Why Liberalism Failed

by Patrick J. Deneen

A succession of thinkers in subsequent decades and centuries were to build upon these three basic revolutions of thought, redefining liberty as the liberation of humans from established authority, emancipation from arbitrary culture and tradition, and the expansion of human power and dominion over nature through advancing scientific discovery and economic prosperity.

Liberty is it then re-defined as freedom from instead of freedom for

Liberalism’s ascent and triumph required sustained efforts to undermine the classical and Christian understanding of liberty, the disassembling of widespread norms, traditions, and practices, and perhaps above all the reconceptualization of primacy of the individual defined in isolation from arbitrary accidents of birth, with the state as the main protector of individual rights and liberty.

The liberal adoption of these revolutions in thought and practice constituted a titanic wager that a wholly new understanding of liberty could be pursued and realized by overturning preceding philosophic tradition and religious and social norms, and by introducing a new relationship between humans and nature. What has become the literal “Whig” inter...

Liberalism’s victory was declared to be unqualified and complete in 1989 in the seminal article “The End of History” by Francis Fukuyama, written following the collapse of the last competing ideological opponent.

Liberalism’s own success makes it difficult to sustain reflection on the likelihood that the greatest current threat to liberalism lies not outside and beyond liberalism but within it.

No matter our contemporary malady, there is no challenge that can’t be fixed by a more perfect application of liberal solutions. These maladies include the corrosive social and civic effects of self-interest—a disease that arises from the cure of overcoming the ancient reliance upon virtue.

Perhaps above all, liberalism has drawn down on a preliberal inheritance and resources that at once sustained liberalism but which it cannot replenish. The loosening of social bonds in nearly every aspect of life—familial, neighborly, communal, religious, even national—reflects the advancing logic of liberalism and is the source of its deepest instability.

Battles in policy areas such as education and health care—in which either the state or the market is proposed as providing the resolution—reflect the weakening of forms of care that drew on more local commitments and devotions that neither the state nor market can hope to replicate or replace.

Liberalism is most fundamentally constituted by a pair of deeper anthropological assumptions that give liberal institutions a particular orientation and cast: 1) anthropological individualism and the voluntarist conception of choice, and 2) human separation from and opposition to nature. These two revolutions in the understanding of human nature and society constitute “liberalism” inasmuch as they introduce a radically new definition of “liberty.”

The two major anthropological assumptions of liberalism: individualism and choice and opposition to nature

The first revolution, and the most basic and distinctive aspect of liberalism, is to base politics upon the idea of voluntarism—the unfettered and autonomous choice of individuals.

Legitimacy is conferred by consent.

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.

Human beings are thus, by nature, nonrelational creatures, separate and autonomous.

Liberalism begins a project by which the legitimacy of all human relationships—beginning with, but not limited to, political bonds—becomes increasingly dependent on whether those relationships have been chosen, and chosen on the basis of their service to rational self-interest.

Locke—the first philosopher of liberalism—

without broader consideration of the impact of one’s choices upon the community, one’s obligations to the created order, and ultimately to God.

liberalism equals choice without consideration of broader context of community or God

In effect, liberal theory sought to educate people to think differently about themselves and their relationships.

Liberalism encourages loose connections.

Liberal philosophy rejected this requirement of human self-limitation. It displaced first the idea of a natural order to which humanity is subject and later the notion of human nature itself. Liberalism inaugurated a transformation in the natural and human sciences and humanity’s relationship to the natural world.

The first wave of this revolution—inaugurated by early-modern thinkers dating back to the Renaissance—insisted that man should employ natural science and a transformed economic system to seek mastery of nature. The second wave—developed largely by various historicist schools of thought, especially in the nineteenth century—replaced belief in the idea of a fixed human nature with belief in human “plasticity” and capacity for moral progress. These two iterations of liberalism—often labeled “conservative” and “progressive”—contend today for ascendance, but we do better to understand their deep interconnection.

The first wave of the liberalism focused on mastery over nature: oil industry and energy consumption. The second wave focused on the plasticity of the human: sexuality and gender revolution

But this self-interested, possessive aspect of our nature could, if usefully harnessed, promote an economic and scientific system that increased human freedom through the capacity of human beings to exert mastery over natural phenomena.

Today’s political debates occur largely and almost exclusively between these two varieties of liberals. Neither side confronts the fundamentally alternative understanding of human nature and the human relationship to nature defended by the preliberal tradition.

autonomous activity. Liberalism rejects the ancient conception of liberty as the learned capacity of human beings to conquer the slavish pursuit of base and hedonistic desires.

Under liberalism, human beings increasingly live in a condition of autonomy in which the threatened anarchy of our purportedly natural condition is controlled and suppressed through the imposition of laws and the corresponding growth of the state. With humanity liberated from constitutive communities (leaving only loose connections) and nature harnessed and controlled, the constructed sphere of autonomous liberty expands seemingly without limit.

Ironically, the more completely the sphere of autonomy is secured, the more comprehensive the state must become. Liberty, so defined, requires liberation from all forms of associations and relationships, from family to church, from schools to village and community, that exerted control over behavior through informal and habituated expectations and norms.

With the liberation of individuals from these associations, there is more need to regulate behavior through the imposition of positive law.

At the same time, as the authority of social norms dissipates, they are increasingly felt to be residual, arbitrary, and oppressive, motivating calls for the state to actively work toward their eradication.

The individual and the state mark two points of ontological priority.

The sole object and justification of this indifference to human ends—of the emphasis on “Right” over “Good”—is the embrace of the liberal human as self-fashioning expressive individual. This aspiration requires that no truly hard choices be made. There are only different lifestyle options.

The ancient claim that man is a political animal, and must through the exercise and practice of virtue learned in communities achieve a form of local and communal self-limitation—a condition properly understood as liberty—cannot be denied forever without cost.

THE basic division of modern politics since the French Revolution has been between the left and the right, reflecting the respective sides of the French National Assembly, where revolutionaries congregated to the left and royalists gathered to the right.

In distinct but related ways, the right and left cooperate in the expansion of both statism and individualism, although from different perspectives, using different means, and claiming different agendas.

context. 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.

As Bertrand de Jouvenel quipped about social contractarianism, it was a philosophy conceived by “childless men who must have forgotten their own childhood.”

Locke writes that the law works to increase liberty, by which he means our liberation from the constraints of the natural world.

Thus, for liberal theory, while the individual “creates” the state through the social contract, in a practical sense, the liberal state “creates” the individual by providing the conditions for the expansion of liberty, increasingly defined as the capacity of humans to expand their mastery over circumstance.

And a liberalism in this state is created by the individual for kind way of social contract but in the individual is created by the state as well because of the extended opportunities for liberty

Eventually, however, this project becomes a main driver of liberal imperialism, an imperative justified among others by John Stuart Mill in his treatise Considerations on Representative Government, where he calls for compulsion over “uncivilized” peoples in order that they might lead productive economic lives, even if they must be “for a while compelled to it,” including through the institution of “personal slavery.”5

Liberal imperialism in the assumptions of white supremacy

According to Polanyi, the replacement of this economy required a deliberate and often violent reshaping of local economies, most often by elite economic and state actors disrupting and displacing traditional communities and practices. The “individuation” of people required not only the separation of markets from social and religious contexts but people’s acceptance that their labor and its products were nothing more than commodities subject to price mechanisms, a transformative way of considering people and nature alike in newly utilitarian and individualistic terms. Yet market liberalism required treating both people and natural resources as these “fictitious commodities”—as material for use in industrial processes—in order to disassociate markets from morals and “re-train” people to think of themselves as individuals separate from nature and one another. As Polanyi pithily says of this transformation, “laissez-faire was planned.”

This reminds me of the resistance of black market banks and communities which weather by definition been local entities and not subject to warp privy to the types of universal national controls that would’ve been preferred or demand it based on the liberalism model

From the dawn of modernity to contemporary headlines, the proponents and heirs of classical liberalism—those whom we today call “conservative”—have at best offered lip service to the defense of “traditional values” while its leadership class unanimously supports

the main instrument of practical individualism in our modern world, the global “free market.”

While the “Life of Julia” campaign seemed thus designed for liberals who generally supported government programs that helped foster economic opportunity and greater equality, Julia was nevertheless someone who could not be an object of admiration without the background appeal of conservative liberalism’s valorization of the autonomous individual as the normative ideal of human liberty.

Thus the two sides of the liberal project wage a ceaseless and absorbing contest over means, the ideal avenue for liberating the individual from constitutive relationships, from unchosen traditions, from restraining custom.

This very liberation in turn generates liberalism’s self-reinforcing circle, wherein the increasingly disembedded individual ends up strengthening the state that is its own author.

Nisbet saw the rise of fascism and communism as the predictable consequence of the liberal attack upon smaller associations and communities.

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

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. And while progressive liberals claim to advance a shared sense of national destiny and solidarity that should decrease the advance of an individualist economy and reduce income inequality, the only part of the left’s political agenda that has triumphed has been the project of personal and especially sexual autonomy. Is it mere coincidence that both parties, despite their claims to be locked in a political death grip, mutually advance the cause of liberal autonomy and inequality?

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.

disassociation of nature from culture. The fundamental premise of liberalism is that the natural condition of man is defined above all by the absence of culture, and that, by contrast, the presence of culture marks existence of artifice and convention, the simultaneous effort to alter but conform to nature.

Despite its romantic rejection of the cold, rationalist, and utilitarian Hobbesian picture of humanity, Rousseau’s primitivist alternative nevertheless reveals continuity among all iterations of liberalism in its fundamental commitment to the severance of nature from culture.

“cultivate.” Just as the potential of a plant or animal isn’t possible without cultivation, so it was readily understood that the human creature’s best potential simply could not be realized without good culture. This was so evident to ancient thinkers that the first several chapters of Plato’s Republic are devoted not to a discussion of political forms but to the kinds of stories that are appropriate for children.