Why Liberalism Failed

by Patrick J. Deneen

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.

We are meritocrats out of a survivalist instinct. If we do not race to the very top, the only remaining option is a bottomless pit of failure. To simply work hard and get decent grades doesn’t cut it anymore if you believe there are only two options: the very top or rock bottom. It is a classic prisoner’s dilemma: to sit around for 2–3 hours at the dining hall “shooting the breeze,” or to spend time engaged in intellectual conversation in moral and philosophical issues, or to go on a date all detract from time we could be spending on getting to the top and, thus, will leave us worse off relative to everyone else. . . . 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.3

The state is created to restrain the external actions of individuals and legally restricts the potentially destructive activity of radically separate human beings. Law is a set of practical restraints upon self-interested individuals; Hobbes does not assume the existence of self-restraint born of mutual concern. As he writes in Leviathan, 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,” and thus always acts as an external constraint upon our natural liberty.6 By contrast, liberty persists “where there is silence of the law,” limited only insofar as the “authorized” rules of the state are explicit.7 Only the state can limit our natural liberty: the state is the sole creator and enforcer of positive law, and it even determines legitimate and illegitimate expressions of religious belief. The state is charged with maintaining social stability and preventing a return to natural anarchy; in so doing, it “secures” our natural rights.

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.

In this world, gratitude to the past and obligations to the future are replaced by a nearly universal pursuit of immediate gratification: culture, rather than imparting the wisdom and experience of the past so as to cultivate virtues of self-restraint and civility, becomes synonymous with hedonic titillation, visceral crudeness, and distraction, all oriented toward promoting consumption, appetite, and detachment. As a result, superficially self-maximizing, socially destructive behaviors begin to dominate society. In schools, norms of modesty, comportment, and academic honesty are replaced by widespread lawlessness and cheating (along with increasing surveillance of youth), while in the fraught realm of coming-of-age, courtship norms are replaced by “hookups” and utilitarian sexual encounters. The norm of stable lifelong marriage is replaced by various arrangements that ensure the autonomy of the individuals, whether married or not. Children are increasingly viewed as a limitation upon individual freedom, which contributes to liberalism’s commitment to abortion on demand, while overall birth rates decline across the developed world. In the economic realm, the drive for quick profits, often driven by incessant demands for immediate profitability, replaces investment and trusteeship. And in our relationship to the natural world, short-term exploitation of the earth’s bounty becomes our birthright, even if it forces our children to deal with shortages of such resources as tops...

sexuality. People who are “uncultivated” in the consumption of both food and sex, Aristotle observed, are the most vicious of creatures, literally consuming other humans to slake their base and untutored appetites. Far from being understood as opposites of human nature, customs and manners were understood to be derived from, governed by, and necessary to the realization of human nature. 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.

Liberty is the learned capacity to govern oneself using the higher faculties of reason and spirit through the cultivation of virtue. 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. It was the central aim of the liberal arts to cultivate the free person and the free citizen, in accordance with this understanding of liberty. The liberal arts made us free.

at the end of the path of liberation lies enslavement. Such liberation from all obstacles is finally illusory, for two simple reasons: 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. And in our pursuit of the satisfaction of our limitless desires, we will very quickly exhaust the planet. Our destiny, should we enter fully down this path toward our complete liberation, is one in which we will be more governed by necessity than ever before. We will be governed not by our own capacity for self-rule but rather by circumstance, particularly the circumstances resulting from scarcity, devastation, and chaos.

At our institutions of higher learning, a multitude of panels and conferences were organized on the economic crisis, bemoaning such things as the absence of oversight, lax regulatory regime, failures of public and private entities to exercise diligence in dispensing credit or expanding complex financial products. Yet one searches in vain for a university president or college leader—especially at the elite echelon—acknowledging that there was deep culpability on the part of their own institutions for our failure and our students’ as well. After all, it was the leading graduates of the elite institutions of the nation who occupied places of esteem in top financial and political institutions throughout the land who were responsible for precipitating the economic crisis.

Society today has been organized around the Millian principle that “everything is allowed,” at least so long as it does not result in measurable (mainly physical) harm. It is a society organized for the benefit of the strong, as Mill recognized. By contrast, a Burkean society is organized for the benefit of the ordinary—the majority who benefit from societal norms that the strong and the ordinary alike are expected to follow.

Democracy is thus an acceptable legitimating tool only as long as its practices exist within, and are broadly supportive of, liberal assumptions. When democratic majorities reject aspects of liberalism—as electorates throughout western Europe and America have done in recent years—a growing chorus of leading voices denounce democracy and the unwisdom of the masses.

We have endless choices of the kind of car to drive but few options over whether we will spend large parts of our lives in soul-deadening boredom within them.