Liberalism delivers on all its promises. This is the author’s contention. Neither does he intend to take sides.
He contends that both conservatives and progressives have combined to create all the features of liberal society in which we live, move and have our being. These two positions are not opposites, as is often thought. What was originally conceived as a theory of what human beings are by such as Plato and Francis Bacon,; has, through the mediation of John Stuart Mil, Hobbes and many lesser beings, been made into a reality.
Deneen concisely describes what this reality comprises of. He notes both the continuance of the development of liberalism through the ages as well as the distinctive redefining of its terms in recent times which has produced its current iteration. Liberalism, as expressed in reality, he argues, is the exact representation of its philosophical blueprint. There are many surprises here for the reader. And as an introduction to the subject, the book is a help. There are also some challenging views here as well.
A particular criticism that has been made in the American reviews is that Deneen is complaining about modernity. This assumes he is taking his stand from within one of liberalisms strands, the conservative. Yet his argument could equally be made from the other side, from the progressive strand of liberalism. As Deneen points out, the objection that has arisen to the results of the last presidential election in the USA and the EU referendum in Britain is one that was made from within liberalism by certain of its exponents in the past. (And indeed, all ages are modern to the people who live in them).
At the same time, the author, if he wants to be consistent with the thrust of his argument, cannot describe as ‘deformations’ certain features of the establishment of liberalism as a currently-lived reality. He seems to fall into this as a way of drawing the reader’s attention to what he asserts to be the failure of liberalism. Just as the oak tree is in the acorn, so these features of liberalism as lived, were always present in its philosophical DNA. The animal that looked cute as a puppy has grown to be the species Rottweiler that is always was. Though muzzled and neutered, it is still the same. And it may share this fierce nature with its two rivals that are now defunct. The author reminds the reader of Mill’s utilitarian imperialist proposal for making productive those native peoples who were deemed by him to be inefficient.
It’s possible to feel when reading that Deneen doesn’t always quite fully articulate the observations or conclusions that his text begs. For example, liberal liberty of the self-actualised individual can only be guaranteed by the state, and to which end the state must and has become ever larger and ubiquitous. In the Bible, it is God who liberates and who confers material benefits on people. Now the Almighty God-State does this, and it does it far more thoroughly. (In Britain an MP has described the National Health Service (NHS) as the nearest thing the English have to a religion).
Although liberal liberty claims to enable people to make a free choice, there are examples, certainly from Britain, that a writer could have quoted to indicate that you can only choose what the liberal state allows: this necessarily ubiquitous entity will defend your right to agree with it. He suggests that if there is a post-liberal age it could be totalitarian. While he hints at its growing authoritarianism, he could equally have posited that totalitarianism is liberalisms self-perpetuating end state, rather than its decline. Deneen highlights many contradictions of liberalism in practice, but it sometimes feels as if he doesn’t always fire a full broadside.
Though the author alludes to the reasons for it, he doesn't express any surprise that millions of ordinary people who are neither philosophers nor radicals have so easily and so quickly abandoned their previous habits and affections. It was easy to change their sexual habits. Why?
Deneen concludes his book with a brief selection of thoughts and one important suggestion, considering how liberalism first began, as to what might be possible if there were to be an age that is post-liberal. One suggestion will surprise both liberals and conservatives if they assume the author is writing respectively either against or for their position.
Overall, the book could be enjoyed for the author’s concise formulations of what liberalism is in practice. These are almost Shakespearian in their economy of words. They also take on the character of indictments read out in a courtroom. Or they feel like the sword thrusts of a master swordsman, driving his blade into the deepest sinews of Leviathan.
But will the beast die? Can it die? To quote Sir Roger Scruton writing about one of liberalism’s rival ideologies, and referencing Deneen on page 5, has the software ‘ossified into hardware’? If it can die, what is it to take some of its scrimshaw in our knapsack as we set out, as the author suggests, to look for another place, another belonging, outside the city of destruction?
As the Israelites, liberated from the fleshpots of Egypt, wandered in the wilderness in search of the Promised Land, some hankered after the good things they had been left behind in the land of their former slavery.
Liberalism offers to crown your will with imperial rule. It offers to place the orb of the world in the left hand of your aspirations, and the sceptre of the power of unfettered freedom in the right hand of your appetites. Above all, it offers to lay on your shoulders the mantle of righteousness, that which is woven from the gold and silver threads of equality and diversity.
And the devil, taking him up into an high mountain, shewed unto him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time. And the devil said unto him, All this power will I give thee, and the glory of them: for that is delivered unto me; and to whomsoever I will I give it. If thou therefore wilt worship me, all shall be thine.


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Why Liberalism Failed Paperback – 14 May 2019
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Product details
- Publisher : *Yale University Press; 1st edition (14 May 2019)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 264 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0300240023
- ISBN-13 : 978-0300240023
- Dimensions : 20.83 x 13.97 x 2.29 cm
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Best Sellers Rank:
92,285 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- 440 in Political Conservatism & Liberalism
- 472 in 21st Century History
- 610 in Political Philosophy (Books)
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Review
"One of the most important political books of 2018." - Rod Dreher, American Conservative
"Deneen's book is valuable because it focuses on today's central issue. The important debates now are not about policy. They are about the basic values and structures of our social order." - David Brooks, New York Times
"Bracing. . . . Deneen comes as a Jeremiah to announce that Tocqueville's fear that liberalism would eventually dissolve all [its] inheritances . . . may now be fully upon us." - Ross Douthat, New York Times
"Mr. Deneen has written a serious book offering a radical critique of modernity, and he has taken the trouble to do so both concisely and engagingly. His insights as well as his crotchets in pursuit of his argument are often arresting. He writes compellingly on the growth of government in tandem with the spread of liberal market principles, for example, noting that a supposed preference for 'limited government' has been no match for the demand for expanding government enforcement of individual rights." - Tod Lindberg, Wall Street Journal
One of the most talked-about books of the moment. - Scott Reyburn, The New York Times
"Why Liberalism Failed offers cogent insights into the loss of meaning and community that many in the West feel, issues that liberal democracies ignore at their own peril." - President Barack Obama
"Few books challenge the core assumptions of modern liberalism as unapologetically as the suggestively titled Why Liberalism Failed by Patrick Deneen." - Shadi Hamid, TheAtlantic.com
Liberalism is clearly in everybody's sights, and Why Liberalism Failed will be an important contributor to the conversation, suggesting that we cannot work within the existing paradigm anymore. The philosophers will not solve our problems; working with our neighbors will. - Joshua Mitchell, Professor of Political Theory, Georgetown University
"Deneen writes with clarity, candor and superior scholarship to create one of the most absorbing political philosophy books of the past decade. No one who reads it, no one who considers its substance, will be able to think about the dynamics and the consequences of the American democratic experiment in quite the same way." - Archbishop Charles J. Chaput, author of Author of Strangers in a Strange Land
"This courageous and timely book is a major contribution to understanding the rude awakening in the Trump moment. It shows that we must transcend the death grip of the two oscillating poles of classical liberalism (of Republican and Democratic parties) and examine the deep assumptions that hold us captive. It also reveals that if we remain tied to liberalism's failure, more inequality, repression, and spiritual emptiness await us." - Cornel West, Professor of the Practice of Public Philosophy, Harvard
"Patrick Deneen is a probing and gifted cultural critic, afire with controlled moral passion. Why Liberalism Failed provides a bracing antidote to the pieties of left and right by showing how an impoverished, bipartisan conception of liberty has imprisoned the public life it claims to have set free. One could not ask for a timelier or more necessary enrichment of our depleted political discourse." - Jackson Lears, Board of Governors Distinguished Professor of History, Rutgers University
A path-breaking book, boldly argued and expressed in terms that might justifiably be called prophetic in character. - Wilfred M. McClay, G.T. and Libby Blankenship Chair in the History of Liberty, University of Oklahoma
About the Author
Patrick J. Deneen is Professor of Political Science and holds the David A. Potenziani Memorial College Chair of Constitutional Studies at the University of Notre Dame. His previous books include The Odyssey of Political Theory, Democratic Faith, and a number of edited volumes. He lives in South Bend, IN.
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Mooncarrot the Hare
4.0 out of 5 stars
Liberalism delivers on ALL its promises.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 28 April 2018Verified Purchase
26 people found this helpful
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John Fletcher
4.0 out of 5 stars
Needed to be written.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 29 May 2018Verified Purchase
After a generation or so in which Liberalism seemed untouchable, and even just a synonym for "good," its grimmer consequences are starting to be felt in the breakdown of social and economic systems around the world, and the passing of the discourse of tradition and collective action from the mainstream into the hands of so-called "extremists" and "populists." Yet for anyone vaguely familiar with the history of Liberalism, there is an obvious paradox: this is exactly what the doctrine was supposed to produce; the end of tradition and local and natural cultures and their replacement by interchangeable, androgynous economic and social actors trying to maximise their individual advantage. What do you mean you don't like it? It's a bit late to say that now.
So here is Patrick Deneen to give Liberalism a brutal and much deserved kicking. As he points out at the beginning, what we are actually seeing is not the failure of liberalism, but rather its success in fulfilling its objectives. And indeed by the time he has finished there is very little that is left standing. Such criticisms often have a strong ideological flavour but Deneen largely avoids imposing his personal opinions, and he shows, with great clarity, how social and economic liberalism are not opposites, but all part of the same grand scheme.
Some niggles. The book is very American, and effectively ignores the European Socialist tradition, which provides (an always did), an alternative and coherent ideology to Liberalism, which is why Liberals were always so bitterly opposed to Socialism. And it ends on a rather artificially upbeat note, suggesting that somehow Liberalism is capable off reform. But overall it's the kind of book that needed to be written, and I'm glad someone has.
So here is Patrick Deneen to give Liberalism a brutal and much deserved kicking. As he points out at the beginning, what we are actually seeing is not the failure of liberalism, but rather its success in fulfilling its objectives. And indeed by the time he has finished there is very little that is left standing. Such criticisms often have a strong ideological flavour but Deneen largely avoids imposing his personal opinions, and he shows, with great clarity, how social and economic liberalism are not opposites, but all part of the same grand scheme.
Some niggles. The book is very American, and effectively ignores the European Socialist tradition, which provides (an always did), an alternative and coherent ideology to Liberalism, which is why Liberals were always so bitterly opposed to Socialism. And it ends on a rather artificially upbeat note, suggesting that somehow Liberalism is capable off reform. But overall it's the kind of book that needed to be written, and I'm glad someone has.
14 people found this helpful
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David J Warden
3.0 out of 5 stars
Prophetic but a bit of a slog
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 23 December 2020Verified Purchase
This is quite a difficult read for a Brit. Heavy on American content (Madison, Tocqueville, the Amish and so on). I had to skim through a lot of it. But the basic message is prophetic and hard-hitting. Liberalism is an ideology in its death throes because it has failed to live up to its promises. It has created an overclass of entitled college-educated elites and a left-behind servant class condemned as racists and xenophobes. Populism (in its bad sense) is one of the pathological outcomes of liberalism. Liberalism has 'deracinated' and disembedded us (rootlessness, placelessness) and enslaved us to an 'orgy' of cultureless consumerism and disconnected loneliness. Deneen argues that fascism, Marxism, and liberalism are the three ideologies of modernity and that liberalism is the last one standing. I'm surprised that he doesn't explicitly mention conservativism as an alternative, given that he is of course conversant with Edmund Burke. In the UK, Roger Scruton wrote about this older conservative tradition and we have been talking about one-nation conservatism and 'blue Labour' as hybrid political responses which reject the pathologies of hyper-individualised liberalism (blue being the colour of conservatism in the UK). Nick Timothy and Paul Embery are two particularly good writers, along with David Goodhart and Matthew Goodwin. John Gray also wrote a good book about liberalism in 2000 which described its two faces: universalist liberalism (the bad type) and pluralist liberalism (the good type). Isaiah Berlin and Michael Oakeshott are also in this conservative philosophical tradition. So there's a rich tradition to draw on. We don't have to start from scratch.
One person found this helpful
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Catherine Welch
2.0 out of 5 stars
Have a dictionary handy, but don’t expect any ground-breaking revaluations or evidenced conclusions
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 2 February 2021Verified Purchase
I wrote a list of questions that came to mind from reading the Introduction and Chapter 1 that I hoped would be addressed later on, including ‘What is your definition of Liberalism?’ None of those questions come even close to being answered, but instead Deneb further diversifies his argument to include disparate philosophies, beliefs and consequences under an ever-widening banner of ‘liberalism’, with no clear effort to define what he means by the term. He claims that all the ills of conservatism and progressivism are due to a common undercurrent of ‘liberalism’ (which he fails to adequately define at any point), but his arguments are weak. He conflates features of human psychology and behaviour in general with political ideologies, and lazily lumps them under an umbrella banner of ‘liberalism’. He then cherry-picks historical, philosophical and idiological evidence to support his arguments.
There is a confusingly superfluous circumlocution to camouflage doublespeak (tongue-in-cheek to describe what I mean). In reality, he could have completed this work using half the words, within a more typical range of vocabulary. However, that would perhaps just uncover his biases and weak foundations to a wider audience, and lose the ‘Academic Mystique’ effect which conceals his failure to really justify the purpose of the book.
I really wouldn’t waste my time on this, unless it is to increase your vocabulary by looking up all the over-complicated words he uses, and perhaps explore the works of some better-known political philosophers.
There is a confusingly superfluous circumlocution to camouflage doublespeak (tongue-in-cheek to describe what I mean). In reality, he could have completed this work using half the words, within a more typical range of vocabulary. However, that would perhaps just uncover his biases and weak foundations to a wider audience, and lose the ‘Academic Mystique’ effect which conceals his failure to really justify the purpose of the book.
I really wouldn’t waste my time on this, unless it is to increase your vocabulary by looking up all the over-complicated words he uses, and perhaps explore the works of some better-known political philosophers.

Daniel LO
5.0 out of 5 stars
Groundbreaking. A bit complicated lenguaje though.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 8 April 2020Verified Purchase
I would say this is rather a ‘crucial’ reading to understand what is going on in the world today, specially in the political sphere.
I was debating whether give it 4 starts instead of 5 due to the slightly -and in my opinion unnecessary- complicated language. The author is a professor, nevertheless it would have made my reading more enjoyable if ‘simpler ’ words where used, and probably increase reach.
Regardless I loved the book and the thesis.
Recommended.
I was debating whether give it 4 starts instead of 5 due to the slightly -and in my opinion unnecessary- complicated language. The author is a professor, nevertheless it would have made my reading more enjoyable if ‘simpler ’ words where used, and probably increase reach.
Regardless I loved the book and the thesis.
Recommended.