Why Liberalism Failed

by Patrick J. Deneen

The imperative to overcome culture as part of the project of mastering nature was expressed with forthright clarity by John Dewey, one of liberalism’s great heroes. Dewey insisted that the progress of liberation rested especially upon the active control of nature, and hence required the displacement of traditional beliefs and culture that reflected a backward and limiting regard for the past. He described these two approaches to the human relationship to nature as “civilized” versus “savage.” The savage tribe manages to live in the desert, he wrote, by adapting itself to the natural limits of its environment; thus “its adaptation involves a maximum of accepting, tolerating, putting up with things as they are, a maximum of passive acquiescence, and a minimum of active control, of subjection to use.” A “civilized people” in the same desert also adapts; but “it introduces irrigation; it searches the world for plants and animals that will flourish under such conditions; it improves, by careful selection, those which are growing there. As a consequence, the wilderness blossoms as a rose. The savage is merely habituated; the civilized man has habits which transform the environment.”4 Dewey traced his thought back to Francis Bacon, whom he considered the most important thinker in history. Bacon, he wrote in his Reconstruction in Philosophy, teaches that “scientific laws do not lie on the surface of nature. They are hidden, and must be wrested from nature by an active and elaborat...