This book takes a while to get your head totally around it. But the dominating message is “Liberalism failed, Liberalism failed because of Liberalism, and Liberalism cannot fix itself.”
In the United States today, we use the word “Liberal” to mean the Progressive Liberals. But this is not what Professor Deneen means: Liberalism includes both the “Conservatives” and “Liberals!” Both Conservatives and Progressives are the opposite sides of the coin called Liberalism. To understand this, we need a definition of what Liberalism is in Deneen’s usage.
Deneen’s definition is, “Liberalism … 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 maintaining order of otherwise unfettered individuals. Liberalism thus disassembles a world of customs and replaces it with promulgated laws.” (italics in the original) From the Preface to the Paperback Edition. Whereas the Conservatives insist on the liberty to free the individual man through opportunity to access free markets globally, the Progressives insist liberty to free the individual man through economic and social equality.
The three major ideologies of the world are Communism, Fascism, and Liberalism. Francis Fukuyama in the 1989 essay, “The End Of the World,” used Hegel’s definition of the end of the world where all ideologies would finally be resolved into the only and correct one. He declared the End of World when Liberalism successfully stood alone in the world after the flaws were exposed of both Communism and Fascism lead to the destruction of states based on those ideologies. Much of this book is a refutation of Fukuyama's premise. I think a reader would have difficulty understanding what Deneen is arguing against without having read Fukuyama.
The founders of the United States built a republic based on a philosophy of Classical Liberalism. Today, a solid majority of Americans believe that the United States has and is moving in the wrong direction. Nearly every premise of Classical Liberalism has been destroyed through the construction of the government of the United States as it exists today. There is almost no aspect of human life for an American that isn’t somehow impacted by the US government, and most Americans feel that they are powerless to change the situation. Liberalism promised the limitation of government and the liberation of the individual from arbitrary political control. Liberalism has produced just the opposite of what Liberalism initially promised. This is part of the evidence of why Professor Deneen claims Liberalism failed.
According to Deneen, Liberalism ultimately fails because it has a false concept of human nature which results in the state growing through its agencies removed from the electorate, the regulations enforce the removal of some constraint on freedom (in itself an oxymoron,) and the laws imposed to create human equality. In politics, government, economics, education, and technology, Liberalism is bankrupting freedom. Liberalism gives the citizens of the United States politicians that have no power other than figureheads of the nation, a massive government structure, an economic system borrowing on the future with debts to be paid by our grandchildren left with a supposed plan, “they will figure it out,” an educational system that rejects the history of the world including the United States while providing a “servile” education to placate the needs of the economic and technologic systems and rejecting the study of its own culture, and a technology system that uses massive amounts of resources, unbounded by the loss of morals and virtues of the US citizen while trying to fill the unsatisfiable appetites for more by the peoples. (“WOW: A long sentence for me but well documented in Deneen’s analysis.) A conclusion is drawn by Deneen and I agree with it: Liberalism is unsustainable!
Deneen then builds his argument supporting these conclusions by examining what the various political philosophers had observed and proposed. Then, he comparing the outcomes of the growth of the state, the construction of the free market, the destruction of the culture of the United States, the effects of technology and the loss of freedoms as a result of technology, the destruction of an educational system that allowed critical thinking and introspection of Liberalism while fostering a false sense of value to STEM education, the building of an elite aristocracy cutoff from the electorate, and the loss of freedom for the citizenship.
So where does this all lead? What comes after Liberalism? The scions of the slaves produced under Liberalism will produce populist movements and revolution. There may be hope for a new ideology that is better, but it is more likely that this will lead to authoritarianism: It has in the past: one only needs to look the probability of where past revolution produced. To avoid these grim outcomes, Deneen suggests that we need to engage in the negotiation between the Utopia and the realistic as was initiated by Plato. We need to acknowledge what Liberalism achieved and have the desire to eschew a return to a “preliberal age.” We can not go back. We must outgrow the “age of ideologies” and foster a culture of household economics and polis life where the focus is on events near and local to us rather than far away and conducted by the massive, impersonal government(s) which are now the outcomes of Liberalism. And finally, there might emerge a better theory of politics.
Professor Patrick J. Deneen is the David A. Potenziani Memorial College Chair of Constitutional Studies at the University of Notre Dame. This book is erudite and is well referenced. It is based on the studies of various pollical philosophers including Plato, Aristotle, Niccolo Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, Francis Bacon, John Locke, John Stuart Mill, Immanuel Kant, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, Alexis de Tocqueville, Edwin Burke, Georg Hegel, Karl Marx, John Dewey, Friedrich Hayek and many, many, more. In part, this is what makes this book, while readable, difficult to fully understand. While almost all readers will come away from this book with an appreciation for the argument Deneen is making, I doubt anyone unfamiliar with the major arguments of these philosophers will understand Deneen’s logic. While I consider myself well read in Philosophy, I found myself referring back to original sources to comprehend Deneen’s arguments. Of most importance, in my opinion, was the concept of “freedom” from Hegel’s “Philosophy of History.”
All in all: this book which probably began as a series of essays when taken together, creates a book worth thinking about.
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Fernando Stefanelli Galucci
A much and long needed criticism of our modern times
Reviewed in Brazil on May 4, 2020Amazon Customer
A troubling and prescient read
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 2, 2020