Why Liberalism Failed

Published Jan. 9, 2018 by Yale University Press.

ISBN:: 978-0-300-22344-6

(1 review)

Of the three dominant ideologies of the twentieth century—fascism, communism, and liberalism—only the last remains. This has created a peculiar situation in which liberalism’s proponents tend to forget that it is an ideology and not the natural end-state of human political evolution. As Patrick Deneen argues in this provocative book, liberalism is built on a foundation of contradictions: it trumpets equal rights while fostering incomparable material inequality; its legitimacy rests on consent, yet it discourages civic commitments in favor of privatism; and in its pursuit of individual autonomy, it has given rise to the most far-reaching, comprehensive state system in human history. Here, Deneen offers an astringent warning that the centripetal forces now at work on our political culture are not superficial flaws but inherent features of a system whose success is generating its own failure.

1 edition

brenticus reviewed Why Liberalism Failed by Patrick J. Deneen

None

4 stars

The first - and probably most important - thing to point out about this book is that "liberalism" refers to the political philosophy of liberalism, otherwise known as classical liberalism and in certain senses closer to libertarianism or capitalism. This has little to do with a "liberal party" in modern politics, although he does refer to them as progressives where relevant. Deneen is writing about how the liberal ideology followed by most of the modern world after the fall of communism, regardless of how left or right they lean, is fundamentally flawed and is moving towards collapse due to its own overwhelming success.

Deneen makes a whole pile of criticisms in this book without being overly political about it. This isn't something that one party is doing right and the other is doing wrong; they feed off of each other, with the right advancing economic freedoms while the left advances …

The first - and probably most important - thing to point out about this book is that "liberalism" refers to the political philosophy of liberalism, otherwise known as classical liberalism and in certain senses closer to libertarianism or capitalism. This has little to do with a "liberal party" in modern politics, although he does refer to them as progressives where relevant. Deneen is writing about how the liberal ideology followed by most of the modern world after the fall of communism, regardless of how left or right they lean, is fundamentally flawed and is moving towards collapse due to its own overwhelming success.

Deneen makes a whole pile of criticisms in this book without being overly political about it. This isn't something that one party is doing right and the other is doing wrong; they feed off of each other, with the right advancing economic freedoms while the left advances personal and sexual freedoms, with neither party undoing what the other has passed. Liberalism defines itself based on a limited government protecting the people's rights, but throughout the book he points out how, over time, the government needs to expand more to protect more rights and to protect old rights from new threats. Liberalism defines a feedback loop where antagonistic forces feed on each other to continually expand the reach of government, eventually resulting in either despotism or the collapse of liberal ideology.

An important point that Deneen builds on throughout the book is the idea that liberalism has corroded our idea of liberty to remove our desire for a virtuous life. Most pre-liberal philosophies aim to assist people with overcoming their vices and becoming better citizens; liberalism instead claimed to accept human nature as it was, and defined a way for people to do whatever they please. Instead of trying to temper vices in order to free people from the harm they would do to themselves if left unchecked, liberalism encouraged that harm, saying it was only human nature, and laid the groundwork for the wasteful, consumerist, borderline hedonist lifestyle pervading society today.

I do have one fairly serious complaint about this book, however. It makes an equivalence between the left and right (or progressives and conservatives) that I don't think still holds true in a modern political landscape. Now, Deneen does note at the beginning that he wrote the vast majority of this book before Trump was elected as President of the United States, but since the election we've been seeing a renewed effort from conservatives to drive corporatism and anti-government sentiments that are more disruptive to the average person's life than the freedoms pursued by progressives in recent years. Fighting for people to be able to go to the doctor or get life-altering surgeries without derailing their lives is something that most would consider a virtuous pursuit; fighting for billionaires to make more money and for brown people to get kicked out of the control would largely be considered the opposite. The book considers these two ideas to be equivalent, even though the dichotomy is becoming ever more pronounced as time goes on.

Still, in spite of those false equivalences this book makes many strong arguments that support the idea of Liberalism being the root of our - and its own - problems. It's not a matter of left or right, socialism or capitalism, regulation or free markets. It's a problem of ideology, that the very basis of our society encourages us to support our vices over our virtues and drives us further into the realms of insanity for the sake of our right to do so. Liberalism can't be fixed. It is its own disease, and all we're doing is experiencing the symptoms.