Why Liberalism Failed

by Patrick J. Deneen

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.