Why Liberalism Failed

by Patrick J. Deneen

Legend and story have always reflected this; in the Arthurian romances the Round Table is shattered from within. The sword is returned to the lake; the effort begins anew. Violent, destructive, greedy, fallible as he may be, man retains his vision of order and resumes his search.

In the young twenty-first century, liberal democracy, that system that marries majority rule with individual rights, has entered a crisis of legitimacy.

has failed to deliver on its promises to growing, and increasingly mobilized and vocal, numbers of people.

The symptoms of this ailment are easy to observe: an increasing skew in the distribution of wealth; decay in traditional institutions, from civic associations to labor unions to the family; a loss of trust in authority—political, religious, scientific, journalistic—and among citizens themselves; growing disillusionment with progress in effecting equal justice for all; above all, perhaps, the persistent and widening polarization between those who want incr...

The fragmentation not only continues but deepens. As people sort into new social and political tribes, electoral results confound and alarm ...

By liberalism, Deneen has in mind not the narrow definition of popular American discourse, namely progressive big government or caring government (depending on your point of view). He means the broader conception familiar to political philosophers, the set of principles upon which liberal democracies the world over are built.

The result is a bold and far-reaching critique of the root liberal assumption, associated with the Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant, of individual autonomy.

The problem is not that liberalism has been hijacked but that its elevation of individual autonomy was wrong from the start, and the passage of decades has only made its error more evident.

Scholars have launched radical critiques of liberalism before. From the left have come broadsides from Marx and his progeny, including the Frankfurt School, and from postmodern thinkers such as Foucault.

From the right have come attacks from Nietzsche, Schmitt, and traditionalists in the Catholic Church and other religious institutions. From a location difficult to pinpoint ...

Deneen’s book is disruptive not only for the way it links social maladies to liberalism’s first principles, but also because it is difficult to categorize along our conventional left-right spectrum.

to its virtues but doubtless owes much to a sudden global anxiety that liberal democracy is on the ropes.

a hunger for deeper explanations of why the ascendancy of liberalism, at what was supposed to be “the End of History,” no longer seems inevitable.

I began writing this book when my own thinking about these matters seemed to me to have sufficiently matured, and without any intention to speak to a specific set of political events.

The timing—concurrent with the passage of Brexit, the election of Donald Trump, and a wave of populist electoral victories across Europe—was coincidental but ultimately not that astonishing. Yet I have been asked to comment on these and related events more often than I expected.

This book was written in imitation of the classical explorations of the “logic of a regime,” a genre with pedigree as ancient as the ...

A more immediate precursor and model is Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. I hoped to call attention to internal causes for liberalism’s failure, a failure that was generally undetectable to the denizens of liberal regimes w...

In the course of many discussions subsequent to the book’s publication I have been asked numerous questions about how my analysis relates to contemporary events. These questions have led me to answers that extend the analysis in three directions.

which explore the irony that liberalism’s core value of individual autonomy creates structures that result in a felt loss of liberty for many citizens.

Second, in response to questions about the origins and nature of contemporary populism, I reply that liberalism’s efforts to foster a “new aristocracy” lead the attempt by a frustrated citizenry to reassert political control over their fates.

Third, when asked about the source of the many discontents arising from issues ranging from unfettered immigration to transgenderism, I have suggested that these (and other issues) are born of liberalism’s fundamental commitment to a form ...

yet liberalism has a more recent pedigree, being arguably only a few hundred years old.

It arises from a redefinition of the nature of liberty to mean almost the opposite of its original meaning. By ancient and Christian understandings, liberty was the condition of self-governance, whether achieved by the individual or by a political community.

Because self-rule was achieved only with difficulty—requiring an extensive habituation in virtue, particularly self-command and self-discipline over base but insistent appetites—the achievement of...

This limitation was achieved not primarily by promulgated law—though law had its place—but through extensive soc...

This was so much the case that Thomas Aquinas regarded custom as a form of law, and often superior to formalized law, having t...

Liberalism reconceives liberty as the opposite of this...

is understood to be the greatest possible freedom from external constraints, including customary norms. The only limitation on liberty, in this view, should be duly enacted laws consistent with m...

Liberalism thus disassembles a world of custom and replaces it w...

Ironically, as behavior becomes unregulated in the social sphere, the state must be constantly enlarged through an expansion of lawmaking and regulatory activities. “The Empire of Liberty” expands ...

The same dynamic is seen in the economic realm: fulfilling the sovereignty of individual choice in an economy requires the demolition of any ...

The market—once a defined and limited space within the city—must ultimately become borderless. The logic of liberalism thus demands near-limitles...

state architecture and a globalized economy, both created in the name of the liberation of the individual, combine to leave the individual powerless and overwhelmed by the very structures tha...

Contemporary liberals condemn such “populist” responses, but they are a reaction to the ungovernability of both the economic and political domains and represent a bottom-up effort to reassert political control over an increasingly administrative state and a denationalized economy.

I devote a chapter to liberalism’s co-optation of democratic energies. Liberalism at once seeks theoretical democratic legitimation (in the form of a notional “social contract”) while limiting actual democratic practices.

Liberalism’s origins were marked by often explicit efforts to establish forms of democracy while largely forestalling actual democratic participation and rule.

Liberalism’s defenders respond first by giving this phenomenon a pejorative name—“populism”—which is intended to distinguish such electoral energies from legitimately “democratic” ones.

Thus one will often encounter condemnations of populist electoral victories as antidemocratic. What is signaled here is liberalism’s effort to maintain the appearance of democratic legitimation, even amid evidence that democracy no longer supports it.

Democracy, in fact, cannot ultimately function in a liberal regime. Democracy requires extensive social forms that liberalism aims to deconstruct, particularly shared social practices and commitments that arise from thick communities, not a random collection of unconnected selves entering and exiting an election booth.

As Montesquieu pointed out long ago, democracy is the most demanding regime, given its demands for civic virtue.

The cultivation of virtue requires the thick presence of virtue-forming and virtue-supporting institutions, but these are precisely the institutions and practices that liberalism aims to hollow and eviscerate in the name of individual liberty.

In a deep irony, liberalism claims legitimacy based upon democratic consent, yet it ultimately hollows out the pro...

Today’s liberals are divided between those who seek to claim that democracy is legitimate only when affirming liberal commitments, and a growing number who are willing to jettison any residual clai...

Elite rule within liberal democracies has been noted for many decades, with few analyses more insightful on this score than James Burnham’s 1941 study, The Managerial Revolution (which influenced, among others, George Orwell as he was writing 1984).

the propertied (aristocratic) class was in the process of being replaced by a new class who perceived that power lay no longer in static property but in the manipulation of ideas and production processes.

The new “managerial elite” would maintain the appearance of what Burnham called “Parliamentary control,” but power would be pooled in publ...

The new ruling elite would govern a state-managed economy in which a nation’s (and, eventually, the world’s) wealth would necessarily flow through these...