Why Liberalism Failed

by Patrick J. Deneen

Tocqueville perceived that this same “brutish indifference” would manifest itself not only politically but economically as well. Dissolving the practices, along with the structures, that draw people out of temporal narrowness, he feared, would have the effect of separating people’s capacity to discern a shared fate. Fractured time, and the resultant escape into the “solitude of our own hearts,” would lead to self-congratulation and actual physical as well as psychic separation of those who were economically successful from those less fortunate. In effect, he predicted that a new aristocracy would arise, but that its “brutish indifference” born of temporal fracturing would lead it to be worse than the aristocracy it was replacing. “The territorial aristocracy of past ages was obliged by law, or thought itself obliged by custom, to come to the help of its servants and to relieve their distress. But the industrial aristocracy of our day, when it has impoverished and brutalized the men it uses, abandons them in their time of crisis to public charity to feed them. … Between workman and master there are frequent relations, but no true association.”