instance, one can envision the perpetuation of a political system called “liberalism” that, becoming fully itself, operates in forms opposite to its purported claims about liberty, equality, justice, and opportunity. Contemporary liberalism will increasingly resort to imposing the liberal order by fiat--especially in the form of an administrative state run by a small minority who increasingly disdain democracy. End runs around democratic and populist discontent have become the norm, and backstopping the liberal order is the ever more visible power of a massive “deep state,” with extensive powers of surveillance, legal mandate, police power, and administrative control. …

[A second possible denouement would be] the end of liberalism and its replacement by another regime. Most people envisioning such scenarios rightly warn of the likely viciousness of any successor regime, and close to hand are the examples of the collapse of the Weimar Republic and the rise of fascism, and Russia’s brief flirtation with liberalism before the imposition of communism. While these brutal and failed examples suggest that such possibilities are unlikely to generate widespread enthusiasm even in a postliberal age, some form of populist nationalist authoritarianism or military autocracy seems altogether plausible as an answer to the anger and fear of a postliberal citizenry.

Faced with these two possible outcomes, Deneen suggests not a new grand blueprint, but rather undertaking “tentative first steps” to "seed the ground" for ways of living yet to come. He suggests three, which may be summed up as:

1) Acknowledge the achievements of liberalism; eschew any desire for an impossible “return” to some preliberal age. Build upon these liberal achievements while abandoning the foundational philosophical positions that allowed for liberal failure.

2) Outgrow the age of ideology. Deneen: “Instead of trying to conceive a replacement ideology (or returning to some updated version of an alternative, such as a renascent Marxism), we should focus on developing practices that foster new forms of culture, household economics, and polis life.”

3) Allow any new theory of politics to develop organically, based on the experiences of lived communities. From “the cauldron of such experience and practice, a better theory of politics and society might ultimately emerge,” one that retains the “rightful demands” liberalism itself makes, “particularly for justice and dignity.”

Deneen closes his magisterial Why Liberalism Failed with a consideration of the challenges faced by those who would take up these “tentative steps”. Chief among these challenges is the difficulties of fostering and defending new cultural models in the midst of our growing and every more dysfunctional “anticulture.” His vision of cultural viability going forward shares much with the projects of other critics and thinkers writing at present, such as the Benedict Option of Rod Dreher (whom he mentions), or the philosophical focus on practices and communities of practice of Alasdair MacIntyre.

Deneen’s book is a must read for those who want to get at the roots of what now ails the West. There is much, very much, in it that I haven’t mentioned. I only hope I have identified and roughly outlined the main theses.

Return to Why Liberalism Failed: Introduction and Part 1.

Order Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed at Amazon.

Have some deadpan with your coffee. Check out Idiocy, Ltd. Dryest humor in the west.

Why Liberalism Failed: Patrick Deneen's 4th Thesis

Patrick J. Deneen teaches Political Science
and Constitutional Studies at the University of Notre Dame.
[This is part 4 of a 5-part essay on Patrick Deneen’s book Why Liberalism Failed. Return to part 1.]

4. Liberalism creates a globalized monoculture

Our word culture derives from the Latin verb colere: to till the land, to inhabit, also to worship. The term thus relates to cultus, a religious grouping defined by its own understanding of the divine or its own particular rituals for relating to the divine. Etymology is sometimes less than helpful when seeking to define current usage of terms, but in this case it is not. This complex of meanings in the Latin points to how the word culture is now understood.

As we have seen, liberalism explicitly seeks to liberate the individual from what it considers the arbitrary and oppressive strictures of the past. But into what precisely is the individual liberated? Nature? A new liberal culture? Hardly. Deneen argues that liberalism, as it advances, can only liberate into “anticulture”.

But isn't that perhaps a bit shrill on Deneen's part; isn't he overstating the case? We need to consider his arguments.

All previously known cultures were characterized by deep links to place (the geographical locale in which the culture arose) and a deep sense of generational time (the individual was aware of being beholden both to his/her heritage and to his people’s future). Liberalism, theorizing nature in Baconian fashion as a placeless expanse to be subjected to man’s technological advance, and theorizing man himself as self-made, self-actualizing individual, undermines both these fundamental preconditions of culture. Ever eroding both the local as an idea and the integrity of specific geographical locales, liberalism eventually proves unsustainable.

[Human] mastery of nature is producing consequences that suggest such mastery is at best temporary and finally illusory: ecological costs of burning fossil fuels, limits of unlimited application of antibiotics, political fallout from displacement of workforce by technology, and so forth. Among the greatest challenges facing humanity is the ability to survive progress.

In a recent study, an international team of marine biologists predicts that the oceans will be basically “dead” by the year 2048. What does such news even mean in human terms? Liberalism has no answer. Have humans ever lived in a world with “dead” oceans? Never in our 220,000-year history. In comparison to that spread of two-hundred-plus millennia, the new ideology of liberalism has given us the tools to render sterile a massive expanse of the planet’s ecosystem in a mere handful of generations.

We have gotten used to hearing announcements like this one from marine biologists, and our reactions are of two kinds. Either we claim that it must be mere “alarmism”, that no such thing will happen, or we shrug and go on with our lives, assuming that when it does happen our descendants will figure out a way to pull through. “Unfortunate, that,” seems the general response, “but what can we do about it?”

Is this progress? If so, in what ways? In some metrics, yes, we've progressed greatly. In others, our development can only be judged a deep pathology that systematically numbs us to long-term human realities. In either case, we seem to acknowledge ourselves powerless in the face of the need for ongoing "development".

Our fatalism is another aspect of triumphant liberalism that Deneen teases out. Liberalism has raised human activities like “the economy” and “technology” to a kind of functional transcendence beyond human control. The stunning thing is that citizens of the liberal order so blithely accept this as “just the way it is”.

[A deep] anxiety arises from the belief that there is an inevitability to technological advances that no amount of warning about their dangers can prevent. A kind of Hegelian or Darwinian narrative seems to dominate our worldview. We seem inescapably to be either creating our own destroyer or, as Lee Silver writes in Remaking Eden, evolving into a fundamentally different treasure that we have reason to fear becoming. Our popular culture seems to be a kind of electronic Cassandra, seeing the future but unable to get anyone to believe it.

Under advanced liberalism, economy and technology are not human practices linked to particular cultures, but transcendent, globalized phenomena to which all cultures must bow. They are in effect post-human: forces no specific cultural order could hope to alter or resist. The early liberal theorists didn't predict this.

Meanwhile, of course, liberalism pursues its project of undermining actual individual cultures at breakneck speed. Deneen analyses how, in a gesture of deep denial, liberalism now weaponizes the very language of cultural difference in order to spread its global monoculture.

A panoply of actual cultures is replaced by a celebration of “multiculturalism,” the reduction of actual cultural variety to liberal homogeneity loosely dressed in easily discarded native garb. The “-ism” of “multiculturalism” signals liberalism’s victorious rout of actual cultural variety. Even as cultures are replaced by a pervasive anticulture, the language of culture is advanced as a means of rendering liberal humanity’s detachment from specific cultures. The homogenous celebration of every culture effectively means no culture at all. The more insistent the invocation of “pluralism” or “diversity” or, in the retail world, “choice,” the more assuredly the destruction of actual cultures is advancing.

In recent decades, we see the following absurd formula dictating norms: “We must respect diversity! Diversity means that if you don’t agree with us liberals on all fundamental points, you aren’t diverse enough. You must become like us, then we can be diverse together. You don’t want to be a bigot, do you?” Bizarrely, the self-contradictory absurdity of this formula escapes notice in huge swaths of academia, media, government. As if different cultures, by definition, don’t sometimes differ on fundamentals. Liberals pride themselves on being tolerant, but of course if they only tolerate those who agree with them, that cannot be called tolerance in any meaningful sense of the word. In this pseudo-intellectual environment, which grows shriller and more dogmatic by the year, does any real pluralism stand a chance?

On both fronts then--i.e. in relation to nature and in relation to the distinct visions of human flourishing that characterize real cultures--liberalism can only abet, as Deneen says, "anticulture".

Liberalism’s success in the West and its global reach only mean a speeding up of the spread of this anticulture. Actual cultures are hollowed out and once distinct peoples, redefined as “global citizens” and “consumers”, are forced to worship the now reified liberal powers of Economy and Technology. In Why Liberalism Failed, Deneen subtly analyses this dynamic at work, showing on various fronts how these theoretical deities erode real cultures, all while employing an abstracted language (multiculturalism, diversity, community) to mask the erosion taking place.

Next: 5. Liberalism justifies and promotes an unsustainable relation to nature (plus Conclusion)

Order Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed at Amazon.

Have some deadpan with your coffee. Check out Idiocy, Ltd. Dryest humor in the west.

Why Liberalism Failed: Patrick Deneen's 3rd Thesis

3. Liberalism is grounded on an impoverished understanding of liberty

This particular thesis relates closely to what we’ve just laid out in section 2. The central place of liberty in the American project is evident to everyone. What is less known, however, is the fact that this term underwent a major shift in meaning before it became cornerstone in our political self-understanding.

In paradigm shifts in the sciences, it is common to see key terms from the older theory retained, but having undergone radical changes in meaning to fit the new paradigm. Important terms are not often abandoned entirely; rather they are repurposed. Of course similar semantic shifts also occur in periods of cultural or political revolution. A cherished concept like liberty becomes the prize in an ideological struggle; and the revolutionaries, if successful, seize it as their own, managing in the process to modify its meaning even as they lay claim to its old prestige.

Deneen makes clear that Enlightenment thinkers did not formulate their new politics from scratch, but developed it out of ancient and medieval political concepts which they bent into new shapes to match their new order. This was both an organic development (one typically works with the concepts one inherits) and a strategic one (the populace can only be rallied with terms they recognize). In the case of the traditional concept liberty, the semantic shift pulled off by these thinkers hit at the roots of the ancient concept.

Deneen lays out the tradition behind the term as follows:

Liberalism did not, of course, discover or invent the human longing for liberty: the word libertas is of ancient origin, and its defense and realization have been a primary goal from the first forays into political philosophy in ancient Greece and Rome. The foundational texts of the Western political tradition focused especially on the question how to constrain the impulse to and assertions of tyranny, and characteristically settled upon the cultivation of virtue and self-rule as the key correctives to the tyrannical temptation. The Greeks especially regarded self-government as a continuity from the individual to the polity, with the realization of either only possible if the virtues of temperance, wisdom, moderation, and justice were to be mutually sustained and fostered. Self-governance in the city was possible only if the virtue of self-governance governed the souls of citizens; and self-governance of individuals could be realized only in a city that understood that citizenship itself was a kind of ongoing habituation in virtue, through both law and custom. (italics mine)

For the Greeks, any polity that would avoid falling into tyranny must first understand the necessity of teaching its individual citizens to rule themselves, to control their appetites and recognize a certain degree of duty to the whole. Liberty, then, was a dual condition: a virtue in possession of which individuals would be free both from the overweening demands of their own greed and lust (pushing at them from the inside) and from the tyrant who would always be ready to seize control of their polity (pushing at them from the outside). Needless to say, this is hardly how Americans understand liberty today. Liberty in America is largely two things: 1) my personal freedom to behave/consume/think as I choose without others impeding me; 2) the power of the American government to uphold this freedom against all challengers (whether communist, fascist, etc.). Nowhere in this American understanding of liberty is the key classical and medieval element of liberty from the overweening power of one’s own lusts.

How was this change in stress effected?

Liberty was fundamentally reconceived, even if the word was retained.… Liberty [had long been thought] to involve discipline and training in self-limitation of desires, and corresponding social and political arrangements that sought to inculcate corresponding virtues that fostered the arts of self-government. Classical and Christian political thought was self-admittedly more “art” than “science”: it relied extensively on the fortunate appearance of inspiring founding figures and statesmen who could uphold political and social self-reinforcing virtuous cycles, and acknowledged the likelihood of decay and corruption as an inevitable future of any human institution….

The roots of liberalism lay in efforts to overturn a variety of anthropological assumptions and social norms that had come to be believed as sources of pathology--namely, fonts of conflict as well as obstacles to individual liberty. The foundations of liberalism were laid by a series of thinkers whose central aim was to disassemble what they concluded were irrational religious and social norms in the pursuit of civil peace that might in turn foster stability and prosperity, and eventually individual liberty of conscience and action.

Deneen traces this project back to Machiavelli, who first explicitly rejected what he saw as the unrealistic political fantasies of previous republics. For Machiavelli, the old belief that strong republics were founded on the cultivation of virtue was laughably naive.

Rather than promoting unrealistic standards for behavior--especially self-limitation--that could at best be unreliably achieved, Machiavelli proposed grounding a political philosophy upon readily observable human behaviors of pride, selfishness, greed, and the quest for glory…. By acknowledging ineradicable human selfishness and the desire for material goods, one might conceive of ways to harness those motivations rather than seeking to moderate or limit those desires.

Of course this basic Machiavellian insight comes most into its own in our modern thinking on the advantages of the free market. After Machiavelli, Hobbes and Descartes proved crucial as sources of the new politics.

Second, the classical and Christian emphasis upon virtue … relied upon reinforcing norms and social structures arrayed extensively throughout political, social, religious, economic, and familial life. What were viewed as the essential supports for a training in virtue--and hence, preconditions for liberty from tyranny--came to be viewed as sources of oppression, arbitrariness, and limitation. Descartes and Hobbes in turn argued that the rule of irrational custom and unexamined tradition--especially religious belief and practice--was a source of arbitrary governance and unproductive internecine conflicts, and thus an obstacle to a stable and prosperous regime. Each proposed remediating the presence of custom and tradition by introducing “thought experiments” that reduced people to their natural essence--conceptually stripping humans of accidental attributes that obscured from us our true nature--so that philosophy and politics could be based upon a reasoned and reflective footing. Both expressed confidence in a more individualistic rationality … and each believed that potential deviations from rationality could be corrected by the legal prohibitions and sanctions of a centralized political state.

These are the philosophical roots of later Enlightenment thinkers' radical repurposing of the concept liberty. Deneen would not deny that many social goods have been effected based on this shift. But by the latter decades of the 20th century, if not earlier, the social pathologies such reconfigured liberty encouraged became obvious. And at present, well into the new century, it’s become impossible to ignore that while many things were gained, many others were lost.

Deneen makes clear how liberty as we now conceive it may be encouraging a kind of mass barbarism. On the one hand, democracy as a task, as something needing active civic engagement and cultivation at the local level, is giving way to a growing statism, where “democratic” activists rise up to demand their “rights” or “entitlements” from a state that is seen as Great Provider. Simultaneously, these rights or entitlements continue to grow well beyond anything put forward in the original liberal charter. On the other hand, the Hobbesian shift in the understanding of liberty--that we are somehow born as free individuals rather than needing to learn liberty as a social practice--raises up citizens that conceive of their own liberty as grounded in their bodies, almost as with some animal species (bears, for instance, which rove as individuals, rather than chimpanzees, which live in groups). As liberalism develops, such cultureless individualism becomes the norm, leading, as we have seen, to a need for external checks:

Informal relationships are replaced by administrative directives, political policies, and legal mandates … requiring an ever-expanding state apparatus to ensure social cooperation. The threat and evidence of declining civic norms require centralized surveillance, highly visible police presence, and a carceral state to control the effects of its own successes while diminishing civic trust and mutual commitment.

Always with a mind to the role of education in political formation, Deneen sees the hand of this liberalism in recent developments on our campuses:

Liberalism … undermines education by replacing a definition of liberty as an education in self-government with liberty as autonomy and the absence of constraint. Ultimately it destroys liberal education, since it begins with the assumption that we are born free, rather than that we must learn to become free. Under liberalism, the liberal arts are instruments of personal liberation, an end that is consistently pursued in the humanities, in the scientific and mathematical disciplines (STEM), and in economics and business. In the humanities, liberatory movements based on claims of identity regard the past as a repository of oppression, and hence displace the legitimacy of the humanities as a source of education. Meanwhile, the subjects that advance the practical and effectual experience of autonomy--STEM, economics, and business--come to be regarded as the sole subjects of justified study.

Both left and right push this dynamic forward, so that now we have come to the odd pass were the humanities are largely “victim studies” (only good for producing activists bent on further destruction of their own cultural roots) and where “practical” fields are conceived as job training. Completely lost is the vision of education as the preparation of citizens for life in a republic.

In all of this, note that liberty, in a belated echo of the mechanistic thinking of the early moderns, must always be liberty of bodies. Deneen traces this logic in our current humanities, where now we see that only bodily, physical differences count as valid grounds for claiming victim status:

The humanities and social sciences … focus on identity politics and redressing past injustices to specific groups, under the “multicultural” and “diversity” banners…. [But the] groups that are deemed worthy of strenuous efforts to redress grievances are identified for features relating to their bodies--race, gender, sexual identity--while “communities of work and culture,” including cohesive ethnic and class groupings, receive scant attention. Thus while students’ groups grounded in racial or sexual identity demand justice so that they can fully join modern liberal society, cohesive ethnic groups resistant to liberal expressive individualism like Kurds or Hmong, persecuted religious minorities such as Copts, non urban nonelites such as leaders in the 4-H, and the rural poor can expect little attention from today’s campus liberals.

At present these developments are writ large only in academic settings, which has led some to claim that all this is only a matter of “student protest”, that the kids will eventually “grow up and face the real world”. What is ignored in this assessment is the fact that these very campuses are training the people who will soon move into directorial positions across the culture, in government, media and the corporate world. Already, especially in high tech, we see precisely these kinds of “political correctness” determining corporate policy and affecting the whole society through the above-mentioned “Community Standards” guidelines that are little more than liberal censorship of public discourse. This same mentality is getting ever more entrenched in print and television media as well.

In various ways, then, the Enlightenment rewriting of the concept liberty, in Deneen’s view, has led to a social order that valorizes hedonism and greed even as it barbarizes what used to be liberal education. Given the central role of education in any advanced polity, a role the ancients well understood, our liberal republics are put in jeopardy by the changes this liberal "liberty" has belatedly brought to our universities.

Next: 4. Liberalism creates a globalized monoculture

Order Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed at Amazon.

Check out my Idiocy, Ltd. and begin the long, hard reckoning.

Why Liberalism Failed: Patrick Deneen's 2nd Thesis

[This is part 2 of a 5-part article on Patrick Deneen’s book Why Liberalism Failed. Part 1 is here.]

2. Liberal individualism and statism reinforce each other in a vicious cycle

A vast population of such artificially "natural" individuals, with ever weaker cultural norms to moderate behavior, each insisting on his or her right to “make my own rules”, will necessarily become difficult to govern. In a regime where “experiments in living” are the norm, there will be few shared standards or customs to dictate interpersonal relations, sexual mores, or the borders between private and public space. There will likewise be no common cultural heritage to refer to when disagreements arise, making the state and its laws a necessary arbiter for differences that were previously dealt with at the local level. Liberalism must thus, again in a perverse twist, lead to less and less individual liberty as the liberal project progresses. Thus Deneen’s second major thesis.

Among both scholars and the general public, the debate over the religious and/or secular intentions of the American Founders continues unabated. One reason is evident enough: the American founding was a profoundly and subtly mixed phenomenon, the Founders framing a political order that would 1) suit the almost entirely religious population of the time, but 2) ensure that their new state remained carefully protected from the possibility of any one church taking over. This made eminent sense in the context. The Founders assumed an overwhelmingly Christian population as the one that would inherit and thrive under the political structure they built. They assumed it to such an extent that one of the most prominent, John Adams, could write:

We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge or gallantry would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution is designed only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for any other.

With this background and subsequent American history in mind, many subtle observers in recent decades have made a point that Deneen echoes. Namely: If American society has remained relatively stable in the decades following 1960, it is because it has been able to borrow on the store of (largely Christian) cultural capital left to it by the past. The strong family ethic, stress on personal responsibility, stigma on divorce and sexual license that most of America held to even during the last decades of the 20th century--these were largely an inheritance from more explicitly Christian earlier generations. Many millions of Americans now in their fifties benefited from this stability, which shaped their childhoods via mostly two-parent households and a social environment with roughly traditional moral standards. But given the more experimental and “counter-cultural” social mores of the late ‘60s and ‘70s, many of these same 50-somethings didn’t provide the same stability to their children. Having internalized the counter-cultural ethos, they raised children, now young adults, that consider culture itself to be mainly a matter of breaking whatever remains of the “oppressive” past in favor of a hedonistic liberation that is seen as synonymous with "progress". Thus we now face not only the unraveling of basic family structure, but at the same time such things as the nationwide abandonment of basic civics education. Ask a 20-something today about the Founders, and you are likely to hear: “They were all white slave-owners.” What you won’t get is any sense of the subtlety of what they wrought in framing our Constitution. Ask about Christianity, and you are likely to hear: “What? You don’t believe in evolution?”--as if religion and science were mutually exclusive. Yet, ironically, it is still the American constitutional order, along with our religiously-grounded respect for the dignity of individual conscience, that underpins the very society these 20-somethings live and breathe in. But for how long?

For many observers, the upshot in inescapable: these younger generations can't be counted on to maintain or defend our political order. One sees them high up in a tree, gleefully sawing away at the branches they sit on, sure that when those branches break they will land in Utopia. This is what Deneen means by his version of the now common lament:

Liberalism has drawn down on a preliberal inheritance and resources that at once sustained liberalism but which it cannot replenish. The loosening of social bonds in nearly every aspect of life--familial, neighborly, communal, religious, even national--reflects the advancing logic of liberalism and is the source of its deepest instability.

Again, it is a matter of the combined impact of the radical Millian individualism we discussed in part 1 (“experiments in living”) and the widespread belief that social change, as if by some inherent law of history, is always equal to Progress.

The repercussions of this steady, decade-by-decade withdrawal of cultural capital, our slow march to bankruptcy, are now beginning to be felt more painfully, and since there's no longer any cultural institution that might school the flailing experimenters in their inevitable conflicts, our tribes must look to the state to restore order. The is the paradox Deneen identifies: Liberal individualism must ultimately lead to increasing state intervention in daily life, and thus eventually undermine real liberty.

Deneen focuses on the increase of state intervention, but we might also note something we're seeing ever more of: corporate intervention. I’m thinking mainly of Silicon Valley’s growing efforts at social engineering, undertaken in the name of vague “community standards” or a need for “safety”. What “community”, we may ask, do they mean exactly? The whole of humanity? Whether it’s Mark Zuckerberg talking or some other Silicon Valley demigod, the claim that they speak for such a vast community is equally absurd. One also thinks, in terms of such interventions, of the growing power of corporate HR departments and, of course, university administrations, of which more below. Whether it is literally the state, then, or the new tech elite that polices our public discourse, intervention is becoming the new normal.

The problem with all this, as Deneen recognizes, is twofold. First, state laws and “speech codes” do not a culture make; and since we are deeply social beings, yearning for real cultural ties, the abstract notions of “community” on offer from government bureaucracies and corporate thought-police will necessarily leave us cold. As they will also leave us deeply suspicious. Second, how is it that liberal state bureaucracies and corporate ideologists have come to have so much direct power over our speech, our businesses, our actions? Growing around us we see new nexuses of power that we cannot attach to actual human faces or connect to any real heritage we recognize. There's a profound absenteeism about the powers that increasingly pull the strings.

Evidence suggests that nearly all of us, even staunch secular liberals, even tech enthusiasts, now feel the weight of this looming ersatz "community". How is it, we wonder, that our social order promises us such radical individual freedom, yet we seem ever more hemmed in and monitored in everything we say and do? Why this encroachment, year by year, of ever more surveillance, ever new metrics by which to check our behavior, our political loyalties, our personal contacts? Why, for many of us, do our careers now seem to hang in the balance under a pervasive monitoring? Why do many of us feel that our right to raise our children as we see fit, or our right to speak our ideas in public--two very fundamental rights--are on the verge of being taken away by powers we never voted into office?

For Deneen, the depth of this malaise is evidenced not only in the current populist revolts against liberal elites (Trumpism, Brexit, the rising power of the far right in France and elsewhere) but also in the ubiquity of dystopian fiction and films. We sense that something big is coming, that certain fundamental freedoms are under attack and may soon be no more, but we aren’t sure exactly how it will happen. Many of us also sense that whatever is coming is connected to the current regnant, globalizing liberal order, and so we must dislodge our distant elites while we still can.

Deneen demonstrates that this ever more invasive meddling of state and state-like structures in citizens' lives is underwritten by the very thoroughness with which liberalism has bulldozed the institutions that local societies once depended on (church, local economy, family, heritage). Avid to create its society of Millian individuals free of traditional bonds, liberalism destroyed all competition, and now must answer to that old warning: “You break it, you buy it.” Sadly, liberals in general believe that this new responsibility thrown at the state (“Heal our wounds! Provide better jobs! Protect our dignity! Keep our kids in line!”) can only be met by enacting … yet more liberalism. Deneen sees this as emphatically the wrong answer, as evidence in fact of a vicious cycle that liberal elites are predisposed by ideology not to recognize.

One of the most telling examples Deneen gives of this vicious cycle in action comes from the change in culture on university campuses. Until not long ago, American universities were understood as institutions upholding a particular cultural heritage (Western Europe, the United States) and saw their mandate as raising up citizens able to carry on the best of this heritage. The university was to offer a “liberal education” (in content more what we might call a humanist education, after Renaissance models) the goal being to civilize students in a particular cultural order. Many of the best of our universities were founded with a religious mandate, and until not long ago took that mandate seriously. The sexual revolution, the reframing of education as job training, and the new SJW politics of “diversity” have entirely overturned this previous civilizing mission:

One of the upheavals of the sexual revolution was the rejection of long-standing rules and guidelines governing the behavior of students at the nation’s colleges and universities. Formerly understood to stand in for parents--in loco parentis, “in place of the parent”--these institutions dictated rules regarding dormitory life, dating, curfews, visitations, and comportment. Adults--often clergy--were charged with continuing the cultivation of youth into responsible adulthood. Some fifty years after students were liberated from the nanny college, we are seeing not sexual nirvana but widespread confusion and anarchy, and a new form of in abstentia parentis--the paternalist state.

Long-standing local rules and cultures that governed behavior through education and cultivation of norms, manners, and morals came to be regarded as oppressive limitations on individual liberty. Those forms of control were lifted in the name of liberation, leading to regularized abuse of those liberties, born primarily of a lack of any sets of practices or customs to delineate limits on behavior, especially in the fraught arena of sexual interaction. The federal government, seen as the only legitimate authority for redress, exercised its powers to reregulate the liberated behaviors. But in the wake of disassembled local cultures, there is not longer a set of norms by which to cultivate self-rule, since these would constitute an unjust limitation upon our freedom. Now there can be only punitive threats that occur after the fact. Most institutions have gotten out of the business of seeking to educate the exercise of freedom through cultivation of character and virtue; emphasis is instead placed upon the likelihood of punishment after one body has harmed another body.

And so we enter the era of hysteria about “rape culture” on campus, a phenomenon entirely unsupported by statistics. Nevertheless, the “rape culture” claims are predictable enough given 1) third-wave feminism and 2) that campus culture itself promotes a hook-up approach to sexual relations. This has resulted in a nationwide undergraduate free-for-all, where young men are of course going to follow their biological inclinations, while young women, under the influence of alcohol, are going to end up engaging in “regret sex”, feeling the day after that they’ve been used, a feeling then reformulated days and sometimes months later as “I was raped”. What is to be done about this repeat phenomenon? The Obama Department of Education comes to the rescue by creating directives that allow unprincipled university administrations to validate all claims against young men, many of which claims, later, show little merit (cf. the ongoing saga of “Mattress Girl” or any number of other cases). Meanwhile the media takes up the “rape culture” narrative, even as it continues to promote sexual hedonism from the other side of its mouth, and the result is predictably a growing sense of sexual anomie: distrust between the sexes that leads soon to demands for signing of “consent forms” before sexual relations happen (an actual American development that one could hardly even imagine under Soviet rule) and a generalized reregulation of such things as shoulder pats or hugs (“Did I give you consent to touch me?”). In this way, step by step, the sexual revolution manages to turn what used to be the ritualized dance of relations between the sexes into a bureaucratically managed farce.

Here again, as Deneen points out, we can see the Hobbesian natural man mythology at work, this time implemented through university administrations, the media and the state:

This immorality tale is the Hobbesian vision in microcosm: first, tradition and culture must be eliminated as arbitrary and unjust (“natural man”). Then we see that absent such norms, anarchy ensues (“the state of nature”). Finding this anarchy unbearable, we turn to a central sovereign as our sole protector, that “Mortall God” who will protect us from ourselves (“the social contract”). We have been liberated from all custom and tradition, all authority that sought to educate within the context of ongoing communities, and have replaced these things with a distant authority that punishes us when we abuse our freedoms. And now, lacking any informal and local forms of authority, we are virtually assured that those abuses will regularly occur and that the state will find it necessary to intrude ever more minutely into personal affairs (“Prerogative”).

Many might guess from this example that Deneen will end by advising readers to vote for the Republican Party in hopes of restoring an earlier American social vision. But that guess would be wrong. Deneen provides analyses of this individualism/statism vicious cycle in other areas as well, for instance in our liberal economy, which commodifies nature, place and labor to radical degrees. When disastrous displacements inevitably result, the liberal state is then called upon to address the fallout. In this instance it is the policy agenda of Republicans that is more implicated. In fact Deneen sees our two-party system working in a kind of “pincer movement”, Democratic left and Republican right each doing its part to push the same deep liberal agenda: increasing individualism/increasing statism. He notes that the Republican right has long promised to promote two basic things: traditional family values and unregulated capitalism; and yet, oddly, it has only ever delivered on one of these two: the laissez-faire capitalism. Meanwhile, the Democratic left has also, in recent years, promised to promote two basic things: identity-based rights and dignity (especially in terms of sexuality) and strong social programs to ensure a more egalitarian outcome; and yet, again, our Democrats have only delivered on one of these: identity politics, with a special focus on sexual minorities. Deneen sees it as instructive that our two parties, apparently in bitter opposition to each other, both deliver only those goods that further individualize the citizenry: 1) radically unregulated capitalism, where winners have no responsibility to the larger community; 2) radical sexual autonomy, where sex is increasingly divorced from reproduction and family.

For Deneen, it is not merely an irony that this is what we end up with; rather, it is the “operating system” of advanced liberalism doing what it does. Neither Democratic nor Republican Party, which run as “applications” in this operating system, is capable of changing it, and so they now work in a “pincer movement” that further erodes any national unity.

Deneen sees advanced liberal society as one plagued by loneliness, a condition that results ultimately from liberalism's long and largely successful attempt to separate citizens from institutions like church, family, tradition, local economy, etc. (I cover Deneen's treatment of the systemic nature of this attempt in part 1.) With no thick communities in which to thrive, individuals feel weak, without anchor, and when their discontent arises, it is channeled at that same institution which essentially defines them as rights-bearing individuals: the liberal state. Protector of individual rights, the list of which keeps growing, the state is called upon to take up more and more of the general social burden, reapplying the glue that it busied itself unsticking over the course of centuries. The liberal state more often than not responds to these demands, as in some ways it must, and the Nanny State is born. As Deneen reads it, liberty ends up a necessary casualty.

Next: 3. Liberalism is grounded on an impoverished understanding of liberty

Order Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed at Amazon.

Have some deadpan with your coffee. Check out Idiocy, Ltd. Dryest humor in the west.

Why Liberalism Failed: Patrick Deneen’s 5 Main Arguments

[This page contains the first of five sections, including a brief introduction. I will link the remaining sections 2-5 from here as they are completed.]

The Five Arguments:

1. Liberalism is grounded on a false theory of human nature (with Introduction)
2. Liberal individualism and statism reinforce each other in a vicious cycle
3. Liberalism is grounded on an impoverished understanding of liberty
4. Liberalism creates a globalized monoculture
5. Liberalism justifies and promotes an unsustainable relation to nature (plus Conclusion)

Introduction

Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed, just out in February, continues to garner ever-wider acclaim as the year's must-read book of political analysis. I would go further and predict it will eventually be recognized as one of the key works of political theory of the early decades of this century. In what follows, I attempt to sum up Deneen’s hard-hitting, interlocking theses on the causes of our deepening malaise, but want to begin by quoting the opening paragraphs of his last chapter:

Liberalism has failed because liberalism has succeeded. As it becomes fully itself, it generates endemic pathologies more rapidly and pervasively than it is able to produce Band-aids and veils to cover them. . . .

The narrowing of our political horizons has rendered us incapable of considering that what we face today is not a set of discrete problems solvable by liberal tools but a systemic challenge arising from pervasive invisible ideology. The problem is not in just one program or application but in the operating system itself. It is almost impossible for us to conceive that we are in the midst of a legitimation crisis in which our deepest systemic assumptions are subject to dissolution. . . . Liberalism’s apologists regard pervasive discontent, political dysfunction, economic inequality, civic disconnection, and populist reject as accidental problems disconnected from systemic causes, because their self-deception is generated by enormous reservoirs of self-interest in the maintenance of the present system. This divide will only widen, the crises will become more pronounced, the political duct tape and economic spray paint will increasingly fail to keep the house standing. The end of liberalism is in sight.

And:

Liberalism’s defenders today regard their discontented countrymen as backward and recidivist, often attributing to them the most vicious motivations: racism, narrow sectarianism, or bigotry, depending on the issue at hand. To the extent that liberalism regards itself as a self-healing, perpetual political machine, it remains almost unthinkable for its apologists to grasp that its failure may lead to its replacement by a cruel and vicious successor. No serious effort to conceive a humane postliberal alternative is likely to emerge from the rear-guard defenders of a declining regime.

If these few paragraphs give some sense of the scope and paradoxical thrust of Deneen’s argument, they may also reveal why some see his prognosis as overly grim. In fact Deneen does claim our political order is beginning to unwind, and predicts its end, as his provocative title (in prophetic past tense) suggests. But how have we gotten to this point? If his book is important, if his arguments cannot just be brushed off, it’s because he succeeds in laying out a series of interlocking systemic features of liberal politics that explain why breakdown is inevitable.

[NB: A brief clarification of terms may be in order for some. What is meant here by liberalism? Simply put, Deneen is using the term liberalism in its more academic sense to mean a post-Enlightenment system of government characterized by (more or less) free markets, individual liberty, and elections. He has in mind particularly our American republic as founded in our Constitution. He is not using the term liberal in the way it is often used in common parlance today--to mean Democrat, say, rather than Republican. In Deneen’s usage, all our prominent politicians are part of “the liberal tradition”--George W. Bush as much as Barack Obama. The term liberal, then, is meant to distinguish our politics from, say, the monarchism of previous centuries or the Leninism or fascism of more recent times.]

Deneen’s theses on the liberal project buttress his argument that eventual failure is virtually built in. In my reading, the following five theses are the most important.

Eric Mader

1. Liberalism is grounded on a false theory of human nature

This is one of the most provocative of Deneen’s points, and will take a bit of unpacking. We begin with 17th c. English philosopher Thomas Hobbes.

In an effort to explain the origins of government, Hobbes theorized on the primitive human condition before the rise of society: the condition of man in a purported “state of nature”. Hobbes imagined pre-political men to live individually, all against all, in brutal competition for nourishment and comfort. For primitive man, there were no legal limits on individual behavior; he lived by pure freedom of will, his grasping and greed only checked by the natural limits of the environment and violence from competitors. Given that life in such a state proved, as Hobbes famously put it, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” the philosopher speculated that the first political arrangements arose by consent of these warring individuals. Individuals contracted mutual agreements to temper the endemic violence of the natural state, and thus civil society was born.

Hobbes is recognized as a protoliberal thinker, laying some of the groundwork, but later figures more central to the liberal project took up the idea of a “state of nature”, particularly Locke and Rousseau. Hobbes’ “natural man” theory proved crucial to the formation of liberal thought because it offered two things: 1) a kind of general anthropology (a theory of humanity in its basic state which, in this case, characterized humans as individual and greedy); and 2) a rough theoretical basis for politics (man’s willingness to enter into social contract through the instinct of self-preservation).

Though his theory may sound fanciful or arcane to contemporary Americans, it is nonetheless one of the crucial grounds on which our political edifice is built. Hobbes projected “natural” humans as 1) individuals interested primarily in self-preservation, 2) by definition free, and 3) in constant quest of their own individual fulfillment, all against all. One can hear the echo of this anthropology, point for point, in our Declaration of Independence, when it lists our unalienable rights as “[1] Life, [2] Liberty and [3] the pursuit of Happiness,” each term corresponding to one of Hobbes’ stresses.

Central as it has proved in later Western history, there is nonetheless a serious problem with the “state of nature” theory. Simply put, it is a political myth that corresponds to nothing in actual history. The errors in Hobbes' “natural man” thesis are well-nigh glaring.

Most obviously, there is no such thing as “pre-social” human being. Humans are by definition social animals (indeed even our near relatives, chimpanzees and gorillas, are social animals) and there are no known examples of Homo sapiens, no matter how “primitive”, living in a condition anything like Hobbes projected. Even a cursory glance at Hobbes’ myth should reveal its shallowness, given that each human being is and always has been raised up in a family of one sort or another, in which cooperation and mutual aid, as well as limits and punishments, are basic constituents. Further, the stress in Hobbes’ theory on single, separate individuals in brutal competition for resources is problematic. Primitive humanity shows competition, but it is competition between groups, organized as families or clans, not between lone individuals spread out as discrete points on a terrain.

The “state of nature” theory was key for early liberal thinkers because it allowed them to legitimize government as a social contract willingly entered into by naturally “free” individuals. Human freedom was formulated in a radically individuated way on the basis of the Hobbesian myth.

Deneen sees this founding gesture of the liberal order as setting in motion a political practice that, by a deep historical irony, eventually brings into partial reality the mythical Hobbesian state. For Deneen, Hobbes’ “state of nature” theory ends up being a kind of perverse self-fulfilling prophecy of the society that liberalism ultimately creates. Though there never was an original “state of nature”, according to Deneen we are bringing one into being by means of our deep absorption of Hobbes’ theory.

Deneen underlines how from the very beginning liberal governments enforced policies designed to systematically weaken any human bonds or obligations (such as to church, guild, family) that were not mediated by the liberal state or formulated in terms of individual rights. From the start, the liberal state intervened in already established social webs, breaking them apart in order to 1) put the state in place of “nature”, so that it may finally 2) ensure the “natural” rights of those originally “free” individual men. Deneen explains how the “state of nature” myth was implemented:

In a reversal of the scientific method, what is advanced as a philosophical set of arguments [Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau] is then instantiated in reality. The individual as a disembedded, self-interested economic actor didn’t exist in any actual state of nature but rather was the creation of an elaborate intervention by the incipient state in early modernity, at the beginnings of the liberal order. … Few works have made this intervention clearer than the historian and sociologist Karl Polanyi’s classic study The Great Transformation.…

According to Polanyi, the replacement of [previous social arrangements] required a deliberate and often violent reshaping of local economies, most often by elite economic and state actors disrupting and displacing traditional communities and practices. The “individuation” of people required not only the separation of markets from social and religious contexts but people’s acceptance that their labor and its products were nothing more than commodities subject to price mechanisms, a transformative way of considering people and nature alike in newly utilitarian and individualistic terms.…[The goal was] to disassociate markets from morals and “re-train” people to think of themselves as individuals separate from nature and one another. As Polanyi pithily says of this transformation, “laissez-faire was planned.”

Later liberal thinkers like John Stuart Mill (1806-73) doubled down on this project, reformulating it in even more explicitly individual terms as a kind of culture war. It was understood, of course, that liberalism would not bring about a classless society, so Mill focused on what was needed for liberal societies to raise up sufficiently independent individuals to serve as a ruling class. Deneen:

In order to liberate these individuals from accident and circumstance, Mill insisted that the whole of society be remade for their benefit, namely by protecting their unique differences against oppressive social norms, particularly religious strictures and social norms governing behavior and comportment. Put another way, Mill argued that “custom” must be overthrown so that those who seek to live according to personal choices in the absence of such norms are at greatest liberty to do so.… Mill called for a society premised around “experiments in living”: society as test tube for the sake of geniuses who are “more individual.”

“Oppressive social norms”, “experiments in living”, “more individual”--this sounds strikingly post-1960s in many ways, doesn’t it? But Deneen is presenting the views of a 19th-century intellectual, a man writing well before the first Ford Model T’s. The historical lesson is perhaps that it takes time for ideas to move through institutions and finally be brought into mass social practice--but move they will. Of Mill’s projected society of “geniuses” Deneen writes:

We live today in the world Mill proposed. Everywhere, at every moment, we are to engage in experiments in living. Custom has been routed: much of what today passes for culture--with or without the adjective “popular”--consists of mocking sarcasm and irony.… Society has been transformed along Millian lines in which especially those regarded as judgmental are to be special objects of scorn, in the name of nonjudgmentalism.

John Stuart Mill, great supporter of genius,
grandfather of the hippy generation
Deneen sees this earlier liberal project of radical individuation, premised on contempt for traditions and customs, as finally linking up with market forces and the lure of fad and fashion, to create what he calls our liberal “anticulture.”

In this world, gratitude to the past and obligations to the future are replaced by a nearly universal pursuit of immediate gratification: culture, rather than imparting the wisdom and experience of the past so as to cultivate virtues of self-restraint and civility, becomes synonymous with hedonic titillation, visceral crudeness, and distraction, all oriented toward promoting consumption, appetite, and detachment. As a result, superficially self-maximizing, socially destructive behaviors begin to dominate society.

For Deneen, this is the end result of liberalism’s original “state of nature” myth as it combines with Mill’s “experiments in living”. Given the centrality of both these forms of radical individualism in modern liberalism, the problem is systemic.

Deneen argues that the liberal order's mythical stress on the naturalness of radical individualism is part of what now renders it unstable. He gives myriad examples of this instability, but we need only think in anthropological terms to see good reason for our current malaise. Such radically weaponized individualism doesn’t correspond to what human beings really are: social creatures that, for our very flourishing and sanity, depend on group bonds and deep loyalties that define both our humanity and our place in the cosmos. Against this, and by design, secular liberalism atomizes societies, replacing religious community and ethnic or family loyalty with a Hobbesian myth that theorizes humanity as an aggregate of grasping, self-directed loners. That we now see a surfeit of individuals struggling with a painful lack of meaning, even as they set out to compete against their peers in the market, is not, as Deneen would say, “an error in our implementation of liberal thought”, but rather exactly the kind of people liberalism set out to create: the “natural man”. This is one of the troubling paradoxes of liberalism as it becomes ever more itself:

Ironically … the political project of liberalism, is shaping us into the creatures of its prehistorical fantasy, which in fact required the combined massive apparatus of the modern state, economy, education system, science and technology to make us into: increasingly separate, autonomous, non-relational selves.

[Problems/Questions: Some readers may take issue with the connection I make between Hobbes and the wording of the Declaration of Independence, saying that 1) Locke’s understanding of the state of nature was more decisive for the Founders than Hobbes’, that 2) Locke’s version of the theory differed in key ways, and that 3) there is no good evidence directly linking Locke’s writing on the topic with an immediate Hobbesian influence. I’m aware of these questions, but will not attempt to settle them one way or another. I believe they’re somewhat moot in any case, given Hobbes’ importance as a political thinker in the protoliberal era. A more interesting way to frame the larger issue might be to ask to what degree the American founding was ultimately grounded in “natural right” thinking (in a Hobbesian register) and to what degree dependent on “natural law” thinking. I look forward to the forthcoming book by Timothy Gordon, who writes on this topic and who has argued that the Founders’ project would have been unintelligible without a deep conceptual grounding in the older natural law. I don’t know what Gordon’s precise arguments will be, as I haven’t gotten to his just-published title (Catholic Republic: Why America Will Perish Without Rome) but his approach seems promising. After all, even if the implementation of the American project over the course of centuries arguably depended more on stressing natural right, that doesn’t necessarily mean the founding conceptual framework didn’t depend largely on natural law. From what I have heard in interviews with Gordon, I suspect his work will include the argument that the American project is bound to founder once the last traces of a natural law understanding of key concepts have been bled out of the culture.]

Next: 2. Liberal individualism and statism reinforce each other in a vicious cycle

Order Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed at Amazon.

Check out my Idiocy, Ltd. and begin the long, hard reckoning.