Why Liberalism Failed

by Patrick J. Deneen

Every institution of government shows declining levels of public trust

I'm worried that Deneen may be tending to far to the right. This is only the introduction, but he seems to be leaning a little harder on how big government has betrayed the country’s ideals, while not mentioning how the “free market “ has evolved into an omnipresence and omniscient cluster of corporate oligopolies. We'll see.

This same technology that is supposed to connect us more extensively and intimately is making us more lonely, more apart.

Cited in the Introduction: Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, by Sherry Turkle.

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

Thus the rise of our ideologically inflected tribalism: the left leaning on the government to fight the predations of the uncaring market, the right decrying the expanding authority of government and worshipping the "free" market.

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.

I don’t get it. This seems like a stretch: that the subjugation of nature was necessary, and thus would lead inevitably to the enmity of science and nature.

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.

(Good highlight by Brian Denton; however, I disagree with part)

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.

This is subtle, but I think he’s got an interesting point.

The global market displaces a variety of economic subcultures, enforcing a relentless logic of impersonal transactions that have led to a crisis of capitalism and the specter of its own unraveling.

Nope, too simplistic. Other factors are at play, some of which were contingent. The past few hundred years of liberalism have simultaneously been the period when we found and used fossil fuels. Those won't be there the next time. Without almost-free fuel, would markets have gone global?

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.

I'm getting ahead of the narrative, but I disagree. The first point sounds mostly right, but not the second. I'd go with: … anthropological individualism leading to 1) assumption of rational choice and 2) social disassociation.

According to Hobbes, human beings exist by nature in a state of radical independence and autonomy.

Hobbes turned out to be about as staggeringly wrong as possible on that.

they employ their rational self-interest to sacrifice most of their natural rights in order to secure the protection and security of a sovereign.

… but to the extent his error didn’t prevent him from formulating a key step towards the social contract and, later, free labor, this was still crucial in the development of liberalism.

law is comparable to hedges, “not to stop travelers, but to keep them in the way”; that is, law restrains people’s natural tendency to act on “impetuous desires, rashness or indiscretion,”

By misunderstanding the social nature of humanity, he saw *laws* but didn’t spot *norms*, thus setting up the collapse of the latter (which may have been inevitable in a high-density heterogeneous society anyway).

Only the state can limit our natural liberty: the state is the sole creator and enforcer

Idiot. Is the glare of that person you want to impress a mechanism of the state’s law? Or the traditions of a culture towards guests? How could he have missed so much?

Human beings are thus, by nature, nonrelational creatures, separate and autonomous.

Even marriage, Locke holds, is finally to be understood as a contract

What absurdly reductionist *males*! Could they have been any more oblivious to the fabric of society? Male privilege, writ early.

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,

That was important — but contextually it was very naive.

but in fact influence students to act more selfishly,

Tell it!

Liberalism encourages loose connections.

My thesis — we’ll see if he gets it — is that this is crucial. Humans must *feel needed* to be psychologically healthy. Freud hinted at this in his “Civilization and its Discontents” (I think; it has been a *long* time). I suspect he only sees societal problems, not the concomitant psychological crises.

THE WAR AGAINST NATURE

I’m skeptical going in. Technologically primitive societies only lived in harmony with nature because they didn’t have the technology to tame or dominate it. This is the consequence of evolution under scarcity constraints, and orthogonal to liberalism.

understood the human creature as part of a comprehensive natural order.

(Maybe the egghead elites — the hunters and gatherers always knew it was a battle.)

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. Liberalism inaugurated a transformation in the natural and human sciences and humanity’s relationship to the natural world.

Since the "limitation" was itself an assertion that denied human nature — evolving under conditions of scarcity hardly left humans "in harmony" with capricious nature — the removal of that implausible limit would have "inaugurated" anything at all, much less something revolutionary.

the idea of a fixed human nature with belief in human “plasticity” and capacity for moral progress.

Two different concepts at play here: humans who don’t expect (or even have a conception of) progress can still perceive themselves in a never-ending conflict with a hostile “nature”. The idea of “harmony” has very little empirical evidence, although plenty of [racist] romanticism about “noble savages”.

Second-wave liberals

The author is creating a strawman here — would "nearly every" conservative or liberals fall neatly into his two categories?

Neither side confronts the fundamentally alternative understanding of human nature and the human relationship to nature defended by the preliberal tradition.

Wait — I thought you were setting up all that “harmony with nature” stuff as the house-built-on-sand nonsense that liberalism was built up from. Are you really touting the pre-liberalism harmony nonsense as truth?

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

NO! This is an unwarranted exaggeration. He used similar language previously, but his prior "rejection" was that [a Liberal] society could not be founded on the reliance on virtue — NOT that the possibility or aspiration towards virtue itself is rejected. If the valuation of virtue was deprecated in the original formulation of Liberalism, he needs to provide more evidence than this implicit assertion.

A central preoccupation of such societies becomes the comprehensive formation and education of individuals and citizens in the art and virtue of self-rule.

Has there ever been any evidence that such a society has succeeded to create anything as benevolent as the modern world, much less better?

Liberalism instead understands liberty as the condition in which one can act freely within the sphere unconstrained by positive law.

I applaud this paragraph! "Positive Law" — yes, but will he discuss how norms can complement law, except as society becomes more heterogeneous and dense? And "loose connections" — discuss the divergent role of institutions?

Ironically, the more completely the sphere of autonomy is secured, the more comprehensive the state must become.

Not the market? The following comments imply the loss of human connections are inevitably replaced by the state. This reinforces my concern that he doesn't perceive how the right's affection for the "free" market blinds them to how erosion of society is torn by those ideologically opposing forces.

the imposition of positive law.

Ahistorical: imposition of law goes back far beyond Liberalism. Check Mosaic Law, for example: the explicit of what authorities want beyond common norms. Liberalism didn't create that tension, although it did ultimately exacerbate it as an increasingly heterogeneous society discovered it had conflicting norms.

Liberalism thus culminates in two ontological points: the liberated individual and the controlling state.

I am sad. I'd hope for a nuanced examination, but the ideological bent here is glaring.

immediate gratification:

(Wow! Talking about immediate gratification with no gimlet eye cast upon the encroachment of the market?)

This undermining led, in turn, to these goods being undermined in reality, as the norm-shaping power of authoritative institutions grew tenuous with liberalism’s advance.

We're getting deep into "get off my lawn" territory here. He's ranting, but without seeing the dual prongs of Liberalism. The emphasis of profits, or increae in cheating are due to the Leviathan replacing norms? How, exactly, does reliance on the government incentivize an orientation towards profits?

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.

At this point, he's reaching for conclusions that are supportable by his premises. Conquering nature may, on it's own, lead to a dire state of affairs, but provides no illumination about how society got to where it is. The thesis here is too simplistic.

the liberal project is ultimately self-contradictory

Yes…

and that it culminates in the twin depletions of moral

… yeah, so far, so good …

material res...

… er, nope. Sorry. You can't blame Liberalism for the exploitation of nature. See how Paleolithic indigenous North Americans abused nature for millennia at a "buffalo jump" for one tiny tidbit of evidence. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head-Smashed-In_Buffalo_Jump And ponder how meat-filled megafauna coincidentally died off when humans arrived in the vicinity. By focusing on this, you're missing the real picture.

I'm going to try to slog through the rest of this, but when I know I disagree with his thesis, that's gonna be tough. Actually, what'll also be tough will be to refrain from commenting at every little thing I disagree with. «groan»

Whether described as left vs. right, blue vs. red, or liberal vs. conservative, this basic division seems to capture a permanent divide between two fundamental human dispositions,

The division can be seen in game theory, implied by the anticipation of either a trustworthy or untrustworthy world. So, yeah, the bimodal distribution of humans into those two categories is probably a dynamically stable situation.

the apparent unbridgeability of the chasm separating the two sides merely masks a more fundamental, shared worldview.

Pretty big claim coming on…

One, deemed “conservative,” advances the project of individual liberty and equality of opportunity especially through defense of a free and unfettered market;

The market is given salience here — excellent!

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.

Yup. That's the divide.

Our dominant political narrative pits defenders of individual liberty—articulated

I object to the presumption that those aligned with the Market are *more* protective of individual liberty than those aligned with the State. Yes, once the state has become oppressive, that seems axiomatic. But the market has quietly become just as oppressive, simultaneously. If the author's thesis were examined fairly, he'd probably come to a different conclusion. But he's ideologically aligned, naively, with the [presumptively] non-coercive market.

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.

Yes!

Individualism and statism advance together, always mutually supportive, and always at the expense of lived and vital relations

In distinct but related ways, the right and left cooperate in the expansion of both statism and individualism, although from different perspectives, using different means, and claiming different agendas.

For both “liberals” and “conservatives,” the state becomes the main driver of individualism, while individualism becomes the main source of expanding power and authority of the state.

Again, he seems to be on the right track, but then focuses on the state while ignoring the "market".

Both “classical” and “progressive” liberalism ground the advance of liberalism in individual liberation from the limitations of place, tradition, culture, and any unchosen relationship.

liberation from nature’s limitations.

Wait — "nature"? How did he jump from "the limitations of place, tradition, culture, and any unchosen relationship" to nature?

We are by nature “free and independent,” naturally ungoverned and even nonrelational. As Bertrand de Jouvenel quipped about social contractarianism, it was a philosophy conceived by “childless men who must have forgotten their own childhood.”

Ha ha!

Locke writes that the law works to increase liberty, by which he means our liberation from the constraints of the natural world.

By "natural world" here he seems to mean something akin to the primeval "state of nature", which has little to do with literal nature.

If the expansion of freedom is secured by law, then the opposite also holds true in practice: increasing freedom requires the expansion of law.

I need a lot more explanation of this.