It was a Saturday night in May 2018 in Fox Hill, N.Y., and the Notre Dame political-science professor Patrick Deneen was talking about his garden. The occasion was a conference called “Beyond Liberalism,” organized around Deneen's unlikely bestseller, Why Liberalism Failed (Yale University Press, 2018). The setting was the mess hall of a “Bruderhof” intentional community, patterned on those established by Christian pacifists in the wake of World War I. Partly, Deneen talked about his garden because he had been on the road promoting his book and was looking forward to spending more time at home. But the garden was significant for other reasons. Every summer in his compost, Deneen said, he made something new out of something old. This was the essence of his ideal of “culture.” Culture was not, as many in liberal America assumed, about liberating ourselves from nature and convention. It consisted, rather, in “responsible stewardship.” Culture was “thick, inherited, and connected to a place,” Deneen said. “It renews itself like soil.”
The idea is central to Deneen's argument in Why Liberalism Failed, which announces America's failed — past tense — liberal tradition. For Deneen, “liberalism” refers not just to the political beliefs of self-identified liberals or progressives, but also to the broader, rights-based political philosophy that has guided both major political parties for most of American history. That philosophy, according to Deneen, depends on a flawed understanding of human nature. This understanding can be seen most clearly in the social contract theories of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, which take their cues from the image of the radically individualistic “state of nature” rather than the “thick” social soil of the garden. They thus prepare the way for today's liberal market and state, which work together to “emancipate” individuals from morality, tradition, and even biology. “Ironically, but perhaps not coincidentally,” Deneen writes, “the political project of liberalism is shaping us into the creatures of its prehistorical fantasy: increasingly separate, autonomous, nonrelational selves replete with rights and defined by our liberty, but insecure, powerless, afraid, and alone.”
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