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Conserving America?: Essays on Present Discontents
"Opinions about America have taken a decisive turn in the early part of the 21st century. Some 70% of Americans believe that the country is moving in the wrong direction, and half the country thinks that its best days are behind it. Most believe that their children will be less prosperous and have fewer opportunities than previous generations. Evident to all is that the political system is broken and social fabric is fraying, particularly as a growing gap between wealthy haves and left-behind have-nots increases, a hostile divide widens between faithful and secular, and deep disagreement persists over America's role in the world. Wealthy Americans continue to build gated enclaves in and around select cities where they congregate, while growing numbers ofChristians compare our times to those of the late Roman empire, and ponder a fundamental withdrawal from wider American society into updated forms of Benedictine monastic communities. The signs of the times suggest that much is wrong with America. This collection of thematic essays by Notre Dame political theorist and public intellectual Patrick Deneen addresses the questions, is there something worth conserving in America, and if so, is America capable of conservation? Can a nation founded in a revolutionary moment that led to the founding of the first liberal nation be thought capable of sustaining and passing on virtues and practices that ennoble? Or is America inherently a nation that idolizes the new over the old, license over ordered liberty, and hedonism over self-rule? Can America conserve what is worth keeping for it to remain--or even become--a Republic?"--
192 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2016
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About the author
Patrick J. Deneen
23 books228 followersPatrick J. Deneen holds a B.A. in English literature and a Ph.D. in Political Science from Rutgers University. From 1995-1997 he was Speechwriter and Special Advisor to the Director of the United States Information Agency. From 1997-2005 he was Assistant Professor of Government at Princeton University. From 2005-2012 he was Tsakopoulos-Kounalakis Associate Professor of Government at Georgetown University, before joining the faculty of Notre Dame in Fall 2012. He is the author and editor of several books and numerous articles and reviews and has delivered invited lectures around the country and several foreign nations.
Deneen was awarded the A.P.S.A.'s Leo Strauss Award for Best Dissertation in Political Theory in 1995, and an honorable mention for the A.P.S.A.'s Best First Book Award in 2000. He has been awarded research fellowships from Princeton University and the Earhart Foundation.
His teaching and writing interests focus on the history of political thought, American political thought, religion and politics, and literature and politics.
Deneen was awarded the A.P.S.A.'s Leo Strauss Award for Best Dissertation in Political Theory in 1995, and an honorable mention for the A.P.S.A.'s Best First Book Award in 2000. He has been awarded research fellowships from Princeton University and the Earhart Foundation.
His teaching and writing interests focus on the history of political thought, American political thought, religion and politics, and literature and politics.
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March 5, 2017
This book, a book of essays, is effectively a companion to Ryszard Legutko’s The Demon In Democracy. The core theme of both books is that “liberal democracy” is inherently defective; the books explore why and what that implies. Whereas Legutko’s project is to compare liberal democracy to Communism, to explain their similarities and what that has meant for post-Communist Europe, Patrick Deneen’s is to explain how the American founding itself implies liberal democracy, and therefore, in a culture that needs renewal from the evils created by liberal democracy, conservatives are wrong to call for a return to the Founding—for, like the serpent in the Garden, the evil has been there since the beginning.
This book is thus in the genre I call the “Great Fragmentation”—the dissolution of the post-war grouping of disparate philosophies under one general umbrella of “conservatism.” The fissures have been growing for twenty years, and the fragmentation is now nearly complete, accelerated by the successive impacts of the Great Recession, which revealed cultural and societal conflicts within conservatism as a whole, and of Donald Trump, who offered a new mashup of philosophies, generally conservative in orientation but in a new form, to those dissatisfied with existing conservative electoral politics.
As a result, as of this moment conservatives break down into two basic groupings, though what exactly will ultimately be the final form of “conservatism” is anybody’s guess. One group can be called “classical liberals.” Their focus is maximization of individual opportunity. Individual autonomy is, for them, an unfettered good and a defense against the overweening state. Their historical focus was on individualism as the best defense against the State, and their high point was resistance to 20th Century aggressive collectivism, but as those collectivisms have waned individualism for its own sake has waxed in the thought of classical liberals. Within this group there are those who want more or less American global commitment, and other differences also exist, but the key is a focus on unfettered liberty, or apparently unfettered liberty. It is these classical liberals who most often point to the principles of the American Founding as what we have departed from and should return to. Figures ranging from George Bush to Bill Kristol to the magazine National Review fall into this group. Classical liberals put the “liberal” in liberal democracy.
A second, rising, group sees the modern State as a problem, but unfettered individualism not as the solution. Instead, this group sees individualism as rather one cause, the main cause, of a cultural breakdown and the vanishing of the concept of the common good, and the State as a participant in that fragmentation through its pursuit and mandate of excessive individualism. This group focuses on cultural renewal through a revival of civil society outside the State, with an eye to rebuilding intermediary institutions and a distaste for winner-take-all economics. We can call them the “civil institutionalists.” Relevant figures include the American Conservative magazine and Rod Dreher, the Pope Urban of the “Benedict Option.” But few politicians as of yet fall into this group, although arguably Steve Bannon, and thus elements of Trump’s circle, maintain a certain rough alignment. Thinkers in this group, including Deneen, are currently providing the intellectual heft necessary to develop and flesh this out, what is really a new position in America. Without the rise of Trump, combined with a reaction against the attempts by Obama to crush religious liberty, this group would probably have gained no traction. As it is, they form the core of a new thing, something that seems strange to delineate, since it is largely outside the American Founding tradition, but has ample historical precedent. Whether civil institutionalism will be that new thing remains to be seen, but if it does, it will be books like this that make it possible.
As this is a book of essays, most of them derived from talks given to academic audiences, it suffers somewhat from disjointedness. Each essay is excellent, but the reader is left to weave them into a whole—or not, depending on his level of commitment. Deneen divides his twelve essays into three groups, focused roughly on an analysis of where we are now (“Hope Among The Ruins”), philosophical conservatism (“Thinking Conservatively”), and more pessimistic thoughts about the future (“American Twilight?”). It is the latter two groups of essays, especially the third, that, combined, contain a coherent explication of civil institutionalism (my term, not his).
At the core of this argument, Deneen contrasts two views of liberty. One, the older, arising from such thinkers as Aristotle and Aquinas, holds that man is by nature social and political, and thus “to the extent that humans are able to develop true and flourishing individuality, it is only by means of political society and its constitutive groups and associations. . . . [L]iberty is the cultivated ability to exercise self-governance, to limit ourselves in accordance with our nature and the natural world.” Virtue consists of exercising self-limitation and self-governance; lack of virtue is a form of slavery. Virtue, and liberty, is the opposite of “living as one likes.”
The other view, the newer, follows Hobbes, Locke and others to view liberty as the ability of the individual to exercise choice in the pursuit of the satisfaction of self-interest. It is this newer view that is “liberal” in the sense of “classical liberalism” or “liberal democracy.” It exalts the ability to “live as one likes.” And the State exists to enhance the individual’s ability to choose for himself—therefore, an ever more powerful State is necessary to better secure the individual’s freedom to choose. “Thus, one of the main roles of the liberal State becomes the active liberation of individuals from any existing limiting conditions,” whether those be economic, familial, community-based, class-based, group-based, or even biologically based. Deneen notes that “Liberalism is perhaps best defined as the effort to liberate individuals from all forms of arbitrary and non-chosen relationships.” This approach separates the members of society, as their relationships become instrumental rather than organic, which leads to a geographical and class sorting that cuts counter to a view of the common good that builds communalism and social solidarity.
It is important to remember what classical liberalism is NOT. “It is not constitutionalism, not the rule of law, not rule by elected representatives, not the separation of Church and State, not the recognition of rights attached to individual. All of these features, and more we might name, are the inheritance of a pre-liberal tradition, developed especially throughout the period of Christendom that we moderns are often prone to label ‘the Dark Ages.’ Liberalism is a distinct way of thinking of these various institutional, legal, judicial and even social arrangements that now largely claims them all of its own making and invention.” And, of course, liberalism in this sense is an ideology, “a system of ideas that proposes a seamless political architecture, outside of which existing political arrangements are deemed to be illegitimate and require immediate remaking.” Hence the intolerance of any program that denies the deification of personal liberty.
As Tocqueville and, later, Robert Nisbet, pointed out, “Statism is a logical and even inevitable consequence of individualism.” (Deneen cites Tocqueville very frequently. Civil institutionalist conservatives of late have taken to quoting him extensively, because many of the negative characteristics he noted, and predictions he made, about Americans and our system, which seemed merely incidental in better times, have now blossomed fully, and not in a nice way.) Because personal liberty is the highest good, the State must necessarily level all limitations on individual autonomy, most especially those created by the intermediary institutions that make up the strength of a healthy society (what Legutko aptly calls “coercion to freedom”). And when this destruction is complete, the State’s power becomes unfettered, and it uses that power to oppose any belief or system that makes universal moral claims.
Therefore, to combat anti-conservative beliefs, left-liberalism or progressivism, by demanding more individualism merely exacerbates the problems of social decay and fragmentation created by those beliefs, which also worship individual choice. And, of course, the State’s action is made worse by our own actions, as Robert Putnam showed in Bowling Alone—not to mention that since that book, technology has further accelerated our abilities to ignore our fellow man and to lead lives of unfettered choice. Thus, Deneen calls for us to re-think the entire logic of casting liberty in the mold of Hobbes and Locke, and instead return to the earlier conception, that pre-dates the Founding, when many early Americans recognized the inherent tension between the exaltation of liberty and maintaining civil society in the long term. Whether that would require a wholesale restructuring of our politics, or could require only a moral awakening and consequent recapture of a common moral vision that placed voluntary limits on unfettered individualism, Deneen does not say.
The rest of the book contains essays that have a connection to this core theme. One, “Progress and Memory,” in particular bears on the larger question of liberal democracy. A common claim of today’s civil institutional conservatives is that forgetting the past, thereby severing our connections to the past, is foolish, but is mandated by both liberal democracy (including in its conservative manifestations) and progressive ideologies of various types. We need memory of both the good and the bad; a polity that exalts the eternal now, or, worse, the eternal future, is necessarily doomed. “Recalling those who have preceded us and awaiting those who will follow, we forge civilization itself, the accumulation of memory and the intention of continuity into the future.” Classical liberalism, whose economics are market capitalism and whose politics are liberal democracy, “a politics designed to promote maximum individual freedom, protection of rights, minimal public or private obligation, ever-increasing mobility and opportunity,” focuses on time-present, the self-interest of each of us in the now, dictated by the supposed key command of human nature, self-interest. Progressivism focuses on the future that change will bring us, change in human nature to a better nature, focused beyond lowly self-interest, but, like liberalism, wholly discounts the past. Nostalgism is living only in the past, an idealized past, and being inherently hostile to changes occurring in the present or proposed for the future. None of these are acceptable. Instead, we should “restore temporal continuity” and link all things together in the web of time, including with respect to matters frequently denigrated by conservatives cast in the liberal democratic mold, such as protecting the environment.
Deneen also examines the “patriotic vision,” in an essay from immediately after 9/11. He cites the ancient Greek practice of “theory”—originally the office of a man sent from a particular polis to a foreign location, in order to see it, evaluate it and give a report. The point was not simply to collect facts, but to determine whether foreign practices revealed some deficiency in the sending city that might need correction. Such a man had to both be clear-seeing about practices that diverged from those of his own city, and deeply familiar with, valuing and respecting, his own city’s practices, such that he could keep “the city open to improvement without loosening the ancient loyalties.” He had to objectively compare his city with others, without losing his love for his own city. Over time, this function became not just an office but more broadly associated with some philosophers, who traveled in their thoughts, not physically—for example, Socrates, who both criticized and submitted to his city. Finally, “theorist” became associated with an adversarial, “citizen of the cosmos” approach to social criticism, divorced from rootedness in one’s own city. Deneen points to Descartes, “a kind of ‘free rider’ on the wealth, security, generosity, and anonymity provided by modern nations, and especially by cosmopolitan cities that are sufficiently liberal as not to demand any loyalty in return.” He concludes that we should not be free riders—we should be like the original Greek theoroi, reflective of what may need to change, but always aware of what is our and what we owe to it and our fellows.
In another essay, “Citizenship as Vocation,” Deneen again turns to Tocqueville, who noted the “restlessness” or “inquietude” of Americans, created by equality of opportunity and unfettered choice, causing them to precipitously chase after new things, an “inconstancy born of anxiety.” Americans tend to denigrate that one can have a “vocation,” in the sense of a call to do certain things with one’s life. As Deneen notes in his core essays, America is built on the idea of self-sufficiency and self-interest, which tend to atomization (and suggests those whose vocation is politics should always be suspect in the American system), in opposition to the earlier, Platonic concept of human insufficiency that requires man to join in society. Deneen, with Tocqueville, calls for us to view citizenship as vocation to serve one’s fellows, in a way similar to the ideal functioning of an aristocracy, as a counterweight to our nation’s tendency toward centrifugal force and atomistic individualism.
Another essay, “Ordinary Virtue,” I think is the most powerful and illuminating in the book, though it has little direct bearing on today’s politics. It is framed around the speech of William James to Civil War veterans in 1897, at the dedication of the memorial to Robert Gould Shaw that still stands in Boston Commons. James suggested that it was not his military virtue, of courage even unto death, that most distinguished Shaw. Rather, it was that he was willing to command the 54th Massachusetts, a regiment of black soldiers, at all. He did so out of a sense of duty, to his parents, primarily, after initially declining. He knew it would harm his chances for advancement and would reduce his stature in the eyes of many. Deneen quotes James: “That lonely kind of courage (civic courage as we call it in peace-times) is the kind of valor to which the monuments of nations should most of all be reared . . . of five hundred of us who could storm a battery side by side with others, perhaps not one could be found who would risk his worldly fortunes all alone in resisting an enthroned abuse.” This civic courage is equivalent to their “sacred Honors” that the signers of the Declaration declared themselves willing to sacrifice, along with life and liberty. It is an honor that is only retrospectively gained, by the movement and change of a society to recognize that the actor was right do act as he did. “One cannot immediately honor that which a polity does not recognize as honorable, thus making such a form of ‘civic courage’ all the more extraordinary.” Returning again to Tocqueville, Deneen notes that democracies encourage this form of virtue less than other forms of government, because of the power of the majority to dominate opinion, and thus over time tend to encourage too much “going with the flow.” Thus, it is especially this virtue that we must encourage and fight for, in a time when the “go along, get along” mentality, enshrined in the demand for freedom to do as every man pleases, even to the destruction of the core of society, dominates.
This is a philosophical book. It is not a jeremiad; it is not even a clear call to specific action. It is not designed to raise the blood pressure of the reader. But for readers interested in figuring out where we are and where we are heading, especially readers who are interested in actively participating in the new tendencies in American conservatism and American life as those grow and develop, this book is extremely valuable.
This book is thus in the genre I call the “Great Fragmentation”—the dissolution of the post-war grouping of disparate philosophies under one general umbrella of “conservatism.” The fissures have been growing for twenty years, and the fragmentation is now nearly complete, accelerated by the successive impacts of the Great Recession, which revealed cultural and societal conflicts within conservatism as a whole, and of Donald Trump, who offered a new mashup of philosophies, generally conservative in orientation but in a new form, to those dissatisfied with existing conservative electoral politics.
As a result, as of this moment conservatives break down into two basic groupings, though what exactly will ultimately be the final form of “conservatism” is anybody’s guess. One group can be called “classical liberals.” Their focus is maximization of individual opportunity. Individual autonomy is, for them, an unfettered good and a defense against the overweening state. Their historical focus was on individualism as the best defense against the State, and their high point was resistance to 20th Century aggressive collectivism, but as those collectivisms have waned individualism for its own sake has waxed in the thought of classical liberals. Within this group there are those who want more or less American global commitment, and other differences also exist, but the key is a focus on unfettered liberty, or apparently unfettered liberty. It is these classical liberals who most often point to the principles of the American Founding as what we have departed from and should return to. Figures ranging from George Bush to Bill Kristol to the magazine National Review fall into this group. Classical liberals put the “liberal” in liberal democracy.
A second, rising, group sees the modern State as a problem, but unfettered individualism not as the solution. Instead, this group sees individualism as rather one cause, the main cause, of a cultural breakdown and the vanishing of the concept of the common good, and the State as a participant in that fragmentation through its pursuit and mandate of excessive individualism. This group focuses on cultural renewal through a revival of civil society outside the State, with an eye to rebuilding intermediary institutions and a distaste for winner-take-all economics. We can call them the “civil institutionalists.” Relevant figures include the American Conservative magazine and Rod Dreher, the Pope Urban of the “Benedict Option.” But few politicians as of yet fall into this group, although arguably Steve Bannon, and thus elements of Trump’s circle, maintain a certain rough alignment. Thinkers in this group, including Deneen, are currently providing the intellectual heft necessary to develop and flesh this out, what is really a new position in America. Without the rise of Trump, combined with a reaction against the attempts by Obama to crush religious liberty, this group would probably have gained no traction. As it is, they form the core of a new thing, something that seems strange to delineate, since it is largely outside the American Founding tradition, but has ample historical precedent. Whether civil institutionalism will be that new thing remains to be seen, but if it does, it will be books like this that make it possible.
As this is a book of essays, most of them derived from talks given to academic audiences, it suffers somewhat from disjointedness. Each essay is excellent, but the reader is left to weave them into a whole—or not, depending on his level of commitment. Deneen divides his twelve essays into three groups, focused roughly on an analysis of where we are now (“Hope Among The Ruins”), philosophical conservatism (“Thinking Conservatively”), and more pessimistic thoughts about the future (“American Twilight?”). It is the latter two groups of essays, especially the third, that, combined, contain a coherent explication of civil institutionalism (my term, not his).
At the core of this argument, Deneen contrasts two views of liberty. One, the older, arising from such thinkers as Aristotle and Aquinas, holds that man is by nature social and political, and thus “to the extent that humans are able to develop true and flourishing individuality, it is only by means of political society and its constitutive groups and associations. . . . [L]iberty is the cultivated ability to exercise self-governance, to limit ourselves in accordance with our nature and the natural world.” Virtue consists of exercising self-limitation and self-governance; lack of virtue is a form of slavery. Virtue, and liberty, is the opposite of “living as one likes.”
The other view, the newer, follows Hobbes, Locke and others to view liberty as the ability of the individual to exercise choice in the pursuit of the satisfaction of self-interest. It is this newer view that is “liberal” in the sense of “classical liberalism” or “liberal democracy.” It exalts the ability to “live as one likes.” And the State exists to enhance the individual’s ability to choose for himself—therefore, an ever more powerful State is necessary to better secure the individual’s freedom to choose. “Thus, one of the main roles of the liberal State becomes the active liberation of individuals from any existing limiting conditions,” whether those be economic, familial, community-based, class-based, group-based, or even biologically based. Deneen notes that “Liberalism is perhaps best defined as the effort to liberate individuals from all forms of arbitrary and non-chosen relationships.” This approach separates the members of society, as their relationships become instrumental rather than organic, which leads to a geographical and class sorting that cuts counter to a view of the common good that builds communalism and social solidarity.
It is important to remember what classical liberalism is NOT. “It is not constitutionalism, not the rule of law, not rule by elected representatives, not the separation of Church and State, not the recognition of rights attached to individual. All of these features, and more we might name, are the inheritance of a pre-liberal tradition, developed especially throughout the period of Christendom that we moderns are often prone to label ‘the Dark Ages.’ Liberalism is a distinct way of thinking of these various institutional, legal, judicial and even social arrangements that now largely claims them all of its own making and invention.” And, of course, liberalism in this sense is an ideology, “a system of ideas that proposes a seamless political architecture, outside of which existing political arrangements are deemed to be illegitimate and require immediate remaking.” Hence the intolerance of any program that denies the deification of personal liberty.
As Tocqueville and, later, Robert Nisbet, pointed out, “Statism is a logical and even inevitable consequence of individualism.” (Deneen cites Tocqueville very frequently. Civil institutionalist conservatives of late have taken to quoting him extensively, because many of the negative characteristics he noted, and predictions he made, about Americans and our system, which seemed merely incidental in better times, have now blossomed fully, and not in a nice way.) Because personal liberty is the highest good, the State must necessarily level all limitations on individual autonomy, most especially those created by the intermediary institutions that make up the strength of a healthy society (what Legutko aptly calls “coercion to freedom”). And when this destruction is complete, the State’s power becomes unfettered, and it uses that power to oppose any belief or system that makes universal moral claims.
Therefore, to combat anti-conservative beliefs, left-liberalism or progressivism, by demanding more individualism merely exacerbates the problems of social decay and fragmentation created by those beliefs, which also worship individual choice. And, of course, the State’s action is made worse by our own actions, as Robert Putnam showed in Bowling Alone—not to mention that since that book, technology has further accelerated our abilities to ignore our fellow man and to lead lives of unfettered choice. Thus, Deneen calls for us to re-think the entire logic of casting liberty in the mold of Hobbes and Locke, and instead return to the earlier conception, that pre-dates the Founding, when many early Americans recognized the inherent tension between the exaltation of liberty and maintaining civil society in the long term. Whether that would require a wholesale restructuring of our politics, or could require only a moral awakening and consequent recapture of a common moral vision that placed voluntary limits on unfettered individualism, Deneen does not say.
The rest of the book contains essays that have a connection to this core theme. One, “Progress and Memory,” in particular bears on the larger question of liberal democracy. A common claim of today’s civil institutional conservatives is that forgetting the past, thereby severing our connections to the past, is foolish, but is mandated by both liberal democracy (including in its conservative manifestations) and progressive ideologies of various types. We need memory of both the good and the bad; a polity that exalts the eternal now, or, worse, the eternal future, is necessarily doomed. “Recalling those who have preceded us and awaiting those who will follow, we forge civilization itself, the accumulation of memory and the intention of continuity into the future.” Classical liberalism, whose economics are market capitalism and whose politics are liberal democracy, “a politics designed to promote maximum individual freedom, protection of rights, minimal public or private obligation, ever-increasing mobility and opportunity,” focuses on time-present, the self-interest of each of us in the now, dictated by the supposed key command of human nature, self-interest. Progressivism focuses on the future that change will bring us, change in human nature to a better nature, focused beyond lowly self-interest, but, like liberalism, wholly discounts the past. Nostalgism is living only in the past, an idealized past, and being inherently hostile to changes occurring in the present or proposed for the future. None of these are acceptable. Instead, we should “restore temporal continuity” and link all things together in the web of time, including with respect to matters frequently denigrated by conservatives cast in the liberal democratic mold, such as protecting the environment.
Deneen also examines the “patriotic vision,” in an essay from immediately after 9/11. He cites the ancient Greek practice of “theory”—originally the office of a man sent from a particular polis to a foreign location, in order to see it, evaluate it and give a report. The point was not simply to collect facts, but to determine whether foreign practices revealed some deficiency in the sending city that might need correction. Such a man had to both be clear-seeing about practices that diverged from those of his own city, and deeply familiar with, valuing and respecting, his own city’s practices, such that he could keep “the city open to improvement without loosening the ancient loyalties.” He had to objectively compare his city with others, without losing his love for his own city. Over time, this function became not just an office but more broadly associated with some philosophers, who traveled in their thoughts, not physically—for example, Socrates, who both criticized and submitted to his city. Finally, “theorist” became associated with an adversarial, “citizen of the cosmos” approach to social criticism, divorced from rootedness in one’s own city. Deneen points to Descartes, “a kind of ‘free rider’ on the wealth, security, generosity, and anonymity provided by modern nations, and especially by cosmopolitan cities that are sufficiently liberal as not to demand any loyalty in return.” He concludes that we should not be free riders—we should be like the original Greek theoroi, reflective of what may need to change, but always aware of what is our and what we owe to it and our fellows.
In another essay, “Citizenship as Vocation,” Deneen again turns to Tocqueville, who noted the “restlessness” or “inquietude” of Americans, created by equality of opportunity and unfettered choice, causing them to precipitously chase after new things, an “inconstancy born of anxiety.” Americans tend to denigrate that one can have a “vocation,” in the sense of a call to do certain things with one’s life. As Deneen notes in his core essays, America is built on the idea of self-sufficiency and self-interest, which tend to atomization (and suggests those whose vocation is politics should always be suspect in the American system), in opposition to the earlier, Platonic concept of human insufficiency that requires man to join in society. Deneen, with Tocqueville, calls for us to view citizenship as vocation to serve one’s fellows, in a way similar to the ideal functioning of an aristocracy, as a counterweight to our nation’s tendency toward centrifugal force and atomistic individualism.
Another essay, “Ordinary Virtue,” I think is the most powerful and illuminating in the book, though it has little direct bearing on today’s politics. It is framed around the speech of William James to Civil War veterans in 1897, at the dedication of the memorial to Robert Gould Shaw that still stands in Boston Commons. James suggested that it was not his military virtue, of courage even unto death, that most distinguished Shaw. Rather, it was that he was willing to command the 54th Massachusetts, a regiment of black soldiers, at all. He did so out of a sense of duty, to his parents, primarily, after initially declining. He knew it would harm his chances for advancement and would reduce his stature in the eyes of many. Deneen quotes James: “That lonely kind of courage (civic courage as we call it in peace-times) is the kind of valor to which the monuments of nations should most of all be reared . . . of five hundred of us who could storm a battery side by side with others, perhaps not one could be found who would risk his worldly fortunes all alone in resisting an enthroned abuse.” This civic courage is equivalent to their “sacred Honors” that the signers of the Declaration declared themselves willing to sacrifice, along with life and liberty. It is an honor that is only retrospectively gained, by the movement and change of a society to recognize that the actor was right do act as he did. “One cannot immediately honor that which a polity does not recognize as honorable, thus making such a form of ‘civic courage’ all the more extraordinary.” Returning again to Tocqueville, Deneen notes that democracies encourage this form of virtue less than other forms of government, because of the power of the majority to dominate opinion, and thus over time tend to encourage too much “going with the flow.” Thus, it is especially this virtue that we must encourage and fight for, in a time when the “go along, get along” mentality, enshrined in the demand for freedom to do as every man pleases, even to the destruction of the core of society, dominates.
This is a philosophical book. It is not a jeremiad; it is not even a clear call to specific action. It is not designed to raise the blood pressure of the reader. But for readers interested in figuring out where we are and where we are heading, especially readers who are interested in actively participating in the new tendencies in American conservatism and American life as those grow and develop, this book is extremely valuable.
February 9, 2017
Dr. Deneen's thoughtful work focuses on what it means to conserve and be a conservative in a nation that owes so much to the liberal tradition. This book is a collection of topical essays all relating to that central theme. In light of both recent political events and the history of ideas, Deneen suggests that today's "conservatives" and "liberals" both ultimately rest on the same liberal tradition, originating at least from Hobbes if not earlier, which emphasizes the autonomous individual, free from any obligations or associations apart from voluntary contract. For both free-market liberals and socialistic liberals, the chief end of society is to protect and preserve the rights and freedom of the individual. Contemporary political discourse is merely assorted disagreements about how to achieve that end. Since the American tradition hails from the classical liberal tradition, conservatives in America are faced with the paradoxical project of attempting to conserve liberalism.
This book wraps up with an excellent essay entitled "After Liberalism." Deneen suggests that liberalism's rejection of natural duties has in fact directly promoted the inequalities and injustices that modern left-liberals decry. The tension, despair, and loneliness of the modern age is an inherent feature of liberalism, not a bug. Deneen suggests that perhaps it is time to seek out an alternative to liberalism that can pick up the pieces when liberalism collapses (something that ought to be hoped for rather than feared). He concludes: "It is now the task for those with imagination and courage, and a deep commitment not only to humanity, but to human beings, to begin to envision an alternative future to the one to which we now seem destined, which will focus especially on beginning to put together what liberalism has torn asunder."
This book wraps up with an excellent essay entitled "After Liberalism." Deneen suggests that liberalism's rejection of natural duties has in fact directly promoted the inequalities and injustices that modern left-liberals decry. The tension, despair, and loneliness of the modern age is an inherent feature of liberalism, not a bug. Deneen suggests that perhaps it is time to seek out an alternative to liberalism that can pick up the pieces when liberalism collapses (something that ought to be hoped for rather than feared). He concludes: "It is now the task for those with imagination and courage, and a deep commitment not only to humanity, but to human beings, to begin to envision an alternative future to the one to which we now seem destined, which will focus especially on beginning to put together what liberalism has torn asunder."
July 7, 2023
Still trying to undertand Deneen's deep antipathy for liberalism. After reading three books, I still cannot shake the feeling that he would have liked Burke to be a Founding Father, Clay or another upstanding Whig to have been President, and De Tocqueville to be the book of record on the early Republic. These counterfactual obsessions drive an otherwise sober political theorist to entertain postliberal fantasies of an America where localism, patriotic duty, filial piety and religious obligation have more sway than allegiance to state or market.This utopian thought experiment fails to persuade in the long run: the fault is not in our liberal stars but in ourselves-- no matter how times Deneen denigrates Locke or Mill.
Here are my notes
p.1 It matters not whether Republicans or Democrats control various institutions: to the extent that increasing and pervasive policy runs through the nation’s capital, all questions of import come under its orbit and it becomes of tantamount importance that all or most of the three branches be controlled by one’s preferred party
p.2 Bearing the weight of every political expectation, the battle over control and direction of our governmental institutions takes on titanic proportions, and demands a scorched-earth electoral and governing philosophy that has the pervasive effect of disgusting and disillusioning the broader electorate. As that disillusionment and disconnection deepens, committed ideologues in each party assume control of an electoral process rigged to favor the most committed, exacerbating the partisan divide and increasing civic disillusion.
p.3 The Right especially blames the role of expanding government for America’s social and economic disarray, and calls for a return to Constitutional principles of limited government, negative rights as protections of individual liberty, and economic laissez-faire. The Left blames the rise of individualism as the source of fraying social bods and calls for an enveloping national and even global “community” to provide both equal opportunity and equal security. For the Right, answers to contemporary problems lie primarily in liberating the Market; for the Left, solutions lie in providing government assistance. Voters are asked to take sides between these two solutions, but their misgivings about the broader political system reflect unarticulated dissatisfaction with a fundamentally false choice.
p.4 What is especially masked by our purported choices between primary allegiance to the Market , on the one hand, and the State, on the other, is that both “choices” advance a basic commitment to depersonalization and abstraction. Our main political choices come down to which depersonalized mechanism will purportedly secure human goods—the space of the Market which collects our billions upon billions of choices to provide for our wants and needs of others; or the liberal State, which establishes depersonalized procedures and mechanisms for the wants and needs of others that otherwise go unmet or insufficiently addressed by the Market, via the mechanism of taxation and depersonalized distribution of goods and services.
p.5 As set forth at the birth of the republic by James Madison, one of its main architects, the “first object of government” is protection of the “diversity in the faculties of men.” Madison states in Federalist 10 that “ from the protection of different and unequal faculties of acquiring property, the possession of different degrees and kinds of property immediately results….” The first object of government enshrined in our Constitutional order is the protection of private differences, primarily distinctions that are manifest in different economic attainments, but further, whatever differences that are understood to arise from our “diversity of faculties.” Our regime enshrines the priority of inviolable private difference lodged in our “faculties,” and is thus designed to shape a polity and a society that removes all potential obstacles to the realization of those private differences. That is, not only does the regime seek to ensure preservation of private property rights, but to establish a comprehensive regime that ensures the greatest possible differentiation and development of those “diverse faculties.”
p.7 …modern American individuals come simultaneously to regard themselves as self-made self-makers, no longer detecting the pervasive order that shapes their identity and self-conception. The citizenry increasingly conforms to the stated aims of the Constitutional order, its first object being the protection and encouragement of the “diversity of faculties.”A form of uniformity becomes the defining feature of such people: rather than a patchwork of variegated ways of life , a people shaped toward the end of diversity become increasingly identical: secure in their belief in being self-made self makers, those identities become expressions of well-designed, market tested identity fashions, superficially covering a self without deep content, without historical memory or cultural formation. … The public becomes the servant of our private wants and expressions: America becomes not a res publica, but a res idiotica… concerned solely with private things.
p.15 Yet if patriotism is a laudable expression of gratitude and perhaps even a requirement for human nobility , at the same time Aristotle reminds us that a “good citizen” is only rarely “ a good man.” It is a rare polity that does not call upon its citizens at times to act ignobly, at odds with virtue. Thus, if the love of one’s own is a core political requirement, at the same time it remains one of the most persistent threats to justice.
p.72 Tocqueville identifies a terrible contradiction in the American soul: in their unique craving for “newness,” for the infinite possibility of the better, greater, more perfect opportunity, Americans are impelled to pursue a happiness ever out of reach. Incapable of rest and satisfaction with what they have achieved, in effect, Americans fall into a form of enslavement—enslavement to a pursuit without end. In their “restlessness” they are driven without hope of contentment. Unable to restrain their desire for the promise of what lies around the next corner, they prove unable to find satisfaction with what they have come to know on their own street. The imperative of choice removes the choice to rest, to declare the search over, to accept limits, dissatisfactions, imperfections, impingements, discomfort, humiliations, and in turn to overlook satisfaction, fulfillment, ease, familiarity, friendship, community, and happiness. By declaring what he is not, the American precludes discovering what he is; by insisting on what he will not have, he prevents himself from keeping anything.
p.119 Liberalism begins with a radical critique of the ancestral. The philosophy of Hobbes and Locke—along with other modernist philosophers such as Descartes and Kant—begins by indicting the legitimacy of the inherited , which is to say, the unchosen. That which is bequeathed us from the past is understood to be a form of generational oppression, arbitrary rule of those who happened to be born before we were. Liberalism inaugurates a project in legitimacy that can only be conferred upon a human institution when that institution has been chosen. It rejects the ruling claims of tradition as arbitrary impositions, instead holding that every generation should in some sense understand itself to create the world anew through its own choices—indeed, displacing the ancestral for the governance of the current and up-to-date.
p.121 Its politics is liberal democracy—a politics designed to promote maximum individual freedom, protection of rights, minimal public or private obligation, ever-increasing mobility and opportunity. Among its great innovations is the invention of modern representation, a vehicle that relieves citizens of the obligation of having to think about much beyond themselves and their interests. The intention of the designers of liberal democracy was that representatives – reflecting an older ethic of obligation to past and future—would be safeguards and stewards of the common good
p.141 … the central aim of education is to impart a kind of self-overcoming, and the sphere in which this is most comprehensively achieved is in the sphere of politics. Thus, for Aristotle, politics is itself a form of education, above all the education in self-governance (in all its forms, individual and collective). Citizenship is defined as “ruling and being ruled in turn,” the learned capacity to govern others and to be governed… Governance of self and society—and especially the appetites—requires a kind of training in the political sphere. That is to say, even as the citizenry is taught by the polity, the moderate citizenry is necessary to perpetuate a moderate regime
p.143 Aristotle, then, clearly points to the need for a healthy and vibrant sphere that we would today call “culture”/ His emphasis upon education, the mutually reinforcing role of family and the broader society on the formation of the virtuous individual and polity, and the need for the resources of memory and history for the purposes of hitting the mark of moderation (thus, the central role of phronesis, or judgment) all point to the central role of culture in the formation of the flourishing human being.
p.174 Thus, for liberal theory, while the individual “creates” the State through the social contract, in a practical sense the liberal State “creates” the individual by providing the conditions for the expansion of liberty, now defined increasingly as the capacity of humans to expand their mastery over nature. Far from there being an inherent conflict between the individual and the State—as so much of modern political reporting would suggest—liberalism establishes a deep and profound connection between the liberal ideal of liberty that can only be realized through the auspices of a powerful State. The State dos not merely serve as a referee between contesting individuals; in securing our capacity to engafe in productive activities, especially commerce, the State establishes a condition in reality that existed in theory only in the State of Nature—that is, the ever-increasing achievement of the autonomous , freely choosing individual. Rather than the State acting as an impediment to the realization of our individuality, the State becomes the main agent of our liberation from the limiting conditions in which humans have historically found themselves.
Here are my notes
p.1 It matters not whether Republicans or Democrats control various institutions: to the extent that increasing and pervasive policy runs through the nation’s capital, all questions of import come under its orbit and it becomes of tantamount importance that all or most of the three branches be controlled by one’s preferred party
p.2 Bearing the weight of every political expectation, the battle over control and direction of our governmental institutions takes on titanic proportions, and demands a scorched-earth electoral and governing philosophy that has the pervasive effect of disgusting and disillusioning the broader electorate. As that disillusionment and disconnection deepens, committed ideologues in each party assume control of an electoral process rigged to favor the most committed, exacerbating the partisan divide and increasing civic disillusion.
p.3 The Right especially blames the role of expanding government for America’s social and economic disarray, and calls for a return to Constitutional principles of limited government, negative rights as protections of individual liberty, and economic laissez-faire. The Left blames the rise of individualism as the source of fraying social bods and calls for an enveloping national and even global “community” to provide both equal opportunity and equal security. For the Right, answers to contemporary problems lie primarily in liberating the Market; for the Left, solutions lie in providing government assistance. Voters are asked to take sides between these two solutions, but their misgivings about the broader political system reflect unarticulated dissatisfaction with a fundamentally false choice.
p.4 What is especially masked by our purported choices between primary allegiance to the Market , on the one hand, and the State, on the other, is that both “choices” advance a basic commitment to depersonalization and abstraction. Our main political choices come down to which depersonalized mechanism will purportedly secure human goods—the space of the Market which collects our billions upon billions of choices to provide for our wants and needs of others; or the liberal State, which establishes depersonalized procedures and mechanisms for the wants and needs of others that otherwise go unmet or insufficiently addressed by the Market, via the mechanism of taxation and depersonalized distribution of goods and services.
p.5 As set forth at the birth of the republic by James Madison, one of its main architects, the “first object of government” is protection of the “diversity in the faculties of men.” Madison states in Federalist 10 that “ from the protection of different and unequal faculties of acquiring property, the possession of different degrees and kinds of property immediately results….” The first object of government enshrined in our Constitutional order is the protection of private differences, primarily distinctions that are manifest in different economic attainments, but further, whatever differences that are understood to arise from our “diversity of faculties.” Our regime enshrines the priority of inviolable private difference lodged in our “faculties,” and is thus designed to shape a polity and a society that removes all potential obstacles to the realization of those private differences. That is, not only does the regime seek to ensure preservation of private property rights, but to establish a comprehensive regime that ensures the greatest possible differentiation and development of those “diverse faculties.”
p.7 …modern American individuals come simultaneously to regard themselves as self-made self-makers, no longer detecting the pervasive order that shapes their identity and self-conception. The citizenry increasingly conforms to the stated aims of the Constitutional order, its first object being the protection and encouragement of the “diversity of faculties.”A form of uniformity becomes the defining feature of such people: rather than a patchwork of variegated ways of life , a people shaped toward the end of diversity become increasingly identical: secure in their belief in being self-made self makers, those identities become expressions of well-designed, market tested identity fashions, superficially covering a self without deep content, without historical memory or cultural formation. … The public becomes the servant of our private wants and expressions: America becomes not a res publica, but a res idiotica… concerned solely with private things.
p.15 Yet if patriotism is a laudable expression of gratitude and perhaps even a requirement for human nobility , at the same time Aristotle reminds us that a “good citizen” is only rarely “ a good man.” It is a rare polity that does not call upon its citizens at times to act ignobly, at odds with virtue. Thus, if the love of one’s own is a core political requirement, at the same time it remains one of the most persistent threats to justice.
p.72 Tocqueville identifies a terrible contradiction in the American soul: in their unique craving for “newness,” for the infinite possibility of the better, greater, more perfect opportunity, Americans are impelled to pursue a happiness ever out of reach. Incapable of rest and satisfaction with what they have achieved, in effect, Americans fall into a form of enslavement—enslavement to a pursuit without end. In their “restlessness” they are driven without hope of contentment. Unable to restrain their desire for the promise of what lies around the next corner, they prove unable to find satisfaction with what they have come to know on their own street. The imperative of choice removes the choice to rest, to declare the search over, to accept limits, dissatisfactions, imperfections, impingements, discomfort, humiliations, and in turn to overlook satisfaction, fulfillment, ease, familiarity, friendship, community, and happiness. By declaring what he is not, the American precludes discovering what he is; by insisting on what he will not have, he prevents himself from keeping anything.
p.119 Liberalism begins with a radical critique of the ancestral. The philosophy of Hobbes and Locke—along with other modernist philosophers such as Descartes and Kant—begins by indicting the legitimacy of the inherited , which is to say, the unchosen. That which is bequeathed us from the past is understood to be a form of generational oppression, arbitrary rule of those who happened to be born before we were. Liberalism inaugurates a project in legitimacy that can only be conferred upon a human institution when that institution has been chosen. It rejects the ruling claims of tradition as arbitrary impositions, instead holding that every generation should in some sense understand itself to create the world anew through its own choices—indeed, displacing the ancestral for the governance of the current and up-to-date.
p.121 Its politics is liberal democracy—a politics designed to promote maximum individual freedom, protection of rights, minimal public or private obligation, ever-increasing mobility and opportunity. Among its great innovations is the invention of modern representation, a vehicle that relieves citizens of the obligation of having to think about much beyond themselves and their interests. The intention of the designers of liberal democracy was that representatives – reflecting an older ethic of obligation to past and future—would be safeguards and stewards of the common good
p.141 … the central aim of education is to impart a kind of self-overcoming, and the sphere in which this is most comprehensively achieved is in the sphere of politics. Thus, for Aristotle, politics is itself a form of education, above all the education in self-governance (in all its forms, individual and collective). Citizenship is defined as “ruling and being ruled in turn,” the learned capacity to govern others and to be governed… Governance of self and society—and especially the appetites—requires a kind of training in the political sphere. That is to say, even as the citizenry is taught by the polity, the moderate citizenry is necessary to perpetuate a moderate regime
p.143 Aristotle, then, clearly points to the need for a healthy and vibrant sphere that we would today call “culture”/ His emphasis upon education, the mutually reinforcing role of family and the broader society on the formation of the virtuous individual and polity, and the need for the resources of memory and history for the purposes of hitting the mark of moderation (thus, the central role of phronesis, or judgment) all point to the central role of culture in the formation of the flourishing human being.
p.174 Thus, for liberal theory, while the individual “creates” the State through the social contract, in a practical sense the liberal State “creates” the individual by providing the conditions for the expansion of liberty, now defined increasingly as the capacity of humans to expand their mastery over nature. Far from there being an inherent conflict between the individual and the State—as so much of modern political reporting would suggest—liberalism establishes a deep and profound connection between the liberal ideal of liberty that can only be realized through the auspices of a powerful State. The State dos not merely serve as a referee between contesting individuals; in securing our capacity to engafe in productive activities, especially commerce, the State establishes a condition in reality that existed in theory only in the State of Nature—that is, the ever-increasing achievement of the autonomous , freely choosing individual. Rather than the State acting as an impediment to the realization of our individuality, the State becomes the main agent of our liberation from the limiting conditions in which humans have historically found themselves.
March 2, 2023
I’m going to keep this short and sweet as opposed to some of my longer reviews that end up more personal essays than focused reviews. This book is fantastic! Read this book! If you read Patrick Deneen’s “Why Liberalism Failed” and enjoyed it, and are wondering if you’d enjoy these earlier essays, you will! Grab this! These pieces are from roughly 2002 until 2014 (the date on which the speeches were delivered--most of the essays are speeches--or the essay was published is given at the end of each piece). What’s invigorating is we see the evolution of Deneen’s thought on democracy, liberalism, and conservatism. See Charles Haywood’s fantastic summary of Deneen’s project in Haywood’s review above. Deneen is a Ferrari going through his gears as the book progresses, and by the end of the book, when he is three years away from publishing “Why Liberalism Failed,” he is in fifth gear and the pistons are popping. He’s sharpened his critique, delineated the terms of debate, and provided a profound schema for understanding the terms under scrutiny.
February 28, 2020
12 thought provoking essays or lectures that were delivered to various groups. I enjoyed “Why you should not eat the person sitting next to you” and “Progress and Memory”. The essays lead me to understand that in the USA we really have classical liberals and progressive liberals; the importance of culture; and a longer list of interest books to read.
February 21, 2018
And extraordinary set of essays, all of them thoughtful critiques of the modern democratic system. Well worth the time!
June 13, 2020
Spectacular. May liberalism's death be swift, final, and irrevocable. Deneen has done more than his share in making this so. May his house increase and his readership grow.
Want to read
June 8, 2021contains john locke's essays
March 7, 2017
This is an illuminating collection of lucid essays, most of which draw sharp and little-noticed distinctions that are particularly important for us to understand at this historical moment. Personally, I will be quoting from these essays for years to come. In another sense, these essays hint at a greater, more comprehensive and systematic intellectual work tracing and distinguishing traditional conservatism from classical liberalism. Reading these challenging essays, you can’t help but feel that Mr. Deneen still has a culture shaping magnum opus in him. This book feels like the appetizer for what will turn out to be a greater work. It makes one look forward with anticipation to what Mr. Deneen will turn out next.
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