Why Liberalism Failed

by Patrick J. Deneen

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.

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 are at once deformations of its claims yet realizations of liberal ideology.

Rather than seeing the accumulating catastrophe as evidence of our failure to live up to liberalism’s ideals, we need rather to see clearly that the ruins it has produced are the signs of its very success. To call for the cures of liberalism’s ills by applying more liberal measures is tantamount to throwing gas on a raging fire. It will only deepen our political, social, economic, and moral crisis.

Liberalism is the first of the modern world’s three great competitor political ideologies, and with the demise of fascism and communism, it is the only ideology still with a claim to viability. As ideology, liberalism was the first political architecture that proposed transforming all aspects of human life to conform to a preconceived political plan.

What’s most insidious about the cave that we occupy is that its walls are like the backdrops of old movie sets, promising seemingly endless vistas without constraints or limits, and thus our containment remains invisible to us.

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. Either it enforces conformity to a lie it struggles to defend, or it collapses when the gap between claim and reality finally results in wholesale loss of belief among the populace. More often than not, one precedes the other.

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.

Advanced liberalism is eliminating liberal education with keen intent and ferocity, finding it impractical both ideologically and economically.

How many of us can sit for an hour reading a book or simply thinking or meditating without an addict’s longing for just a hit of the cell phone, that craving that won’t allow us to think or concentrate or reflect until we’ve had our hit? This same technology that is supposed to connect us more extensively and intimately is making us more lonely, more apart.

Claiming to liberate the individual from embedded cultures, traditions, places, and relationships, liberalism has homogenized the world in its image—ironically, often fueled by claims of “multiculturalism” or, today, “diversity.”

Neither Progressivism’s faith that liberalism will be realized when we move forward toward the realization of liberalism’s promise nor Conservatism’s tale that American greatness will be restored when we reclaim the governing philosophy of our Constitution offers any real alternative to liberalism’s advance. The past can instruct, but there can be no return and no “restoration.” Liberalism has ruthlessly drawn down a reservoir of both material and moral resources that it cannot replenish. Its successes were always blank checks written against a future it trusted it could repair. Conservatism rightly observes that progressivism’s destination is a dead end, and progressivism rightly decries conservatism’s nostalgia for a time that cannot be restored.

rejection of the world’s first and last remaining ideology does not entail its replacement with a new and doubtless not very different ideology. Political revolution to overturn a revolutionary order would produce only disorder and misery. 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.

What’s needed now is not to perfect our philosophy any further but to again do more honor to ourselves. 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 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.

The foundations of liberalism were laid by a series of thinkers whose central aim was to disassemble what they concluded were irrational religious and social norms in the pursuit of civil peace that might in turn foster stability and prosperity, and eventually individual liberty of conscience and action.

First, politics would be based upon reliability of “the low” rather than aspiration to “the high.” The classical and Christian effort to foster virtue was rejected as both paternalistic and ineffectual, prone to abuse and unreliability.

Descartes and Hobbes in turn argued that the rule of irrational custom and unexamined tradition—especially religious belief and practice—was a source of arbitrary governance and unproductive internecine conflicts, and thus an obstacle to a stable and prosperous regime.

A “new science of politics” was to be accompanied by a new natural science—in particular, a science that would seek practical applications meant to give humans a chance in the war against nature.

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.

Liberalism is credited with the cessation of religious war, the opening of an age of tolerance and equality, the expanding spheres of personal opportunity and social interaction that today culminate in globalization, and the ongoing victories over sexism, racism, colonialism, heteronormativity, and a host of other unacceptable prejudices that divide, demean, and segregate.

Liberalism is thus not merely, as is often portrayed, a narrowly political project of constitutional government and juridical defense of rights. Rather, it seeks to transform all of human life and the world. 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.

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.

This might be a surprising claim, since the philosophy of classical liberalism appears to suggest the opposite: not that the state helps to create the individual, but rather—according to social contract theory—that individuals, free and equal by nature, through consent bring into existence a limited state. Hobbes and Locke both—for all their differences—begin by conceiving natural humans not as parts of wholes but as wholes apart.

From the dawn of modernity to contemporary headlines, the proponents and heirs of classical liberalism—those whom we today call “conservative”—have at best offered lip service to the defense of “traditional values” while its leadership class unanimously supports the main instrument of practical individualism in our modern world, the global “free market.”

“The Life of Julia” is meant to depict present-day reality. But the ad makes increasingly clear that its story is the very opposite of Hobbes’s: it is the liberal state that creates the individual.

Thus the two sides of the liberal project wage a ceaseless and absorbing contest over means, the ideal avenue for liberating the individual from constitutive relationships, from unchosen traditions, from restraining custom. Behind the lines, however, both have consistently sought the expansion of the sphere of liberation in which the individual can best pursue his or her preferred lifestyle, leading to mutual support of the expansion of the state as the requisite setting in which the autonomous individual could come into being. While “conservative” liberals express undying hostility to state expansion, they consistently turn to its capacity to secure national and international markets as a way of overcoming any local forms of governance or traditional norms that might limit the market’s role in the life of a community.

And while “progressive” liberals declaim the expansive state as the ultimate protector of individual liberty, they insist that it must be limited when it comes to enforcement of “manners and morals,” preferring the open marketplace of individual “buyers and sellers,” especially in matters of sexual practice and infinitely fluid sexual identity, the definition of family, and individual choices over ending one’s own life. The modern liberal state consistently expands to enlarge our self-definition as “consumers”—a word more often used today to describe denizens of the liberal nation-state than “citizens”—while entertaining us with a cataclysmic battle between two sides that many begin to rightly suspect aren’t that different after all.

Beyond psychological longing, the ascent of the state as object of allegiance was a necessary consequence of liberalism’s practical effects. Having shorn people’s ties to the vast web of intermediating institutions that sustained them, the expansion of individualism deprived them of recourse to those traditional places of support and sustenance. The more individuated the polity, the more likely that a mass of individuals would inevitably turn to the state in times of need. This observation, echoing one originally made by Tocqueville, suggests that individualism is not the alternative to statism but its very cause. Tocqueville, unlike so many of his current conservative and progressive readers, understood that individualism was not the solution to the problem of an increasingly encompassing centralized state but the source of its increasing power.

The expansion of liberalism rests upon a vicious and reinforcing cycle in which state expansion secures the end of individual fragmentation, in turn requiring further state expansion to control a society without shared norms, practices,

The anticulture of liberalism—supposedly the source of our liberation—accelerates liberalism’s success and demise.

Tocqueville perceived the way in which “fractured time” generates individualism, which in turn would have profound social, political, and economic consequences as the underlying logic of liberal democracy advances. He fretted especially about the inability of a liberal democratic people to see their own lives and actions as part of a continuum of time, and hence to consider long-term implications of their actions and deeds as part of a long-term human community.

One of the upheavals of the sexual revolution was the rejection of long-standing rules and guidelines governing the behavior of students at the nation’s colleges and universities. Formerly understood to stand in for parents—in loco parentis, “in place of the parent”—these institutions dictated rules regarding dormitory life, dating, curfews, visitations, and comportment. Adults—often clergy—were charged with continuing the cultivation of youth into responsible adulthood. Some fifty years after students were liberated from the nanny college, we are seeing not a sexual nirvana but widespread confusion and anarchy, and a new form of in absentia parentis—the paternalist state.

Liberalism extends itself by inhabiting spaces abandoned by local cultures and traditions, leading either to their discarding or suppression or, far more often, to their contentless redefinition.

Liberalism has taken a page from this insidious practice: under liberalism, “culture” becomes a word that parasitizes the original, displacing actual cultures with a liberal simulacrum eagerly embraced by a populace that is unaware of the switch. Invocations of “culture” tend to be singular, not plural, whereas actual cultures are multiple, local, and particular.

The “-ism” of “multiculturalism” signals liberalism’s victorious rout of actual cultural variety. Even as cultures are replaced by a pervasive anticulture, the language of culture is advanced as a means of rendering liberal humanity’s detachment from specific cultures. The homogenous celebration of every culture effectively means no culture at all. The more insistent the invocation of “pluralism” or “diversity” or, in the retail world, “choice,” the more assuredly the destruction of actual cultures is advancing. Our primary allegiance is to celebration of liberal pluralism and diversity, shaping homogenized and identical adherents of difference, demanding and ensuring pervasive indifferentism.

The very basis of liberalism’s success again ushers in the conditions for its demise.

First, as we have seen, there is much concern about the ways that modern technology undermines community and tends to make us more individualistic, but in light of the deeper set of conditions that led to the creation of our technological society, we can see that “technology” simply supports the fundamental commitments of early-modern political philosophy and its founding piece of technology, our modern republican government and the constitutional order.

nonexistence. In our current lamentations about a variety of crises—the civic crisis in which we seem to have lost the capacity to speak the language of common good; our financial crisis, in which both public and private debt, accrued for immediate satiation, is foisted upon future generations in the vague hope that they will devise a way to deal with it; our environmental crisis, in which most of the answers to our problems are framed in terms of technological fixes but which ultimately require us to control our ceaseless appetites; and the moral crisis of a society in which personal commitments such as families so easily unravel and are replaced by therapy and social programs—we fail to see the deep commonalities arising from the very success of our modern liberal project. We are certainly right to congratulate ourselves for the successes of our technology, but we are also right to worry about the costs of our technological society. Our “culture of technology” was premised, from the very start, on a false definition of liberty, and it now seems to be leading us ineluctably into a condition of bondage to the consequences of our own fantasy.

But if liberalism ultimately replaces all forms of culture with a pervasive anticulture, then it must undermine education as well. In particular, it must undermine liberal education, the education that was understood as the main means of educating free persons by means of deep engagement with the fruits of long cultural inheritance, particularly the great texts of antiquity and the long Christian tradition.

The goal of understanding ourselves was to understand how to use our liberty well, especially how to govern appetites that seemed inherently insatiable. At the heart of the liberal arts in this older tradition was an education in what it meant to be human, above all how to achieve freedom, not only from external restraint but from the tyranny of internal appetite and desire. The “older science” sought to encourage the hard and difficult task of negotiating what was permitted and what was forbidden, what constituted the highest and best use of our freedom, and what actions were wrong. Each new generation was encouraged to consult the great works of our tradition, the epics, the great tragedies and comedies, the reflections of philosophers and theologians, the revealed word of God, the countless books that sought to teach us how to use our liberty well. To be free—liberal—was an art, something learned not by nature or instinct but by refinement and education. And the soul of the liberal arts was the humanities, education in how to be a human being.

The collapse of the liberal arts in this nation follows closely upon the redefinition of liberty, away from its ancient and Christian understanding of self-rule and disciplined self-command, in favor of an understanding of liberty as the absence of restraints upon one’s desires. If the purpose of the liberal arts was to seek an instruction in self-rule, then its teaching no longer aligns with the contemporary ends of education. Long-standing requirements to learn ancient languages in order to read the classical texts, or to require an intimate familiarity with the Bible and scriptural interpretation, were displaced by a marketplace of studies driven by individual taste and preference. Above all, the liberal arts are increasingly replaced by “STEM,” which combines a remnant of the ancient liberal arts—science and mathematics—with their applied forms, technology and engineering, alongside increasing demands for preparation for careers in business and finance.

Slowly the religious underpinnings of the university were discarded and discontinued; while the humanities continued to remain at the heart of the liberal arts education, they were no longer guided by a comprehensive vision afforded by the religious traditions whose vision and creed had provided the organizing principle for the efforts of the university.

The current mission of the university is “the advancement of society through research, creative activity, scholarly inquiry and the development of new knowledge.” The stress in this updated mission statement is upon the research and scientific mission of the university, notably the aim of creating “new knowledge,” not “the cultivated mind that is guided by virtue.”

By adopting a jargon comprehensible only to “experts,” they could emulate the scientific priesthood, even if by doing so they betrayed the humanities’ original mandate to guide students through their cultural inheritance. Professors in the humanities showed their worth by destroying the thing they studied.5

Today the liberal arts have exceedingly few defenders. The children of the left cultural warriors of the 1980s are no longer

concerned with a more representative and inclusive canon. They are more interested in advancing the cause of egalitarian autonomy, now arrayed against the older liberal norms of academic freedom and free speech in the name of what some call “academic justice” and greater campus representation. While a rallying point is the cry for greater diversity, the ongoing project of “diversification” in fact creates greater ideological homogeneity on nearly every campus. Under the guise of differences in race, an exploding number of genders, and a variety of sexual orientations, the only substantive worldview advanced is that of advanced liberalism: the ascent of the autonomous individual backed by the power and support of the state and its growing control over institutions, including schools and universities.

The children of the right’s cultural warriors have also largely abandoned interest in the role of formative books as the central contribution for cultivating self-government. Instead, today’s “conservatives” are more likely to dismiss the role of the liberal arts not only as a lost cause, but not even worth the fight anymore.9 Instead, reflecting priorities of the modern marketplace, they are more inclined to call for greater emphasis on STEM and economic fields—those fields that have gained prominence because of the victory of ideas in many of the “Great Books” that successfully proposed that old books might no longer be studied. Conservative political leaders like Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin or Senat...

If a renaissance is to come, it must be from a reconstituted education in the liberal arts. While a great patchwork of liberal arts colleges remains, most liberal arts institutions have been deeply shaped by presuppositions of the “new science.”