I’ve had this book on my radar for some years, but until now haven’t found the opportunity to read it. I was happy to find a copy in a library and pick it up. As a novice in the field of political theory, I feared the book would be confusing, boring, or some mix of the two, but it really wasn’t. In fact, it was very well written, with long flowing sentences that were easy to follow, sprinkled with some advanced vocabulary fitting for a distinguished professor at an elite University.
So what is this book? It is a diagnosis and critique. But not just any critique; Deneen offers a radical-to the roots-critique of liberalism as an ideology. For that is exactly what he claims it is. Born out of the myth of the autonomous individual freely choosing to form a state by way of the social contract, it was in fact a revolution in anthropology, he claims. The free market was devised to serve the telos of this new project: the emancipation of the human person, not from vice and passions, but from any unchosen external restraint or limit.
Deneen argues that what we today call conservatives and progressives are actually both united in their adherence to the liberal project. The difference between them is that conservatives restrain the liberalizing scope to freeing humanity from the constraints and limits of nature, while progressives expand the scope to include the limits of human nature and biology.
The author contrasts this modern revolutionary view of liberty with the classical vision of liberty. The earlier notion of liberty was of mastery over one’s passions, the freedom to choose the good. If enough people could be formed to exercise such self-control in a given social context like a town, then a self-governing group could emerge. This group could only govern well insofar as a critical mass of them were habituated in virtue and able to constrain their own passions for selfish gain. What stands out as the key element in this classical view is the role of the virtues. The new view of liberty, however, is fundamentally different: freedom from constraints, oppression, and limitations. And in practicality, this means freedom to indulge in the passions, as long as no one “picks my pocket nor breaks my leg,” to quote Jefferson.
Deneen argues then that liberalism, in one sense, has not failed at all. It delivered exactly what it was destined to deliver given its philosophical and anthropological foundations. But in another sense, it has failed to deliver the promises of ever-greater freedom and ever-growing economic prosperity that are central to it. This cycle of failed promises and the idea that more freedom will finally bring about the desired prosperity and liberty is where the book’s title comes from.
Any regular readers of my little blog will know I have had a keen interest in the topic of Biblical anthropology for some years. I was surprised and delighted to find that Deneen points to the turn away from a classical view of the human person to the one devised by the early liberal thinkers as a key to understanding the essential nature of liberalism — and why it will fail. Simply put, it gets humanity wrong. As Deneen describes it, liberalism is built on the notion that the individual is the starting point for everything else. It dreams up an Edenic scenario of unattached, autonomous individuals who come together freely to make a social contract about how they shall govern themselves. But in reality, humans always exist in families and tribes. There is no lone ranger, at least not for long.
This unsound foundation creates a tension, or even a contradiction, between liberalism’s ideals and the inescapable realities of human nature and society.
Deneen goes on to identify another contradiction. He argues that an ever-growing government is inherent in liberalism since it is needed to secure the expanding individual rights of the autonomous self. But here is a central contradiction: the expanding state apparatus itself must control more and more of its citizens lives in order to accomplish this. Such a diagnosis certainly has the ring of truth.
The book also touches upon the topic of culture in a way that I found helpful. Deneen argues that true culture is always local, organic, connected to history, and rooted in place. These are the hallmarks of local cultures all over the world and throughout history. Liberalism, by contrast, flattens, homogenizes, abstracts, and can only mimic such real cultures. It does not and cannot create real culture. This was an interesting point that I think has a lot of merit. Culture arises organically out of the shared life and practices of a group of people, and that culture cannot help but be made unique by the unique circumstances, geography, history, particularities of that group of people. And so almost by definition you cannot have a global culture.
What people call a global culture will necessarily leave almost everyone still connected to a local culture alienated from it.
The lens of Deneen’s analysis provides some interesting insights into more recent events. He claims that the death of self-governance (a classical virtue overthrown by liberalism) is the common thread between the widespread campus chaos of the 2010s and the 2008 mortgage crisis. The campus chaos arises from the fact that young adults are given the wafer-thin moral guidance of consent to guide them through the impossible moral maze of campus Life. And since these young people have not been taught to master their appetites, they wreak havoc in their relationships because their inner lives are a mess of conflicting desires.
Similarly, the investment bankers getting rich off dubious loans were shaped in a context where financial self-restraint was unheard of, where the profit motive was not moderated by other moral considerations. The inner desires for riches trumped everything else, and the result was a catastrophic global economic crisis that ruined the financial lives of millions. There are certainly other decisive factors at play in both these phenomena, but the connective tissue Deneen identifies is not imaginary. The loss of virtue that comes bundled with the ideology of liberalism certainly played a part.
Deneen offers an interesting perspective on the interplay between classical liberalism and progressivism. While classical liberalism created inequalities (intentionally), progressivism came in and argued for a new form of liberalism to deal with those inequalities. But it was not a deep rejection of liberalism’s core values.
“But this embrace of economic equality [by progressivism] was not intended to secure an opposite outcome to classical liberalism: rather, it sought to extend the weakening of social forms and cultural traditions already advanced by classical liberalism, with an end to increasing political consolidation. Under classical liberalism, this end could best be achieved by limiting government’s authority over individuals. For progressive liberalism, it was best achieved by empowering the State to equalize the fruits of an increasingly prosperous society while intervening more actively in the realms of church, family, and even human sexuality” (p. 142).
Melt down local connections, reforge strong partisan political ones. This is certainly what we have seen as progressives has advanced across Western democracies in the early 21st century. Deneen’s depth-charge criticism gets underneath the froth of contemporary partisan politics.
While I was ready for the critique of liberalism and progressivism, I had not come across a non-progressive critique of free market capitalism before this book. This is probably the aspect of the book that gave me the most food for thought. As someone with firmly conservative leanings, I’ve tended to buy into the idea that the free market is a de facto good which has lifted billions out of poverty. I still believe the free market is preferable to central control, or monopolies, or the corruptions of crony capitalism, but this book helped me see the very real local costs which were part of the package of global free markets, as well as the dehumanizing effects of reducing local economic production to dollar amounts and fungible units to be traded across the global market.
All in all, I really enjoyed the book and learned a lot from it. While published in 2018, so much has happened since then culturally that it was very interesting to read it in early 2025 as Trump started his second term. J.D. Vance is perhaps the clearest contemporary example of a post-liberal ‘conservative’ (we are all struggling with finding the right terms here), who is friendly with Deneen, and willing to entertain ideas and approaches to governing which go against some of the sacred cows of classical liberalism. As N.S. Lyons has argued recently, the second Trump term seems like the clearest end-point for the “long twentieth century.” And with it, perhaps, the end of liberalism as we have known it.
The question is: What comes next?
Phil's Scribblings 