Why Liberalism Failed

by Patrick J. Deneen

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 This observation, echoing one originally made by Tocqueville, suggests that individualism is not the alternative to statism but its very cause.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.