Patrick Deneen

Patrick J. Deneen (born 1964) is an American political theorist and author, known for his critical examination of liberalism and its effect on contemporary society. He is a professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame, where his work emphasizes the interrelations of political philosophy, culture, and religion. Quotes Why Liberalism Failed (2018) Yale University Press ISBN 978-0-300-22344-6 Our main political choices come down to which depersonalized mechanism will purportedly advance our freedom and security — the space of the market, which collects our billions upon billions of choices to provide for our wants and needs without demanding from us any specific thought or intention about the wants and needs of others; or the liberal state, which establishes depersonalized procedures and mechanisms for the wants and needs of others that remain insufficiently addressed by the market. Introduction (p. 17) Among the greatest challenges facing humanity is the ability to survive progress. Ch. 1: "Unsustainable Liberalism" (p. 29) Liberal anticulture rests on three pillars: first, the wholesale conquest of nature, which consequently makes nature into an independent object requiring salvation by the notional elimination of humanity; second, a new experience of time as a pastless present in which the future is a foreign land; and third, an order that renders place fungible and bereft of definitional meaning. 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.The advance of this anticulture takes two primary forms. Anticulture is the consequence of a regime of standardizing law replacing widely observed informal norms that come to be discarded as forms of oppression; and it is the simultaneous consequence of a universal and homogenous market, resulting in a monoculture that, like its agricultural analogue, colonizes and destroys actual cultures rooted in experience, history, and place. These two visages of the liberal anticulture thus free us from other specific people and embedded relationships, replacing custom with abstract and depersonalized law, liberating us from personal obligations and debts, replacing what have come to be perceived as burdens on our individual autonomous freedom with pervasive legal threat and generalized financial indebtedness. In the effort to secure the radical autonomy of individuals, liberal law and the liberal market replace actual culture with an encompassing anticulture.This anticulture is the arena of our liberty — yet increasingly, it is rightly perceived as the locus of our bondage and even a threat to our continued existence. The simultaneous heady joy and gnawing anxieties of a liberated humanity, shorn of the compass of tradition and inheritance that were the hallmarks of embedded culture, are indicators of liberalism’s waxing success and accumulating failure. The paradox is our growing belief that we are thralls to the very sources of our liberation — pervasive legal surveillance and control of people alongside technological control of nature. As the empire of liberty grows, the reality of liberty recedes. The anticulture of liberalism — supposedly the source of our liberation — accelerates liberalism’s success and demise. Ch. 3: "Liberalism as Anticulture" (pp. 66–7) Preserved in discrete human inheritances—arts, literature, music, architecture, history, law, religion—culture expands the human experience of time, making both the past and the future present to creatures who otherwise experience only the present moment. Ch. 3 (p. 77) In the ancient world . . . the dominant definition of liberty involved recognition that it required an appropriate form of self-governance. . . . To be free, above all, was to be free from enslavement to one’s own basest desires, which could never be fulfilled, and the pursuit of which could only foster ceaseless craving and discontent. Ch. 4: "Technology and the Loss of Liberty" (p. 100) To be free — liberal — was an art, something learned not by nature or instinct but by refinement and education. And the soul of the liberal arts was the humanities, education in how to be a human being. Ch. 5: "Liberalism against Liberal Arts" (p. 115) At the end of the path of liberation lies enslavement. Such liberation from all obstacles is finally illusory, for two simple reasons: human appetite is insatiable and the world is limited. For both of these reasons, we cannot be truly free in the modern sense. We can never attain satiation, and will be eternally driven by our desires rather than satisfied by their attainment. And in our pursuit of the satisfaction of our limitless desires, we will very quickly exhaust the planet. Ch. 5 (p. 125) This is liberalism’s most fundamental wager: the replacement of one unequal and unjust system with another system enshrining inequality that would be achieved not by oppression and violence but with the population’s full acquiescence, premised on the ongoing delivery of increasing material prosperity along with the theoretical possibility of class mobility. Ch. 6: "The New Aristocracy" (p. 138) In effect, liberalism advances most effectively through both classical and progressive liberalisms, the economic liberalism of Locke and the lifestyle liberalism of Mill, even while the two claim to be locked in battle. The destruction of social norms, culture, and the social ecology of supporting institutions and associations is advanced by both the market and the state. Ch. 6 (pp. 151–2) We should finally not be surprised that even a degraded citizenry will throw off the enlightened shackles of a liberal order, particularly as the very successes of that order generate the pathologies of a citizenry that finds itself powerless before forces of government, economy, technology, and globalizing forces. Yet once degraded, such a citizenry would be unlikely to insist upon Tocquevillian self-command; its response would predictably take the form of inarticulate cries for a strongman to rein in the power of a distant and ungovernable state and market. Liberalism itself seems likely to generate demotic demands for an illiberal autocrat who promises to protect the people against the vagaries of liberalism itself. Liberals are right to fear this eventuality, but persist in willful obliviousness of their own complicity in the birth of the illiberal progeny of the liberal order itself. Ch. 7: "The Degradation of Citizenship" (pp. 177–8) The skills of building, fixing, cooking, planting, preserving, and composting not only undergird the independence and integrity of the home but develop practices and skills that are the basic sources of culture and a shared civic life. They teach each generation the demands, gifts, and limits of nature; human participation in and celebration of natural rhythms and patterns; and independence from the culture-destroying ignorance and laziness induced by the ersatz freedom of the modern market. Conclusion (pp. 193–4) Elections provide the appearance of self-governance but mainly function to satiate any residual civic impulse before we return to our lives as employees and consumers. Conclusion (p. 195) External links Category:1964 births Category:Living people Category:Political scientists from the United States Category:Catholics from the United States Category:Rutgers University alumni Category:Georgetown University faculty Category:Princeton University faculty Category:University of Notre Dame faculty Category:People from Connecticut