Why Liberalism Failed

by Patrick J. Deneen

“imaginary republics and principalities that have never existed in practice and never could; for the gap between how people actually behave and how they ought to behave is so great that anyone who ignores everyday reality in order to live up to an ideal will soon discover that he has been taught how to destroy himself, not how to preserve himself.”3

A revolution in modern science thus called as well for overturning such philosophical traditions as Stoicism and Christian emphasis upon “acceptance” in favor of belief in an expanding and potentially limitless human capacity to control circumstance and effect human desires upon the world.

human appetite is insatiable and the world is limited. For both of these reasons, we cannot be truly free in the modern sense. We can never attain satiation, and will be eternally driven by our desires rather than satisfied by their attainment.

One of the most powerful ways that liberalism advances is by implicitly encouraging globalized narcissism while perpetuating a pervasive belief in its own benevolence.

the economist Tyler Cowen, whose book Average Is Over echoes the basic contours of Locke’s argument. While noting that liberalism and market capitalism perpetuate titanic and permanent forms of inequality that might have made dukes and earls of old blush, Cowen argues that we are at the end of a unique period in American history, a time of widespread belief in relative equality and shared civic fate, and entering an age in which we will effectively see the creation of two separate nations.

“Citizens who are bound to take part in public affairs must turn from the private interests and occasionally take a look at something other than themselves. As soon as common affairs are treated in common, each man notices that he is not as independent of his fellows as he used to suppose and