Why Liberalism Failed

by Patrick J. Deneen

It conceived humans as rights-bearing individuals who could fashion and pursue for themselves their own version of the good life. Opportunities for liberty were best afforded by a limited government devoted to “securing rights,” along with a free-market economic system that gave space for individual initiative and ambition. Political legitimacy was grounded on a shared belief in an originating “social contract” to which even newcomers could subscribe, ratified continuously by free and fair elections of responsive representatives. Limited but effective government, rule of law, an independent judiciary, responsive public officials, and free and fair elections were some of the hallmarks of this ascendant order and, by all evidence, wildly successful wager.

Liberalism definition

Nearly every one of the promises that were made by the architects and creators of liberalism has been shattered. The liberal state expands to control nearly every aspect of life while citizens regard government as a distant and uncontrollable power, one that only extends their sense of powerlessness by relentlessly advancing the project of “globalization.” The only rights that seem secure today belong to those with sufficient wealth and position to protect them, and their autonomy—including rights of property, the franchise and its concomitant control over representative institutions, religious liberty, free speech, and security in one’s papers and abode—is increasingly compromised by legal intent or technological fait accompli.

The economy favors a new “meritocracy” that perpetuates its advantages through generational succession, shored up by an educational system that relentlessly sifts winners from losers. A growing distance between liberalism’s claims and its actuality increasingly spurs doubts about those claims rather than engendering trust that the gap will be narrowed.

Liberalism has failed—not because it fell short, but because it was true to itself. It has failed because it has succeeded. As liberalism has “become more fully itself,” as its inner logic has become more evident and its self-contradictions manifest, it has generated pathologies that ...

In contrast to its crueler competitor ideologies, liberalism is more insidious: as an ideology, it pretends to neutrality, claiming no preference and denying any intention of shaping the souls under its rule. It ingratiates by invitation to the easy liberties, diversions, and attractions of freedom, pleasure, and wealth. It makes itself invisible, much as a computer’s operating system goes largely unseen—until it crashes. Liberalism becomes daily more visible precisely because its deformations are becoming too obvious to ignore.

Among the few iron laws of politics, few seem more unbreakable than the ultimate unsustainability of ideology in politics. Ideology fails for two reasons—first, because it is based on falsehood about human nature, and hence can’t help but fail; and second, because as those falsehoods become more evident, the gap grows between what the ideology claims and the lived experience of human beings under its domain until the regime loses legitimacy.

We can see this today especially in four distinct but connected areas of our common life: politics and government, economics, education, and science and technology. In each of these domains, liberalism has transformed human institutions in the name of expanding liberty and increasing our mastery and control of our fates. And in each case, widespread anger and deepening discontent have arisen from the spreading realization that the vehicles of our liberation have become iron cages of our captivity.

The liberties that liberalism was brought into being to protect—individual rights of conscience, religion, association, speech, and self-governance—are extensively compromised by the expansion of government activity into every area of life.

Such a keenly felt distance and lack of control is not a condition to be solved by a better and more perfect liberalism—rather, this crisis of governance is the culmination of the liberal order.

Citizens are more likely to be called “consumers,” yet the liberty to buy every imaginable consumer good does little to assuage the widespread economic anxiety and discontent over waxing inequality—indeed, the assumption by economic leaders seems to be that increased purchasing power of cheap goods will compensate for the absence of economic security and the division of the world into generational winners and losers.

They accede in the duties demanded of them by their elders, but without joy or love—only with a keen sense of having no other choice. Their overwhelming response to their lot—expressed in countless comments they have offered to me over the years describing their experience and expectations of their own education—is one of entrapment and “no exit,” of being cynical participants in a system that ruthlessly produces winners and losers even as it demands that they understand this system to be a vehicle of “social justice.”

We are meritocrats out of a survivalist instinct. If we do not race to the very top, the only remaining option is a bottomless pit of failure. To simply work hard and get decent grades doesn’t cut it anymore if you believe there are only two options: the very top or rock bottom. It is a classic prisoner’s dilemma: to sit around for 2–3 hours at the dining hall “shooting the breeze,” or to spend time engaged in intellectual conversation in moral and philosophical issues, or to go on a date all detract from time we could be spending on getting to the top and, thus, will leave us worse off relative to everyone else. … Because we view humanity—and thus its institutions—as corrupt and selfish, the only person we can rely upon is our self. The only way we can avoid failure, being let down, and ultimately succumbing to the chaotic world around us, therefore, is to have the means (financial security) to rely only upon ourselves.

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.

This same technology that is supposed to connect us more extensively and intimately is making us more lonely, more apart.6 Devices increasingly replace humans in the workplace, apparently granting us liberty but making us our technology’s ward and helpmeet.

Ironically, but perhaps not coincidentally, 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, and science and technology to make us into: increasingly separate, autonomous, nonrelational selves replete with rights and defined by our liberty, but insecure, powerless, afraid, and alone.

These ends have been achieved through the depersonalization and abstraction advanced via two main entities—the state and the market.

Thus the insistent demand that we choose between protection of individual liberty and expansion of state activity masks the true relation between the state and market: that they grow constantly and necessarily together. Statism enables individualism, individualism demands statism.

A better course will consist in smaller, local forms of resistance: practices more than theories, the building of resilient new cultures against the anticulture of liberalism.

Out of the fostering of new and better selves, porously invested in the fate of other selves—through the cultivation of cultures of community, care, self-sacrifice, and small-scale democracy—a better practice might arise, and from it, ultimately, perhaps a better theory than the failing project of liberalism.

Liberty was fundamentally reconceived, even if the word was retained. Liberty had long been believed to be the condition of self-rule that forestalled tyranny, within both the polity and the individual soul. Liberty was thus 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 feature of any human institution.

Three main efforts undergirded this revolution in thought and practice. First, politics would be based upon reliability of “the low” rather than aspiration to “the high.”

Second, the classical and Christian emphasis upon virtue and the cultivation of self-limitation and self-rule relied upon reinforcing norms and social structures arrayed extensively throughout political, social, religious, economic, and familial life.

Third, if political foundations and social norms required correctives to establish stability and predictability, and (eventually) to enlarge the realm of individual freedom, the human subjection to the dominion and limits of nature needed also to be overcome.

While none of these thinkers was a liberal, given their respective reservations regarding popular rule, their revolutionary reconception of politics, society, science, and nature laid the foundation of modern liberalism. A succession of thinkers in subsequent decades and centuries were to build upon these three basic revolutions of thought, redefining liberty as the liberation of humans from established authority, emancipation from arbitrary culture and tradition, and the expansion of human power and dominion over nature through advancing scientific discovery and economic prosperity.

Liberalism’s ascent and triumph required sustained efforts to undermine the classical and Christian understanding of liberty, the disassembling of widespread norms, traditions, and practices, and perhaps above all the reconceptualization of primacy of the individual defined in isolation from arbitrary accidents of birth, with the state as the main protector of individual rights and liberty.

A main result of the widespread view that liberalism’s triumph is complete and uncontested—indeed, that rival claims are no longer regarded as worthy of consideration—is a conclusion within the liberal order that various ills that infect the body politic as well as the civil and private spheres are either remnants of insufficiently realized liberalism or happenstance problems that are subject to policy or technological fix within the liberal horizon.

These maladies include the corrosive social and civic effects of self-interest—a disease that arises from the cure of overcoming the ancient reliance upon virtue.

Among the greatest challenges facing humanity is the ability to survive progress.

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.

Liberalism is most fundamentally constituted by a pair of deeper anthropological assumptions that give liberal institutions a particular orientation and cast: 1) anthropological individualism and the voluntarist conception of choice, and 2) human separation from and opposition to nature.

The first revolution, and the most basic and distinctive aspect of liberalism, is to base politics upon the idea of voluntarism—the unfettered and autonomous choice of individuals.

What was new is that the default basis for evaluating institutions, society, affiliations, memberships, and even personal relationships became dominated by considerations of individual choice based on the calculation of individual self-interest, and without broader consideration of the impact of one’s choices upon the community, one’s obligations to the created order, and ultimately to God.

Liberal philosophy rejected this requirement of human self-limitation. It displaced first the idea of a natural order to which humanity is subject and later the notion of human nature itself.

First-wave liberals are today represented by “conservatives,” who stress the need for scientific and economic mastery of nature but stop short of extending this project to human nature. They support nearly any utilitarian use of the world for economic ends but oppose most forms of biotechnological “enhancement.” Second-wave liberals increasingly approve nearly any technical means of liberating humans from the biological nature of our own bodies.

Its two revolutions—its anthropological individualism and the voluntarist conception of choice, and its insistence on the human separation from and opposition to nature—created its distinctive and new understanding of liberty as the most extensive possible expansion of the human sphere of autonomous activity.

Liberalism rejects the ancient conception of liberty as the learned capacity of human beings to conquer the slavish pursuit of base and hedonistic desires.

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.

The sole object and justification of this indifference to human ends—of the emphasis on “Right” over “Good”—is the embrace of the liberal human as self-fashioning expressive individual. This aspiration requires that no truly hard choices be made. There are only different lifestyle options.

In its advanced stage, passive depletion has become active destruction: remnants of associations historically charged with the cultivation of norms are increasingly seen as obstacles to autonomous liberty, and the apparatus of the state is directed toward the task of liberating individuals from such bonds.

In the material and economic realm, liberalism has drawn down on age-old reservoirs of resources in its endeavor to conquer nature. No matter the political program of today’s leaders, more is the incontestable program.

Liberalism was thus a titanic wager that ancient norms of behavior could be lifted in the name of a new form of liberation and that conquering nature would supply the fuel to permit nearly infinite choices. The twin outcomes of this effort—the depletion of moral self-command and the depletion of material resources—make inevitable an inquiry into what comes after liberalism.

We can pursue more local forms of self-government by choice, or suffer by default an oscillation between growing anarchy and the increasingly forcible imposition of order by an increasingly desperate state.

The ancient claim that man is a political animal, and must through the exercise and practice of virtue learned in communities achieve a form of local and communal self-limitation—a condition properly understood as liberty—cannot be denied forever without cost.

The left is characterized by a preference for change and reform, a commitment to liberty and equality, an orientation toward progress and the future, while the right is the party of order and tradition, hierarchy, and a disposition to valorize the past.

The modern American landscape is occupied by two parties locked in permanent battle. One, deemed “conservative,” advances the project of individual liberty and equality of opportunity especially through defense of a free and unfettered market; the other, deemed liberal, aims at securing greater economic and social equality through extensive reliance upon the regulatory and judicial powers of the national government. Our dominant political narrative pits defenders of individual liberty—articulated by such authors of the liberal tradition as John Locke and the American Founding Fathers—against the statism of “progressive” liberals inspired by figures like John Stuart Mill and John Dewey. The two worldviews are regarded as irreconcilable opposites.

These battles often come down to a basic debate over whether the ends of the polity are best achieved by market forces with relatively little interference by the state, or by government programs that can distribute benefits and support more justly than the market can achieve.

Individualism and statism advance together, always mutually supportive, and always at the expense of lived and vital relations that stand in contrast to both the starkness of the autonomous individual and the abstraction of our membership in the state.

This deeper cooperation helps to explain how it has happened that contemporary liberal states—whether in Europe or America—have become simultaneously both more statist, with ever more powers and activity vested in central authority, and more individualistic, with people becoming less associated and involved with such mediating institutions as voluntary associations, political parties, churches, communities, and even family.

This deeper continuity between right and left derives from two main sources: first, philosophical, with both the classical and progressive liberal traditions arguing ultimately for the central role of the state in the creation and expansion of individualism; and second, practical and political, with this joint philosophical project strengthening an expansion of both state power and individualism.

Both “classical” and “progressive” liberalism ground the advance of liberalism in individual liberation from the limitations of place, tradition, culture, and any unchosen relationship. Both traditions—for all their differences over means—can be counted as liberal because of this fundamental commitment to liberation of the individual and to the use of natural science, aided by the state, as a primary means for achieving practical liberation from nature’s limitations. Thus statism and individualism grow together while local institutions and respect for natural limits diminish.