In the past few years, liberalism, broadly understood, has found itself under attack by some smart and thoughtful traditionalists. Their charges are serious, and deserve to be carefully considered. But ultimately, they suffer from too thin a conception of just what liberalism is, and what the tradition that has grown up around it has offered us.
Patrick Deneen's 2018 book Why Liberalism Failed has served as a major focal point for this criticism. Deneen is a political theorist at the University of Notre Dame, and his book is a work of political theory, cultural criticism, and at times tough-minded polemic. It attempts to demonstrate why the early modern liberalism of Thomas Hobbes, Francis Bacon, and John Locke, among others, resulted in our deracinated culture, atomistic families, titanic inequality, and dysfunctional politics. Liberalism is failing not because it has been tried and found wanting, Deneen argues. Rather, liberalism's success is its undoing: "As liberalism has 'become more fully itself,' as its inner logic has become more evident and its self-contradictions manifest, it has generated pathologies that are at once deformations of its claims yet realizations of liberal ideology."
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