Why Liberalism Failed

by Patrick J. Deneen

People are apt to feel more in common with others who share a political outlook even if they are from a different area of the country (or even foreigners), a different ethnic or racial background, and—remarkably, given the history of religious warfare—a different religion.

The project of advancing the liberal order takes the superficial form of a battle between seemingly intractable foes, and the energy and acrimony of that contest shrouds a deeper cooperation that ends up advancing liberalism as a whole.

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 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.

A main goal of Locke’s philosophy is to expand the prospects for our liberty—defined as the capacity to satisfy our appetites—through the auspices of the state. Law is not a discipline for self-government but the means for expanding personal freedom: “The end of law is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom.”

At the heart of liberal theory is the supposition that the individual is the basic unit of human existence, the only natural human entity that exists. Liberal practice then seeks to expand the conditions for this individual’s realization.

In a reversal of the scientific method, what is advanced as a philosophical set of arguments is then instantiated in reality.

cf. Fukuyama's assessment of the natural human condition

This aspiration had been thwarted heretofore by antiquated belief in individual self-determination, neglectful of a profound and growing interdependence that was now generating the potential for “the gradual creation of a higher type of individual and higher life.”

reminds me: relational foundation human anthropology is baptized by Mormonism. cf. especially Christ Who Heals.

the ad makes increasingly clear that its story is the very opposite of Hobbes’s: it is the liberal state that creates the individual. Through the increasingly massive and all-encompassing Leviathan, we are finally free of one another.

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.16 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.

A population seeking to fill the void left by the weakening of more local memberships and associations was susceptible to a fanatical willingness to identify completely with a distant and abstract state.

Nisbet remains an instructive guide. In The Quest for Community, his 1953 analysis of the rise of modern ideologies, Nisbet argued that the active dissolution of traditional human communities and institutions had given rise to a condition in which a basic human need—“the quest for community”—was no longer being met. Statism arose as a violent reaction against this feeling of atomization.

Although conservative liberals claim to defend not only a free market but family values and federalism, the only part of the conservative agenda that has been continuously and successfully implemented during their recent political ascendance is economic liberalism, including deregulation, globalization, and the protection of titanic economic inequalities.

the only part of the left’s political agenda that has triumphed has been the project of personal and especially sexual autonomy.

What is popularly called a “culture,” often modified by an adjective—for instance, “pop culture” or “media culture” or “multiculturalism”—is in fact a sign of the evisceration of culture as a set of generational customs, practices, and rituals that are grounded in local and particular settings.

Liberal anticulture rests on three pillars: first, the wholesale conquest of nature, which consequently makes nature into an independent object requiring salvation by the notional elimination of humanity; second, a new experience of time as a pastless present in which the future is a foreign land; and third, an order that renders place fungible and bereft of definitional meaning. These three cornerstones of human experience—nature, time and place—form the basis of culture, and liberalism’s success is premised upon their uprooting and replacement with facsimiles that bear the same names.

A core ambition of liberalism is the liberation of such appetites from the artificial constraints of culture—either to liberate them entirely as a condition of our freedom, or, where they require constraint, to place them under the uniform and homogenized governance of promulgated law rather than the inconstant impositions and vagaries of diverse cultures.

From the outset, proponents of liberalism understood that cultural constraints over expression and pursuit of appetite were obstacles to the realization of a society premised upon unleashing erstwhile vices (such as greed) as engines of economic dynamism, and that state power might be required to overturn cultural institutions responsible for containing such appetites.

This transformation of the experience of time has been described in terms of two distinct forms of time: whereas preliberal humanity experienced time as cyclical, modernity thinks of it as linear.

Tocqueville notes that the propensity to think only within the context of one’s own lifespan, and to focus on satisfaction of immediate and baser pleasures, is a basic “propensity in human nature.” To chasten, educate, and moderate this basic instinct is the fruit of broader political, social, religious, and familial structures, practices, and expectations. Liberalism stresses our liberation from continuous time as a basic feature of our nature, and thus regards such formative institutions, structures, and practices as obstacles to the achievement of our untrammeled individuality. The disassembling of those cultural forms that tutor our presentism and instruct us that a distinctive feature of our humanity is our capacity to remember and to promise renders us at once free, and trapped by “brutish indifference” to any time outside our eternal present.

As the Greeks understood, the mother of culture—of the Nine Muses—was Mnemosyne, whose name means “memory.” Culture educates us about our generational debts and obligations.

Preserved in discrete human inheritances—arts, literature, music, architecture, history, law, religion—culture expands the human experience of time, making both the past and the future present to creatures who otherwise experience only the present moment.

As Thomas Jefferson articulated in the Lockean tuneup that preceded his drafting of the Declaration of Independence, the most fundamental right defining the liberal human is the right to leave the place of one’s birth.10 Our default condition is homelessness.

Berry is not hesitant to acknowledge that community is a place of constraint and limits. Indeed, in this simple fact lies its great attraction.

While our main political actors argue over whether the liberal state or the market better protects the liberal citizen, they cooperate in the evisceration of actual cultures.

Solzhenitsyn cut to the heart of liberalism’s great failing and ultimate weakness: its incapacity to foster self-governance.

This immorality tale is the Hobbesian vision in microcosm: first, tradition and culture must be eliminated as arbitrary and unjust (“natural man”). Then we see that absent such norms, anarchy ensues (“the state of nature”). Finding this anarchy unbearable, we turn to a central sovereign as our sole protector, that “Mortall God” who will protect us from ourselves (“the social contract”). We have been liberated from all custom and tradition, all authority that sought to educate within the context of ongoing communities, and have replaced these things with a distant authority that punishes us when we abuse our freedoms. And now, lacking any informal and local forms of authority, we are virtually assured that those abuses will regularly occur and that the state will find it necessary to intrude ever more minutely into personal affairs (“Prerogative”).

By 2008, the financial industry was stripped bare of any such culture rooted in nature, time and place—as were college campuses. Indeed, training at dorm parties and the fraternities of one’s college were the ideal preparation for a career in the mortgage bond market, and the financial frat party of Wall Street more generally. The mortgage industry rested upon the financial equivalent of college “hookups,” random encounters of strangers in which appetites (for outsized debt or interest) were sated without any care for the consequences for the wider community.

Absent these norms, individuals pursue liberalized liberty, fulfilling the desire to do as one wishes, all that is not restrained by law or causing obvious harm.

Liberal individualism demands the dismantling of culture; and as culture fades, Leviathan waxes and responsible liberty recedes.

Turkle reminds us that the root of the word “community” means literally “to give among each other” and argues that such a practice requires “physical proximity” and “shared responsibilities.”

Social media become ersatz substitutes for what they destroy, and Turkle seems pessimistic about the prospects for slowing this transformation. At best we can try to limit our children’s access to the internet, but Turkle seems resigned to dim prospects of fundamentally changing the current dynamic.

I want to challenge, or at least complicate, these two related ways that modern humans have come to discern and portray technology—as something that shapes and even remakes us, and does so with a kind of iron law of inevitability.

As I have argued throughout, liberalism above all advances a new understanding of liberty. In the ancient world—whether pre-Christian antiquity, particularly ancient Greece, or during the long reign of Christendom—the dominant definition of liberty involved recognition that it required an appropriate form of self-governance. This conception of liberty was based upon a reciprocal relationship between the self-government of individuals through the cultivation of virtue (whether ancient or Christian conceptions of virtue, which differed), and the self-government of polities, in which the governing aspiration was the achievement of the common good. Ancient thought sought a “virtuous circle” of polities that would support the fostering of virtuous individuals, and of virtuous individuals who would form the civic life of a polity oriented toward the common good. Much of the challenge faced by ancient thinkers was how to start such a virtuous circle where it did not exist or existed only partially, and how to maintain it against the likelihood of civic corruption and persistent temptation to vice. Liberty, by this understanding, was not doing as one wished, but was choosing the right and virtuous course. To be free, above all, was to be free from enslavement to one’s own basest desires, which could never be fulfilled, and the pursuit of which could only foster ceaseless craving and discontent. Liberty was thus the condition achieved by self-rule, over one’s own appetites and over...

a terrific summary

One of the ways modern republicanism was intended to combat the ancient problem of political faction was not by commending public spiritedness but by fostering a “mistrust of motives” that would result from the large expanse of the republic, constantly changing political dynamics, the encouragement to “pluralism” and expansion of diversity as a default preference, and thus the shifting commitments of the citizenry. A technological society like our own comes into being through a new kind of political technology—one that replaces the ancient commendation of virtue and aspiration to the common good with self-interest, the unleashed ambition of individuals, an emphasis on private pursuits over a concern for public weal, and an acquired ability to reconsider any relationships that limit our personal liberty. In effect, a new political technology is invented—a “new science of politics”—that itself conditions our understanding of the purposes and ends of science and technology.

It is less a matter of our technology “making us” than of our deeper political commitments shaping our technology.

I note this profound difference of approach to the question and use of technology between the likes of the old-order Amish and contemporary liberals not to urge that denizens of liberal modernity adopt wholesale the practices and beliefs of the Amish but to make a specific point. We regard our condition as one of freedom, whereas from the standpoint of liberal modernity, adherents of Amish culture are widely perceived to be subject to oppressive rules and customs. Yet we should note that while we have choices about what kind of technology we will use—whether a sedan or a jeep, an iPhone or a Galaxy, a Mac or a PC—we largely regard ourselves as subject to the logic of technological development and ultimately not in a position to eschew any particular technology. By contrast, the Amish—who seem to constrain so many choices—exercise choice over the use and adoption of technologies based upon criteria upon which they base their community. Who is free?

holy cow

Maybe the deepest irony is that our capacity for self-government has waned almost to the point of 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.

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.

Liberalism undermines liberal education in the first instance by detaching the educational enterprise itself from culture and making it an engine of anticulture.

Liberalism further undermines education by replacing a definition of liberty as an education in self-government with liberty as autonomy and the absence of constraint. Ultimately it destroys liberal education, since it begins with the assumption that we are born free, rather than that we must learn to become free.

In the humanities, liberatory movements based on claims of identity regard the past as a repository of oppression, and hence displace the legitimacy of the humanities as a source of education.

The liberal arts precede this understanding of liberty. They reflect, instead, a premodern understanding—one found in the teachings of such authors as Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero, and in the biblical and Christian traditions, articulated not only in the Bible but in the works of Augustine, Aquinas, Dante, More, and Milton. It is no coincidence that at the heart of the liberal arts tradition was an emphasis on classical and Christian texts by these authors. For all their many differences, they all agree that liberty is not a condition into which we are naturally born but one we achieve through habituation, training, and education—particularly the discipline of self-command.

The condition of doing as one wants is defined in this premodern view as one of slavery, in which we are driven by our basest appetites to act against our better nature.

As these mottos attest, the older tradition sought to foster an ethic of restraint. It recognized that humankind was singular among the creatures in its capacity to choose among numerous options, and so in its need for guidance in that condition of liberty. This liberty, the ancients understood, was subject to misuse and excess: the oldest stories in our tradition, including the story of humankind’s fall from Eden, told of the human propensity to use freedom badly.

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.

The aim of the new “multiversity” was to advance the Baconian project of human mastery over the world.

As a practical effect, the insistence by students no longer to be required to take a sequential education in the liberal arts, in the belief that they should sooner begin study of something “practical,” aligns perfectly with the interest of faculty to focus on the “creation of new knowledge”