Deneen Patrick J 2018 Why Liberalism Failed

W H Y L I B E R A L I S M FA I L E D
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Why Liberalism
Failed
PATRICK J. DENEEN
Foreword by James Davison Hunter and

John M. Owen IV
New Haven and London

Published with the assistance of the Institute for Advanced Studies in
Culture, University of Virginia.
Copyright © 2018 by Patrick J. Deneen.

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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To Inge
The gap between medieval Christianity’s ruling principle
and everyday life is the great pitfall of the Middle Ages. It is
the problem that runs through Gibbon’s history, which he
dealt with by a delicately malicious levity, pricking at every
turn what seemed to him the hypocrisy of the Christian ideal
as opposed to natural human functioning. . . .
Chivalry, the dominant idea of the ruling class, left as
great a gap between ideal and practice as religion. The ideal
was a vision of order maintained by the warrior class and
formulated in the image of the Round Table, nature’s perfect
shape. King Arthur’s knights adventured for the right against
dragons, enchanters, and wicked men, establishing order in a
wild world. So their living counterparts were supposed, in
theory, to serve as defenders of the Faith, upholders of
justice, champions of the oppressed. In practice, they were
themselves the oppressors, and by the 14th century the
violence and lawlessness of men of the sword had become a
major agency of disorder. When the gap between ideal and
real becomes too wide, the system breaks down. Legend and
story have always reflected this; in the Arthurian romances
the Round Table is shattered from within. The sword is
returned to the lake; the effort begins anew. Violent,
destructive, greedy, fallible as he may be, man retains his
vision of order and resumes his search.
—barbara t u c h m a n , A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous
14th Century
Contents
Foreword James Davison Hunter and John M. Owen IV ix
Preface xiii
Acknowledgments xvii
Introduction: The End of Liberalism 1
on e. Unsustainable Liberalism 21
two. Uniting Individualism and Statism 43
th ree. Liberalism as Anticulture 64
fo ur. Technology and the Loss of Liberty 91
fi ve. Liberalism against Liberal Arts 110
si x. The New Aristocracy 131
se ven . The Degradation of Citizenship 154
Conclusion: Liberty after Liberalism 179

C o nt e nt s
Notes 199
Bibliography 213
Index 221
viii
Foreword
The Yale University Press series Politics and Culture begins

with the premise that self-government, the hallmark and glory
of the United States, the West, and an expanding number of
countries around the world, is ailing. Those who sense the
ailment cannot agree on what it is, much less how it is to be
treated; and that disagreement, only deepening as time passes,
is in fact part of the ailment. In the young twenty-first century,
liberal democracy, that system that marries majority rule with
individual rights, has entered a crisis of legitimacy. As practiced
in recent decades, and as an international ordering principle,
it has failed to deliver on its promises to growing, and increas-
ingly mobilized and vocal, numbers of people.
The symptoms of this ailment are easy to observe: an
increasing skew in the distribution of wealth; decay in tradi-
tional institutions, from civic associations to labor unions to the
family; a loss of trust in authority—political, religious, scien
tific, journalistic—and among citizens themselves; growing
ix
Foreword
disillusionment with progress in effecting equal justice for all;

above all, perhaps, the persistent and widening polarization
between those who want increasingly open and experimental
societies and those who want to conserve various traditional
institutions and practices. The fragmentation not only contin-
ues but deepens. As people sort into new social and political
tribes, electoral results confound and alarm experts and further
widen polarization. W. B. Yeats’s line “the center cannot hold”
applies in our fractured societies as much as it did when he
wrote it a century ago. In the age of Trump, it is not even clear
where the center is or how we might rediscover and reoccupy it.
Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed, the second book
in this series, locates the source of the legitimacy crisis in
liberalism itself. By liberalism, Deneen has in mind not the
narrow definition of popular American discourse, namely
progressive big government or caring government (depend-
ing on your point of view). He means the broader concep-
tion familiar to political philosophers, the set of principles
upon which liberal democracies the world over are built. Why
Liberalism Failed pulls together a number of strands of dis-
content about liberalism today, strands found in academic,
political, and popular discourse. The result is a bold and far-
reaching critique of the root liberal assumption, associated
with the Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant, of indi-
vidual autonomy. We use the “root” metaphor deliberately:
Deneen’s is a radical critique, arguing that liberalism needs
not reform but retirement. The problem is not that liberalism
has been hijacked but that its elevation of individual autono-
my was wrong from the start, and the passage of decades has
only made its error more evident.
x
Foreword
Scholars have launched radical critiques of liberalism be-

fore. From the left have come broadsides from Marx and his
progeny, including the Frankfurt School, and from postmodern
thinkers such as Foucault. From the right have come attacks
from Nietzsche, Schmitt, and traditionalists in the Catholic
Church and other religious institutions. From a location diffi-
cult to pinpoint have come onslaughts from Milbank and Hau-
erwas. Such critiques inevitably provoke strong reactions from
other scholars and intellectuals. Radical critiques are designed
to do that—to disrupt the dominant discourse and challenge its
routine absorption and redirection of critique, so that people
will think more fundamentally about existing political, social,
and economic institutions and practices.
Readers of all sorts will find that Why Liberalism Failed
challenges not only their thinking but many of their most
cherished assumptions about politics and our political order.
Deneen’s book is disruptive not only for the way it links social
maladies to liberalism’s first principles, but also because it is
difficult to categorize along our conventional left-right spec-
trum. Much of what he writes will cheer social democrats and
anger free-market advocates; much else will hearten tradi-
tionalists and alienate social progressives. Some of these read-
ers nonetheless will be tempted to place the book in one or
another familiar category, the better to manage and perhaps
dismiss its critique. They should resist that temptation, which
is itself a symptom of our polarized times and perhaps the
chief reason why Deneen’s argument is precisely the kind we
most need to hear now.
James Davison Hunter
and John M. Owen IV, Series Editors
xi
Preface
This book was completed three weeks before the 2016 presi-
dential election. Its main arguments matured over the past
decade, before Brexit or President Trump was even conceiv-
able. My basic assumption was that the underpinnings of our
inherited civilized order—norms learned in families, in com-
munities, through religion and a supporting culture—would
inevitably erode under the influence of the liberal social
and political state. But I anticipated that liberalism would
relentlessly continue replacing traditional cultural norms and
practices with statist Band-Aids, even as a growing crisis of
legitimacy would force its proponents to impose liberal ideol-
ogy upon an increasingly recalcitrant populace. Liberalism
would thus simultaneously “prevail” and fail by becoming
more nakedly itself.
From that vantage, I hinted that such a political condition
was ultimately untenable, and that the likely popular reaction
to an increasingly oppressive liberal order might be forms of
xiii
P r e fac e
authoritarian illiberalism that would promise citizens power

over those forces that no longer seemed under their control:
government, economy, and the dissolution of social norms
and unsettled ways of life. For liberals, this would prove the
need for tighter enforcement of a liberal regime, but they
would be blind to how this crisis of legitimacy had been cre-
ated by liberalism itself. I did not suggest these conclusions
expecting to see such a dynamic come to pass in my lifetime,
and might have written a somewhat different book in light of
recent events. However, I believe my original analysis still
helps us understand the basic outlines of our moment, and
avoids the excessively narrow focus that can come from too
deep an immersion in headlines.
Today’s widespread yearning for a strong leader, one with
the will to take back popular control over liberalism’s forms of
bureaucratized government and globalized economy, comes
after decades of liberal dismantling of cultural norms and
political habits essential to self-governance. The breakdown
of family, community, and religious norms and institutions,
especially among those benefiting least from liberalism’s
advance, has not led liberalism’s discontents to seek a restora-
tion of those norms. That would take effort and sacrifice in a
culture that now diminishes the value of both. Rather, many
now look to deploy the statist powers of liberalism against its
own ruling class. Meanwhile, huge energies are spent in mass
protest rather than in self-legislation and deliberation, re-
flecting less a renewal of democratic governance than politi-
cal fury and despair. Liberalism created the conditions, and
the tools, for the ascent of its own worst nightmare, yet it
lacks the self-knowledge to understand its own culpability.
xiv
P r e fac e
While I end this volume by calling on political philoso-

phers for help in finding a way out of the vise in which we now
find ourselves—the mental grip of those revolutionary ideol-
ogies inaugurated in modernity first by liberalism itself—the
better course lies not in any political revolution but in the
patient encouragement of new forms of community that can
serve as havens in our depersonalized political and economic
order. As the Czech dissident Václav Havel wrote in “The
Power of the Powerless”: “A better system will not automati-
cally ensure a better life. In fact, the opposite is true: only by
creating a better life can a better system be developed.”1 Only
a politics grounded in the experience of a polis—lives shared
with a sense of common purpose, with obligations and grati-
tude arising from sorrows, hopes, and joys lived in genera-
tional time, and with the cultivation of capacities of trust and
faith—can begin to take the place of our era’s distrust, es-
trangement, hostility, and hatreds. As my teacher and friend
Carey McWilliams wrote at the conclusion of one of his most
penetrating essays, “strengthening [our shared] democratic
life is a difficult, even daunting, task requiring sacrifice and
patience more than dazzling exploits.”2 Sacrifice and patience
are not the hallmarks of the age of statist individualism. But
they will be needed in abundance for us to usher in a better,
doubtless very different, time after liberalism.
xv
Acknowledgments
This short book was written in a brief span—after several dec-

ades of reflection. My debts are therefore many, and in some
cases the acknowledgment of my gratitude is long overdue.
The unpayable debts to the late Wilson Carey McWilliams,
my friend and teacher, should be everywhere in evidence on
these pages. He would have written a much better book on
the travails of liberalism, but I would trade such a book for
just one more conversation on the state of the world between
sips of bourbon and laughter.
The first ideas of this book were conceived at Rutgers and
Princeton, and I am thankful for generous interlocutors like
George Kateb, Robert P. George, and the late Paul Sigmund.
I am grateful to the James Madison Program in American
Ideals and Institutions, and its associate director Brad Wilson,
for a timely fellowship during 2008–9.
Many of these ideas matured during my years at George-
town University. I am indebted to Joshua Mitchell, Father
xvii
A c k n o w l e d g m e nt s
James V. Schall, S.J., Father Stephen Fields, S.J., and two de-
parted friends, Jean Bethke Elshtain and George Carey. I
most gratefully acknowledge the friendship and support of
Bill Mumma. I remain in awe of the many students who to-
gether made the Tocqueville Forum so special during its most
glorious years.
At Notre Dame, our lives have been suffused with sustain-
ing friendships. My gratitude to Phillip Muñoz, Susan Collins,
John O’Callaghan, Sean and Christel Kelsey, Dave O’Connor,
Philip Bess, John and Alicia Nagy, Francesca Murphy, John
Betz, John Cavadini, Gerard Bradley, Rick and Nicole Gar-
nett, Jeff Pojanowski, Martijn Cremers, Father Bill Miscam-
ble, David Solomon, Carter Snead, Gladden Pappin, Dan
Philpott, Mike Griffin, Anna and Michael Moreland, and Brad
Gregory. I gratefully acknowledge the generosity of two vital
programs at the University of Notre Dame, the Center for
Ethics and Culture and the Tocqueville Program for Inquiry
into Religion and Public Life, both which supported comple-
tion of this book. My thanks also to Mimi Teixeira, who as-
sisted with preparation of the manuscript.
More friends than I can possibly acknowledge have helped
me in countless ways, and I hope you find fruits of our conver-
sations here, along with my deepest gratitude. My thanks to
Chad Pecknold, Francis X. Maier, Rod Dreher, Bill McClay,
Jeremy Beer (who suggested a version of the title), Mark
Henrie, Jason Peters, Jeff Polet, Mark Mitchell, Brad Birzer,
Phillip Blond, Cindy Searcy, Dan Mahoney, John Seery,
Susan McWilliams, Brad Klingele, and Michael Hanby. I am
grateful to Rusty Reno, David Mills, Dan McCarthy, John
Leo, and Scott Stephens for publishing several early versions
xviii
A c k n o w l e d g m e nt s
of parts of these chapters. I especially thank Steve Wrinn for

his wise counsel and friendship over so many years.
I’m grateful to the Institute for the Advanced Studies on
Culture at the University of Virginia, particularly James Dav-
ison Hunter and John Owen IV, who expressed early interest
in this project. My thanks to Bill Frucht, who urged me to
write short and so gamely championed the book at Yale Uni-
versity Press.
Shortly before the book went to press, two friends of long
standing passed away, Benjamin Barber and Peter Lawler.
I would that my teacher Ben and my valued interlocutor and
friend Peter might have been able to read some fruits of our
many conversations and debates. Their voices and ideas are
here, and remain too in the many lives they touched. But still,
I miss them both.
To my wife, Inge, and our children Francis, Adrian, and
Alexandra, my heart is full and words fail.
And because so many years have passed since the intima-
tions of this project began whispering to me, doubtless there
are many owed my thanks whom I haven’t named here. You
know who you are. My deepest and abiding gratitude.
xix
W H Y L I B E R A L I S M FA I L E D
Introduction: The End of Liberalism
A
political philosophy conceived some
500 years ago, and put into effect at
the birth of the United States nearly
250 years later, was a wager that politi-
cal society could be grounded on a dif-
ferent footing. It conceived humans as
rights-bearing individuals who could
fashion and pursue for themselves their own version of the
good life. Opportunities for liberty were best afforded by a
limited government devoted to “securing rights,” along with
a free-market economic system that gave space for individual
initiative and ambition. Political legitimacy was grounded on
a shared belief in an originating “social contract” to which
even newcomers could subscribe, ratified continuously by
free and fair elections of responsive representatives. Limited
but effective government, rule of law, an independent judici-
ary, responsive public officials, and free and fair elections
1
I nt r o d u cti o n
were some of the hallmarks of this ascendant order and, by all

evidence, wildly successful wager.
Today, some 70 percent of Americans believe that their
country is moving in the wrong direction, and half the coun-
try thinks its best days are behind it. Most believe that their
children will be less prosperous and have fewer opportunities
than previous generations. Every institution of government
shows declining levels of public trust by the citizenry, and
deep cynicism toward politics is reflected in an uprising on all
sides of the political spectrum against political and economic
elites. Elections, once regarded as well-orchestrated perform-
ances meant to convey legitimacy to liberal democracy, are
increasingly regarded as evidence of an impregnably rigged
and corrupt system. It is evident to all that the political system
is broken and social fabric is fraying, particularly as a growing
gap increases between wealthy haves and left-behind have-
nots, a hostile divide widens between faithful and secular peo-
ples, and deep disagreement persists over America’s role in
the world. Wealthy Americans continue to gravitate to gated
enclaves in and around select cities, while growing numbers
of Christians compare our times to that of the late Roman
Empire and ponder a fundamental withdrawal from wider
American society into updated forms of Benedictine monastic
communities. The signs of the times suggest that much is
wrong with America. A growing chorus of voices even warn
that we may be witnessing the end of the Republic unfolding
before our eyes, with some yet-unnamed regime in the midst
of taking its place.
Nearly every one of the promises that were made by the
architects and creators of liberalism has been shattered. The
2
liberal state expands to control nearly every aspect of life

while citizens regard government as a distant and uncontrol-
lable power, one that only extends their sense of powerless-
ness by relentlessly advancing the project of “globalization.”
The only rights that seem secure today belong to those with
sufficient wealth and position to protect them, and their au-
tonomy—including rights of property, the franchise and its
concomitant control over representative institutions, reli-
gious liberty, free speech, and security in one’s papers and
abode—is increasingly compromised by legal intent or tech-
nological fait accompli. The economy favors a new “meritoc-
racy” that perpetuates its advantages through generational
succession, shored up by an educational system that relent-
lessly sifts winners from losers. A growing distance between
liberalism’s claims and its actuality increasingly spurs doubts
about those claims rather than engendering trust that the gap
will be narrowed.
Liberalism has failed—not because it fell short, but be-
cause it was true to itself. It has failed because it has succeed-
ed. 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 defor-
mations of its claims yet realizations of liberal ideology. A
political philosophy that was launched to foster greater equi-
ty, defend a pluralist tapestry of different cultures and beliefs,
protect human dignity, and, of course, expand liberty, in prac-
tice generates titanic inequality, enforces uniformity and ho-
mogeneity, fosters material and spiritual degradation, and
undermines freedom. Its success can be measured by its
achievement of the opposite of what we have believed it would
3
achieve. Rather than seeing the accumulating catastrophe as

evidence of our failure to live up to liberalism’s ideals, we
need rather to see clearly that the ruins it has produced are
the signs of its very success. To call for the cures of liberalism’s
ills by applying more liberal measures is tantamount to throw-
ing gas on a raging fire. It will only deepen our political, so-
cial, economic, and moral crisis.
This may be a moment for more than mere institutional tink-

ering. If indeed something more fundamental and trans-
formative than “normal politics” is happening, then we are in
the midst not just of a political realignment, characterized by
the dying gasp of an old white working class and the lashing
out of debt-burdened youth. We may rather be witnessing an
increasingly systemic failure, due to the bankruptcy of its un-
derlying political philosophy, of the political system we have
largely taken for granted. The fabric of beliefs that gave rise
to the nearly 250-year-old American constitutional experi-
ment may be nearing an end. While a number of our Found-
ing Fathers believed that they had lighted on a “new science
of politics” that would resist the inevitable tendency of all re-
gimes to decay and eventually die—even comparing the con-
stitutional order to an entropy-defying perpetual motion de-
vice, “a machine that would go of itself”—we should rightly
wonder whether America is not in the early days of its eternal
life but rather approaching the end of the natural cycle of
corruption and decay that limits the lifespan of all human
creations.
This political philosophy has been for modern Americans
like water for a fish, an encompassing political ecosystem in
4
which we have swum, unaware of its existence. Liberalism is

the first of the modern world’s three great competitor political
ideologies, and with the demise of fascism and communism, it
is the only ideology still with a claim to viability. As ideology,
liberalism was the first political architecture that proposed
transforming all aspects of human life to conform to a precon-
ceived political plan. We live in a society and increasingly a
world that has been remade in the image of an ideology—the
first nation founded by the explicit embrace of liberal philoso-
phy, whose citizenry is shaped almost entirely by its commit-
ments and vision.
But unlike the visibly authoritarian regimes that arose
in dedication to advancing the ideologies of fascism and
communism, liberalism is less visibly ideological and only
surreptitiously remakes the world in its image. In contrast to
its crueler competitor ideologies, liberalism is more insidious:
as an ideology, it pretends to neutrality, claiming no prefer-
ence and denying any intention of shaping the souls under its
rule. It ingratiates by invitation to the easy liberties, diver-
sions, and attractions of freedom, pleasure, and wealth. It
makes itself invisible, much as a computer’s operating system
goes largely unseen—until it crashes. Liberalism becomes
daily more visible precisely because its deformations are
becoming too obvious to ignore. As Socrates tells us in Plato’s
Republic, most humans in most times and places occupy a cave,
believing it to be a complete reality. What’s most insidious
about the cave that we occupy is that its walls are like the
backdrops of old movie sets, promising seemingly endless vis-
tas without constraints or limits, and thus our containment
remains invisible to us.
5
Among the few iron laws of politics, few seem more un-
breakable than the ultimate unsustainability of ideology in
politics. Ideology fails for two reasons—first, because it is based
on falsehood about human nature, and hence can’t help but
fail; and second, because as those falsehoods become more
evident, the gap grows between what the ideology claims and
the lived experience of human beings under its domain until
the regime loses legitimacy. Either it enforces conformity to a
lie it struggles to defend, or it collapses when the gap between
claim and reality finally results in wholesale loss of belief among
the populace. More often than not, one precedes the other.
Thus, even as liberalism has penetrated nearly every na-
tion on earth, its vision of human liberty seems increasingly
to be a taunt rather than a promise. Far from celebrating the
utopic freedom at the “end of history” that seemed within
grasp when the last competing ideology fell in 1989, human-
ity comprehensively shaped by liberalism is today burdened
by the miseries of its successes. It pervasively finds itself to be
caught in a trap of its own making, entangled in the very ap-
paratus that was supposed to grant pure and unmitigated free-
dom.
We can see this today especially in four distinct but con-
nected areas of our common life: politics and government,
economics, education, and science and technology. In each of
these domains, liberalism has transformed human institutions
in the name of expanding liberty and increasing our mastery
and control of our fates. And in each case, widespread anger
and deepening discontent have arisen from the spreading re-
alization that the vehicles of our liberation have become iron
cages of our captivity.
6
politics
Citizens of advanced liberal democracies are in near revolt

against their own governments, the “establishment,” and the
politicians they have themselves selected as their leaders and
representatives. Overwhelming majorities regard their gov-
ernments as distant and unresponsive, captured by the
wealthy, and ruling solely for the advantage of the powerful.
At its inception, liberalism promised to displace an old aris-
tocracy in the name of liberty; yet as it eliminates every ves-
tige of an old order, the heirs of their hopeful antiaristocratic
forebears regard its replacement as a new, perhaps even more
pernicious, kind of aristocracy.
Liberalism was premised upon the limitation of govern-
ment and the liberation of the individual from arbitrary po-
litical control. But growing numbers of citizens regard the
government as an entity separate from their own will and
control, not their creature and creation as promised by liberal
philosophy. The “limited government” of liberalism today
would provoke jealousy and amazement from tyrants of old,
who could only dream of such extensive capacities for surveil-
lance and control of movement, finances, and even deeds and
thoughts. The liberties that liberalism was brought into being
to protect—individual rights of conscience, religion, associa-
tion, speech, and self-governance—are extensively compro-
mised by the expansion of government activity into every area
of life. Yet this expansion continues, largely as a response to
people’s felt loss of power over the trajectory of their lives in
so many distinct spheres—economic and otherwise—leading
to demands for further intervention by the one entity even
7
nominally under their control. Our government readily com-

plies, moving like a ratchet wrench, always in one direction,
enlarging and expanding in response to civic grievances, iron-
ically leading in turn to citizens’ further experience of dis-
tance and powerlessness.
Citizens thus feel only tenuously connected to political
representatives whose work was to “refine and enlarge” the
public sentiment. Representatives in turn express their relative
powerlessness in relation to a permanent bureaucracy staffed
by career employees whose incentive is to maintain or enlarge
their budgets and activity. More power accrues to the execu-
tive branch, which nominally controls the bureaucracy and
through administrative rules can at least provide the appear-
ance of responsiveness to a restive polity. Political rule by an
increasingly unpopular legislature that theoretically derives its
legitimacy from the people is replaced with commands and
mandates of an executive whose office is achieved by massive
influxes of lucre.1 Liberalism claimed to replace arbitrary rule
by distant and popularly unchosen leaders with responsive rule
through elected public servants. Our electoral process today,
however, appears more to be a Potemkin drama meant to con-
vey the appearance of popular consent for a figure who will
exercise incomparable arbitrary powers over domestic policy,
international arrangements, and, especially, war-making.
Such a keenly felt distance and lack of control is not a
condition to be solved by a better and more perfect liberal-
ism—rather, this crisis of governance is the culmination of
the liberal order. Liberalism proposed that occasional consent
would suffice for the elevation of a leadership class composed
of those of “fit characters”—namely those, in the incompara-
8
ble words of Alexander Hamilton, concerned with “com-

merce, finance, negotiation and war, all the objects which
have charms for minds governed by that passion.” The sys-
tem’s architects intended to encourage a focus on private con-
cerns among the citizenry—a res idiotica that they called a “re-
public.” If there is difficulty “keeping it,” a republic cannot
survive in the absence of “public things.” The belief that lib-
eralism could achieve modus vivendi by encouraging privatism
has culminated in the nearly complete disassociation of the
governing class and a citizenry without a cives.
economics
Civic unhappiness is mirrored in economic discontent. Citi-

zens are more likely to be called “consumers,” yet the liberty
to buy every imaginable consumer good does little to assuage
the widespread economic anxiety and discontent over waxing
inequality—indeed, the assumption by economic leaders
seems to be that increased purchasing power of cheap goods
will compensate for the absence of economic security and the
division of the world into generational winners and losers.
There has always been, and probably always will be, econom-
ic inequality, but few civilizations appear to have so exten-
sively perfected the separation of winners from losers or cre-
ated such a massive apparatus to winnow those who will
succeed from those who will fail. Marx once argued that the
greatest source of economic discontent was not necessarily
inequality but alienation—the separation of worker from
product and the attendant loss of any connection with the
goal and object of one’s efforts. Today’s economy not only
9
maintains and extends this alienation but adds a profound

new form of geographic alienation, the physical separation of
beneficiaries of the globalized economy from those left
behind. This leads the economic winners to combine lamen-
tations of economic inequality with sotto voce denunciations
of the backward views of those who condemn globalization’s
course. The losers, meanwhile, are consoled with the reminder
that they are wealthy beyond compare to even the wealthiest
aristocrats of an earlier age. Material comforts are a ready salve
for the discontents of the soul.
As the reactions in the urban centers to the outcome of
the Brexit vote and the election of Donald J. Trump evince,
those same leaders are shocked that the terms of the social
contract appear not to be acceptable to Walmart shoppers.
Still, nothing can finally be done, for globalization is an inevi-
table process, unstoppable by any individual or nation. What-
ever one thinks of economic integration, standardization,
and homogenization, it is pointless to entertain thoughts of
alternatives. One of globalization’s cheerleaders, Thomas
Friedman, has defined it in just such terms of inevitability:
It is the inevitable integration of markets, nation-states and
technologies to a degree never witnessed before—in a way
that is enabling individuals, corporations and nation-states to
reach around the world farther, faster, deeper and cheaper
than ever before and in a way that is enabling the world to
reach into individuals, corporations and nation-states farther,
faster, deeper, cheaper than ever before.2
Whether people want the world “reaching into” individuals,

corporations, and nation states is not a matter for discussion,
for the process cannot be stopped. The economic system that
10
simultaneously is both liberalism’s handmaiden and its en-

gine, like a Frankenstein monster, takes on a life of its own,
and its processes and logic can no longer be controlled by
people purportedly enjoying the greatest freedom in history.
The wages of freedom are bondage to economic inevitability.
education
The rising generation is indoctrinated to embrace an econom-

ic and political system they distinctly fear, filling them with
cynicism toward their future and their participation in main-
taining an order they cannot avoid but which they neither be-
lieve in nor trust. Far from feeling themselves to constitute the
most liberated and autonomous generation in history, young
adults believe less in their task at hand than Sisyphus rolling
the boulder up the mountainside. They accede in the duties
demanded of them by their elders, but without joy or love—
only with a keen sense of having no other choice. Their over-
whelming response to their lot—expressed in countless com-
ments they have offered to me over the years describing their
experience and expectations of their own education—is one of
entrapment and “no exit,” of being cynical participants in a
system that ruthlessly produces winners and losers even as it
demands that they understand this system to be a vehicle of
“social justice.” One can hardly be surprised that even the
“winners” admit during frank moments that they are both
swindlers and swindled. As one student described the lot of
her generation to me:
We are meritocrats out of a survivalist instinct. If we do not
race to the very top, the only remaining option is a bottomless
11
pit of failure. To simply work hard and get decent grades

doesn’t cut it anymore if you believe there are only two options:
the very top or rock bottom. It is a classic prisoner’s dilemma:
to sit around for 2–3 hours at the dining hall “shooting the
breeze,” or to spend time engaged in intellectual conversation
in moral and philosophical issues, or to go on a date all detract
from time we could be spending on getting to the top and, thus,
will leave us worse off relative to everyone else. . . . Because we
view humanity—and thus its institutions—as corrupt and self-
ish, the only person we can rely upon is our self. The only way
we can avoid failure, being let down, and ultimately succumb-
ing to the chaotic world around us, therefore, is to have the
means (financial security) to rely only upon ourselves.3
Advanced liberalism is eliminating liberal education with

keen intent and ferocity, finding it impractical both ideologi-
cally and economically. Students are taught by most of their
humanities and social science professors that the only remain-
ing political matter at hand is to equalize respect and dignity
accorded to all people, even as those institutions are mills for
sifting the economically viable from those who will be mocked
for their backward views on trade, immigration, nationhood,
and religious beliefs. The near unanimity of political views rep-
resented on college campuses is echoed by the omnipresent
belief that an education must be economically practical, culmi-
nating in a high-paying job in a city populated by like-minded
college graduates who will continue to reinforce their keen
outrage over inequality while enjoying its bounteous fruits.
Universities scramble to provide practical “learning outcomes,”
either by introducing a raft of new programs aimed to make
students immediately employable or by rebranding and reori-
enting existing studies to tout their economic relevance. There
is simply no choice to do otherwise in a globalizing, economi-
12
cally competitive world. Few remark upon the fact that this
locution becomes ever more common in advanced liberalism,
the regime that was supposed to ensure endless free choice.
At the moment of liberalism’s culmination, then, we see
the headlong evacuation of the liberal arts. The liberal arts
were long understood to be the essential form of education for
a free people, especially citizens who aspired to self-
government. The emphasis on the great texts—which were
great not only or even because they were old but because they
contained hard-won lessons on how humans learn to be free,
especially free from the tyranny of their insatiable desires—
has been jettisoned in favor of what was once considered “ser-
vile education,” an education concerned exclusively with mon-
ey making and a life of work, and hence reserved for those who
did not enjoy the title of “citizen.” Today’s liberals condemn a
regime that once separated freeman from serf, master from
slave, citizen from servant, but even as we have ascended to the
summit of moral superiority over our benighted forebears by
proclaiming everyone free, we have almost exclusively adopt-
ed the educational form that was reserved for those who were
deprived of freedom. And yet in the midst of our glorious free-
dom, we don’t think to ask why we no longer have the luxury
of an education whose very name—liberal arts—indicates its
fundamental support for the cultivation of the free person.
science and technology
Today’s students are especially encouraged to study a discipline

that is useful, particularly those related to STEM—science,
technology, engineering, and mathematics. Liberalism’s tools
13
for liberating humanity from various forms of bondage were

especially to be achieved through transformations in politics,
namely the representative system that today seems out of our
control; economics, particularly market capitalism, whose glo-
balizing logic cannot be resisted; and science and technology,
arguably the greatest source of our liberation and simultane-
ously the reason for our imperiled environment, the deforma-
tions wrought by our own technologies on our personhood,
and deep anxiety over our inability to control our own innova-
tions. The modern scientific project of human liberation from
the tyranny of nature has been framed as an effort to “master”
or “control” nature, or as a “war” against nature in which its
study would provide the tools for its subjugation at the hands
of humans. Francis Bacon—who rejected classical arguments
that learning aimed at the virtues of wisdom, prudence, and
justice, arguing instead that “knowledge is power”—compared
nature to a prisoner who, under torture, might be compelled
to reveal her long-withheld secrets.
Even if we do not speak in these terms any more, the
modern scientific project now dominates what we regard as
useful and rewarding inquiry. Yet nature seems not to have
surrendered. As the farmer and author Wendell Berry has
written, if modern science and technology were conceived as
a “war against nature,” then “it is a war in every sense—nature
is fighting us as much as we are fighting it. And . . . it appears
that we are losing.”4 Many elements of what we today call our
environmental crisis—climate change, resource depletion,
groundwater contamination and scarcity, species extinction—
are signs of battles won but a war being lost. Today we are
accustomed to arguing that we should follow the science in an
14
issue such as climate change, ignoring that our crisis is the

result of long-standing triumphs of science and technology in
which “following science” was tantamount to civilizational
progress. Our carbon-saturated world is the hangover of a
150-year party in which, until the very end, we believed we
had achieved the dream of liberation from nature’s con-
straints. We still hold the incoherent view that science can
liberate us from limits while solving the attendant conse-
quences of that project.
Meanwhile, we are increasingly shaped by technology
that promises liberation from limits of place, time, and even
identity. The computer in every person’s pocket has been
shown to change the structure of our minds, turning us into
different creatures, conforming us to the demands and nature
of a technology that is supposed to allow expression of our
true selves.5 How many of us can sit for an hour reading a
book or simply thinking or meditating without an addict’s
longing for just a hit of the cell phone, that craving that won’t
allow us to think or concentrate or reflect until we’ve had our
hit? This same technology that is supposed to connect us
more extensively and intimately is making us more lonely,
more apart.6 Devices increasingly replace humans in the
workplace, apparently granting us liberty but making us our
technology’s ward and helpmeet. And advances in the manip-
ulation of nature inevitably raise the possibility of remaking
humanity itself, potentially pitting Humanity 2.0 against
those who refuse or can’t afford to shuck version 1.0.7
What is supposed to allow us to transform our world is
instead transforming us, making us into creatures to which
many, if not most of us, have not given our “consent.” It is
15
making us ever more into the creatures that liberalism sup-

posed was our nature in that “state of nature” that existed
before the coming of civilization, law, and government. Iron-
ically, but perhaps not coincidentally, the political project
of liberalism is shaping us into the creatures of its prehistori-
cal fantasy, which in fact required the combined massive
apparatus of the modern state, economy, education system,
and science and technology to make us into: increasingly
separate, autonomous, nonrelational selves replete with rights
and defined by our liberty, but insecure, powerless, afraid,
and alone.
Liberalism’s success today is most visible in the gathering

signs of its failure. It has remade the world in its image, espe-
cially through the realms of politics, economics, education,
science, and technology, all aimed at achieving supreme and
complete freedom through the liberation of the individual
from particular places, relationships, memberships, and even
identities—unless they have been chosen, are worn lightly,
and can be revised or abandoned at will. The autonomous self
is thus subject to the sovereign trajectory of the very forces
today that are embraced as the tools of our liberation. Yet our
liberation renders us incapable of resisting these defining
forces—the promise of freedom results in thralldom to inevi-
tabilities to which we have no choice but to submit.
These tools were deployed to liberate individuals from
the “givenness” of their condition, especially through “deper-
sonalization” and “abstraction,” liberalism’s vision of liberty
from particular duties, obligations, debts, and relationships.
These ends have been achieved through the depersonaliza-
16
tion and abstraction advanced via two main entities—the state

and the market. Yet while they have worked together in a pin-
cer movement to render us ever more naked as individuals,
our political debates mask this alliance by claiming that alle-
giance to one of these forces will save us from the depreda-
tions of the other. 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 re-
main insufficiently addressed by the market.
Thus the insistent demand that we choose between pro-
tection of individual liberty and expansion of state activity
masks the true relation between the state and market: that
they grow constantly and necessarily together. Statism ena-
bles individualism, individualism demands statism. For all the
claims about electoral transformations—for “Hope and
Change” or “Making America Great Again”—two facts are
naggingly apparent: modern liberalism proceeds by making
us both more individualist and more statist. This is not be-
cause one party advances individualism without cutting back
on statism while the other does the opposite; rather, both
move simultaneously in tune with our deepest philosophic
premises.
Claiming to liberate the individual from embedded cul-
tures, traditions, places, and relationships, liberalism has ho-
mogenized the world in its image—ironically, often fueled by
17
claims of “multiculturalism” or, today, “diversity.” Having

successfully disembedded us from relationships that once
made claims upon us but also informed our conception of
selfhood, our sense of ourselves as citizens sharing a common
fate and as economic actors sharing a common world, liberal-
ism has left the individual exposed to the tools of liberation—
leaving us in a weakened state in which the domains of
life that were supposed to liberate us are completely beyond
our control or governance. This suggests that all along, the
individual was the “tool” of the liberal system, not—as was
believed—vice versa.
The most challenging step we must take is a rejection of the

belief that the ailments of liberal society can be fixed by real-
izing liberalism. The only path to liberation from the inevita-
bilities and ungovernable forces that liberalism imposes is
liberation from liberalism itself. Both main political options
of our age must be understood as different sides of the same
counterfeit coin. Neither Progressivism’s faith that liberalism
will be realized when we move forward toward the realization
of liberalism’s promise nor Conservatism’s tale that American
greatness will be restored when we reclaim the governing
philosophy of our Constitution offers any real alternative to
liberalism’s advance.
The past can instruct, but there can be no return and no
“restoration.” Liberalism has ruthlessly drawn down a reser-
voir of both material and moral resources that it cannot re-
plenish. Its successes were always blank checks written against
a future it trusted it could repair. Conservatism rightly ob-
serves that progressivism’s destination is a dead end, and pro-
18
gressivism rightly decries conservatism’s nostalgia for a time

that cannot be restored. Conservatives and progressives alike
have advanced liberalism’s project, and neither as constituted
today can provide the new way forward that must be dis-
cerned outside our rutted path.
Nor does reflecting upon what follows liberalism’s self-
destruction imply that we must simply devise its opposite, or
deny what was of great and enduring value in the achieve-
ments of liberalism. Liberalism’s appeal lies in its continuities
with the deepest commitments of the Western political tradi-
tion, particularly efforts to secure liberty and human dignity
through the constraint of tyranny, arbitrary rule, and oppres-
sion. In this regard, liberalism is rightly considered to be
based on essential political commitments that were developed
over centuries in classical and Christian thought and practice.
Yet liberalism’s innovations—ones that its architects believed
would more firmly secure human liberty and dignity—which
consisted especially of a redefinition of the ideal of liberty and
a reconception of human nature, have undermined the reali-
zation of its stated commitments. Moving beyond liberalism
is not to discard some of liberalism’s main commitments—
especially those deepest longings of the West, political liberty
and human dignity—but to reject the false turn it made in its
imposition of an ideological remaking of the world in the
image of a false anthropology.
A rejection of the world’s first and last remaining ideology
does not entail its replacement with a new and doubtless not
very different ideology. Political revolution to overturn a rev-
olutionary order would produce only disorder and misery. A
better course will consist in smaller, local forms of resistance:
19
practices more than theories, the building of resilient new

cultures against the anticulture of liberalism.
When Alexis de Tocqueville visited America in the early
decades of the nineteenth century, he observed that Americans
tended to act differently from and better than their individu-
alistic and selfish ideology. “They do more honor to their
philosophy than to themselves,” he wrote. What’s needed
now is not to perfect our philosophy any further but to again
do more honor to ourselves. Out of the fostering of new and
better selves, porously invested in the fate of other selves—
through the cultivation of cultures of community, care, self-
sacrifice, and small-scale democracy—a better practice might
arise, and from it, ultimately, perhaps a better theory than the
failing project of liberalism.
20
CHAPTER ONE
Unsustainable Liberalism
T
h e deepest commitment of liberal-
ism is expressed by the name itself:
liberty. Liberalism has proven both
attractive and resilient because of
this core commitment to the long-
ing for human freedom so deeply
embedded in the human soul. Liber-
alism’s historical rise and global attraction are hardly acciden-
tal; it has appealed especially to people subject to arbitrary
rule, unjust inequality, and pervasive poverty. No other po-
litical philosophy had proven in practice that it could fuel
prosperity, provide relative political stability, and foster indi-
vidual liberty with such regularity and predictability. There
were plausible grounds why, in 1989, Francis Fukuyama could
declare that the long debate over ideal regimes had ended,
and that liberalism was the end station of History.
Liberalism did not, of course, discover or invent the hu-
man longing for liberty: the word libertas is of ancient origin,
21
Un s u s taina b l e L i b e r ali s m
and its defense and realization have been a primary goal from
the first forays into political philosophy in ancient Greece and
Rome. The foundational texts of the Western political tradi-
tion focused especially on the question how to constrain the
impulse to and assertions of tyranny, and characteristically
settled upon the cultivation of virtue and self-rule as the key
correctives to the tyrannical temptation. The Greeks espe-
cially regarded self-government as a continuity from the indi-
vidual to the polity, with the realization of either only possible
if the virtues of temperance, wisdom, moderation, and justice
were to be mutually sustained and fostered. Self-governance
in the city was possible only if the virtue of self-governance
governed the souls of citizens; and self-governance of
individuals could be realized only in a city that understood
that citizenship itself was a kind of ongoing habituation in
virtue, through both law and custom. Greek philosophy
stressed paideia, or education in virtue, as a primary path to
forestalling the establishment of tyranny and protecting lib-
erty of citizens, yet these conclusions coexisted (if at times at
least uneasily) with justifications of inequality exemplified not
only in calls for rule by a wise ruler of a class of rulers, but in
the pervasiveness of slavery.
The Roman and then medieval Christian philosophical
traditions retained the Greek emphasis upon the cultivation
of virtue as a central defense against tyranny, but also devel-
oped institutional forms that sought to check the power of
leaders while (to varying degrees) opening routes to informal
and sometimes formal expression of popular opinion in po-
litical rule. Many of the institutional forms of government
that we today associate with liberalism were at least initially
22
conceived and developed over long centuries preceding the

modern age, including constitutionalism, separation of pow-
ers, separate spheres of church and state, rights and protec-
tions against arbitrary rule, federalism, rule of law, and limited
government.1 Protection of rights of individuals and the belief
in inviolable human dignity, if not always consistently recog-
nized and practiced, were nevertheless philosophical achieve-
ments of premodern medieval Europe. Some scholars regard
liberalism simply as the natural development, and indeed the
culmination, of protoliberal thinking and achievements of
this long period of development, and not as any sort of radical
break from premodernity.2
While this claim is worthy of respectful consideration,
given readily evident continuities, nevertheless contesting
claims that a significant break occurred between modernity and
premodernity—specifically that a novel political philosophy
arose in distinction to premodern forebears—has considerable
warrant. Indeed, the very institutional and even semantic con-
tinuities between classical and Christian premodernity and the
modern period that eventuates in the rise of liberalism can be
deceptive. The achievement of liberalism was not simply a
wholesale rejection of its precedents, but in many cases attained
its ends by redefining shared words and concepts and, through
that redefinition, colonizing existing institutions with funda-
mentally different anthropological assumptions.
Liberty was fundamentally reconceived, even if the word
was retained. Liberty had long been believed to be the condi-
tion of self-rule that forestalled tyranny, within both the
polity and the individual soul. Liberty was thus thought to in-
volve discipline and training in self-limitation of desires, and
23
corresponding social and political arrangements that sought to

inculcate corresponding virtues that fostered the arts of self-
government. Classical and Christian political thought was
self-admittedly more “art” than “science”: it relied extensively
on the fortunate appearance of inspiring founding figures and
statesmen who could uphold political and social self-reinforcing
virtuous cycles, and acknowledged the likelihood of decay and
corruption as an inevitable feature of any human institution.
A signal hallmark of modernity was the rejection of this
long-standing view of politics. Social and political arrange-
ments came to be regarded as simultaneously ineffectual and
undesirable. The roots of liberalism lay in efforts to overturn
a variety of anthropological assumptions and social norms
that had come to be believed as sources of pathology—name-
ly, fonts of conflict as well as obstacles to individual liberty.
The foundations of liberalism were laid by a series of thinkers
whose central aim was to disassemble what they concluded
were irrational religious and social norms in the pursuit of
civil peace that might in turn foster stability and prosperity,
and eventually individual liberty of conscience and action.
Three main efforts undergirded this revolution in thought
and practice. First, politics would be based upon reliability of
“the low” rather than aspiration to “the high.” The classical
and Christian effort to foster virtue was rejected as both pa-
ternalistic and ineffectual, prone to abuse and unreliability. It
was Machiavelli who broke with the classical and Christian
aspiration to temper the tyrannical temptation through an
education in virtue, scoring the premodern philosophic tradi-
tion as an unbroken series of unrealistic and unreliable fanta-
sies of “imaginary republics and principalities that have never
24
existed in practice and never could; for the gap between how
people actually behave and how they ought to behave is so
great that anyone who ignores everyday reality in order to
live up to an ideal will soon discover that he has been taught
how to destroy himself, not how to preserve himself.”3 Rather
than promoting unrealistic standards for behavior—especial-
ly self-limitation—that could at best be unreliably achieved,
Machiavelli proposed grounding a political philosophy upon
readily observable human behaviors of pride, selfishness,
greed, and the quest for glory. He argued further that liberty
and political security were better achieved by pitting different
domestic classes against one another, encouraging each to
limit the others through “ferocious conflict” in the protection
of their particular interests rather than by lofty appeals to a
“common good” and political concord. By acknowledging in-
eradicable human selfishness and the desire for material
goods, one might conceive of ways to harness those motiva-
tions rather than seeking to moderate or limit those desires.
Second, the classical and Christian emphasis upon virtue
and the cultivation of self-limitation and self-rule relied upon
reinforcing norms and social structures arrayed extensively
throughout political, social, religious, economic, and familial
life. What were viewed as the essential supports for a training
in virtue—and hence, preconditions for liberty from tyran-
ny—came to be viewed as sources of oppression, arbitrari-
ness, and limitation. Descartes and Hobbes in turn argued
that the rule of irrational custom and unexamined tradition—
especially religious belief and practice—was a source of arbi-
trary governance and unproductive internecine conflicts,
and thus an obstacle to a stable and prosperous regime. Each
25
proposed remediating the presence of custom and tradition

by introducing “thought experiments” that reduced people to
their natural essence—conceptually stripping humans of ac-
cidental attributes that obscured from us our true nature—so
that philosophy and politics could be based upon a reasoned
and reflective footing. Both expressed confidence in a more
individualistic rationality that could replace long-standing
social norms and customs as guides for action, and each
believed that potential deviations from rationality could be
corrected by the legal prohibitions and sanctions of a central-
ized political state.
Third, if political foundations and social norms required
correctives to establish stability and predictability, and (even-
tually) to enlarge the realm of individual freedom, the human
subjection to the dominion and limits of nature needed also
to be overcome. A “new science of politics” was to be accom-
panied by a new natural science—in particular, a science that
would seek practical applications meant to give humans a
chance in the war against nature. Hobbes’s employer, Francis
Bacon, encouraged a new form of natural philosophy that
would increase human empire over the natural world, provid-
ing for “relief of the human estate” through the expansion of
useful applications of human knowledge.4 A revolution in
modern science thus called as well for overturning such phil-
osophical traditions as Stoicism and Christian emphasis upon
“acceptance” in favor of belief in an expanding and poten-
tially limitless human capacity to control circumstance and
effect human desires upon the world.
While none of these thinkers was a liberal, given their
respective reservations regarding popular rule, their revolu-
26
tionary reconception of politics, society, science, and nature

laid the foundation of modern liberalism. A succession of
thinkers in subsequent decades and centuries were to build
upon these three basic revolutions of thought, redefining lib-
erty as the liberation of humans from established authority,
emancipation from arbitrary culture and tradition, and the
expansion of human power and dominion over nature through
advancing scientific discovery and economic prosperity. Lib-
eralism’s ascent and triumph required sustained efforts to un-
dermine the classical and Christian understanding of liberty,
the disassembling of widespread norms, traditions, and prac-
tices, and perhaps above all the reconceptualization of
primacy of the individual defined in isolation from arbitrary
accidents of birth, with the state as the main protector of
individual rights and liberty.
The liberal adoption of these revolutions in thought and
practice constituted a titanic wager that a wholly new under-
standing of liberty could be pursued and realized by overturn-
ing preceding philosophic tradition and religious and social
norms, and by introducing a new relationship between hu-
mans and nature. What has become the literal “Whig” inter-
pretation of political history widely holds that this wager has
been an uncontested success. The advent of liberalism marks
the end of a benighted age, the liberation of humanity from
darkness, the overcoming of oppression and arbitrary ine-
quality, the descent of monarchy and aristocracy, the advance
of prosperity and modern technology, and the advent of
an age of nearly unbroken progress. Liberalism is credited
with the cessation of religious war, the opening of an age of
tolerance and equality, the expanding spheres of personal
27
opportunity and social interaction that today culminate in

globalization, and the ongoing victories over sexism, racism,
colonialism, heteronormativity, and a host of other unaccept-
able prejudices that divide, demean, and segregate.
Liberalism’s victory was declared to be unqualified and
complete in 1989 in the seminal article “The End of History”
by Francis Fukuyama, written following the collapse of the
last competing ideological opponent.5 Fukuyama held that
liberalism had proved itself the sole legitimate regime on the
basis that it had withstood all challengers and defeated all
competitors and further, that it worked because it accorded
with human nature. A wager that was some five centuries in
the making, and had been first instantiated as a political ex-
periment by the Founders of the American liberal republic
exactly two hundred years before Fukuyama’s bold claim, had
panned out with unprecedented clarity in the often muddled
and contested realm of political philosophy and practice.
A main result of the widespread view that liberalism’s tri-
umph is complete and uncontested—indeed, that rival claims
are no longer regarded as worthy of consideration—is a con-
clusion within the liberal order that various ills that infect the
body politic as well as the civil and private spheres are either
remnants of insufficiently realized liberalism or happenstance
problems that are subject to policy or technological fix within
the liberal horizon. Liberalism’s own success makes it difficult
to sustain reflection on the likelihood that the greatest cur-
rent threat to liberalism lies not outside and beyond liberal-
ism but within it. The potency of this threat arises from the
fundamental nature of liberalism, from what are thought to
be its very strengths—especially its faith in its ability of self-
28
correction and its belief in progress and continual improve-

ment—which make it largely impervious to discerning its
deepest weaknesses and even self-inflicted decline. No matter
our contemporary malady, there is no challenge that can’t be
fixed by a more perfect application of liberal solutions.
These maladies include the corrosive social and civic ef-
fects of self-interest—a disease that arises from the cure of
overcoming the ancient reliance upon virtue. Not only is this
malady increasingly manifest in all social interactions and in-
stitutions, but it infiltrates liberal politics. Undermining any
appeal to common good, it induces a zero-sum mentality that
becomes nationalized polarization for a citizenry that is in-
creasingly driven by private and largely material concerns.
Similarly, the “cure” by which individuals could be liberated
from authoritative cultures generates social anomie that re-
quires expansion of legal redress, police proscriptions, and
expanded surveillance. For instance, because social norms
and decencies have deteriorated and an emphasis on character
was rejected as paternalistic and oppressive, a growing number
of the nation’s school districts now deploy surveillance cam-
eras in schools, anonymous oversight triggering post-facto
punishment. The cure of human mastery of nature is produc-
ing consequences that suggest such mastery is at best tempo-
rary and finally illusory: ecological costs of burning of fossil
fuels, limits of unlimited application of antibiotics, political
fallout from displacement of workforce by technology, and so
forth. Among the greatest challenges facing humanity is the
ability to survive progress.
Perhaps above all, liberalism has drawn down on a prelib-
eral inheritance and resources that at once sustained liberalism
29
but which it cannot replenish. The loosening of social bonds

in nearly every aspect of life—familial, neighborly, communal,
religious, even national—reflects the advancing logic of liber-
alism and is the source of its deepest instability. The increased
focus upon, and intensifying political battles over, the role of
centralized national and even international governments is at
once the consequence of liberalism’s move toward homogeni-
zation and one of the indications of its fragility. The global
market displaces a variety of economic subcultures, enforcing
a relentless logic of impersonal transactions that have led to a
crisis of capitalism and the specter of its own unraveling. Bat-
tles in policy areas such as education and health care—in which
either the state or the market is proposed as providing the
resolution—reflect the weakening of forms of care that drew
on more local commitments and devotions that neither the
state nor market can hope to replicate or replace. The trium-
phant march of liberalism has succeeded in at once drawing
down the social and natural resources that liberalism did
not create and cannot replenish, but which sustained liberal-
ism even as its advance eroded its own unacknowledged
foundations.
Liberalism has been a wager that it can produce more ben-
efits than the costs it would amass, all the while rendering lib-
eral humanity widely insensate to the fact that the mounting
costs are the result of those touted benefits. Thus most today
view this wager as a settled bet, a question whose outcome is
no longer in question. Yet the gathering evidence, once seen
clearly as not circumstantially generated but arising directly
from liberalism’s fruition, reveals that the bookie’s collector is
knocking upon the door. While we have been slow to realize
30
that the odds were in favor of the house, the damning evidence
arising from liberalism’s very success affirms that only blink-
ered ideology can conceal liberalism’s unsustainability.
The strictly legal and political arrangements of modern
constitutionalism do not per se constitute a liberal regime,
but they are animated by two foundational beliefs. Liberalism
is most fundamentally constituted by a pair of deeper anthro-
pological assumptions that give liberal institutions a particu-
lar orientation and cast: 1) anthropological individualism and
the voluntarist conception of choice, and 2) human separation
from and opposition to nature. These two revolutions in the
understanding of human nature and society constitute “liber-
alism” inasmuch as they introduce a radically new definition
of “liberty.”
liberal voluntarism
The first revolution, and the most basic and distinctive aspect
of liberalism, is to base politics upon the idea of voluntar-
ism—the unfettered and autonomous choice of individuals.
This argument was first articulated in the protoliberal defense
of monarchy by Thomas Hobbes. According to Hobbes, hu-
man beings exist by nature in a state of radical independence
and autonomy. Recognizing the fragility of a condition in
which life in such a state is “nasty, brutish, and short,” they
employ their rational self-interest to sacrifice most of their
natural rights in order to secure the protection and security of
a sovereign. Legitimacy is conferred by consent.
The state is created to restrain the external actions of
individuals and legally restricts the potentially destructive
31
activity of radically separate human beings. Law is a set of

practical restraints upon self-interested individuals; Hobbes
does not assume the existence of self-restraint born of mutual
concern. As he writes in Leviathan, law is comparable to
hedges, “not to stop travelers, but to keep them in the way”;
that is, law restrains people’s natural tendency to act on “im-
petuous desires, rashness or indiscretion,” and thus always
acts as an external constraint upon our natural liberty.6 By
contrast, liberty persists “where there is silence of the law,”
limited only insofar as the “authorized” rules of the state are
explicit.7 Only the state can limit our natural liberty: the state
is the sole creator and enforcer of positive law, and it even
determines legitimate and illegitimate expressions of religious
belief. The state is charged with maintaining social stability
and preventing a return to natural anarchy; in so doing, it
“secures” our natural rights.
Human beings are thus, by nature, nonrelational crea-
tures, separate and autonomous. Liberalism begins a project
by which the legitimacy of all human relationships—begin-
ning with, but not limited to, political bonds—becomes in-
creasingly dependent on whether those relationships have
been chosen, and chosen on the basis of their service to ra-
tional self-interest.
As Hobbes’s philosophical successor John Locke under-
stood, voluntarist logic ultimately affects all relationships, in-
cluding familial ones. Locke—the first philosopher of liberal-
ism—on the one hand acknowledges in his Second Treatise of
Government that the duties of parents to raise children and the
corresponding duties of children to obey spring from the
commandment “Honor thy father and mother,” but he fur-
32
ther claims that every child must ultimately subject his inher-
itance to the logic of consent, and thus begin (evoking the
origin of human society) in a version of the State of Nature in
which we act as autonomous choosing individuals. “For every
Man’s Children being by Nature as free as himself, or any of his
Ancestors ever were, may, whilst they are in that Freedom,
choose what Society they will join themselves to, what
Common-wealths they will put themselves under. But if they
will enjoy the Inheritance of their Ancestors, they must take it
on the same terms their Ancestors had it, and submit to all the
Conditions annex’d to such a Possession.”8 Even those who
adopt the inheritance of their parents in every regard do so
only through the logic of consent, even if it is tacit.
Even marriage, Locke holds, is finally to be understood as
a contract whose conditions are temporary and subject to re-
vision, particularly once the child-rearing duties are complet-
ed. If this encompassing logic of choice applies to the most
elemental family relationships, then it applies all the more to
the looser ties that bind people to other institutions and as-
sociations, in which membership is subject to constant moni-
toring and assessment of whether it benefits or unduly bur-
dens any person’s individual rights.
This is not to suggest that a preliberal era dismissed the
idea of individual free choice. Among other significant ways
that preliberal Christianity contributed to an expansion of
human choice was to transform the idea of marriage from an
institution based upon familial and property considerations to
a choice made by consenting individuals on the basis of sacra-
mental love. What was new is that the default basis for evalu-
ating institutions, society, affiliations, memberships, and even
33
personal relationships became dominated by considerations

of individual choice based on the calculation of individual
self-interest, and without broader consideration of the impact
of one’s choices upon the community, one’s obligations to the
created order, and ultimately to God.
Liberalism began with the explicit assertion that it merely
describes our political, social, and private decision making.
Yet it was implicitly constituted as a normative project: what
it presented as a description of human voluntarism in fact had
to displace a very different form of human self-understanding
and experience. In effect, liberal theory sought to educate
people to think differently about themselves and their rela-
tionships. Liberalism often claims neutrality about the choic-
es people make in liberal society; it is the defender of “Right,”
not any particular conception of the “Good.”
Yet it is not neutral about the basis on which people make
their decisions. In the same way that courses in economics
claim merely to describe human beings as utility-maximizing
individual actors, but in fact influence students to act more
selfishly, so liberalism teaches a people to hedge commit-
ments and adopt flexible relationships and bonds. Not only
are all political and economic relationships seen as fungible
and subject to constant redefinition, so are all relationships—
to place, to neighborhood, to nation, to family, and to reli-
gion. Liberalism encourages loose connections.
t h e wa r a g a i n s t n at u r e
The second revolution, and the second anthropological as-

sumption that constitutes liberalism, is less visibly political.
34
Premodern political thought—particularly that informed by

an Aristotelian understanding of natural science—understood
the human creature as part of a comprehensive natural order.
Humans were understood to have a telos, a fixed end, given by
nature and unalterable. Human nature was continuous with
the order of the natural world, and thus humanity was re-
quired to conform both to its own nature and, in a broader
sense, to the natural order of which it was a part. Human be-
ings could freely act against their own nature and the natural
order, but such actions deformed them and harmed the good
of human beings and the world. Aristotle’s Ethics and Aqui-
nas’s Summa Theologiae are alike efforts to delineate the limits
that nature—natural law—places upon human beings. Each
seeks to educate man about how best to live within those lim-
its through the practice of virtues, to achieve a condition of
human flourishing.
Liberal philosophy rejected this requirement of human
self-limitation. It displaced first the idea of a natural order to
which humanity is subject and later the notion of human na-
ture itself. Liberalism inaugurated a transformation in the
natural and human sciences and humanity’s relationship to the
natural world. The first wave of this revolution—inaugurated
by early-modern thinkers dating back to the Renaissance—
insisted that man should employ natural science and a trans-
formed economic system to seek mastery of nature. The sec-
ond wave—developed largely by various historicist schools of
thought, especially in the nineteenth century—replaced belief
in the idea of a fixed human nature with belief in human “plas-
ticity” and capacity for moral progress. These two iterations of
liberalism—often labeled “conservative” and “progressive”—
35
contend today for ascendance, but we do better to understand

their deep interconnection.
The protoliberal thinker who ushered in the first wave of
liberalism’s transformation was Francis Bacon. Like Hobbes
(who was Bacon’s secretary), he attacked the ancient Aristote-
lian and Thomistic understanding of nature and natural law
and argued for the human capacity to “master” or “control”
nature—even reversing the effects of the Fall, including even
the possibility of overcoming human mortality.9
Liberalism became closely bound up with this new orien-
tation of the natural sciences, and it embraced and advanced
as well an economic system—market-based free enterprise—
that similarly promoted human use, conquest, and mastery of
the natural world. Early-modern liberalism held the view that
human nature was unchangeable—human beings were, by na-
ture, self-interested creatures whose base impulses could be
harnessed but not fundamentally altered. But this self-
interested, possessive aspect of our nature could, if usefully
harnessed, promote an economic and scientific system that
increased human freedom through the capacity of human be-
ings to exert mastery over natural phenomena.
The second wave of this revolution begins as an explicit
criticism of this view of humanity. Thinkers ranging from
Rousseau to Marx, from Mill to Dewey, and from Richard
Rorty to contemporary “transhumanists” reject the idea that
human nature is fixed. They adopt the first-wave theorists’
idea that nature is subject to human conquest and apply it to
human nature itself.
First-wave liberals are today represented by “conserva-
tives,” who stress the need for scientific and economic mastery
36
of nature but stop short of extending this project to human

nature. They support nearly any utilitarian use of the world
for economic ends but oppose most forms of biotechnological
“enhancement.” Second-wave liberals increasingly approve
nearly any technical means of liberating humans from the bio-
logical nature of our own bodies. Today’s political debates oc-
cur largely and almost exclusively between these two varieties
of liberals. Neither side confronts the fundamentally alterna-
tive understanding of human nature and the human relation-
ship to nature defended by the preliberal tradition.
Liberalism is thus not merely, as is often portrayed, a nar-
rowly political project of constitutional government and ju-
ridical defense of rights. Rather, it seeks to transform all of
human life and the world. Its two revolutions—its anthropo-
logical individualism and the voluntarist conception of choice,
and its insistence on the human separation from and opposi-
tion to nature—created its distinctive and new understanding
of liberty as the most extensive possible expansion of the hu-
man sphere of autonomous activity.
Liberalism rejects the ancient conception of liberty as the
learned capacity of human beings to conquer the slavish pur-
suit of base and hedonistic desires. This kind of liberty is a
condition of self-governance of both city and soul, drawing
closely together the individual cultivation and practice of
virtue and the shared activities of self-legislation. A central
preoccupation of such societies becomes the comprehensive
formation and education of individuals and citizens in the art
and virtue of self-rule.
Liberalism instead understands liberty as the condition in
which one can act freely within the sphere unconstrained by
37
positive law. This concept effectively brings into being what

was merely theoretical in its imaginary state of nature, shap-
ing a world in which the theory of natural human individual-
ism becomes ever more a reality, now secured through the
architecture of law, politics, economics, and society. Under
liberalism, human beings increasingly live in a condition of
autonomy in which the threatened anarchy of our purport-
edly natural condition is controlled and suppressed through
the imposition of laws and the corresponding growth of the
state. With humanity liberated from constitutive communi-
ties (leaving only loose connections) and nature harnessed
and controlled, the constructed sphere of autonomous liberty
expands seemingly without limit.
Ironically, the more completely the sphere of autonomy is
secured, the more comprehensive the state must become. Lib-
erty, so defined, requires liberation from all forms of associa-
tions and relationships, from family to church, from schools to
village and community, that exerted control over behavior
through informal and habituated expectations and norms.
These controls were largely cultural, not political—law was
less extensive and existed largely as a continuation of cultural
norms, the informal expectations of behavior learned through
family, church, and community. With the liberation of indi-
viduals from these associations, there is more need to regulate
behavior through the imposition of positive law. At the same
time, as the authority of social norms dissipates, they are in-
creasingly felt to be residual, arbitrary, and oppressive, motivat-
ing calls for the state to actively work toward their eradication.
Liberalism thus culminates in two ontological points: the
liberated individual and the controlling state. Hobbes’s Levia-
38
than perfectly portrayed those realities: the state consists sole-

ly of autonomous individuals, and these individuals are “con-
tained” by the state. The individual and the state mark two
points of ontological priority.
In this world, gratitude to the past and obligations to the
future are replaced by a nearly universal pursuit of immediate
gratification: culture, rather than imparting the wisdom and
experience of the past so as to cultivate virtues of self-restraint
and civility, becomes synonymous with hedonic titillation,
visceral crudeness, and distraction, all oriented toward pro-
moting consumption, appetite, and detachment. As a result,
superficially self-maximizing, socially destructive behaviors
begin to dominate society.
In schools, norms of modesty, comportment, and aca-
demic honesty are replaced by widespread lawlessness and
cheating (along with increasing surveillance of youth), while
in the fraught realm of coming-of-age, courtship norms are
replaced by “hookups” and utilitarian sexual encounters. The
norm of stable lifelong marriage is replaced by various ar-
rangements that ensure the autonomy of the individuals,
whether married or not. Children are increasingly viewed as a
limitation upon individual freedom, which contributes to lib-
eralism’s commitment to abortion on demand, while overall
birth rates decline across the developed world. In the
economic realm, the drive for quick profits, often driven by
incessant demands for immediate profitability, replaces
investment and trusteeship. And in our relationship to the
natural world, short-term exploitation of the earth’s bounty
becomes our birthright, even if it forces our children to deal
with shortages of such resources as topsoil and potable water.
39
Restraint of these activities is understood (if at all) to be the

domain of the state’s exercise of positive law, not the result of
cultivated self-governance born of cultural norms.
Premised on the idea that the basic activity of life is the
pursuit of what Hobbes called the “power after power that cea-
seth only in death”—which Alexis de Tocqueville later de-
scribed as “inquietude” or “restlessness”—the endless quest for
self-fulfillment and greater power to satisfy human cravings
requires ever-accelerating economic growth and pervasive
consumption. Liberal society can barely survive the slowing of
such growth, and it would collapse if economic growth were to
stop or reverse for any length of time. The sole object and
justification of this indifference to human ends—of the em-
phasis on “Right” over “Good”—is the embrace of the liberal
human as self-fashioning expressive individual. This aspiration
requires that no truly hard choices be made. There are only
different lifestyle options.
Liberalism’s founders tended to take for granted the per-
sistence of social norms, even as they sought to liberate indi-
viduals from the constitutive associations and education in
self-limitation that sustained these norms. In its earliest mo-
ments, the health and continuity of families, schools, and
communities were assumed, while their foundations were be-
ing philosophically undermined. This undermining led, in
turn, to these goods being undermined in reality, as the norm-
shaping power of authoritative institutions grew tenuous with
liberalism’s advance. In its advanced stage, passive depletion
has become active destruction: remnants of associations his-
torically charged with the cultivation of norms are increas-
ingly seen as obstacles to autonomous liberty, and the appara-
40
tus of the state is directed toward the task of liberating

individuals from such bonds.
In the material and economic realm, liberalism has drawn
down on age-old reservoirs of resources in its endeavor to
conquer nature. No matter the political program of today’s
leaders, more is the incontestable program. Liberalism can
function only by the constant increase of available and con-
sumable material goods, and thus with the constant expansion
of nature’s conquest and mastery. No person can aspire to a
position of political leadership by calling for limits and self-
command.
Liberalism was thus a titanic wager that ancient norms
of behavior could be lifted in the name of a new form of
liberation and that conquering nature would supply the fuel
to permit nearly infinite choices. The twin outcomes of this
effort—the depletion of moral self-command and the deple-
tion of material resources—make inevitable an inquiry into
what comes after liberalism.
If I am right that the liberal project is ultimately self-

contradictory and that it culminates in the twin depletions of
moral and material reservoirs upon which it has relied, then
we face a choice. We can pursue more local forms of self-
government by choice, or suffer by default an oscillation be-
tween growing anarchy and the increasingly forcible imposition
of order by an increasingly desperate state. Taken to its logical
conclusion, liberalism’s end game is unsustainable in every re-
spect: it cannot perpetually enforce order upon a collection of
autonomous individuals increasingly shorn of constitutive social
norms, nor can it provide endless material growth in a world of
41
limits. We can either elect a future of self-limitation born of the

practice and experience of self-governance in local communi-
ties, or we can back inexorably into a future in which extreme
license coexists with extreme oppression.
The ancient claim that man is a political animal, and must
through the exercise and practice of virtue learned in commu-
nities achieve a form of local and communal self-limitation—a
condition properly understood as liberty—cannot be denied
forever without cost. Currently we attempt to treat the nu-
merous social, economic, and political symptoms of liberal-
ism’s liberty, but not the deeper sources of those symptoms,
the underlying pathology of liberalism’s philosophic commit-
ments. While most commentators regard our current crises—
whether understood morally or economically—as a technical
problem to be solved by better policy, our most thoughtful
citizens must consider whether these crises are the foreshocks
of a more systemic quake ahead. Unlike the ancient Romans
who, confident in their eternal city, could not imagine a condi-
tion after Rome, the rising barbarism within the city forces us
now to consider the prospect that a better way awaits.
42
CHAPTER TWO
Uniting Individualism and Statism
T
h e basic division of modern politics
since the French Revolution has
been between the left and the right,
reflecting the respective sides of the
French National Assembly, where
revolutionaries congregated to the
left and royalists gathered to the
right. The terms have persisted because they capture two ba-
sic and opposite worldviews. The left is characterized by a
preference for change and reform, a commitment to liberty
and equality, an orientation toward progress and the future,
while the right is the party of order and tradition, hierarchy,
and a disposition to valorize the past. Whether described as
left vs. right, blue vs. red, or liberal vs. conservative, this basic
division seems to capture a permanent divide between two
fundamental human dispositions, as well as two worldviews
that are mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive of political
options. If one of the first questions posed to new parents is
43
Unitin g I ndi v id u ali s m and Stati s m
whether the baby is a girl or a boy, the question likely to de-

fine us from young adulthood is whether we place ourselves
on the political left or the political right.
Much contemporary life is organized around this basic
division—not only the political machinery, with its plethora
of liberal or conservative commentators, media, consultants,
pollsters, and politicians sorted according to these labels—
but neighborhoods, professions, schools, even one’s choice of
religion.1 People are apt to feel more in common with others
who share a political outlook even if they are from a different
area of the country (or even foreigners), a different ethnic or
racial background, and—remarkably, given the history of re-
ligious warfare—a different religion. Today, a conservative
Protestant evangelical is more likely to befriend and trust an
Orthodox Jew or traditionalist Catholic than a liberal Luther-
an. A white liberal southerner is likely to be more comfortable
revealing political outlooks to a black northern Democrat
than to a white conservative in his neighborhood. A progres-
sive homosexual and a liberal Christian will quickly recognize
commonalities. More than ever, as we enter an era when the
use of sexually differentiating pronouns is discouraged on col-
lege campuses and regional differences dissipate into the stew
of our national monoculture, political alignment seems to be
the one remaining marker that is inescapable and eternal,
even natural and inevitable, defining the core of our identity.
Given the extent to which this basic divide shapes the
outlooks of nearly every politically aware person living in an
advanced liberal society today, it seems almost unthinkable to
suggest that it is far less than it seems—and indeed that the
apparent unbridgeability of the chasm separating the two
44
sides merely masks a more fundamental, shared worldview.

The project of advancing the liberal order takes the superfi-
cial form of a battle between seemingly intractable foes, and
the energy and acrimony of that contest shrouds a deeper co-
operation that ends up advancing liberalism as a whole.
The modern American landscape is occupied by two par-
ties locked in permanent battle. One, deemed “conservative,”
advances the project of individual liberty and equality of op-
portunity especially through defense of a free and unfettered
market; the other, deemed liberal, aims at securing greater
economic and social equality through extensive reliance upon
the regulatory and judicial powers of the national government.
Our dominant political narrative pits defenders of individual
liberty—articulated by such authors of the liberal tradition as
John Locke and the American Founding Fathers—against the
statism of “progressive” liberals inspired by figures like John
Stuart Mill and John Dewey. The two worldviews are regard-
ed as irreconcilable opposites.
These apparently contrary positions are familiar to even
the casual observer of contemporary American politics, with
conservatives—heirs to classical liberalism—typically decrying
statism and liberals—heirs to progressivism—criticizing indi-
vidualism. The two sides contest every policy over this basic
division, touching on contemporary debates over economic
and trade policy, health care, welfare, the environment, and a
host of hotly contested issues. These battles often come down
to a basic debate over whether the ends of the polity are best
achieved by market forces with relatively little interference by
the state, or by government programs that can distribute ben-
efits and support more justly than the market can achieve.
45
Thus classical liberals claim that the individual is funda-

mental and, through an act of contract and consent, brings
into existence a limited government. Progressive liberals
claim that the individual is never wholly self-sufficient, and
that we must instead understand ourselves to be more deeply
defined by membership in a larger unit of humanity. Because
the two sides appear to be defined not only by a gaping policy
divide but by different anthropological assumptions, their
deeper shared undercurrent can be difficult to discern.
Individualism and statism advance together, always mutu-
ally supportive, and always at the expense of lived and vital
relations that stand in contrast to both the starkness of the
autonomous individual and the abstraction of our member-
ship in the state. In distinct but related ways, the right and left
cooperate in the expansion of both statism and individualism,
although from different perspectives, using different means,
and claiming different agendas. This deeper cooperation
helps to explain how it has happened that contemporary lib-
eral states—whether in Europe or America—have become
simultaneously both more statist, with ever more powers and
activity vested in central authority, and more individualistic,
with people becoming less associated and involved with such
mediating institutions as voluntary associations, political par-
ties, churches, communities, and even family. For both “liber-
als” and “conservatives,” the state becomes the main driver of
individualism, while individualism becomes the main source
of expanding power and authority of the state.
This deeper continuity between right and left derives
from two main sources: first, philosophical, with both the
classical and progressive liberal traditions arguing ultimately
46
for the central role of the state in the creation and expansion
of individualism; and second, practical and political, with this
joint philosophical project strengthening an expansion of
both state power and individualism. In the previous chapter I
briefly limned how the two “sides” of liberalism, while appar-
ently locked in intense contestation, together advance the
main objects of the liberal project. In this chapter, I explore
this deeper cooperative endeavor in more detail, with particu-
lar attention to both the philosophical sources within the lib-
eral tradition and their application in the American context.
Both “classical” and “progressive” liberalism ground the
advance of liberalism in individual liberation from the limita-
tions of place, tradition, culture, and any unchosen relation-
ship. Both traditions—for all their differences over means—
can be counted as liberal because of this fundamental
commitment to liberation of the individual and to the use of
natural science, aided by the state, as a primary means for
achieving practical liberation from nature’s limitations. Thus
statism and individualism grow together while local institu-
tions and respect for natural limits diminish. For all their dif-
ferences, this ambition animated thinkers ranging from John
Locke to John Dewey, from Francis Bacon to Francis Bel-
lamy, from Adam Smith to Richard Rorty.
philosophical sources and practical

implications—classical liberalism
This might be a surprising claim, since the philosophy of clas-

sical liberalism appears to suggest the opposite: not that the
state helps to create the individual, but rather—according to
47
social contract theory—that individuals, free and equal by

nature, through consent bring into existence a limited state.
Hobbes and Locke both—for all their differences—begin
by conceiving natural humans not as parts of wholes but
as wholes apart. We are by nature “free and independent,”
naturally ungoverned and even nonrelational. As Bertrand
de Jouvenel quipped about social contractarianism, it was a
philosophy conceived by “childless men who must have for-
gotten their own childhood.”2 Liberty is a condition of com-
plete absence of government and law, in which “all is
right”—that is, everything that can be willed by an individual
can be done. Even if this condition is shown to be untenable,
the definition of natural liberty posited in the “state of na-
ture” becomes a regulative ideal—liberty is ideally the agent’s
ability to do whatever he likes. In contrast to ancient theory—
which understood liberty to be achieved only through virtu-
ous self-government—modern theory defines liberty as the
greatest possible pursuit and satisfaction of the appetites,
while government is a conventional and unnatural limitation
upon this pursuit.
For both Hobbes and Locke, we enter into a social con-
tract not only to secure our survival but to make the exercise
of our liberty more secure. Both Hobbes and Locke—but es-
pecially Locke—understand that liberty in our prepolitical
condition is limited not only by the lawless competition of
other individuals but by our recalcitrant and hostile natures.
A main goal of Locke’s philosophy is to expand the prospects
for our liberty—defined as the capacity to satisfy our appe-
tites—through the auspices of the state. Law is not a disci-
pline for self-government but the means for expanding
48
personal freedom: “The end of law is not to abolish or re-

strain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom.”3 We accept the
terms of the social contract because it will actually increase
our personal liberty by eliminating customs and even laws
that can be thought to limit individual freedom, even while
expanding the prospects for human control over the natural
world. Locke writes that the law works to increase liberty, by
which he means our liberation from the constraints of the
natural world.
Thus, for liberal theory, while the individual “creates” the
state through the social contract, in a practical sense, the lib-
eral state “creates” the individual by providing the conditions
for the expansion of liberty, increasingly defined as the capac-
ity of humans to expand their mastery over circumstance. Far
from there being an inherent conflict between the individual
and the state—as so much of modern political reporting
would suggest—liberalism establishes a deep and profound
connection: its ideal of liberty can be realized only through a
powerful state. If the expansion of freedom is secured by law,
then the opposite also holds true in practice: increasing free-
dom requires the expansion of law. The state does not merely
serve as a referee between contesting individuals; in securing
our capacity to engage in productive activities, especially
commerce, it establishes a condition in reality that existed in
theory only in the state of nature: the ever-increasing achieve-
ment of the autonomous individual.
Thus one of the liberal state’s main roles becomes the ac-
tive liberation of individuals from any limiting conditions. At
the forefront of liberal theory is the liberation from natural
limitations on the achievement of our desires—one of the
49
central aims of life, according to Locke, being the “indolency

of the body.” A main agent of that liberation becomes com-
merce, the expansion of opportunities and materials by which
not only to realize existing desires but even to create new ones
we did not know we had. The state becomes charged with
extending the sphere of commerce, particularly with enlarging
the range of trade, production, and mobility.4 The expansion
of markets and the infrastructure necessary for that expansion
do not result from “spontaneous order”; rather, they require
an extensive and growing state structure, which at times must
extract submission from the system’s recalcitrant or unwilling
participants. Initially, this effort is exerted on local domestic
economy, in which the state must enforce rationalization and
imposition of depersonalized modern markets. Eventually,
however, this project becomes a main driver of liberal imperi-
alism, an imperative justified among others by John Stuart
Mill in his treatise Considerations on Representative Government,
where he calls for compulsion over “uncivilized” peoples in
order that they might lead productive economic lives, even if
they must be “for a while compelled to it,” including through
the institution of “personal slavery.”5
One of the main goals of the expansion of commerce is
the liberation of embedded individuals from their traditional
ties and relationships. The liberal state serves not only the
reactive function of umpire and protector of individual liber-
ty; it also takes on an active role of “liberating” individuals
who, in the view of the state, are prevented from making
wholly free choices as liberal agents. At the heart of liberal
theory is the supposition that the individual is the basic unit
of human existence, the only natural human entity that exists.
50
Liberal practice then seeks to expand the conditions for this

individual’s realization. The individual is to be liberated from
all the partial and limiting affiliations that preceded the lib-
eral state, if not by force then by constantly lowering the bar-
riers to exit. The state claims to govern all groupings within
the society: it is the final arbiter of legitimate and illegitimate
groupings, and from its point of view, streamlining the rela-
tionship between the individual and the liberal state.
In a reversal of the scientific method, what is advanced as
a philosophical set of arguments is then instantiated in reality.
The individual as a disembedded, self-interested economic
actor didn’t exist in any actual state of nature but rather was
the creation of an elaborate intervention by the incipient state
in early modernity, at the beginnings of the liberal order. The
imposition of the liberal order is accompanied by the legiti-
mizing myth that its form was freely chosen by unencumbered
individuals; that it was the consequence of extensive state in-
tervention is ignored by all but a few scholars. Few works have
made this intervention clearer than the historian and sociolo-
gist Karl Polanyi’s classic study The Great Transformation.6 Po-
lanyi describes how economic arrangements were separated
from particular cultural and religious contexts in which those
arrangements were understood to serve moral ends—and pos-
its that these contexts limited not only actions but even pre-
vented the understanding that economic actions could be
properly undertaken to advance individual interests and pri-
orities. Economic exchange so ordered, Polanyi argues, placed
a priority on the main ends of social, political, and religious
life—the sustenance of community order and flourishing of
families within that order.7 The understanding of an economy
51
based upon the accumulated calculations of self-maximizing

individuals was not, properly speaking, a market. A market-
place was understood to be an actual physical space within the
social order, not an autonomous, theoretical space for ex-
changes conducted by abstracted utility maximizers.
According to Polanyi, the replacement of this economy
required a deliberate and often violent reshaping of local
economies, most often by elite economic and state actors dis-
rupting and displacing traditional communities and practices.
The “individuation” of people required not only the separa-
tion of markets from social and religious contexts but people’s
acceptance that their labor and its products were nothing
more than commodities subject to price mechanisms, a trans-
formative way of considering people and nature alike in new-
ly utilitarian and individualistic terms. Yet market liberalism
required treating both people and natural resources as these
“fictitious commodities”—as material for use in industrial
processes—in order to disassociate markets from morals and
“re-train” people to think of themselves as individuals sepa-
rate from nature and one another. As Polanyi pithily says of
this transformation, “laissez-faire was planned.”8
This process was repeated countless times in the history of
modern political economy: in efforts to eradicate the medieval
guilds, in the enclosure controversy, in state suppression of
“Luddites,” in state support for owners over organized labor,
and in government efforts to empty the nation’s farmlands via
mechanized, industrial farming. It was, in complex ways, an
underlying motive during the American Civil War, which,
for all its legitimacy in eliminating slavery, also decisively
brought the state-backed expansion of a national economic
52
system, opposition to which was forever stained by guilt by

association with southern slavery.9 We see its legacy today in
the ongoing expansion of global markets through free-trade
agreements ardently supported by so-called conservatives,
often with the aim of disrupting and ultimately displacing
native cultures that might be of concern both to Burkean
conservatives and to Marxist-leaning critics of relentless
globalization.10 The state’s role in enforcing the existence of a
national market has been reinforced in recent years by efforts
to roll back various state-based environmental standards—
ironically, an activity most ardently embraced by “conserva-
tive” Republicans who are otherwise strident defenders of
“states’ rights.”11
From the dawn of modernity to contemporary headlines,
the proponents and heirs of classical liberalism—those whom
we today call “conservative”—have at best offered lip service
to the defense of “traditional values” while its leadership class
unanimously supports the main instrument of practical indi-
vidualism in our modern world, the global “free market.”
This market—like all markets—while justified in the name of
“laissez-faire,” in fact depends on constant state energy, inter-
vention, and support, and has consistently been supported by
classical liberals for its solvent effect on traditional relation-
ships, cultural norms, generational thinking, and the practices
and habits that subordinate market considerations to con-
cerns born of interpersonal bonds and charity. Claiming that
the radical individual imagined by liberal theory was a “giv-
en,” liberal practice advanced this normative ideal through an
ever-burgeoning state that ceaselessly expanded not in spite
of individualism, but to bring about its realization.
53
philosophical sources and practical

implications—progressive liberalism
One of the consequences of the political, social, and economic

dynamism unleashed by classical liberalism was the widespread
sense that it had underestimated the capacity for human trans-
formation as well. Dewey, for example, in his short book
Individualism, Old and New, praises the “old” liberalism for its
success in “liquefying static property” of the type that was
prevalent in feudal times, and for eliminating the local bases of
social life as the economic and political system became visibly
more national and “interdependent.” He dismisses the
“romantic” individualism that had animated the American be-
lief in self-reliance (here echoing Frederick Jackson Turner’s
observations that the age of the American frontier had come to
a close), instead calling for recognition that it was empirically
true that Americans were now part of a “social whole”
from which no individual could be understood to exist in
separation.12
The “old individualism” had successfully undermined any
vestiges of aristocratic society or Jeffersonian agrarianism, but
the nation had not yet made the leap into a new “organic”
reconciliation of individual and society. The “liberalism of the
past” had created the conditions that now required its own
supercession: a new liberalism was now in view, needing a
push by philosophically and socially sensitive thinkers like
Dewey to realize humanity’s self-transformative potential.
Herbert Croly similarly saw a transformation taking place,
particularly in the national system of commerce, culture, and
identity. But this national system was still animated by a belief
54
in Jeffersonian independence even as in fact it reflected new

forms of interdependence. He called for the creation of a
“New Republic” (the name of the journal he cofounded) that
would achieve “Jeffersonian ends by Hamiltonian means.”
Democracy could no longer mean individual self-reliance
based upon the freedom of individuals to act in accordance
with their own wishes. Instead, it must be infused with a social
and even religious set of commitments that would lead people
to recognize their participation in the “brotherhood of man-
kind.” This aspiration had been thwarted heretofore by anti-
quated belief in individual self-determination, neglectful of a
profound and growing interdependence that was now gener-
ating the potential for “the gradual creation of a higher type of
individual and higher life.”13 Walter Rauschenbusch was to
echo this sentiment in his call to establish the “Kingdom of
God” on earth, a new and more deeply social form of democ-
racy that “would not accept human nature as it is, but move it
in the direction of its improvement.” Rauschenbusch, by over-
coming the individualistic self-interest that he saw informing
even traditional Christian theology—whose object had tradi-
tionally been individual salvation—envisioned, like Dewey
and Croly, the “consummation” of democracy as the “perfec-
tion of human nature.”14
While one may see collectivist economic arrangements
in these thinkers’ practical recommendations—Dewey, for
instance, calls for “public socialism,” and Croly writes in
support of “flagrant socialism”—it would be mistaken to con-
clude that they do not endorse the inviolability and dignity of
the individual. A consistent theme in both men’s work is that
only by eliminating the cramped and limiting individualism
55
of “old liberalism” can a truer and better form of “individual-

ity” emerge. Only complete liberation from the shackles of
unfreedom—including especially the manacles of economic
degradation and inequality—can bring the emergence of a
new and better individuality. The apotheosis of democracy,
they argue, will lead to a reconciliation of the “Many” and the
“One,” a reconciliation of our social nature and our individu-
ality. John Dewey writes, for instance, that “a stable recovery
of individuality waits upon an elimination of the older econom-
ic and political individualism, an elimination that will liberate
imagination and endeavor for the task of making corporate
society contribute to the free culture of its members.”
While we will have to wait for the complete elimination
of old liberalism to know fully how that reconciliation of “in-
dividuality” and “corporate society” will be achieved, what is
clear from these central and formative arguments of the pro-
gressive liberal tradition is that only by overcoming classical
liberalism can true liberalism emerge. The argument still
continues over whether this represents a fundamental break
with, or fundamental fruition of, the liberal project.
The most apt recent symbol of the progressive state’s role in

“creating” the individual was a fictional woman who famously
formed part of President Obama’s campaign for reelection in
2012—a woman who, like Cher or Madonna, needed only a
single name, Julia. Julia appeared briefly toward the begin-
ning of Obama’s campaign as a series of internet slides in
which it was demonstrated that she had achieved her dreams
through a series of government programs that, throughout
her life, had enabled various milestones. Part of the effort to
56
show the existence of a Republican “war on women,” the ad

campaign “Life of Julia” was designed to convince female vot-
ers that only progressive liberals would support the govern-
ment programs that would help them achieve a better life.15
While the “Life of Julia” campaign seemed thus designed
for liberals who generally supported government programs
that helped foster economic opportunity and greater equality,
Julia was nevertheless someone who could not be an object of
admiration without the background appeal of conservative
liberalism’s valorization of the autonomous individual as the
normative ideal of human liberty. If the positive portrayal of
Julia’s extensive reliance upon government aid tended to make
the right blind to the ad’s fundamentally liberal ideal of
autonomy, the left was barely cognizant that the aim of this
assistance was to create the most perfectly autonomous
individual since Hobbes and Locke dreamed up the State of
Nature. In Julia’s world there are only Julia and the govern-
ment, with the very brief exception of a young child who ap-
pears in one slide—with no evident father—and is quickly
whisked away by a government-sponsored yellow bus, never
to be seen again. Otherwise, Julia has achieved a life of perfect
autonomy, courtesy of a massive, sometimes intrusive, always
solicitous, ever-present government. The world portrayed by
“Life of Julia” is an updated version of the frontispiece of
Hobbes’s Leviathan, in which there only exist individuals and
the sovereign state—the former creating and giving legiti-
macy to the latter, the latter ensuring a safe and secure life for
the individuals who brought it into being. The main differ-
ence is that while Hobbes’s story is meant as a thought ex-
periment, “The Life of Julia” is meant to depict present-day
57
reality. But the ad makes increasingly clear that its story is the
very opposite of Hobbes’s: it is the liberal state that creates
the individual. Through the increasingly massive and all-
encompassing Leviathan, we are finally free of one another.
Thus the two sides of the liberal project wage a ceaseless
and absorbing contest over means, the ideal avenue for liber-
ating the individual from constitutive relationships, from un-
chosen traditions, from restraining custom. Behind the lines,
however, both have consistently sought the expansion of the
sphere of liberation in which the individual can best pursue
his or her preferred lifestyle, leading to mutual support of the
expansion of the state as the requisite setting in which the
autonomous individual could come into being. While “con-
servative” liberals express undying hostility to state expansion,
they consistently turn to its capacity to secure national and
international markets as a way of overcoming any local forms
of governance or traditional norms that might limit the mar-
ket’s role in the life of a community.16 And while “progressive”
liberals declaim the expansive state as the ultimate protector
of individual liberty, they insist that it must be limited when it
comes to enforcement of “manners and morals,” preferring
the open marketplace of individual “buyers and sellers,” espe-
cially in matters of sexual practice and infinitely fluid sexual
identity, the definition of family, and individual choices over
ending one’s own life. The modern liberal state consistently
expands to enlarge our self-definition as “consumers”—a
word more often used today to describe denizens of the lib-
eral nation-state than “citizens”—while entertaining us with a
cataclysmic battle between two sides that many begin to right-
ly suspect aren’t that different after all.
58
creating the individual
At the heart of liberal theory and practice is the preeminent

role of the state as agent of individualism. This very liberation
in turn generates liberalism’s self-reinforcing circle, wherein
the increasingly disembedded individual ends up strengthen-
ing the state that is its own author. From the perspective of
liberalism, it is a virtuous circle, but from the standpoint of
human flourishing, it is one of the deepest sources of liberal
pathology.
An earlier generation of philosophers and sociologists
noted the psychological condition that led increasingly dislo-
cated and disassociated selves to derive their basic identity
from the state. These analyses—in landmark works such as
Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, Erich Fromm’s
Escape from Freedom, and Robert Nisbet’s The Quest for Com-
munity—recognized, from various perspectives and disci-
plines, that a signal feature of modern totalitarianism was that
it arose and came to power through the discontents of peo-
ple’s isolation and loneliness. A population seeking to fill the
void left by the weakening of more local memberships and
associations was susceptible to a fanatical willingness to iden-
tify completely with a distant and abstract state. While this
analysis attracted adherents in years following the fall of
Nazism and the rise of communism, it has since declined,
suggesting that many contemporary thinkers do not think it
applies to liberal ideology.17 Yet there is no reason to suppose
the basic political psychology works any differently today.
Nisbet remains an instructive guide. In The Quest for
Community, his 1953 analysis of the rise of modern ideologies,
59
Nisbet argued that the active dissolution of traditional human

communities and institutions had given rise to a condition in
which a basic human need—“the quest for community”—was
no longer being met. Statism arose as a violent reaction against
this feeling of atomization. As naturally political and social
creatures, people require a thick set of constitutive bonds in
order to function as fully formed human beings. Shorn of the
deepest ties to family (nuclear as well as extended), place, com-
munity, region, religion, and culture, and deeply shaped to
believe that these forms of association are limits upon their
autonomy, deracinated humans seek belonging and self-
definition through the only legitimate form of organization
remaining available to them: the state. Nisbet saw the rise of
fascism and communism as the predictable consequence of the
liberal attack upon smaller associations and communities.
Those ideologies offered a new form of belonging by adopting
the evocations and imagery of the associations they had dis-
placed, above all by offering a new form of quasi-religious
membership, a kind of church of the state. Our “community”
was now to consist of countless fellow humans who shared an
abstract allegiance to a political entity that would assuage all of
our loneliness, alienation, and isolation. It would provide for
our wants and needs; all it asked in return was complete devo-
tion to the state and the elimination of any allegiance to any
other intermediary entity. To provide for a mass public, more
power to the central authority was asked and granted. Thus
Nisbet concludes, “It is impossible to understand the massive
concentrations of political power in the twentieth century, ap-
pearing so paradoxically, or it has seemed, right after a century
and a half of individualism in economics and morals, unless we
60
see the close relationship that prevailed all through the nine-
teenth century between individualism and State power and
between both of these together and the general weakening of
the area of association that lies intermediate to man and the
State.”18
Beyond psychological longing, the ascent of the state as
object of allegiance was a necessary consequence of liberal-
ism’s practical effects. Having shorn people’s ties to the vast
web of intermediating institutions that sustained them, the
expansion of individualism deprived them of recourse to those
traditional places of support and sustenance. The more indi-
viduated the polity, the more likely that a mass of individuals
would inevitably turn to the state in times of need. This ob-
servation, echoing one originally made by Tocqueville, sug-
gests that individualism is not the alternative to statism but its
very cause. Tocqueville, unlike so many of his current con-
servative and progressive readers, understood that individual-
ism was not the solution to the problem of an increasingly
encompassing centralized state but the source of its increas-
ing power. As he wrote in Democracy in America,
So . . . no man is obliged to put his powers at the disposal of
another, and no one has any claim of right to substantial sup-
port from his fellow man, each is both independent and weak.
These two conditions, which must be neither seen quite sepa-
rately nor confused, give the citizen of a democracy extremely
contradictory instincts. He is full of confidence and pride in
his independence among his equals, but from time to time his
weakness makes him feel the need for some outside help which
he cannot expect from any of his fellows, for they are both
impotent and cold. In this extremity he naturally turns his eyes
toward that huge entity [the tutelary state] which alone stands
out above the universal level of abasement. His needs, and
61
even more his longings, continually put him in mind of that

entity, and he ends by regarding it as the sole and necessary
support of his individual weakness.19
The individualism arising from the philosophy and prac-

tice of liberalism, far from fundamentally opposing an in-
creasingly centralized state, both required it and in fact in-
creased its power. Indeed, individualism and statism have
powerfully combined to all but rout the vestiges of pre- and
often nonliberal communities animated by a philosophy and
practice distinct from statist individualism. Today’s classical
liberals and progressive liberals remain locked in a battle for
their preferred end game—whether we will be a society of
ever more perfectly liberated, autonomous individuals or ever
more egalitarian members of the global “community”—but
while this debate continues apace, the two sides agree on their
end while absorbing our attention in disputes over the means,
thus combining in a pincer movement to destroy the vestiges
of the classical practices and virtues that they both despise.
The expansion of liberalism rests upon a vicious and
reinforcing cycle in which state expansion secures the end of
individual fragmentation, in turn requiring further state ex-
pansion to control a society without shared norms, practices,
or beliefs. Liberalism thus increasingly requires a legal and
administrative regime, driven by the imperative of replacing
all nonliberal forms of support for human flourishing (such as
schools, medicine, and charity), and hollowing any deeply
held sense of shared future or fate among the citizenry. Infor-
mal relationships are replaced by administrative directives,
political policies, and legal mandates, undermining voluntary
civic membership and requiring an ever-expanding state
62
apparatus to ensure social cooperation. The threat and evi-

dence of declining civic norms require centralized surveil-
lance, highly visible police presence, and a carceral state to
control the effects of its own successes while diminishing
civic trust and mutual commitment.
The ways in which the individualist philosophy of classical
liberalism and the statist philosophy of progressive liberalism
end up reinforcing each other often go undetected. Although
conservative liberals claim to defend not only a free market
but family values and federalism, the only part of the conserv-
ative agenda that has been continuously and successfully im-
plemented during their recent political ascendance is econom-
ic liberalism, including deregulation, globalization, and the
protection of titanic economic inequalities. And while pro-
gressive liberals claim to advance a shared sense of national
destiny and solidarity that should decrease the advance of an
individualist economy and reduce income inequality, the only
part of the left’s political agenda that has triumphed has been
the project of personal and especially sexual autonomy. Is it
mere coincidence that both parties, despite their claims to be
locked in a political death grip, mutually advance the cause of
liberal autonomy and inequality?
63
CHAPTER THREE
Liberalism as Anticulture
T
h e dual expansion of the state and
personal autonomy rests extensively
on the weakening and eventual loss
of particular cultures, and their re-
placement not by a single liberal
culture but by a pervasive and en-
compassing anticulture. What is
popularly called a “culture,” often modified by an adjective—
for instance, “pop culture” or “media culture” or “multicul-
turalism”—is in fact a sign of the evisceration of culture as a
set of generational customs, practices, and rituals that are
grounded in local and particular settings. As Mario Vargas
Llosa has written, “The idea of culture has broadened to such
an extent that, although nobody has dared to say this explic-
itly, it has disappeared. It has become an ungraspable, multi-
tudinous and figurative ghost.”1 The only forms of shared
cultural “liturgy” that remain are celebrations of the liberal
state and the liberal market. National holidays have become
64
L i b e r ali s m a s A ntic u lt u r e
occasions for shopping, and shopping holy days such as “Black

Friday” have become national holidays. These forms of ab-
stract membership mark a populace delinked from particular
affiliations and devotions, which are transferred to—in a vid-
eo played at the 2012 Democratic National Convention—“the
only thing we all belong to,” the liberal state. This ambitious
claim failed to note that the only thing we all belong to is the
global market, an encompassing entity that contains all po-
litical organizations and their citizenry, now redefined as con-
sumers. The liturgies of nation and market are woven closely
together (the apogee of which is the celebration of commer-
cials during the Super Bowl), simultaneously nationalist and
consumerist celebrations of abstracted membership that reify
individuated selves held together by depersonalized commit-
ments. In the politically nationalist and economically glo-
balist setting, these contentless liturgies often take the form
of two minutes of obligatory patriotism in which a member of
the armed services appears during pauses in a sporting event
for reverential applause before everyone gets back to the
serious business of distracted consumption. The show of
superficial thanks for a military with which few have any di-
rect connection leaves an afterglow that distracts from the
harder question of whether the national military ultimately
functions to secure the global market and so support the con-
struction of abstracted, deracinated, and consumptive selves.
the three pillars of liberal

anticulture
Liberal anticulture rests on three pillars: first, the wholesale

conquest of nature, which consequently makes nature into an
65
independent object requiring salvation by the notional elimi-

nation 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 defi-
nitional meaning. These three cornerstones of human experi-
ence—nature, time and place—form the basis of culture, and
liberalism’s success is premised upon their uprooting and re-
placement 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, re-
placing custom with abstract and depersonalized law, liberat-
ing us from personal obligations and debts, replacing what
have come to be perceived as burdens on our individual au-
tonomous freedom with pervasive legal threat and general-
ized 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 increas-
ingly, 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 liberal-
66
ism’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 lib-
eration—accelerates liberalism’s success and demise.
Anticulture and the Conquest of Nature

One of liberalism’s main revolutions was not in the narrowly
political realm but in its disassociation of nature from culture.
The fundamental premise of liberalism is that the natural
condition of man is defined above all by the absence of cul-
ture, and that, by contrast, the presence of culture marks ex-
istence of artifice and convention, the simultaneous effort to
alter but conform to nature. In its earliest articulation, liberal
anthropology assumed that “natural man” was a cultureless
creature, existing in a “state of nature” noteworthy for the
absence of any artifice created by humans. For the protolib-
eral Hobbes, the state of nature was explicitly the sphere
where no culture was possible, because it lacked the condi-
tions in which stability, continuity, cultural transmission, and
memory could exist. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, for all his oppo-
sition to Hobbes, conceived the state of nature as a place of
relative peace and stability, but nevertheless strikingly similar
to Hobbes’s in its absence of cultural forms, and fundamen-
tally identical in the radical autonomy of its protohuman
inhabitants. Despite its romantic rejection of the cold, ration-
alist, and utilitarian Hobbesian picture of humanity, Rous-
seau’s primitivist alternative nevertheless reveals continuity
67
among all iterations of liberalism in its fundamental commit-

ment to the severance of nature from culture.
While today we can still speak of differences of “nature”
and “nurture,” even the possibility of a divide between these
two would have been incomprehensible to preliberal human-
ity. The revolutionary nature of the break introduced by liber-
alism is discernible even in the very word “culture.” “Culture”
is a word with deep connections to natural forms and proc-
esses, most obviously in words such as “agriculture” or “culti-
vate.” Just as the potential of a plant or animal isn’t possible
without cultivation, so it was readily understood that the hu-
man creature’s best potential simply could not be realized
without good culture. This was so evident to ancient thinkers
that the first several chapters of Plato’s Republic are devoted
not to a discussion of political forms but to the kinds of stories
that are appropriate for children. In a suggestive statement
winding up his introductory chapter in The Politics, Aristotle
declares that the first lawmaker is especially praiseworthy for
inaugurating governance over “food and sex,” that is, the two
elemental human desires that are most in need of cultivation
and civilization: for food, the development of manners that
encourage a moderate appetite and civilized consumption,
and for sex, the cultivation of customs and habits of courtship,
mannered interaction between the sexes, and finally marriage
as the “container” of the otherwise combustible and fraught
domain of sexuality. People who are “uncultivated” in the
consumption of both food and sex, Aristotle observed, are the
most vicious of creatures, literally consuming other humans to
slake their base and untutored appetites. Far from being un-
derstood as opposites of human nature, customs and manners
68
were understood to be derived from, governed by, and neces-

sary to the realization of human nature.
A core ambition of liberalism is the liberation of such
appetites from the artificial constraints of culture—either to
liberate them entirely as a condition of our freedom, or, where
they require constraint, to place them under the uniform
and homogenized governance of promulgated law rather than
the inconstant impositions and vagaries of diverse cultures.
While liberalism describes itself as mainly an effort to con-
strain and limit government, its earliest architects readily
admitted that a powerful and often arbitrary government—
acting upon “prerogative”—was necessary to secure the basic
conditions of freedom and its requisite stability. From the
outset, proponents of liberalism understood that cultural
constraints over expression and pursuit of appetite were ob-
stacles to the realization of a society premised upon unleash-
ing erstwhile vices (such as greed) as engines of economic
dynamism, and that state power might be required to over-
turn cultural institutions responsible for containing such ap-
petites.2 Today, with the success of the liberal project in the
economic sphere, the powers of the liberal state are increas-
ingly focused on dislocating those remaining cultural institu-
tions that were responsible for governance of consumer and
sexual appetite—purportedly in the name of freedom and
equality, but above all in a comprehensive effort to displace
cultural forms as the ground condition of liberal liberty. Only
constraints approved by the liberal state itself can finally be
acceptable. The assumption is that legitimate limits upon lib-
erty can arise only from the authority of the consent-based
liberal state.
69
The liberation of the autonomous individual requires not

only the waxing state apparatus but the expansive project of
conquering nature. This end as well rested most fundamen-
tally upon the notional, and then increasingly real, elimina-
tion of culture. Culture is the “convention” by which humans
interact responsibly with nature, at once conforming to its
governance while introducing human ingenuity and inven-
tion within its limits and boundaries.
A healthy culture is akin to healthy agriculture—while
clearly a form of human artifice, agriculture that takes into ac-
count local conditions (place) intends to maintain fecundity
over generations (time), and so must work with the facts of
given nature, not approach nature as an obstacle to the attain-
ment of one’s unbound appetites. Modern, industrialized agri-
culture works on the liberal model that apparent natural limits
are to be overcome through short-term solutions whose conse-
quences will be left for future generations. These solutions
include the introduction of petroleum-based fertilizers that in-
crease crop yields but contribute to hypoxic zones in lakes and
oceans; genetically engineered crops that encourage increased
use of herbicides and pesticides and whose genetic lines can’t
be contained or predicted; the widespread use of plant mono
cultures that displace local varieties and local practices; and the
use in cattle of antibiotics that have accelerated genetic muta-
tions in bacteria and thus decreased these medicines’ usefulness
for the human population. Industrial processes like these ig-
nore the distinctive demands of local culture and practices and
rely fundamentally on the elimination of existing farming cul-
tures as the essence of agriculture. While purportedly forward-
looking, this approach is profoundly presentist and placeless.
70
A culture develops above all in awareness of nature’s lim-

its, offerings, and demands. This awareness is not “theorized”
but is a lived reality that often cannot be described until it has
ceased to exist.3 Liberalism, by contrast, has aimed consist-
ently at disassociating cultural forms from nature. The effect
is at once to liberate humans from acknowledgement of
nature’s limits while rendering culture into wholly relativist
belief and practice, untethered from anything universal or en-
during. The aim of mastering nature toward the end of
liberating humanity from its limits—a project inaugurated in
the thought of Francis Bacon—was simultaneously an assault
on cultural norms and practices developed alongside nature.
The imperative to overcome culture as part of the project
of mastering nature was expressed with forthright clarity by
John Dewey, one of liberalism’s great heroes. Dewey insisted
that the progress of liberation rested especially upon the ac-
tive control of nature, and hence required the displacement of
traditional beliefs and culture that reflected a backward and
limiting regard for the past. He described these two ap-
proaches to the human relationship to nature as “civilized”
versus “savage.” The savage tribe manages to live in the
desert, he wrote, by adapting itself to the natural limits of its
environment; thus “its adaptation involves a maximum of
accepting, tolerating, putting up with things as they are, a
maximum of passive acquiescence, and a minimum of active
control, of subjection to use.” A “civilized people” in the same
desert also adapts; but “it introduces irrigation; it searches the
world for plants and animals that will flourish under such
conditions; it improves, by careful selection, those which are
growing there. As a consequence, the wilderness blossoms as
71
a rose. The savage is merely habituated; the civilized man has

habits which transform the environment.”4
Dewey traced his thought back to Francis Bacon, whom
he considered the most important thinker in history. Bacon,
he wrote in his Reconstruction in Philosophy, teaches that “scien-
tific laws do not lie on the surface of nature. They are hidden,
and must be wrested from nature by an active and elaborate
technique of inquiry.” The scientist “must force the apparent
facts of nature into forms different to those in which they fa-
miliarly present themselves; and thus make them tell the truth
about themselves, as torture may compel an unwilling witness
to reveal what he has been concealing.”5 Today’s liberals recoil
from such bald expressions of hubris, but rather than reject
Dewey’s effort to eliminate culture toward the end of domi-
nating nature, they are inclined to accept the liberal belief in
human separateness from nature and insist upon the conquest
of humanity—whether through the technological control of
the natural world (“conservative” liberals) or the technologi-
cal control of reproduction and mastery of the human genetic
code (“progressive” liberals). A core feature of the liberal
project is antipathy to culture as a deep relationship with a
nature that defines and limits human nature.
Liberal Timelessness
More than a system of government or legal and political or-
der, liberalism is about redefining the human perception of
time. It is an effort to transform the experience of time, in
particular the relationship of past, present, and future.
Social contract theory was about the abstraction of the
individual not only from human relations and places but also
72
from time. It depicts a history-less and timeless condition, a

thought experiment intended to be applicable at any and all
times. The most obvious reason for this conceit—that we be
invited to see its relevance in any circumstance, as Hobbes
famously argues in pointing out such everyday activities as
locking our chests and doors—obscures the deeper lesson
that humans are by nature creatures who live in an eternal
present. The conceit appeals not to some historical “social
contract” that we must look back to for guidance but to the
continual, ongoing belief that we are always by nature au-
tonomous choosing agents who perceive advantage for our-
selves in an ongoing contractual arrangement. Once again,
however, liberal theory posits a form of existence that contra-
dicts what most people’s actual experience was before liberal
society brought its “natural” conditions into existence. Only
with the ascendancy of liberal political orders does the experi-
ence of history in its fullest temporal dimension wane, and a
pervasive presentism become a dominant feature of life. This
condition is achieved especially through the dismantling of
culture, the vessel of the human experience of time.
The development of progressivism within liberalism is
only a further iteration of this pervasive presentism, a kind of
weaponized timelessness. Like classical liberalism, progres-
sivism is grounded in a deep hostility toward the past, particu-
larly tradition and custom. While widely understood to be
future-oriented, it in fact rests on simultaneous assumptions
that contemporary solutions must be liberated from past an-
swers but that the future will have as much regard for our
present as we have for the past. The future is an unknown
country, and those who live in a present arrayed in hostility to
73
the past must acquire indifference toward, and a simple faith

in, a better if unknowable future. Those whose view of time is
guided by such belief implicitly understand that their “achieve-
ments” are destined for the dustbin of history, given that the
future will regard us as backward and necessarily superseded.
Every generation must live for itself. Liberalism makes
humanity into mayflies, and unsurprisingly, its culmination
has led each generation to accumulate scandalous levels of
debt to be left for its children, while rapacious exploitation of
resources continues in the progressive belief that future
generations will devise a way to deal with the depletions.
This transformation of the experience of time has been
described in terms of two distinct forms of time: whereas
preliberal humanity experienced time as cyclical, modernity
thinks of it as linear. While suggestive and enlightening, this
linear conception of time is still premised on a fundamental
continuity between past, present, and future. Liberalism in its
several guises in fact advances a conception of fractured time,
of time fundamentally disconnected, and shapes humans to
experience different times as if they were radically different
countries.
Alexis de Tocqueville noted the connection between the
rise of liberal orders and the experience of fractured time. He
observed that liberal democracy would be marked above all
by a tendency toward presentism. In its egalitarianism and
especially in its rejection of aristocracy, it would be suspicious
of the past and future, encouraging instead a kind of stunted
individualism. Aristocracy, Tocqueville wrote, “links every-
body, from peasant to king, in one long chain. Democracy
breaks the chain and frees each link. . . . Thus, not only does
74
democracy make men forget their ancestors, but also clouds

their view of their descendants and isolates them from their
contemporaries. Each man is forever thrown back upon him-
self alone and there is a danger that he may be shut up in the
solitude of his own heart.”6
Tocqueville perceived the way in which “fractured time”
generates individualism, which in turn would have profound
social, political, and economic consequences as the underly-
ing logic of liberal democracy advances. He fretted especially
about the inability of a liberal democratic people to see their
own lives and actions as part of a continuum of time, and
hence to consider long-term implications of their actions and
deeds as part of a long-term human community. While a
constitutive feature of an aristocratic age was the pervasive
understanding of oneself as defined by one’s place in a gen-
erational order, a hallmark of democracy was to “break” that
chain in the name and pursuit of liberation of the individual.
While beneficial for individual liberation from generational
definition and debts, the fractured experience of time was to
have baleful political implications. Modern liberal democra-
cies, Tocqueville believed, would have a powerful tendency to
act only for the short term, thus to discount the consequences
of their actions upon future generations:
Once [liberal democrats] have grown accustomed not to think
about what will happen after their life, they easily fall back into
a complete and brutish indifference about the future, an atti-
tude all too well suited to certain propensities in human nature.
As soon as they have lost the way of relying chiefly upon distant
hopes, they are naturally led to want to satisfy their least
desires at once. . . . [Thus] there is always a danger that men
will give way to ephemeral and casual desires and that, wholly
75
renouncing whatever cannot be acquired without protracted ef-

fort, they may never achieve anything great or calm or lasting.7
Tocqueville notes that the propensity to think only within

the context of one’s own lifespan, and to focus on satisfaction
of immediate and baser pleasures, is a basic “propensity in
human nature.” To chasten, educate, and moderate this basic
instinct is the fruit of broader political, social, religious, and
familial structures, practices, and expectations. Liberalism
stresses our liberation from continuous time as a basic feature
of our nature, and thus regards such formative institutions,
structures, and practices as obstacles to the achievement of
our untrammeled individuality. The disassembling of those
cultural forms that tutor our presentism and instruct us that a
distinctive feature of our humanity is our capacity to remem-
ber and to promise renders us at once free, and trapped by
“brutish indifference” to any time outside our eternal present.
Tocqueville perceived that this same “brutish indifference”
would manifest itself not only politically but economically as
well. Dissolving the practices, along with the structures, that
draw people out of temporal narrowness, he feared, would
have the effect of separating people’s capacity to discern a
shared fate. Fractured time, and the resultant escape into the
“solitude of our own hearts,” would lead to self-congratulation
and actual physical as well as psychic separation of those who
were economically successful from those less fortunate. In
effect, he predicted that a new aristocracy would arise, but that
its “brutish indifference” born of temporal fracturing would
lead it to be worse than the aristocracy it was replacing. “The
territorial aristocracy of past ages was obliged by law, or
thought itself obliged by custom, to come to the help of its
76
servants and to relieve their distress. But the industrial aristoc-

racy of our day, when it has impoverished and brutalized the
men it uses, abandons them in their time of crisis to public
charity to feed them. . . . Between workman and master there
are frequent relations, but no true association.”8 The fractur-
ing of time is embraced as a form of freedom, a liberation
especially of personal obligations we have to those with whom
we share a past, a future, and even—ultimately—the present
itself.
A better way to understand culture is as a kind of collec-
tive trust. Culture is the practice of full temporality, an insti-
tution that connects the present to the past and the future. As
the Greeks understood, the mother of culture—of the Nine
Muses—was Mnemosyne, whose name means “memory.”
Culture educates us about our generational debts and obliga-
tions. At its best, it is a tangible inheritance of the past, one
that each of us is obligated to regard with the responsibilities
of trusteeship. It is itself an education in the full dimension of
human temporality, meant to abridge our temptation to live
within the present, with the attendant dispositions of ingrati-
tude and irresponsibility that such a narrowing of temporality
encourages. 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.
Liberalism as Nowhere and Everywhere

Liberalism valorizes placelessness. Its “state of nature” posits
a view from nowhere: abstract individuals in equally abstract
77
places. Not only does liberalism rest on the anthropological

assumption that humans are from no one—emerging, as
Hobbes described, “from the earth like mushrooms and grown
up without any obligation to each other”—but that we are
from nowhere.9 The place where one happens to be born and
raised is as arbitrary as one’s parents, one’s religion, or one’s
customs. One should consider oneself primarily a free chooser,
of place as of all relationships, institutions, and beliefs.
This is not to say that humans who are more firmly em-
bedded within cultural settings don’t sometimes set out for
new pastures. But liberalism sets a distinctive and radically
placeless “default” that begins as theory but eventually re-
shapes the world in its image. As Thomas Jefferson articulat-
ed in the Lockean tuneup that preceded his drafting of the
Declaration of Independence, the most fundamental right de-
fining the liberal human is the right to leave the place of one’s
birth.10 Our default condition is homelessness.
This placeless default is one of the preeminent ways that
liberalism subtly, unobtrusively, and pervasively undermines
all cultures and liberates individuals into the irresponsibility
of anticulture. No thinker has more ably discerned the de-
racinating effects of modern life than the Kentucky farmer,
novelist, poet, and essayist Wendell Berry. An unapologetic
defender of community in place, Berry regards community as
a rich and varied set of personal relationships, a complex of
practices and traditions drawn from a store of common mem-
ory and tradition, and a set of bonds forged between a people
and a place that—because of this situatedness—is not porta-
ble, mobile, fungible, or transferable.11 Community is more
than a collection of self-interested individuals brought to-
78
gether to seek personal advancement. Rather, it “lives and

acts by the common virtues of trust, goodwill, forbearance,
self-restraint, compassion, and forgiveness.”12
Berry is not hesitant to acknowledge that community is a
place of constraint and limits. Indeed, in this simple fact lies
its great attraction. Properly conceived, community is the ap-
propriate setting for flourishing human life—flourishing that
requires culture, discipline, constraint, and forms. At the
most elemental level (in an echo of Aristotle, if an uncon-
scious one), community is both derived from and in turn
makes possible healthful family life. Absent the supports of
communal life, family life is hard-pressed to flourish. This is
because family life is premised, in Berry’s view, on the disci-
pline of otherwise individualistic tendencies toward narrow
self-fulfillment, particularly erotic ones. He commends
arrangements [that] include marriage, family structure, divi-
sions of work and authority, and responsibility for the instruc-
tion of children and young people. These arrangements exist,
in part, to reduce the volatility and dangers of sex—to preserve
its energy, its beauty, and its pleasure; to preserve and clarify
its power to join not just husband and wife to one another but
parents to children, families to the community, the commu-
nity to nature; to ensure, so far as possible, that the inheritors
of sexuality, as they come of age, will be worthy of it.13
Communities maintain standards and patterns of life that

encourage responsible and communally sanctioned forms of
erotic bonds, with the aim of fostering the strong family ties
and commitments that constitute the backbone of communal
health and the conduit of culture and tradition. Communities
thus chasten the absolutist claims of “rights bearers”: for
instance, Berry insists that they are justified in maintaining
79
internally derived standards of decency in order to foster and

maintain a desired moral ecology. He explicitly defends the
communal prerogative to demand that certain books be re-
moved from the educational curriculum and to insist on the
introduction of the Bible into the classroom as “the word of
God.” He even reflects that “the future of community life in
this country may depend on private schools and home school-
ing.”14 Family is the wellspring of the cultural habits and prac-
tices that foster the wisdom, judgment, and local knowledge
by which humans flourish and thrive in common and rightly
claim the primary role in the education and upbringing of a
given community’s children.
Community begins with the family but extends outward
to incorporate an appropriate locus of the common good. For
Berry, the common good can be achieved only in small, local
settings. These dimensions cannot be precisely drawn, but
Berry seems to endorse the town as the basic locus of com-
monweal, and the region mainly in the economic and not in-
terpersonal realm. He is not hostile toward a conception of
national or even international common good, but he recog-
nizes that the greater scope of these larger units tends toward
abstraction, which comes always at the expense of the flour-
ishing of real human lives. Larger units than the locality or
the region can flourish in the proper sense only when their
constitutive parts flourish. Modern liberalism, by contrast,
insists on the priority of the largest unit over the smallest, and
seeks everywhere to impose a homogenous standard on a
world of particularity and diversity. One sees this tendency
everywhere in modern liberal society, from education to court
decisions that nationalize sexual morality, from economic
80
standardization to minute and exacting regulatory regimes.15

The tendency of modern politics—born of a philosophy that
endorses the expansion of human control—is toward the sub-
jection of all particularities to the logic of market dynamics,
exploitation of local resources, and active hostility toward di-
verse local customs and traditions in the name of progress and
rationalism.
Modern politics, as Berry has pointed out, is impatient
with local variety, particularly when it does not accept the
modern embrace of material progress, economic growth, and
personal liberation from all forms of work that are elemental
or that forestall mobility and efficiency.16 Berry is a strong
critic of the homogenization that modern states and modern
economic assumptions enforce.17 He is a defender of “com-
mon” or “traditional” sense, that sense of the commons that
often resists the logic of economic and liberal development
and progress. Echoing Giambattista Vico, an early critic of
the deracinated rationalism of Descartes and Hobbes, Berry
defends what Vico named the sensus communis. Such “common
knowledge” is the result of the practice and experience, the
accumulated store of wisdom born of trials and corrections of
people who have lived, suffered, and flourished in local set-
tings. Rules and practices based on a preconceived notion of
right cannot be imposed absent prudential consideration and
respect toward common sense.18 This is not to suggest that
traditions cannot be changed or altered, but, as Burke argued,
they must be given the presumptive allowance to change in-
ternally, with the understanding and assent of people who
have developed lives and communities based upon those prac-
tices. There is then, in Berry’s thought, a considerable respect
81
for the dignity of “common sense,” a nonexpert way of under-

standing the world that comes through experience, memory,
and tradition, and is the source of much democratic opinion
that liberalism typically dismisses.
the death of culture and

the rise of leviathan
While our main political actors argue over whether the lib-
eral state or the market better protects the liberal citizen, they
cooperate in the evisceration of actual cultures. Liberal legal
structures and the market system mutually reinforce the de-
construction of cultural variety in favor of a legal and eco-
nomic monoculture—or, more correctly, a mono-anticulture.
Individuals, liberated and displaced from particular histories
and practices, are rendered fungible within a political-
economic system that requires universally replaceable parts.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn clearly perceived the lawlessness
at the heart of liberal orders—a lawlessness that arose most
centrally from liberalism’s claims to value “rule of law” as it
hollowed out every social norm and custom in favor of legal
codes. In his controversial 1978 commencement address at
Harvard University, “A World Split Apart,” Solzhenitsyn
criticized modern liberal reliance upon “legalistic” life. Echo-
ing the Hobbesian and Lockean understanding of law as
positivistic “hedges” constraining otherwise perfect natural
autonomy, liberal legalism is posed against our natural liberty,
and thus is always regarded as an imposition that otherwise
should be avoided or circumvented. Delinked from any con-
ception of “completion”—telos or flourishing—and disasso-
82
ciated from norms of natural law, legalism results in a wide-

spread effort to pursue desires as fully as possible while
minimally observing any legal prohibition. As Solzhenitsyn
noted,
If one is right from a legal point of view, nothing more is re-

quired, nobody may mention that one could still not be en-
tirely right, and urge self-restraint or a renunciation of these
rights, call for sacrifice and selfless risk: this would simply
sound absurd. Voluntary self-restraint is almost unheard of: every-
one strives toward further expansion to the extreme limit of
legal frames.19
Solzhenitsyn cut to the heart of liberalism’s great failing and

ultimate weakness: its incapacity to foster self-governance.
It is fitting that Solzhenitsyn delivered this lecture at Har-
vard, the nation’s premier university, since the elite universi-
ties are preeminent examples of what were once institutions of
cultural formation that have become purveyors of liberal anti-
culture. Elite universities, and the educational system more
broadly, are the front lines in the advance of liberalism’s delib-
erate and wholesale disassembly of a broad swath of cultural
norms and practices in the name of liberation from the past.
Two areas in particular are served and undergirded by the edu-
cational imperative to advance the contemporary anticulture:
dissolutions of sexual and economic norms, both advanced in
the name of liberation of the human will that is defined espe-
cially by consumption, hedonism, and short-term thinking.
The fact that each of liberalism’s two main parties—“liberals”
and “conservatives”—views one of these activities as problem-
atic and the other at the core of its commitments reflects the
insidiousness and pervasiveness of liberalism’s advance.
83
The universities are the front line of the sexual revolution,

the high churches charged with proselytizing the modern or-
thodoxy of individual liberation. As Stephen Gardner has de-
scribed the central dogma of the new creed, “Eros must be
raised to the level of religious cult in modern society. . . . It is
in carnal desire that the modern individual believes he affirms
his ‘individuality.’ The body must be the true ‘subject’ of de-
sire because the individual must be the author of his own de-
sire.”20 The “subject” imagined in the “state of nature” is now
the resulting creature and creation of liberalism’s educational
system, at once claiming merely to respect the natural auton-
omy of individuals and actively catechizing this “normless”
norm.
One of the upheavals of the sexual revolution was the re-
jection of long-standing rules and guidelines governing the
behavior of students at the nation’s colleges and universities.
Formerly understood to stand in for parents—in loco parentis,
“in place of the parent”—these institutions dictated rules re-
garding dormitory life, dating, curfews, visitations, and com-
portment. Adults—often clergy—were charged with continu-
ing the cultivation of youth into responsible adulthood. Some
fifty years after students were liberated from the nanny col-
lege, we are seeing not a sexual nirvana but widespread confu-
sion and anarchy, and a new form of in absentia parentis—the
paternalist state.
Long-standing local rules and cultures that governed be-
havior through education and cultivation of norms, manners,
and morals came to be regarded as oppressive limitations on
individual liberty. Those forms of control were lifted in the
name of liberation, leading to regularized abuse of those lib-
84
erties, born primarily of lack of any sets of practices or cus-

toms to delineate limits on behavior, especially in the fraught
arena of sexual interaction. The federal government, seen as
the only legitimate authority for redress, exercised its powers
to reregulate the liberated behaviors. But in the wake of disas-
sembled local cultures, there is no longer a set of norms by
which to cultivate self-rule, since these would constitute an
unjust limitation upon our freedom. Now there can be only
punitive threats that occur after the fact. Most institutions
have gotten out of the business of seeking to educate the ex-
ercise of freedom through cultivation of character and virtue;
emphasis is instead placed upon the likelihood of punishment
after one body has harmed another body.
This immorality tale is the Hobbesian vision in micro-
cosm: first, tradition and culture must be eliminated as arbi-
trary and unjust (“natural man”). Then we see that absent
such norms, anarchy ensues (“the state of nature”). Finding
this anarchy unbearable, we turn to a central sovereign as our
sole protector, that “Mortall God” who will protect us from
ourselves (“the social contract”). We have been liberated from
all custom and tradition, all authority that sought to educate
within the context of ongoing communities, and have re-
placed these things with a distant authority that punishes us
when we abuse our freedoms. And now, lacking any informal
and local forms of authority, we are virtually assured that
those abuses will regularly occur and that the state will find it
necessary to intrude ever more minutely into personal affairs
(“Prerogative”).
We see an identical liberation of appetite in the economic
realm, where varying economic cultures are dismantled in the
85
name of homogenous “laws” of economics, disconnecting the

pursuit of appetite from the common good, and relying upon
the unreliable enforcement of abstract and distant regulation
of markets, backstopped by the promise of punishment by the
liberal state. Just as the destruction of distinct campus cul-
tures and their replacement by an increasingly laissez-faire
jungle with distant administrative oversight have given rise to
a “rape culture,” so too has “the market” replaced a world of
distinctive economic cultures. The near collapse of the world
economy in 2008 was, above all, the result of the elimination
of a culture that existed to regulate and govern the granting
and procuring of mortgages. This activity was historically un-
derstood as consummately local, requiring relationships that
developed over time and in place. Laws and norms once ex-
isted to shore up the local mortgage culture, forbidding banks
to open branches in communities outside those where they
were based, premised on a belief that the granting and accept-
ing of debt rested on trust and local knowledge. These laws,
and the culture they supported, presupposed that “the bank-
ers’ interests and the interests of the larger community are
one and the same.”21 The mortgage market was thus under-
stood not as a naked arena of anonymous and abstract rela-
tions but as a form of organized remembrance in which trust,
reputation, memory, and obligation were required for the
market to operate. As J. P. Morgan chief Thomas Lamont
said of his business in 1928, “the community as a whole de-
mands of the banker that he shall be an honest observer of
conditions about him, that he shall make constant and careful
study of those conditions, financial, economic, social and po-
litical, and that he shall have a wide vision over them all.”22
86
By 2008, the financial industry was stripped bare of any

such culture rooted in nature, time and place—as were
college campuses. Indeed, training at dorm parties and the
fraternities of one’s college were the ideal preparation for a
career in the mortgage bond market, and the financial frat
party of Wall Street more generally. The mortgage industry
rested upon the financial equivalent of college “hookups,”
random encounters of strangers in which appetites (for out-
sized debt or interest) were sated without any care for the
consequences for the wider community. Responsibility- and
cost-free loans were mutually satisfactory and wholly liberat-
ing from the constraints of an older financial order. But much
as on college campuses, these arrangements led to gross irre-
sponsibility and abuse, damaging communities and demolish-
ing lives. The response has been the same: calls for greater
government regulation and oversight over the consequences
of untrammeled appetite, with threats of penalties (rarely
enforced) and a massive expansion of the administrative state
to oversee a basic human interaction—the effort to secure
shelter. Liberation from the confinements and limitations of
local market cultures brings not perfect liberty but the expan-
sion of Leviathan. The destruction of culture achieves not
liberation but powerlessness and bondage.
The dissolution of culture is simultaneously the prerequi-
site for the liberation of the disembedded individual, for a
pervasive and encompassing market, and for the empower-
ment of the state. Individuals appeal to available authorities
for a loosening of cultural norms and practices in the name of
individual liberation, leading to various pressures that dimin-
ish or dissolve the constitutive features of long-standing
87
informal norms. Absent these norms, individuals pursue lib-

eralized liberty, fulfilling the desire to do as one wishes, all
that is not restrained by law or causing obvious harm. But
without the guiding standards of behavior that were generally
developed through cultural practices and expectations, liber-
ated individuals inevitably come into conflict. The only au-
thority that can now adjudge those claims is the state, leading
to an increase in legal and political activity in local affairs that
were once generally settled by cultural norms. Liberal indi-
vidualism demands the dismantling of culture; and as culture
fades, Leviathan waxes and responsible liberty recedes.
parasitic liberalism
Evidence of our anticulture surrounds us yet is pervasively

denied. Liberalism extends itself by inhabiting spaces aban-
doned by local cultures and traditions, leading either to their
discarding or suppression or, far more often, to their content-
less redefinition. Rather than produce our own cultures,
grounded in local places, embedded in time, and usually de-
veloped from an inheritance from relatives, neighbors, and
community—music, art, storytelling, food—we are more
likely to consume prepackaged, market-tested, mass-marketed
consumables, often branded in commercialized symbolism
that masks that culture’s evisceration. A stream of stories ac-
centuates our increasing inability to do things for ourselves,
from Matthew Crawford’s widely read and discussed account
of the decline of shop class as an indicator of our widening
ignorance of how to make and repair things to a recent report
of declining sales and maintenance of pianos in the home, a
88
consequence of the replacement of music played at home

with mass-produced music.23
The champion of all “brood parasites” is the brown-
headed cowbird, which lays its eggs in the nests of more than
two hundred bird species, getting other birds to raise young
cowbirds as their own. Liberalism has taken a page from this
insidious practice: under liberalism, “culture” becomes a
word that parasitizes the original, displacing actual cultures
with a liberal simulacrum eagerly embraced by a populace
that is unaware of the switch. Invocations of “culture” tend to
be singular, not plural, whereas actual cultures are multiple,
local, and particular. We tend to speak of such phenomena as
“popular culture,” a market-tested and standardized product
devised by commercial enterprises and meant for mass con-
sumption. Whereas culture is an accumulation of local and
historical experience and memory, liberal “culture” is the vac-
uum that remains when local experience has been eviscerated,
memory is lost, and every place becomes every other place. A
panoply of actual cultures is replaced by celebration of “mul-
ticulturalism,” the reduction of actual cultural variety to lib-
eral homogeneity loosely dressed in easily discarded native
garb. The “-ism” of “multiculturalism” signals liberalism’s
victorious rout of actual cultural variety. Even as cultures are
replaced by a pervasive anticulture, the language of culture is
advanced as a means of rendering liberal humanity’s detach-
ment from specific cultures. The homogenous celebration of
every culture effectively means no culture at all. The more
insistent the invocation of “pluralism” or “diversity” or, in the
retail world, “choice,” the more assuredly the destruction of
actual cultures is advancing. Our primary allegiance is to
89
celebration of liberal pluralism and diversity, shaping homog-

enized and identical adherents of difference, demanding and
ensuring pervasive indifferentism.
By contrast, while cultures are many and varied, their
common features almost always include a belief in the conti-
nuity between human nature and the natural world; the expe-
rience of the past and the future as embedded within the
present; and assurance of the sacredness of one’s place, along
with depths of gratitude and responsibility to the care and
preservation of one’s places. Liberalism was premised upon a
rejection of each of these constitutive aspects of culture, since
to recognize continuity with nature, the debts and obligations
attending the flow of time and generations, or a strong
identity with one’s place was to limit one’s experience and op-
portunity to become a self-making author. Culture was the
greatest threat to the creation of the liberal individual, and a
major ambition and increasing achievement of liberalism was
to reshape a world organized around the human war against
nature, a pervasive amnesia about the past and indifference
toward the future, and the wholesale disregard for making
places worth loving and living in for generations. The re-
placement of these conditions with a ubiquitous and uniform
anticulture is at once a crowning achievement of liberalism
and among the greatest threats to our continued common life.
The very basis of liberalism’s success again ushers in the con-
ditions for its demise.
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CHAPTER FOUR
Technology and the Loss of Liberty
P
raise and misgivings about our techno-
logical nature have been with us for mil-
lennia, but it is only in modern times—
roughly since the dawn of the industrial
era—that we have entered what we might
call a technological age. While we have
always been technological creatures, our
reliance on technology has distinctly changed, along with our
attitude toward technology and our relationship with it. One
is hard-pressed to think of premodern works of poetry, litera-
ture, or song that express society-wide infatuation with
technology. There are no great medieval works extolling the
invention of the iron stirrup or the horse collar. Our intellec-
tual and emotional relationship to that technology—both our
wild optimism about the prospects of human progress and our
profound terror about the apocalypse this same technology
might bring about—are products of modern times.1
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T e chn o l o g y and th e L o s s o f L i b e r t y
This oscillation between ecstasy and anxiety over tech-

nology’s role in our lives has become one of the primary forms
of self-expression and entertainment in the modern age, at
least since Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein. In recent years,
the genre seems to have become even more pervasive, with an
emphasis not only on technology’s promise and threat but on
its role in either preventing or bringing about an apocalypse.
My unscientific impression is that more popular program-
ming than ever is devoted to this theme. If our sense of threat
from nuclear weapons seems to have waned somewhat, we
have found other night terrors, from medical catastrophe to
cyborg warfare on humanity to cataclysmic climate change
and the specter of human extinction.
Over the past few decades, several blockbuster films have
depicted the apocalypse as the result of uncontrollable forces
that humans valiantly combatted, often successfully. The
threats include extinction by asteroid, as in Armageddon and
Deep Impact; alien invasion, as in Independence Day, War of the
Worlds, and Battle Los Angeles; and, in 2012, general demise co-
incident with the end of the Mayan calendar. In all of these
films, it is technology, in various ways, that is the source of hu-
manity’s eventual triumph over or salvation from these threats.
But most recent entrants to the genre seem rather to focus
on how our technology is likely to be the source of our doom.
Some recent films hark back to fears of a nuclear apocalypse,
such as The Book of Eli or The Road. Others posit that we will
end civilization through global warming, such as The Day after
Tomorrow. There are films about medical experiments going
awry, leading to a massive die-off, such as I Am Legend, Quar-
antine, Contagion, and Rise of the Planet of the Apes. There are
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stories about our technology failing or attacking us, such as the

Terminator series and, more recently, the television show Revo-
lution, about a time when all machines cease to operate and
electricity ceases to flow. The successful HBO series Westworld
depicts machines becoming more human than a dehumanized
humanity, intimating that we may have invented a better ver-
sion of ourselves. Similarly, the digital series H+ tells of a future
in which developments in nanotechnology lead to widespread
implantation of tiny chips into human beings, allowing them to
discard cellphones, tablets, and computers by becoming inter-
connected receivers of data, texts, and email. While the series
begins with triumphalist pronouncements by transhumanist
techno-optimists, the technology soon turns deadly, causing a
massive die-off of millions who have been implanted.
Most examples of this recent genre seems to reflect a
widespread foreboding about a shared sense of powerlessness,
and even the potential for a new kind of bondage to the very
technology that is supposed to liberate us. These movies and
programs portray how, in our optimistic and even hubristic
belief that our technology will usher in a new age of freedom,
we discover in various ways that we are subjects to those very
technologies. Far from controlling our technology for our
own betterment, we find that the technology ends up either
ruling or destroying us.
android humanity
A host of academic studies and works also explore, if less

dramatically, the ways in which we are subjects to the trans-
formative effects of our technologies. A paramount example
93
today may be found in anxious descriptions of how the inter-

net and social media are inescapably changing us, mainly for
the worse. Several recent books and studies describing the
measurable baleful effects of these technologies have found a
ready audience well beyond the usual academic circles. For
instance, in his widely discussed book The Shallows, Nicholas
Carr describes how the internet is literally changing us, trans-
forming our brains into different organs from those of the
preinternet world. Appealing to developments in studies of
brain plasticity, Carr describes how persistent occupation
with the internet is leading to physiological changes to our
brains, and hence to the ways we think, learn, and act. He
argues that sustained exposure to the internet is rewiring our
synapses, making us intensely hungry for frequent changes in
images and content and less able than our forebears to con-
centrate and focus. For Carr, this change is not altogether for
the worse, since some areas of the brain have shown measur-
able increases, particularly those related to decision making
and problem solving. But those gains are accompanied by sig-
nificant losses in language facility, memory, and concentra-
tion. We are, he argues, becoming more shallow, not simply
in a superficial way, but physiologically. The internet is
making us dumber.2
Other books emphasize the contributions of the internet
and the social media to changes in our social and relational
lives, often for the worse. In her book Alone Together MIT’s
Sherry Turkle assembles evidence that our pervasive use of
modern social media doesn’t so much create new communities
as it substitutes for the real-world communities that it destroys.
Turkle reminds us that the root of the word “community”
94
means literally “to give among each other” and argues that
such a practice requires “physical proximity” and “shared re-
sponsibilities.” The growing presence of social media fosters
relationships that avoid either of these constitutive elements of
community, replacing that thicker set of shared practices with
the thinner and more evanescent bonds of “networks.” Turkle
is not simply nostalgic—she acknowledges the difficult and
even awful aspects of community in earlier times. She describes
the community in which her grandparents lived, for instance,
as “rife with deep antagonisms.” But the same thickness that
gave rise to such contentious relations, she writes, also inspired
people to take care of each other in times of need. Turkle fears
that we are losing not only that experience but also the capac-
ity to form the thick bonds that constitute community, and that
our attraction to social media at once undermines these bonds
and provides a pale simulacrum to fill the void. Social media
become ersatz substitutes for what they destroy, and Turkle
seems pessimistic about the prospects for slowing this transfor-
mation. At best we can try to limit our children’s access to
the internet, but Turkle seems resigned to dim prospects of
fundamentally changing the current dynamic.3
These recent works follow in the tradition established by
critics of technology who emphasize the way that technology
changes us and, in particular, destroys long-standing ways of
life, attacking the very basis of culture. There is a long tradi-
tion of cultural criticism, ranging from Lewis Mumford’s cri-
tiques of modernism to Jacques Ellul’s The Technological Society,
which emphasizes the way the “technique” of technology eras-
es everything in its path in the name of utility and efficiency,
and more recently to Wendell Berry, who has argued that
95
machine technology has its own logic, which tends to destroy

the practices and traditions of a community. Perhaps the most
representative voice in this tradition is that of Neil Postman,
whose book Technopoly—published in 1992—was suggestively
subtitled The Surrender of Culture to Technology.
In that book, Postman describes the rise in the modern
era of what he calls Technocracy. Preindustrial forms of cul-
ture and social organization used tools no less than techno-
cratic societies, Postman writes, but the tools they employed
“did not attack (or more precisely, were not intended to at-
tack) the dignity and integrity of the culture into which they
were introduced. With some exceptions, tools did not prevent
people from believing in their traditions, in their God, in
their politics, in their methods of education, or in the legiti-
macy of their social organization.”4 The tools adopted by a
Technocracy, by contrast, constantly transform the way of
life. Postman writes, “Everything must give way, in some de-
gree, to their development. . . . Tools are not integrated into
the culture; they attack the culture. They bid to become the
culture. As a consequence, tradition, social mores, myth, pol-
itics, ritual, and religion have to fight for their lives.”5 From
technocracy we have entered the age of “technopoly,” in
which a culturally flattened world operates under an ideology
of progress that leads to “the submission of all forms of cul-
tural life to the sovereignty of technique and technology.”
The residual cultural practices that survived the era of
technocracy now give way to a transformed world in which
technology is itself our culture—or anticulture, a tradition-
destroying and custom-undermining dynamic that replaces
cultural practices, memory, and beliefs.
96
What these critiques have in common is the supposition

that our technology is changing us, often for the worse. We
are the subjects of its activity and largely powerless before its
transformative power. Our anxiety arises from the belief that
we may no longer control the technology that is supposed to
be a main tool of our liberty.
Perhaps an even deeper anxiety arises from the belief that
there is an inevitability to technological advances that no
amount of warning about their dangers can prevent. A kind of
Hegelian or Darwinian narrative seems to dominate our
worldview. We seem inescapably to be either creating our
own destroyer or, as Lee Silver writes in Remaking Eden,
evolving into a fundamentally different creature that we have
reason to fear becoming. Our popular culture seems to be a
kind of electronic Cassandra, seeing the future but unable to
get anyone to believe it. The culture offers entertaining
prophecies born of our anxieties, and we take perverse pleas-
ure distracting ourselves with portrayals of our powerlessness.
One example of this genre of technological (as well as
political) inevitability, albeit framed in a triumphalist mode, is
the narrative advanced by Francis Fukuyama in his famous
essay, and later book, The End of History. The book, in par-
ticular, provides a long materialist explanation of the inescap-
able scientific logic, driven by the need for constant advances
in military technology, contributing to the ultimate rise of the
liberal state. Only the liberal state, in Fukuyama’s view, could
provide the environment for the open scientific inquiry that
has led to the greatest advances in military devices and tactics.
All others are inexorably forced to follow. Yet, in a book writ-
ten only a decade later on advances in biotechnology and “our
97
posthuman future,” Fukuyama acknowledges that this

very logic might end up altering human nature itself, and as a
result imperiling the political order of liberal democracy it
had been developed to support.6
Other works speak of technological inevitability as a re-
sult of forces embedded within the nature of reality itself. In
his now-classic 1967 essay “Do Machines Make History?” the
economic historian Robert Heilbroner depicts a logic within
the development of history that pushed humans toward tech-
nological development. While societies might adopt those
technologies at different speeds, nevertheless there is a form
of “soft determinism” in technological development. Perhaps
more forthright still is the argument found in Daniel J. Boor-
stin’s short book The Republic of Technology, published in 1978,
in which he depicts technological development as following a
kind of “Law” like that of gravity or thermodynamics. For
example, “the Supreme Law of the Republic of Technology is
convergence, the tendency for everything to become more
like everything else.”7 The laws governing technological de-
velopment thus inevitably shape our human world in an in-
creasingly identical form—anticipating today’s suspicions
that modern technology’s child, “globalization,” is a kind of
inescapable unfolding.
Whether told as praise or lament, this narrative of inevi-
tability tends to grant autonomy to technology itself, as if its
advances occurred independently of human intention and
thought. It becomes a process inescapably driven by its own
internal logic—or, to modify a phrase of Hegel’s, “the cun-
ning of techne,” the unconscious unfolding of a technological
Geist that leads inevitably to convergence and singularity, a
98
fully technologized culmination of History with a capital H.

It, too, perhaps has a slaughterbench that demands its share
of victims in the course of its unfolding, but their sacrifice is
justified by Progress to a better and even perfected future.
I want to challenge, or at least complicate, these two re-
lated ways that modern humans have come to discern and
portray technology—as something that shapes and even re-
makes us, and does so with a kind of iron law of inevitability.
Doing so requires me to take a step back into an exploration
of what Aristotle called “the master science” of all sciences—
political philosophy—and try to discern the deeper origins of
humanity’s new relationship to technology.
the technology of liberalism
As I have argued throughout, liberalism above all advances a

new understanding of liberty. In the ancient world—whether
pre-Christian antiquity, particularly ancient Greece, or dur-
ing the long reign of Christendom—the dominant definition
of liberty involved recognition that it required an appropriate
form of self-governance. This conception of liberty was based
upon a reciprocal relationship between the self-government
of individuals through the cultivation of virtue (whether an-
cient or Christian conceptions of virtue, which differed), and
the self-government of polities, in which the governing aspi-
ration was the achievement of the common good. Ancient
thought sought a “virtuous circle” of polities that would sup-
port the fostering of virtuous individuals, and of virtuous in-
dividuals who would form the civic life of a polity oriented
toward the common good. Much of the challenge faced by
99
ancient thinkers was how to start such a virtuous circle where

it did not exist or existed only partially, and how to maintain
it against the likelihood of civic corruption and persistent
temptation to vice.
Liberty, by this understanding, was not doing as one
wished, but was choosing the right and virtuous course. 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. Liberty was thus the condition achieved by self-
rule, over one’s own appetites and over the longing for
political dominion.
The defining feature of modern thought was the rejec-
tion of this definition of liberty in favor of the one more fa-
miliar to us today. Liberty, as defined by the originators of
modern liberalism, was the condition in which humans were
completely free to pursue whatever they desired. This condi-
tion—fancifully conceived as a “state of nature,” was imag-
ined as a condition before the creation of political society, a
condition of pure liberty. Its opposite was thus conceived as
constraint. Liberty was no longer, as the ancients held, the
condition of just and appropriate self-rule.
The main political obstacle to be overcome was limita-
tion upon individual liberty imposed by other people. The
old political orders, previously devoted to the inculcation of
virtue and the commendation of the common good, were at-
tacked early on by Niccolò Machiavelli as “imaginary repub-
lics and principalities,” dealing in oughts rather than taking
humans as they actually are. In order to unleash the produc-
tive and scientific capacity of human societies, a different
100
mode and order had to be introduced—a completely new

form of political technology that made possible a technologi-
cal society. That form of technology was the modern repub-
lic—posited on the rejection of the key premises of ancient
republicanism—and above all it rested on the harnessing of
self-interest in both the public and the private realms in order
to secure human liberty and increase the scope, scale, and ex-
tent of human power over nature.
The precondition of our technological society was that
great achievement of political technology, the “applied tech-
nology” of liberal theory, our Constitution. The Constitution
is the embodiment of a set of modern principles that sought
to overturn ancient teachings and shape a distinctly different
modern human. It is a kind of precursor technology, the pre-
condition for the technology that today seems to govern us.
According to James Madison in Federalist 10, the first object of
government is the protection of “the diversity in the faculties
of men,” which is to say our individual pursuits and the
outcomes of those pursuits—particularly, Madison notes,
differences in attainment of property. Government exists to
protect the greatest possible sphere of individual liberty, and
it does so by encouraging the pursuit of self-interest among
both the citizenry and public servants. “Ambition must be
made to counteract ambition”: powers must be separate and
divided powers to prevent any one person from centralizing
and seizing power; but at the same time, the government itself
is to be given substantial new powers to act directly on indi-
viduals, both to liberate them from the constraints of their
particular localities, and to promote the expansion of com-
merce and the “useful arts and sciences.”
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This new political technology developed to expand the

practice of the modern understanding of liberty was designed
to liberate us from partial loyalties to particular people and
places, and make us into individuals who, above all, strive to
achieve our individual ambitions and desires. Part of the new
technology of modern republicanism is what Madison calls an
“enlarged orbit” that will increase individual prospects for
their ambitions while making our interpersonal ties and com-
mitments more tenuous. One of the ways modern republican-
ism was intended to combat the ancient problem of political
faction was not by commending public spiritedness but by
fostering a “mistrust of motives” that would result from the
large expanse of the republic, constantly changing political
dynamics, the encouragement to “pluralism” and expansion
of diversity as a default preference, and thus the shifting com-
mitments of the citizenry. A technological society like our
own comes into being through a new kind of political tech-
nology—one that replaces the ancient commendation of vir-
tue and aspiration to the common good with self-interest, the
unleashed ambition of individuals, an emphasis on private
pursuits over a concern for public weal, and an acquired
ability to reconsider any relationships that limit our personal
liberty. In effect, a new political technology is invented—a
“new science of politics”—that itself conditions our under-
standing of the purposes and ends of science and technology.
Technology does not exist autonomous of political and social
norms and beliefs, but its development and applications are
shaped by such norms. Liberalism introduces a set of norms
that lead us, ironically, to the belief that technology develops
independent of any norms and intentions, but rather shapes
102
our norms, our polity, and even humanity, and inevitably es-
capes our control.
In light of this set of political preconditions to a technological

society, we can reconsider the two dominant narratives by
which we tend to think about our relationship to technology:
that technology “shapes” us in ways that should cause regret
and even concern, and that its effects are inevitable and
irreversible.
First, as we have seen, there is much concern about the
ways that modern technology undermines community and
tends to make us more individualistic, but in light of the
deeper set of conditions that led to the creation of our tech-
nological society, we can see that “technology” simply sup-
ports the fundamental commitments of early-modern political
philosophy and its founding piece of technology, our modern
republican government and the constitutional order. It is less
a matter of our technology “making us” than of our deeper
political commitments shaping our technology. You could
say that our political technology is the operating system that
creates the environment in which various technological pro-
grams may thrive, and that the operating system was itself the
result of a transformation of the definition and understanding
of liberty.
This recognition was acknowledged, if incompletely, in
a widely discussed article that appeared in the Atlantic
entitled “Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?” Its author, Stephen
Marche, begins in the usual manner, showing how a form
of technology—Facebook in this case—appears to be contrib-
uting to greater instances of loneliness and corresponding
103
feelings of sadness and even depression. The author views

loneliness as a nearly pathological condition, rising to
epidemic levels even as the use of social networking tools like
Facebook has increased. Some 20 percent of Americans—
sixty million people—say they experience unhappiness due to
loneliness, he reports, and a vast array of therapeutic social
services has arisen to attempt to combat this form of depres-
sion. “A matter of nostalgic lament has morphed into an issue
of public health.”8
Yet, Marche refreshingly avoids blaming Facebook for this
epidemic of loneliness. Rather, he notes that Facebook, and
technologies like it, have facilitated or even enabled a preex-
isting predilection—the long-standing American desire to be
independent and free. Facebook is thus a tool that elicits lone-
liness from a deeper set of philosophical, political, and even
theological commitments. As Marche points out, “Loneliness
is one of the first things that Americans spend their money
achieving. . . . We are lonely because we want to be lonely. We
have made ourselves lonely.” Technologies like Facebook, he
writes, “are the by-product of a long-standing national appe-
tite for independence.” That appetite, as I have argued, is it-
self the result of a redefinition of the nature of liberty.
Consider a different kind of “technology”: how we inhab-
it the world through our built environment. More than any
other people, Americans have pursued a living arrangement
that promotes the conception of ourselves as independent and
apart, primarily through the creation of the postwar suburb,
made possible by the technology of the automobile. The sub-
urb, however, was not simply the “creation” of the automo-
bile; rather, the automobile and its accessories—highways, gas
104
stations, shopping malls, fast-food chains—permitted a life-

style that Americans, because of their deeper philosophical
commitments, were predisposed to prefer. We find other
evidence of such precommitments beyond the automobile’s
influence, such as the transformation of building styles docu-
mented in the architectural historian Richard Thomas’s
remarkable 1975 article “From Porch to Patio.” Thomas de-
scribes a striking postwar transition in house styles in which
the front porch, formerly the most prominent feature in the
elevation of a house, disappeared in favor of a patio tucked
behind the house. He describes the social and even civic role
played by the porch—not only offering cooler temperatures
and a breeze in the era before air-conditioning, but providing
“intermediate spaces,” a kind of civil space, between the pri-
vate world of the house and the public spaces of the sidewalk
and street. The front porch, often sited within easy chatting
distance of the sidewalk, was an architectural reflection of an
era with a high expectation of sociability among neighbors.
The back patio gained in popularity around the same time as
the increased use of the automobile and the rise of the sub-
urb—all of which created a built environment conducive to
privacy, apartness, insularity, and a declining commitment to
social and civic spaces and practices. These technologies re-
flected the commitments of modern republican liberty, but
they did not—as is too often thought—make us “lonely.”9
As a counterexample, one could pose social and cultural
norms that govern the use of technology for different purposes
and ends. The old-order Amish are often regarded as a society
with a phobia toward technology, but this view reflects a pre-
liminary misunderstanding of technology—in particular, an
105
incapacity to recognize that the technology that is adopted by

that culture reflects a prior commitment to certain social ends,
just as liberal adoption of technology seeks to effect its own
distinctive ends. Some of the decisions of the Amish—like
their rejection of zippers—are incomprehensible to many of
us, but what is most of interest is the basic criterion they use to
decide whether to adopt, and more important how to adopt,
technology in their society. All technological developments
are subject to the basic question, “Will this or won’t it help
support the fabric of our community?” It is believed that the
automobile and electricity will not (though propane-powered
implements are approved). To me, one of the most powerful
examples of this criterion is the decision to eschew insurance,
on the grounds that our form of insurance is premised on max-
imum anonymity and minimal personal commitment. For the
price of a premium based on calculations of actuarial tables, I
join a pool with others seeking insurance for a variety of ob-
jects or conditions, such as automobile, house, life, or health.
When one of these areas suffers damage, I (or my heirs) can
turn to the insurance company for some compensatory pay-
ment to make me whole again. The funds are drawn from the
pool to which all the insured contributed, but we all remain
wholly unaware of how, and to whom, payments are made. I
am insured against a variety of tragedies but wholly off the
hook for any personal responsibility or obligation to anyone
else in the insurance pool. My only obligation is a financial
transaction with the company providing the insurance.
Certain Amish communities ban members from purchas-
ing insurance. Rather, the community itself is their “insur-
ance pool”: members seek to foster a community where it is
106
everyone’s shared responsibility and obligation to make some-

one who suffers a loss “whole” again.10 As the economist
Stephen Marglin writes in his insightful book The Dismal Sci-
ence: How Thinking Like an Economist Undermines Community,
“The Amish, perhaps unique in twentieth-century America in
their attention to fostering community, forbid insurance pre-
cisely because they understand that the market relationship
between an individual and the insurance company under-
mines the mutual dependence of the individuals. For the
Amish, barn raisings are not exercises in nostalgia, but the
cement that binds the community together.”11
I note this profound difference of approach to the ques-
tion and use of technology between the likes of the old-order
Amish and contemporary liberals not to urge that denizens of
liberal modernity adopt wholesale the practices and beliefs of
the Amish but to make a specific point. We regard our condi-
tion as one of freedom, whereas from the standpoint of liberal
modernity, adherents of Amish culture are widely perceived to
be subject to oppressive rules and customs. Yet we should note
that while we have choices about what kind of technology we
will use—whether a sedan or a jeep, an iPhone or a Galaxy, a
Mac or a PC—we largely regard ourselves as subject to the
logic of technological development and ultimately not in a po-
sition to eschew any particular technology. By contrast, the
Amish—who seem to constrain so many choices—exercise
choice over the use and adoption of technologies based upon
criteria upon which they base their community. Who is free?
In our remaking of the world—through obvious technol-
ogies like the internet, and less obvious but no less influential
ones like insurance—we embrace and deploy technologies
107
that make us how we imagine ourselves being. And in a pro-

found irony, it is precisely in this quest to attain ever-more-
perfect individual liberty and autonomy that we increasingly
suspect that we might fundamentally lack choice about
adoption of those technologies.
To secure our modern form of freedom through the great
modern technology of the liberal political order and the capi-
talist economic system it fosters, we ceaselessly need to increase
our power and expand the empire of liberty. Concentrations of
political and economic power are necessary for ever-increasing
individual liberty. In contradiction to our contemporary
political discourse, which suggests that there is some conflict
between the individual and centralized power, we need to un-
derstand that ever-expanding individual liberty is actually the
creation of a sprawling and intricate set of technologies that,
while liberating the individual from the limitations of both na-
ture and obligation, leave us feeling increasingly powerless,
voiceless, alone—and unfree.
This is felt keenly, and with ultimate irony, in the grow-
ing belief that we no longer control the objects or the trajec-
tory of our technological world. As early as 1978, Daniel
Boorstin wrote in The Republic of Technology that “technology
creates its own momentum and is irreversible,” and that “we
live, and will live, in a world of increasingly involuntary com-
mitments.”12 By this he meant that we will no longer choose
our technologies but will be inescapably drawn to those that
make us ever more the creatures imagined by Hobbes and
Locke in the State of Nature: autonomous, free, yet subjects
of the very technologies that allow us the feeling of indepen
dence. Rather than being chosen, our technologies will arise
108
from a dynamic we no longer control, and further enlarge a

system over which we have only the faintest grasp. If our
airwaves are increasingly filled with dramas about a techno-
logical apocalypse, many of those also posit a shadowy and
unknown distant power that seems to pull the strings even
when we think we are autonomous. Think of The Matrix, that
quasi-Platonic film that put into image the suspicion that we
are prisoners in a cave whose images are controlled by pup-
peteers, but which we believe to be reality itself.
Maybe the deepest irony is that our capacity for self-
government has waned almost to the point of nonexistence.
In our current lamentations about a variety of crises—the
civic crisis in which we seem to have lost the capacity to speak
the language of common good; our financial crisis, in which
both public and private debt, accrued for immediate satiation,
is foisted upon future generations in the vague hope that they
will devise a way to deal with it; our environmental crisis, in
which most of the answers to our problems are framed in
terms of technological fixes but which ultimately require us to
control our ceaseless appetites; and the moral crisis of a soci-
ety in which personal commitments such as families so easily
unravel and are replaced by therapy and social programs—we
fail to see the deep commonalities arising from the very suc-
cess of our modern liberal project. We are certainly right to
congratulate ourselves for the successes of our technology,
but we are also right to worry about the costs of our techno-
logical society. Our “culture of technology” was premised,
from the very start, on a false definition of liberty, and it now
seems to be leading us ineluctably into a condition of bondage
to the consequences of our own fantasy.
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CHAPTER FIVE
Liberalism against Liberal Arts
B
e f o r e the advent of liberalism, culture
was the most pervasive human technolo-
gy and the fundamental locus of educa-
tion. It was the comprehensive shaping
force of the person who took part in, and
would in turn pass on, the deepest com-
mitments of a civilization. As the word
itself intimates, a culture cultivates; it is the soil in which the
human person grows and—if it is a good culture—flourishes.
But if liberalism ultimately replaces all forms of culture
with a pervasive anticulture, then it must undermine educa-
tion as well. In particular, it must undermine liberal educa-
tion, the education that was understood as the main means of
educating free persons by means of deep engagement with the
fruits of long cultural inheritance, particularly the great texts
of antiquity and the long Christian tradition. To the extent
that a fully realized liberalism undermines culture and cultiva-
tion into liberty as a form of self-governance, an education for
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L i b e r ali s m a g ain s t L i b e r al A r t s
a free people is displaced by an education that makes liberal

individuals servants to the end of untutored appetite, restless-
ness, and technical mastery of the natural world. Liberal
education is replaced with servile education.
Liberalism undermines liberal education in the first in-
stance by detaching the educational enterprise itself from cul-
ture and making it an engine of anticulture. Education must
be insulated from the shaping force of culture as the exercise
of living within nature and a tradition, instead stripped bare of
any cultural specificity in the name of a cultureless multicul-
turalism, an environmentalism barren of a formative encoun-
ter with nature, and a monolithic and homogenous “diversity.”
Its claims to further multiculturalism only distract from its
pervasive anticultural and homogenizing impetus.
Liberalism further undermines education by replacing a
definition of liberty as an education in self-government with
liberty as autonomy and the absence of constraint. Ultimately
it destroys liberal education, since it begins with the assump-
tion that we are born free, rather than that we must learn to
become free. Under liberalism, the liberal arts are instru-
ments of personal liberation, an end that is consistently
pursued in the humanities, in the scientific and mathematical
disciplines (STEM), and in economics and business. In the
humanities, liberatory movements based on claims of identity
regard the past as a repository of oppression, and hence
displace the legitimacy of the humanities as a source of educa-
tion. Meanwhile, the subjects that advance the practical and
effectual experience of autonomy—STEM, economics, and
business—come to be regarded as the sole subjects of justified
study. The classical understanding of liberal arts as aimed at
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educating the free human being is displaced by emphasis upon

the arts of the private person. An education fitting for a res
publica is replaced with an education suited for a res idiotica—
in the Greek, a “private” and isolated person. The purported
difference between left and right disappears as both concur
that the sole legitimate end of education is the advance of
power through the displacement of the liberal arts.
liberalism’s attack on liberal arts
The phrase “liberal arts” contains the same root as the word
“liberty.” The liberal arts have their origins in a premodern
world, hence are rooted in a premodern understanding of
liberty. We who are the heirs of the liberal tradition are condi-
tioned to believe in a definition of liberty that equates with the
absence of external constraint. The social contract theories of
thinkers like Hobbes and Locke, who defined the natural con-
dition of human beings as one of prepolitical liberty, tell us
that we begin as creatures who are free, and we submit to the
external and artificial contrivance of law only in order to
achieve a measure of security and social peace. In Locke’s un-
derstanding, we submit to law in order to “secure” our liberty
and “dispose of [our] possessions or persons as [we] see fit.”
The liberal arts precede this understanding of liberty.
They reflect, instead, a premodern understanding—one
found in the teachings of such authors as Plato, Aristotle, and
Cicero, and in the biblical and Christian traditions, articulat-
ed not only in the Bible but in the works of Augustine, Aqui-
nas, Dante, More, and Milton. It is no coincidence that at the
heart of the liberal arts tradition was an emphasis on classical
112
and Christian texts by these authors. For all their many differ-
ences, they all agree that liberty is not a condition into which
we are naturally born but one we achieve through habitua-
tion, training, and education—particularly the discipline of
self-command. It is the result of a long process of learning.
Liberty is the learned capacity to govern oneself using the
higher faculties of reason and spirit through the cultivation of
virtue. The condition of doing as one wants is defined in this
premodern view as one of slavery, in which we are driven by
our basest appetites to act against our better nature. It was the
central aim of the liberal arts to cultivate the free person and
the free citizen, in accordance with this understanding of
liberty. The liberal arts made us free.
For many years, this conception of knowledge lay at the
heart of liberal education. It derived its authority from the
faith traditions and cultural practices that one generation
sought to pass on to the next. One sees it today on most cam-
puses as a palimpsest, a medieval vellum whose old writing
was erased to make room for new writing, but from which a
trained eye can still read the ancient teaching. In the gothic
buildings, the name “professor,” “dean,” and “provost,” the
flowing robes that are ceremonially donned once or twice a
year—these and some other presences are fragments of an
older tradition, once the animating spirit of these institutions,
now mostly dead on most campuses.
One sees this older tradition—evidence of this palimp
sest—perhaps most vividly in the aspirational mottos and sym-
bolic seals that educational institutions adopted as goals for
themselves and their students. One representative motto is
that of Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, which was founded as
113
American University in 1804, one of the first universities in

what was then the unsettled West. Its original motto is still
found on the university seal: Religio, Doctrina, Civilitas, prae om-
nibus Virtus: Religion, true learning, civility; above all, virtue.
On the Class Gateway on one of the main approaches to cam-
pus is inscribed a sentence taken verbatim from the Northwest
Ordinance of 1787: “Religion, morality, and knowledge being
necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind,
schools and the means of education shall forever be encour-
aged.” These sentiments guided the founding of the nation’s
public universities, which, in addition to contributing to the
advance of science and practical knowledge, were above all
charged with fostering virtue and morality.
Another public university, the University of Texas at Aus-
tin, has emblazoned on its seal the motto Disciplina Praesidium
Civitate, which is translated as “A cultivated mind is the
guardian genius of democracy.” These words are drawn from
a statement by Texas’s second president, Mirabeau Lamar: “A
cultivated mind is the guardian genius of democracy and,
while guided and controlled by virtue, the noblest attribute of
man. It is the only dictator that freemen acknowledge and the
only security that freemen desire.” This fuller statement, with
its stress on the relationship of virtue, authority, and liberty,
and with the overtones in the word disciplina not only of “cul-
tivation” but of discipline, points to the conception of liberty
as the achievement of hard-won self-control through the dis-
cipline of virtue. The image on the seal includes an open book
on the shield’s upper field, showing the means by which this
discipline of liberty is to be won: through education in the
wisdom, the lessons, and the cautions of the past. The aim of
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such an education is not “critical thinking” but the achieve-

ment of liberty governed by the discipline of virtue.
As these mottos attest, the older tradition sought to foster
an ethic of restraint. It recognized that humankind was singu-
lar among the creatures in its capacity to choose among
numerous options, and so in its need for guidance in that con-
dition of liberty. This liberty, the ancients understood, was
subject to misuse and excess: the oldest stories in our tradition,
including the story of humankind’s fall from Eden, told of the
human propensity to use freedom badly. The goal of under-
standing ourselves was to understand how to use our liberty
well, especially how to govern appetites that seemed inher-
ently insatiable. At the heart of the liberal arts in this older
tradition was an education in what it meant to be human,
above all how to achieve freedom, not only from external re-
straint but from the tyranny of internal appetite and desire.
The “older science” sought to encourage the hard and diffi-
cult task of negotiating what was permitted and what was
forbidden, what constituted the highest and best use of our
freedom, and what actions were wrong. Each new generation
was encouraged to consult the great works of our tradition,
the epics, the great tragedies and comedies, the reflections of
philosophers and theologians, the revealed word of God, the
countless books that sought to teach us how to use our liberty
well. 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.
The collapse of the liberal arts in this nation follows
closely upon the redefinition of liberty, away from its ancient
115
and Christian understanding of self-rule and disciplined

self-command, in favor of an understanding of liberty as the
absence of restraints upon one’s desires. If the purpose of the
liberal arts was to seek an instruction in self-rule, then its
teaching no longer aligns with the contemporary ends of
education. Long-standing requirements to learn ancient lan-
guages in order to read the classical texts, or to require an
intimate familiarity with the Bible and scriptural interpreta-
tion, were displaced by a marketplace of studies driven by
individual taste and preference. Above all, the liberal arts are
increasingly replaced by “STEM,” which combines a rem-
nant of the ancient liberal arts—science and mathematics—
with their applied forms, technology and engineering, along-
side increasing demands for preparation for careers in business
and finance.
The American university slowly changed from the teach-
ing of this older science to a teaching of the new. In the
nineteenth century, a growing number of universities were
established or began to emulate the example of the German
universities, dividing themselves into specialized disciplines
and placing a new stress upon the education of graduate
students—a training in expert knowledge—and placed a new
priority upon discovery of new knowledge. Slowly the reli-
gious underpinnings of the university were discarded and dis-
continued; while the humanities continued to remain at the
heart of the liberal arts education, they were no longer guided
by a comprehensive vision afforded by the religious traditions
whose vision and creed had provided the organizing principle
for the efforts of the university. In the middle part of the
twentieth century, renewed emphasis upon scientific training
116
and technological innovation—spurred especially by govern-

ment investment in the “useful arts and sciences”—further
reoriented many of the priorities of the university system.
Liberal education came to be seen as irrelevant for the
pursuit of modern liberty, particularly as understood as that
liberty secured by military power, science, and technology,
and the expansion of capitalist markets to every corner of the
globe. The idea of the university was passing out of existence,
declared the chancellor of the University of California, Clark
Kerr, in his 1963 Godkin Lectures, published later as The Uses
of the University. In place of a form of education that was guid-
ed by a teleological or religious vision of what constituted an
education of the best human being, he announced the inevi-
table rise of the multiversity, a massive organization that
would be driven above all by the radical separations of the
endeavors of the various members of the university aimed at
providing useful knowledge to the military and industrial
demands of the nation. He declared that “the multiversity was
central to the further industrialization of the nation, to spec-
tacular increases in productivity with affluence following, to
the substantial extension of human life, and to worldwide
military and scientific supremacy.”1 The aim of the new
“multiversity” was to advance the Baconian project of human
mastery over the world.
Following upon this redefinition of the aims of the
university, the incentives and motivations of the faculty
were brought increasingly into accord with new science’s
imperative to create new knowledge: faculty training would
emphasize the creation of original work, and tenure would be
achieved through the publication of a corpus of such work
117
and the approval of far-flung experts in a faculty member’s

field who would attest to the originality and productivity of
the work. A market in faculty hiring and recruitment was
born. Faculty ceased to be committed to particular institu-
tions, their missions, and even their students, and instead
increasingly understood themselves to be members of a pro-
fession. Moral formation ceased to be a relevant criterion in
one’s job description; such concerns were not only irrelevant
to professional success but opposed to modern notions of
liberty.
The university structure was reoriented to stress innova-
tion and the creation of “new knowledge.” The guiding
imperative of education became progress, not an education in
liberty derived from a deep engagement with the past. One
can valuably contrast the commitments of the seal designed at
the time of the founding of the University of Texas with the
mission statement devised in more recent years and found on
the main web portal of the university.2 Articulated beneath a
picture of the old seal—following the obligatory verbiage
about a dedication to “excellence” in education—one finds a
statement about the contemporary purpose. The current mis-
sion of the university is “the advancement of society through
research, creative activity, scholarly inquiry and the develop-
ment of new knowledge.” The stress in this updated mission
statement is upon the research and scientific mission of the
university, notably the aim of creating “new knowledge,” not
“the cultivated mind that is guided by virtue.” One searches
in vain for a modern rearticulation of the sentiments of the
older motto; one finds, rather than the inculcation of virtue,
only the emphasis upon research in the service of progress—
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particularly that progress that contributes to that centuries-

old ambition to subject nature to human will. This change of
emphasis is to be found in the updated mission statement of
nearly every university in America.
As a practical effect, the insistence by students no longer
to be required to take a sequential education in the liberal arts,
in the belief that they should sooner begin study of something
“practical,” aligns perfectly with the interest of faculty to fo-
cus on the “creation of new knowledge” and the concomitant
focus on research and graduate students. Students and faculty
alike mutually abandon a focus on the liberal arts, essentially
out of the same imperative: service to the conception of free-
dom at the heart of the liberal order. Amid their freedom,
students increasingly feel that they have no choice but to
pursue the most practical major, eschewing subjects to which
native curiosity might attract them in obeisance to the demands
of the market. Unsurprisingly, the number of majors in the
humanities continues to decline precipitously, and a growing
number of schools are eliminating disciplines that are no
longer attractive within the university marketplace.
Those best positioned to defend the role of the
humanities at the heart of the liberal arts—members of the
professoriate—on the one hand lament this collapse but
blame it on administrators and “neoliberalism.” They fail to
see how the treatment of the humanities is more deeply a
reflection of the liberal order than a stance of resistance. The
professoriate in the liberal arts has failed to contest, let alone
resist, the dominant liberal trends because of a pervasive inca-
pacity to correctly diagnose the source of the forces arrayed
against the liberal arts.
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la trahison des humanistes
Humanities and more humanistic social science faculty—

predominantly progressive—sought instead to conform the
liberal arts to dominant liberal subcurrents, mainly by turning
against the very thing they studied, the “great books,” and
calling for a stance of progressive interrogation of the object
being studied. Conservative faculty largely opposed the cam-
pus left by demanding devotion to the study of the Great
Books without recognizing that many of these books were the
source of the very forces displacing the study of old books.
Both sides allowed the liberal transformation of the academy
to proceed unopposed.
The left’s answer was unexamined acquiescence. In re-
sponse to these tectonic shifts, those who labored in the hu-
manities began to question their place within the university.
Their practitioners still studied the great texts, but the reason
for doing so was increasingly in doubt.3 Did it make sense any
longer to teach young people the challenging lessons of how
to use freedom well, when the scientific world was soon to
make those lessons unnecessary? Could an approach based on
culture and tradition remain relevant in an age that valued,
above all, innovation and progress? How could the humani-
ties prove their worth in the eyes of administrators and the
broader world?
These doubts within the humanities were a fertile
seedbed for self-destructive tendencies. Inspired by Heideg-
gerian theories that placed primacy on the liberation of the
will, first poststructuralism and then postmodernism took
root. These and other approaches, while apparently hostile to
120
the rationalist claims of the sciences, were embraced out of

the need to conform to the academic demands, set by the
natural sciences, for “progressive” knowledge. Faculty could
demonstrate their progressiveness by showing the backward-
ness of the texts; they could “create knowledge” by showing
their superiority to the authors they studied; they could dis-
play their antitraditionalism by attacking the very books that
were the basis of their discipline. Philosophies that preached
“the hermeneutics of suspicion,” that aimed to expose the way
texts were deeply informed by inegalitarian prejudices, and
that even questioned the idea that texts contained a “teach-
ing” as intended by the author, offered the humanities
the possibility of proving themselves relevant in the terms set
by the modern scientific approach.4 By adopting a jargon
comprehensible only to “experts,” they could emulate the
scientific priesthood, even if by doing so they betrayed the
humanities’ original mandate to guide students through their
cultural inheritance. Professors in the humanities showed
their worth by destroying the thing they studied.5
In an effort to keep pace with their counterparts in STEM
disciplines, the humanities became the most conspicuously
liberative of the disciplines, even challenging (albeit fecklessly)
the legitimacy of the scientific enterprise. Natural condi-
tions—such as those inescapably linked to the biological facts
of human sexuality—came to be regarded as “socially con-
structed.” Nature was no longer a standard in any sense, since
it was now manipulable. Why accept any of the facts of biol-
ogy when those “facts” could be altered, when identity itself
is a matter of choice? If humans had any kind of “nature,”
then the sole permanent feature that seemed acceptable
121
was the centrality of will—the raw assertion of power

over restraints or limits, and the endless possibilities of self-
creation.
Ironically, while postmodernism has posed itself as the
great opponent of rationalist scientism, it shares the same
basic impulse: both rose to dominance in the university in
conformity with the modern definition of freedom. In the
humanities, this belief today takes the form of radical emanci-
patory theory focused on destroying all forms of hierarchy,
tradition, and authority, liberating the individual through the
tools of research and progress. A special focus of the modern
academy is sexual autonomy, a pursuit that reveals how
closely it ultimately sides with a scientific project aimed at
mastering all aspects of nature, including human reproduc-
tion.6 The humanities and social sciences also focus on iden-
tity politics and redressing past injustices to specific groups,
under the “multicultural” and “diversity” banners that ironi-
cally contribute to a campus monoculture. The groups that
are deemed worthy of strenuous efforts to redress grievances
are identified for features relating to their bodies—race, gen-
der, sexual identity—while “communities of work and cul-
ture,” including cohesive ethnic and class groupings, receive
scant attention. Thus while students’ groups grounded in
racial or sexual identity demand justice so that they can fully
join modern liberal society, cohesive ethnic groups resistant
to liberal expressive individualism like Kurds or Hmong, per-
secuted religious minorities such as Copts, nonurban nonelites
such as leaders in the 4-H, and the rural poor can expect little
attention from today’s campus liberals.7
As Wilson Carey McWilliams has noted,
122
Notably, the groups that [liberal reformers] recognize are

all defined by biology. In liberal theory, where our “nature”
means our bodies, these are “natural” groups opposed to
“artificial” bonds like communities of work and culture.
This does not mean that liberalism values these “natural”
groups. Quite the contrary: since liberal political society
reflects the effort to overcome or master nature, liberalism
argues that “merely natural” differences ought not to be
held against us. We ought not to be held back by qualities
we did not choose and that do not reflect our individual
efforts and abilities. [Reformers] recognize women, racial
minorities, and the young only in order to free individuals
from “suspect classifications.”
Class and culture are different. People are part of
ethnic communities or the working class because they
chose not to pursue individual success and assimilation into
the dominant, middle-class culture, or because they were
unable to succeed. Liberal theory values individuals who
go their own way, and by the same token, it esteems those
who succeed in that quest more highly than individuals
who do not. Ethnicity and class, consequently, are marks
of shame in liberal theory, and whatever discrimination
people suffer is, in some sense, their “own fault.” We may
feel compassion for the failures, but they have no just cause
for equal representation, unlike individuals who suffer
discrimination for “no fault of their own.”8
Yet while contemporary emphases in the humanities are

consistent with the aspiration for autonomy that underlies the
modern scientific venture, this conformity has not lent the
humanities much long-term viability. In the absence of
strongly articulated grounds for studying the liberal arts, in
distinction to the modern project of autonomy and mastery,
students and administrators are voting with their feet and
pocketbooks to support the areas that show more promise for
mastering nature. It is a sign of the success of the vision of
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autonomy advanced by the main players in today’s humanities

that their disciplines are shrinking and even disappearing,
while STEM and economic pursuits grow. In the absence of a
persuasive counternarrative, students, parents, and adminis-
trators understand that the best route to achieving the liberal
conception of freedom is not in the humanities but elsewhere.
Today the liberal arts have exceedingly few defenders.
The children of the left cultural warriors of the 1980s are no
longer concerned with a more representative and inclusive
canon. They are more interested in advancing the cause of
egalitarian autonomy, now arrayed against the older liberal
norms of academic freedom and free speech in the name of
what some call “academic justice” and greater campus repre-
sentation. While a rallying point is the cry for greater diver-
sity, the ongoing project of “diversification” in fact creates
greater ideological homogeneity on nearly every campus.
Under the guise of differences in race, an exploding number
of genders, and a variety of sexual orientations, the only sub-
stantive worldview advanced is that of advanced liberalism:
the ascent of the autonomous individual backed by the power
and support of the state and its growing control over institu-
tions, including schools and universities.
The children of the right’s cultural warriors have also
largely abandoned interest in the role of formative books as
the central contribution for cultivating self-government. In-
stead, today’s “conservatives” are more likely to dismiss the
role of the liberal arts not only as a lost cause, but not even
worth the fight anymore.9 Instead, reflecting priorities of the
modern marketplace, they are more inclined to call for great-
er emphasis on STEM and economic fields—those fields that
124
have gained prominence because of the victory of ideas in

many of the “Great Books” that successfully proposed that
old books might no longer be studied. Conservative political
leaders like Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin or Senator
Marco Rubio of Florida disdain the liberal arts for not leading
to high-paying jobs—and find unexpected support from Pres-
ident Obama, who criticized art history on the same grounds.
liberal arts against liberalism?
Contemporary circumstances have only accelerated the de-

mise of the liberal arts. In the absence of forceful articulations
of the reason for their existence on today’s campuses, a com-
bination of demands for “usefulness” and “relevance,” along
with the reality of shrinking budgets, is going to make the
humanities increasingly a smaller part of the university. They
will persist in some form as a “boutique” showcase, an orna-
ment that indicates respect for high learning, but the trajec-
tory of the humanities continues to be toward a smaller role
in the modern university.
While few of today’s professors of the humanities are able
to articulate grounds for protest, I would think the humanities
of old would be able to muster a powerful argument against
this tendency. Its warning would be simple, recalling its oldest
lessons: 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
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attainment. And in our pursuit of the satisfaction of our limit-

less desires, we will very quickly exhaust the planet. Our des-
tiny, should we enter fully down this path toward our complete
liberation, is one in which we will be more governed by neces-
sity than ever before. We will be governed not by our own ca-
pacity for self-rule but rather by circumstance, particularly the
circumstances resulting from scarcity, devastation, and chaos.
Our commitment to a future of liberation from nature
and necessity is illusory—it is the faith-based philosophy of
our time. Religion is often accused of being incapable of
drawing the right conclusions from evidence, but it seems to
me that we have in plain view the greatest leap of faith in our
time—namely, the response of the leadership of our nation
and our institutions of higher learning to this very economic
crisis that otherwise is used to justify a further displacing of
the liberal arts in the name of economic viability. The crisis
was itself precipitated by inattentiveness to the lessons of the
traditional liberal arts, which in turn is today invoked as rea-
son for its further neglect. The economic crisis, as everyone
now knows, was the result of the idea that one could consume
without limits, that a new kind of economics, combined with
a liberatory politics, now allowed us to live beyond our means.
The wanting of something was warrant for the taking of the
thing. Our appetite justified consumption. Our want was suf-
ficient for our satiation. The result was not merely literal
obesity but moral obesity—a lack of self-governance of our
appetites ultimately forced us on a starvation diet.
At our institutions of higher learning, a multitude of panels
and conferences were organized on the economic crisis, be-
moaning such things as the absence of oversight, lax regulatory
126
regime, failures of public and private entities to exercise dili-

gence in dispensing credit or expanding complex financial
products. Yet one searches in vain for a university president or
college leader—especially at the elite echelon—acknowledging
that there was deep culpability on the part of their own institu-
tions for our failure and our students’ as well. After all, it was
the leading graduates of the elite institutions of the nation who
occupied places of esteem in top financial and political institu-
tions throughout the land who were responsible for precipitat-
ing the economic crisis. Graduates of elite institutions occupied
places of power and influence in the national economic order.
Leaders of such educational institutions readily take credit for
Rhodes and Fulbright scholars. What of those graduates who
helped foster an environment of avarice and schemes of the
get-rich-quick? Are we so assured that they did not learn ex-
ceedingly well the lessons that they learned in college?
If a renaissance is to come, it must be from a reconstituted
education in the liberal arts. While a great patchwork of lib-
eral arts colleges remains, most liberal arts institutions have
been deeply shaped by presuppositions of the “new science.”
Hiring and promotion are made increasingly in accordance
with demands of research productivity. Increasingly faculty
members have been overwhelmingly trained at leading re-
search institutions at which priorities of that new science
dominate—priorities that many professors have internalized,
even if those priorities do not mesh well in the liberal arts
settings they occupy. As a result, many of these institutions
incoherently aspire to elite status by aping the research
universities, with many even going so far as to change their
names from “College” to “University.”10
127
Yet their reconstitution is not wholly out of reach. As

“palimpsests,” the older traditions persist. When we think of
“liberal arts” more concretely, we rightly picture a numerous
variety of institutions, most (at least once) religiously affiliated
and variously situated. Most were formed with some relation-
ship to the communities in which they were formed—whether
their religious traditions, attention to the sorts of career pros-
pects that the local economy would sustain, close connection to
the “elders” of the locality, or strong identification with place
and the likelihood of a student body drawn from nearby. Most
sought a liberal education not that fully liberated its students
from place and the “ancestral” but that in fact educated them
deeply in the tradition from which they came, deepening their
knowledge of the sources of their beliefs, confirming—not con-
fronting—their faith, and seeking to return them to the com-
munities from which they were drawn, where it was expected
they would contribute to its future well-being and continuity.
Above all, liberal education did not so much “liberate”
students from the limits of their backgrounds as it reinforced
a basic teaching embedded deeply within its own cultural tra-
dition, namely an education in limits. Often this conception
of limits—conceived most often as based in morality or vir-
tue—was drawn from the religious traditions of the particular
institution. Most classical liberal arts institutions founded
within a religious tradition required not only knowledge of
the great texts of the tradition—including and especially the
Bible—but corresponding behavior that constituted a kind of
“habituation” in the virtues learned in the classroom. Com-
pulsory attendance at chapel or Mass, parietal rules, adult-
supervised extracurricular activities, and required courses in
128
moral philosophy (often taught by the president of the col-

lege) sought to integrate the humanistic and religious studies
of the classroom with the daily lives of the students.
Based upon a classical or Christian understanding of
liberty, this form of education was undertaken with an aim to
pointing to our dependence—not our autonomy—and the
need for self-governance. As the essayist and farmer Wendell
Berry has written, awareness of fundamental constraints of
human action and behavior
is not the condemnation that it may seem. On the contrary, it
returns us to our real condition and to our human heritage,
from which our self-definition as limitless animals has for too
long cut us off. Every cultural and religious tradition that I
know about, while fully acknowledging our animal nature, de-
fines us specifically as humans—that is, as animals (if that word
still applies) capable of living within natural limits but also
within cultural limits, self-imposed. As earthly creatures, we
live, because we must, within natural limits, which we may
describe by such names as “earth” or “ecosystem” or “water-
shed” or “place.” But as humans we may elect to respond to
this necessary placement by the self-restraints implied by
neighborliness, stewardship, thrift, temperance, generosity,
care, kindness, loyalty, and love.11
An education based in a set of cultural conditions takes its

lead from nature and works alongside it, through such prac-
tices as agriculture, craftsmanship, worship, story, memory,
and tradition. It does not, in the model of the new science,
seek nature’s dominion or capitulation. A fundamental re-
sponsibility of education, then, is the transmission of cul-
ture—not its rejection or transcendence. A proper regard for
and transmission of culture seeks to prevent the willful and
129
aggressive exploitation of nature and Gnostic condescension

toward culture, just as it cautions against the sort of roving
and placeless form of deracinated philosophy of the sort rec-
ommended by an education in “critical thinking” and implicitly
commended by our encouragement of our students to define
success only by achieving a condition of placeless itinerancy
demanded by our global economic system.
Finally, understood as a training in limits and care for the
world and particular places and people, a liberal education—
properly understood—is not merely a form of liberation from
“the ancestral” or nature but an education in the limits that
each imposes upon us necessarily to live in ways that do not
tempt us to Promethean forms of individual or generational
self-aggrandizement or the abusive effort to liberate ourselves
from the limits and sanctions of nature. Particularly in an age
during which we are becoming all too familiar with the conse-
quences of living solely in and for the present and disconnected
from “ancestral” concerns for living within our means—wheth-
er financially or environmentally—we would be well served to
move beyond the extreme presentism of the contemporary era.
We should instead seek a reinvigoration of an idea of liberal
education in which we understand liberty to be the condition in
which we come to terms with, and accept, the limits and con-
straints that nature and culture rightfully exert. As commended
by ancient and religious traditions alike, liberty is not liberation
from constraint but rather our capacity to govern appetite and
thus achieve a truer form of liberty—liberty from enslavement
to our appetites and avoidance of depletion of the world. In
short, needful is the rescue of liberal education from liberalism.
130
CHAPTER SIX
The New Aristocracy
W
hile both sides in our
current anticulture wars
advance the liberal project
of statist and market de-
racination and liberation-
ism, achieved through
expansion of individual
autonomy and the Baconian project of conquering nature, stu-
dents are wholly shaped to be working pieces within this sys-
tem of “liberation.” Increasingly today’s students enter college
solely with an aim to its “practical” application, by which is
meant its direct relevance to its economic and technical appli-
cations, wholly unaware that there is a more capacious way of
understanding “practical” to include how one lives as a spouse,
parent, neighbor, citizen, and human being.
A two-tier system has arisen in which elite students are
culled from every corner of the globe so that they may prepare
131
T h e N e w A r i s t o c r ac y
for lives of deracinated vagabondage, majoring only in what

Wendell Berry calls “upward mobility.” Elite universities en-
gage in the educational equivalent of strip mining: identifying
economically viable raw materials in every city, town, and
hamlet, they strip off that valuable commodity, process it in a
distant location, and render the products economically useful
for productivity elsewhere. The places that supplied the raw
materials are left much like depressed coal towns whose min-
eral wealth has been long since mined and exported. Such stu-
dents embrace “identity” politics and “diversity” to serve their
economic interests, perpetual “potentiality” and permanent
placelessness. The identities and diversity thus secured are
globally homogenous, the precondition for a fungible global
elite who readily identify other members capable of living in a
cultureless and placeless world defined above all by liberal
norms of globalized indifference toward shared fates of actual
neighbors and communities. This in turn induces the glo-
balized irresponsibility that was reflected in the economic in-
teractions that precipitated the 2008 economic crisis but
which is assuaged by calls for “social justice,” generally to be
handled through the depersonalized levers of the state. One of
the most powerful ways that liberalism advances is by implic-
itly encouraging globalized narcissism while perpetuating a
pervasive belief in its own benevolence.
Those who remain in the hamlets, towns, and cities are
generally condemned to straitened economic circumstances,
destined for low-wage and stagnant service industry jobs and
cut off from the top tier of analytic-conceptual work that is
reserved for elite graduates. They are rooted in economically
deprived regions or survive on the outskirts of concentrations of
132
elites, where they will struggle with inflated real estate prices
either by overpopulating subpar urban housing or by living at
a great commuting distance from work and entertainment.
They generally own extraordinary and growing levels of debt,
mainly college loans and mortgage debt, though the insistent
demand that they participate fully in the broader economy as
consumers doubtless leads them to accumulate other exces-
sive debts as well. While there is always the chance that one
of their children might move up the economic ladder—
particularly via an elite college—in the main, fairly static
differentiation now persists between the classes.
The fact that there can be both upward and downward
movement, however, and that competition has now been
globalized, leads all classes to share a pervasive anxiety.
Because social status is largely a function of position, income,
and geographic location, it is always comparative and inse-
cure. While advancing liberalism assures that individuals are
more free than ever from accidents of birth, race, gender, and
location, today’s students are almost universally in the thrall
of an economic zero-sum game. Accusations of careerism and
a focus on résumé building are not the result of a failure of
contemporary education but reflect the deepest lessons stu-
dents have imbibed from the earliest age: that today’s society
produces economic winners and losers, and that one’s educa-
tional credentials are almost the sole determinant of one’s
eventual status. Today’s students, in bondage to what the an-
cients would have called “servile education,” generally avoid a
liberal education, having been discouraged from it by their
parents and by society at large. Liberalism spells the demise
of an education once thought fitting for free people.
133
A main lesson learned particularly at elite colleges is the

set of cooperative skills needed to ensure competitive advan-
tage over those who are not in the elite, while recognizing
that even those cooperative relationships are conditioned by a
competitive system. Friendships and even romantic relation-
ships are like international alliances—understood to serve
personal advantage. In his book Coming Apart, Charles
Murray reports that while stable marriages are more likely to
contribute to various measures of life success, those most
likely to form stable lifelong marriages are those at the elite
levels of the social ladder.1 Those in the lower tiers, mean-
while, are experiencing catastrophic levels of familial and
social breakdown, making it all but impossible for them or
their children to move into the upper tier. Elites are studi-
ously silent about the familial basis of their relative success.
Marital stability is now a form of competitive advantage for
the upper tier, an advantage amplified by the insistence that
family formation is a matter of individual choice and even an
obstacle to autonomy. Having shaped the family in the image
of the Hobbesian state of nature, its adoption by the strong is
now one more tool for advantage over the weak.
The educational system, transformed into a tool of
liberalism, is also ultimately the systemic creation of a new
aristocracy of the strong over the weak. Liberalism’s denoue-
ment is a society of deep, pervasive stratification, a condition
that liberals lament even as they contribute in manifold ways
to its perpetuation—particularly through its educational insti-
tutions. Liberalism’s success thus fosters the conditions of its
failure: having claimed to bring about the downfall of aristo-
cratic rule of the strong over the weak, it culminates in a new,
134
more powerful, even more permanent aristocracy that fights

ceaselessly to maintain the structures of liberal injustice.
classical liberalism: roots of

new aristocracy
Liberalism was justified, and gained popular support, as the

opponent of and alternative to the old aristocracy. It attacked
inherited privilege, overturned prescribed economic roles,
and abolished fixed social positions, arguing instead for open-
ness based upon choice, talent, opportunity, and industry. The
irony is the creation of a new aristocracy that has enjoyed in-
herited privileges, prescribed economic roles, and fixed social
positions. Even as liberalism’s architects were forthright about
their ambition to displace the old aristocracy, they were not
silent about their hopes of creating a new aristocracy. Wide-
spread abhorrence of the old aristocracy blinded many who
acquiesced in liberalism’s ambitions, even as it positively ap-
pealed to those who believed they would join the new aristoc-
racy. Liberalism begins as a version of the Rawlsian Original
Position, offering a veil of ignorance beyond which it is prom-
ised that there will be certain winners and losers. Rather than
encouraging the embrace of relative economic and social
equality, as Rawls supposed, this scenario was embraced by
those of liberal dispositions precisely because they anticipated
being its winners. Those inclined to deracination, rootless-
ness, materialism, risk taking, dislocating social change, and
inequality in effect assured their own success, even as they ap-
pealed to the system’s likely losers by emphasizing the injustice
of aristocratic orders.
135
John Locke made clear that the new political and eco-
nomic system he proposed in his Second Treatise of Govern-
ment, liberalism’s foundational text, would result in a different
ruling class. In one of its key chapters, “Of Property,” he di-
vided the world into two sorts of persons: the “industrious
and the rational” and “the querulous and contentious.” In the
world of prehistory, he wrote, both kinds of characters might
have existed in some number, but a subsistence economy
marked above all by absence of private property made it im-
possible to tell them apart. In such a world, each person gath-
ers only enough food and requirements for each passing day,
and any differences of talent, ability, and promise are wholly
unrealized. Locke offers the Indians in the Americas as an
example of such a “pre-history”: subsistence societies in which
neither “industriousness and rationality” nor “querulousness
and contentiousness” can become salient. In such a world, a
potential Bill Gates or Steve Jobs is so busy hunting or
fishing for each day’s meal that his potential goes wholly
unrealized.
Yet if it were really true that the world had yet to distin-
guish between the two kinds of characters, Locke could not
have described their existence. The world he is addressing is
not, in fact, the one in which neither type of personality has
been made manifest; rather, he describes a world in which the
wrong people rule—namely “the querulous and contentious.”
He writes that a caste of lazy, complacent rulers, whose posi-
tion is inherited and who govern without competition or chal-
lenge, will above all manifest querulousness. He proposes to
replace this group with another—those animated by “indus-
triousness and rationality,” whose distinctive character is dis-
136
allowed from full realization by the monopoly on wealth and

power held by the querulous aristocracy.
But why would the commoners, who hold no position of
power or wealth under aristocratic orders, and whose pros-
pects for ruling are no better under a new dispensation,
support trading one ruler for another? Locke has essentially
admitted that one aristocracy—whose rule is based upon in-
herited position and wealth—will be replaced by another:
what Jefferson was to call a “natural aristocracy” whose posi-
tion is based upon higher degrees of “rationality” and “indus-
triousness” than those in the general population. The same
arbitrariness that affords aristocrats position and status in an
aristocratic society also applies to the unequal distribution of
“rationality” and “industriousness.” The criteria for the ruling
class change, but their arbitrary distribution remains.
It is here that Locke invokes the example of the New
World, arguing that a society ruled by the “industrious and
rational” will increase the productivity and value of property
and thereby increase the wealth of all:
To which let me add, that he who appropriates land to himself
by his labour, does not lessen, but increase the common stock
of mankind: for the provisions serving to the support of hu-
man life, produced by one acre of inclosed and cultivated land,
are (to speak much within compass) ten times more than those
which are yielded by an acre of land of an equal richness lying
waste in common. . . . [Thus] a king of a large and fruitful ter-
ritory [in the Americas] feeds, lodges, and is clad worse than a
day-labourer in England.2
With this passage, Locke admits that the new economic, so-
cial, and political arrangements will bring about pervasive in-
equality, but suggests that it is to be preferred to an inequality
137
in which the “querulous and contentious” govern, since every-

one will be in a better material position. Inequality can be
made bearable by the increased wealth that will be enjoyed as
well by lower-status citizens. But Locke also tells us that ine-
quality under the new system has the potential for nearly lim-
itless differentiation. A subsistence economy is noteworthy
for almost complete material equality between ruler and
ruled. The aristocratic order is marked by pervasive inequality
of rank and status, but those differences are relatively immov-
able. The proposed liberal order, by contrast, is premised on
an elastic and expansive condition of inequality based upon
economic prosperity as the method of differentiation between
the higher and lower orders. The means of assuaging indigni-
ties, slights, resentment, or anger at the widening gap between
high and low, successful and ineffective, rulers and ruled, is
the promise of ever-increasing material prosperity for every
member of society.
This is liberalism’s most fundamental wager: the replace-
ment of one unequal and unjust system with another system
enshrining inequality that would be achieved not by oppres-
sion and violence but with the population’s full acquiescence,
premised on the ongoing delivery of increasing material pros-
perity along with the theoretical possibility of class mobility.
Today’s classical liberals continue to advance this settle-
ment as not only acceptable but worthy of celebration. Centu-
ries after Locke, John F. Kennedy summarized this wager with
the promise that “a rising tide raises all boats”—echoed often
by Ronald Reagan—suggesting that even the flimsiest and
cheapest boat could benefit from tsunami-sized differences for
those at the top and the bottom. A vital element of this pros-
138
perity was the aggressive conquest of nature, particularly the

intensive extraction of every potentially useful resource as well
as the invention of processes and methods that would increase
immediate value, regardless of future costs and consequences.
Locke’s thesis was that ongoing and continuous growth of
wealth and prosperity could function as a replacement for so-
cial cohesion and solidarity. As the libertarian Friedrich Hayek
understood, a society that embraces “rapid economic advance”
will necessarily encourage inequality: “Progress at such a fast
rate cannot proceed on a uniform front but must take place in
echelon fashion.”3 Echoing Locke, Hayek recognizes that a
society that advances rapidly and generates significant
economic inequality will necessarily rely upon rapid and even
accelerating advances in order to assuage discontent: “The
enjoyment of personal success will be given to large numbers
only in a society that, as a whole, progresses fairly rapidly. In a
stationary society there will be about as many descending as
there will be those rising. In order that the great majority
should in their individual lives participate in the advance, it is
necessary that it proceed at considerable speed.”4
Hayek acknowledges that the liberal society will generate
as much inequality as the order it replaced, or even more,
but the promise of constant change and progress will ensure
that everyone supports the liberal system. He is confident
that even potentially titanic inequality—far outstripping the
differences between peasant and king—will nevertheless
lead to nearly universal endorsement of such a political and
economic system.
There are now growing doubts over whether the promise
of growth can be perpetuated. Humanity has confronted both
139
the limits imposed by nature, as the costs of two centuries’

economic growth become increasingly evident in today’s ac-
celerating climate change, and the decreasing likelihood that
market capitalism will generate increasing prosperity for eve-
ry part of society. Recent years have proven the foresight of
Kurt Vonnegut’s first novel, Player Piano, that an iron logic
within market capitalism—namely the perpetual effort to
suppress wages either by finding new low-wage markets or
replacing humans with machines or computers—will increas-
ingly reduce all but a few forms of work to drudgery and
indignity. This recognition has led to a return of Locke’s basic
wager that a system that provided material comfort, no mat-
ter the vastness of inequality and absent likely prospects of
growth and mobility between classes, would nevertheless
satisfy most members of society. The most recent muse of
Lockean liberalism is the economist Tyler Cowen, whose
book Average Is Over echoes the basic contours of Locke’s ar-
gument. While noting that liberalism and market capitalism
perpetuate titanic and permanent forms of inequality that
might have made dukes and earls of old blush, Cowen argues
that we are at the end of a unique period in American history,
a time of widespread belief in relative equality and shared
civic fate, and entering an age in which we will effectively see
the creation of two separate nations. Yet in his concluding
chapter, fittingly entitled “A New Social Contract?,” Cowen
nevertheless concludes that liberalism will continue to enjoy
widespread support:
We will move from a society based on the pretense that
everyone is given an okay standard of living to a society in
which people are expected to fend for themselves much
140
more than they do now. I imagine a world where, say, 10 to

15 percent of the citizenry is extremely wealthy and has fan-
tastically comfortable and stimulating lives, the equivalent
of current-day millionaires, albeit with better health
care. . . .
This framing of income inequality in meritocratic
terms will prove self-reinforcing. Worthy individuals will
in fact rise from poverty on a regular basis, and that will
make it easier to ignore those who are left behind.5
Cowen predicts that this low-wage majority will settle in

places that look a lot like Texas: cheap housing, some job cre-
ation, and subpar government services. Political leaders, he
suggests, should consider erecting entire cityscapes of favelas
with low rent and free internet, thus offering a virtual world
of distraction from the grim poverty and spiritual desiccation
that will become a permanent way of life for most citizens. Far
from predicting that this dystopia will bring the end of liber-
alism and precipitate revolution against a social and economic
system that re-creates the conditions of the old aristocracy
that liberalism was supposed to overthrow, Cowen ends his
book on this hopeful note: “We might even look ahead to a
time when the cheap or free fun is so plentiful that it will feel
a bit like Karl Marx’s communist utopia, albeit brought on by
capitalism. That is the real light at the end of the tunnel.”6
rule of the strong
Early-modern liberalism envisioned the autonomous individ-

ual giving rise to a system that resulted in radically different
material attainments. As James Madison said of the world’s
first liberal order, the “first object of government” is protec-
141
tion of the “diversity in the faculties of men.” Madison states

in Federalist 10 that “from the protection of different and un-
equal faculties of acquiring property, the possession of differ-
ent degrees and kinds of property immediately results.” The
first object of the government enshrined in our constitutional
order is the protection of “diversity,” primarily distinctions
that are manifest in different economic attainments, but
further, whatever differences arise from our “diversity of fac-
ulties.” Liberal politics was conceived as a defense of those
inequalities. Liberalism’s second wave—Progressivism—
argued that the rampant inequality that first-wave liberalism
so successfully advanced was, in fact, an obstacle to the reali-
zation of true selfhood. Later liberals agreed that the first
wave of liberalism had successfully undermined the old aristo-
cratic political and economic forms, but concluded that its
very successes had generated new pathologies that needed a
reinvented liberalism. Liberalism today is widely identified as
the opposite of early-modern liberalism’s encouragement of
economic liberty and hence stratification, instead stressing the
imperative for greater economic equality.
But this embrace of economic equality was not intended
to secure an opposite outcome to classical liberalism: rather, it
sought to extend the weakening of social forms and cultural
traditions already advanced by classical liberalism, with an end
to increasing political consolidation. Under classical liberalism,
this end could best be achieved by limiting government’s au-
thority over individuals. For progressive liberalism, it was best
achieved by empowering the State to equalize the fruits of an
increasingly prosperous society while intervening more active-
ly in the realms of church, family, and even human sexuality.
142
Still, like its classical liberal forebear, progressive liberalism

enlisted the support of the masses it would harm by emphasiz-
ing how it would correct the current system’s injustices—in
this case, the economic disparities generated by market capi-
talism. Yet the appeal to economic justice and taming of the
market—never realized, of course—was advanced not ulti-
mately in the name of greater equality but to secure the lib-
eration of those living outside the guidelines and strictures of
cultural norms by disassembling the social structures and cul-
tural practices that supported the flourishing of the greater
part of humanity. The progressive effort to make economic
disparities more equal (without actually ever equalizing them)
is driven by a deeper liberal imperative to equalize individuals’
opportunity to be liberated from entanglements with others,
particularly from the shared cultural norms, institutions, and
associations that bind a people’s fate together. Progressivism
aims above all at the liberation of an elite whose ascent re-
quires the disassembling of norms, intermediating institu-
tions, and thick forms of community, a demolition that comes
at the expense of these communities’ settled forms of life. The
deepest irony is that while our politics today is manifested as a
clash of classical liberals against progressive liberals, we have
seen a steady advance in both economic liberation and
personal liberation. This is because progressive liberalism was
never actually a foe of classical liberalism. Its true enemy
was a kind of lived “Burkeanism”: the way of life of much of
humanity.
Nineteenth-century architects of progressive liberalism
retained a main ambition of classical liberalism, namely the
imperative to liberate individuals from any arbitrary and
143
unchosen relationships and remake the world into one in

which those especially disposed to expressive individualism
would thrive. Few liberals were more forthright than John
Stuart Mill in insisting that this liberation was essential to
creating a new ruling class of wholly self-made individuals. In
order to liberate these individuals from accident and circum-
stance, Mill insisted that the whole of society be remade for
their benefit, namely by protecting their unique differences
against oppressive social norms, particularly religious stric-
tures and social norms governing behavior and comportment.
Put another way, Mill argued that “custom” must be over-
thrown so that those who seek to live according to personal
choices in the absence of such norms are at greatest liberty to
do so.
In contrast to the argument by Yuval Levin that “the
Great Debate” was between Burke and Paine, the “culture
wars” of our time have more to do with differences between
intuitive Burkeans and forthright disciples of Mill. This may
surprise some, since Mill is sometimes taken to be a friend to
conservatism, particularly libertarians. But he was no con-
servative: he was the midwife of modern liberalism, particu-
larly through the arguments advanced in his classic 1859 work,
On Liberty. Many of his libertarian admirers tend to assume
that Mill’s “Harm Principle” speaks primarily about limiting
government’s rule over individual liberty, but Mill was mainly
concerned about the constraints that public opinion could
forge. He opens the book by noting that in the England of his
day, “the yoke of opinion is perhaps heavier, [and] that of law
lighter, than in most other countries of Europe; and there is
considerable jealousy of direct interference, by the legislative
144
or executive power, with private conduct.”7 Writing at the

dawn of the era of popular sovereignty, he acknowledged that
public opinion might someday be translated directly into
popularly mandated coercive government power; but at that
moment, “the majority have not learnt to feel the power of
the government [as] their power, or its opinions their opin-
ions.” What concerned him was not coercive law but oppres-
sive public opinion.
Forms of oppressive “opinion” were mainly manifest
in everyday morality—what Mill witheringly criticized as
“Custom.” While Mill at times argued that a good society
needed a balance of “Progress” and “Custom,” in the main,
he saw custom as the enemy of human liberty, and progress as
a basic aim of modern society. To follow custom was to be
fundamentally unreflective and mentally stagnant. “The hu-
man faculties of perception, judgement, discriminative feel-
ing, mental activity, and even moral preference, are exercised
only in making a choice. He who does anything because it is
a custom, makes no choice.”8
Custom may have once served a purpose, Mill acknowl-
edges—in an earlier age, when “men of strong bodies or
minds” might flout “the social principle,” it was necessary for
“law and discipline, like the Popes struggling against the Em-
perors, [to] assert a power over the whole man, claiming to
control all his life in order to control his character.”9 But cus-
tom had come to dominate too extensively; and that “which
threatens human nature is not the excess, but the deficiency,
of personal impulses and preferences.”10 The unleashing of
spontaneous, creative, unpredictable, unconventional, often
offensive forms of individuality was Mill’s goal. Extraordinary
145
individuals—the most educated, the most creative, the most

adventurous, even the most powerful—freed from the rule of
Custom, might transform society. “Persons of genius,”
Mill acknowledges, “are always likely to be a small minority”;
yet such people, who are “more individual than any other
people,” less capable of “fitting themselves, without hurtful
compression, into any of the small number of moulds which
society provides,” require “an atmosphere of freedom.”11 So-
ciety must be remade for the benefit of this small, but in Mill’s
view vital, number. A society based on custom constrained
individuality, and those who craved most to be liberated from
its shackles were not “ordinary” people but people who
thrived on breaking out of the customs that otherwise
governed society. Mill called for a society premised around
“experiments in living”: society as test tube for the sake of
geniuses who are “more individual.”
We live today in the world Mill proposed. Everywhere, at
every moment, we are to engage in experiments in living.
Custom has been routed: much of what today passes for
culture—with or without the adjective “popular”—consists of
mocking sarcasm and irony. Late night television is the spe-
cial sanctuary of this liturgy. Society has been transformed
along Millian lines in which especially those regarded as judg-
mental are to be special objects of scorn, in the name of
nonjudgmentalism.
Mill understood better than contemporary Millians that
this would require the “best” to dominate the “ordinary.” The
rejection of custom demanded that society’s most “advanced”
elements have greater political representation. For Mill, this
would be achieved through an unequal distribution of voting
146
rights: those with a higher education would be accorded more

votes. In less advanced societies, Mill argued, outright en-
slavement of backward populations might be necessary until
they could be sufficiently set on a path of progressive ad-
vancement. This would mean, first and foremost, forcing
them to work and care more about economic productivity
than about wasteful activities like worship or leisure.
Americans, for much of their history, were not philosoph-
ically interested in Burke but were Burkeans in practice. Most
lived in accordance with custom—with basic moral assump-
tions concerning the fundamental norms that accompanied a
good life. You should respect authority, beginning with your
parents. You should display modest and courteous comport-
ment. You should avoid displays of lewdness or titillation. You
should engage in sexual activity only when married. Once
married, you should stay married. You should have children—
generally, lots of them. You should live within your means.
You should thank and worship the Lord. You should pay
respect to the elderly and remember and acknowledge your
debts to the dead.
Mill dismissed these behaviors as unthinking custom;
Burke praised them as essential forms of “prejudice.” In his
Reflections on the Revolution in France, Burke wrote:
In this enlightened age I am bold enough to confess that we
are generally men of untaught feelings, [and] that, instead of
throwing away our old prejudices, we cherish them. . . . We
are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private
stock of reason, because we suspect that this stock of each man
is small, and that the individuals do better to avail themselves
of the general bank and capital of nations and of ages. . . .
Prejudice renders a man’s virtue his habit, and not a series of
147
unconnected acts. Through just prejudice, his duty becomes

part of his nature.12
Mill feared the tyranny of public opinion, expressed

through custom, but Burke argued that the tyrannical im-
pulse was far more likely found among the “innovators” and
might be restrained by prejudice. It was the unshackled
powerful who were to be feared, not the custom-following
ordinary citizens. Burke saw a close relationship between the
revolutionary and tyrannical impulse, made particularly
insidious when the Great could claim the mantle of popular
legitimacy: “The spirit of innovation is generally the result of
a selfish temper. . . . When they are not on their guard, [the
democratists] treat the humbler part of the community with
the greatest contempt, whilst at the same time, they pretend
to make them the depositories of their power.”13
Society today has been organized around the Millian
principle that “everything is allowed,” at least so long as it
does not result in measurable (mainly physical) harm. It is a
society organized for the benefit of the strong, as Mill recog-
nized. By contrast, a Burkean society is organized for the ben-
efit of the ordinary—the majority who benefit from societal
norms that the strong and the ordinary alike are expected to
follow. A society can be shaped for the benefit of most people
by emphasizing mainly informal norms and customs that se-
cure the path to flourishing for most human beings; or it can
be shaped for the benefit of the extraordinary and powerful by
liberating all from the constraint of custom. Our society was
once shaped on the basis of the benefit for the many ordinary;
today it is shaped largely for the benefit of the few strong.
148
liberalocracy ascendant
The results of this civilizational transformation are

everywhere we look. Our society is increasingly defined by
economic winners and losers, with winners congregating in
wealthy cities and surrounding counties, while losers largely
remain in place—literally and figuratively—swamped by a
global economy that rewards the highly educated cognitive
elite while offering bread crumbs to those left in “flyover
country.” Trends observed decades ago by Robert Reich
and Christopher Lasch, who decried “the secession of the
successful” and the “revolt of the elite,” are today institution-
alized through family, neighborhood, and schools, and repli-
cated by generational succession.14 Children of the successful
receive preparation for entry into the ruling class, while those
who lack those attainments are much less capable of afford-
ing, and insufficiently knowledgeable about, the basic prereq-
uisites needed to push their children into the upper echelon.
Charles Murray and Robert Putnam have ably docu-
mented the self-perpetuating class divide that permeates
modern American society.15 Murray has shown through two
fictional towns—wealthy Belmont and down-at-the-heels
Fishtown—that the wealthy and powerful today enjoy family
and marital stability, relatively low rates of divorce and out-
of-wedlock birth, and low incidences of drugs and criminality,
while on all these measures, Fishtown is descending into so-
cial anarchy. Murray has argued that Belmont simply needs to
practice what it preaches—extol the virtues of virtue, rather
than Millian “experimentalism” and value relativism—in or-
der to instruct the denizens of Fishtown in what’s needed to
149
achieve success. Putnam has urged greater government

support for citizens who are being left behind economically,
proposing a host of programs to help them break the chain of
social decay.
Both ignore what empirical observation should suggest:
this condition is not an aberration from healthy liberalism but
its fulfillment. From the outset, liberalism held forth the
promise of a new aristocracy composed of those who would
flourish with the liberation of the individual from history,
tradition, nature, and culture, and the demolition or attrition
of institutional supports that were redefined as limits or
obstacles to liberty. Those who are best provisioned by dispo-
sition (nature), upbringing (nurture), and happenstance to
succeed in a world shorn of those institutional supports aspire
to autonomy. Even as the liberal family is reconstituted to
serve as the launching pad for the autonomous individual, a
landscape shorn of widespread social networks leaves those
without advantages to succeed in liberal society among the
underclass. Compounding their disadvantage is the “seces-
sion of the successful,” the geographic withdrawal of a social
and economic elite to a few concentrated areas, siphoning
away those who might once have engaged in local philanthro-
py and the building of local civil society.
Murray believes that only willful denial born of progres-
sive prejudice prevents the elite from extolling the virtues of
stable family life and the personal qualities that help them
maintain their social status. His claim neglects a different
cause: the liberalocracy recognizes that it maintains its posi-
tion through the advantages of stable social institutions,
which serve ironically as the launching pad for Millian indi-
150
viduals. Such individuals flourish in a world stripped of cus-

tom, and the kinds of institutions that transmitted cultural
norms, habituated responsibility, and cultivated ordinary vir-
tues. Once such institutions were extensively disassembled—
initially leading to the instability of families regardless of so-
cial class—the family could be reassembled along liberal lines,
now shorn of those social supports but undergirded by sup-
port systems that can be purchased: a new form of servant
class such as nannies and gardeners, along with modern-day
tutors (SAT prep courses) and wet nurses (day care). The
reconstructed family thus becomes one of the primary means
by which the liberalocracy perpetuates itself, much as the
aristocratic family was the source of wealth and status in ear-
lier ages. Where the aristocratic family’s status was bound
up in the land and estate—hence emphasized generational
continuity and primogeniture—the liberalocratic family
rests upon loose generational ties, portable credentials, the
inheritance of fungible wealth, and the promise of mobility.
Meanwhile, the liberalocracy is studiously silent about the
decimation of family and attendant social norms among what
Locke might have called “the querulous and contentious,”
since the liberated individual who is the fruit of liberalism
dictates that these people, now relegated to the underclass,
must bear the cost of disassembling the social forms and
institutions that traditionally supported families even among
the disadvantaged.
In effect, liberalism advances most effectively through
both classical and progressive liberalisms, the economic liber-
alism of Locke and the lifestyle liberalism of Mill, even while
the two claim to be locked in battle. The destruction of social
151
norms, culture, and the social ecology of supporting institu-

tions and associations is advanced by both the market and the
state. Advocates of the former (such as Murray) claim that the
resulting deep inequality can be assuaged by moral admoni-
tion, while proponents of the latter (such as Putnam) argue
that government can substitute for civil society and recon-
struct the family that the liberalocracy has eviscerated. Both
sides regard generational inequality as an aberration, rather
than recognizing it as a key achievement of the liberal order.
The liberalocracy’s self-deception is, in the main, neither
malicious nor devious. Liberalism is arguably the first regime
to put into effect a version of the “Noble Lie” proposed by
Plato in the Republic, which claimed not only that the ruled
would be told a tale about the nature of the regime, but more
important, that the ruling class would believe it as well. The
“noble lie” proposes a story by which the denizens of the
“ideal regime” proposed by Socrates at once believe in their
fundamental equality as members of a common family and in
the natural basis of their inequality. While Plato proposed the
“ideal regime” as a philosophic exercise, liberalism adopted a
version of “the noble lie” in order to advance a similarly con-
stituted order, in which people would be led to believe in the
legitimacy of inequality backstopped by a myth of fundamen-
tal equality. Not only would day laborers be encouraged to
believe that their lot in life would continuously improve by
their ascent in the advance of the liberal order, but more im-
portant, the liberalocrats would be educated in a deep self-
deception that they were not a new aristocracy but the very
opposite of an aristocratic order. A primary vehicle has been a
veneer of social justice and concern for the disadvantaged that
152
is keenly encouraged among liberalocrats from a young age,

often at the very educational institutions most responsible for
their elevation into the elite. It is often these very same people
who, upon encountering the discussion of the “Noble Lie” in
the Republic, will pronounce their disgust at such subterfuge,
all the while wholly unaware that the Cave they occupy has
been rendered invisible by the artificial lighting designed to
hide its walls.
153
CHAPTER SEVEN
The Degradation of Citizenship
T
he term “liberal democracy” is
widely used to describe the regime
that today is regarded by most in the
West as the sole legitimate form of
political organization. “Liberalism”
thus adjectivally coexists with the
noun “democracy,” apparently giv-
ing pride of place to the more ancient regime form in which
the people rule. However, the oft-used phrase achieves some-
thing rather different from its apparent meaning: the adjective
not only modifies “democracy” but proposes a redefinition
of the ancient regime into its effective opposite, to one in
which the people do not rule but are instead satisfied with the
material and martial benefits of living in a liberal res idiotica.
At the same time, the word “democracy” affords legitimation
to the liberal regime from a populace whose purported
consent stands in for a more robust form of citizenship. A
154
T h e D e g r adati o n o f C iti z e n s hip
degraded form of citizenship arises from liberalism’s relentless

emphasis upon private over public things, self-interest over
civic spirit, and aggregation of individual opinion over com-
mon good.
We live in an age in which the ancient suspicion of
democracy as a debased and corrupt form of government has
been largely forgotten, or when encountered, is regarded as
backward, authoritarian, and inhuman. The genius of liberal-
ism was to claim legitimacy on the basis of consent and
arrange periodic managed elections, while instituting struc-
tures that would dissipate democratic energies, encourage the
creation of a fractured and fragmented public, and ensure
government by select elite actors. If this were all that liberal-
ism achieved, however, its patina of legitimation would quick-
ly wear thin as a frustrated populace witnessed a growing
divide between the claims of democracy and the absence of
popular control. Instead, the true genius of liberalism was
subtly but persistently to shape and educate the citizenry to
equate “democracy” with the ideal of self-made and self-
making individuals—expressive individualism—while accept-
ing the patina of political democracy shrouding a powerful
and distant government whose deeper legitimacy arises from
enlarging the opportunities and experience of expressive indi-
vidualism. As long as liberal democracy expands “the empire
of liberty,” mainly in the form of expansive rights, power, and
wealth, the actual absence of active democratic self-rule is
not only an acceptable but a desired end. Thus liberalism
abandons the pervasive challenge of democracy as a regime
requiring the cultivation of disciplined self-rule in favor
of viewing the government as a separate if beneficent entity
155
that supports limitless provision of material goods and

untrammeled expansion of private identity.
antidemocratic liberalism
Liberalism’s defenders are wont to note the dangers of de-

mocracy, particularly the threat of unconstrained majorities
over the liberties of minorities. Prominent political observers
such as Fareed Zakaria have noted the rise of “illiberal de-
mocracy” as a main threat to political stability, rights, and
liberal political economy.1 In the wake of the rise of national-
ist populist movements such as those throughout Europe
that oppose fundamental tenets of the European Union—
particularly focused on the effectual elimination of national
boundaries—and in the wake of Great Britain’s “Brexit” vote
and the election of Donald J. Trump to the U.S. presidency,
political theorist and Wall Street Journal columnist William
Galston devoted a column warning that “the most urgent
threat to liberal democracy is not autocracy; it is illiberal de-
mocracy.”2 In the eyes of leading commentators, democracy
remains as threatening and unsavory a regime as it did for
Plato and Aristotle. While the ancient philosophers typically
relegated democracy to the category of “vicious” or “debased”
regimes, today’s leading thinkers retain a notional allegiance
to democracy only by constraining it within the strictures of
liberalism, arguing that liberalism limits the power of the ma-
jority and protects freedoms of speech and the press, consti-
tutional checks upon government. They also generally tend
to favor fairly open markets and porous national borders,
arguing that these arrangements secure prosperity for the
156
nation’s consumers while allowing globalized opportunities of

economic mobility and opportunity.
Democracy is thus an acceptable legitimating tool only as
long as its practices exist within, and are broadly supportive of,
liberal assumptions. When democratic majorities reject aspects
of liberalism—as electorates throughout western Europe and
America have done in recent years—a growing chorus of lead-
ing voices denounce democracy and the unwisdom of the
masses. American elites have periodically assayed the possibil-
ity of severely limiting democracy, believing that democracy
will undermine policies preferred by experts. In particular,
those favoring the expansion of liberalism beyond the nation-
state, and thus policies that increase economic integration and
the effective erasure of borders, have increasingly become pro-
ponents of further constraining democracy. One such authori-
ty is Jason Brennan of Georgetown University, who has argued
in a book entitled Against Democracy that voters are consist-
ently ill-informed and even ignorant, and that democratic
government thus will ultimately reflect the deficiencies of the
electorate.3 Other libertarian-leaning liberals such as Bryan
Caplan, Jeffrey Friedman, and Damon Root believe that when
democracy threatens the substantive commitments of liberal-
ism—which they maintain will be unavoidably the case, since
uneducated and uninformed voters are illiberal—it might be
better simply to consider ways to jettison democracy.4 Brennan
has instead called for rule by an “epistocracy,” a governing elite
with tested and proven knowledge to efficiently and effectively
govern a modern liberal and capitalist state and social order.
The positions of these contemporary liberals are hardly
new; they echo arguments made by other leading academics
157
during the early part of the twentieth century, when there was
growing confidence in the expertise of the administrative
state and a dim view of the intellectual capacities of the
electorate. In his 1973 book The Crisis of Democratic Theory,
Edward A. Purcell masterfully documented the crisis of dem-
ocratic theory that occurred as a result of early findings in the
social sciences. A considerable quantity of early social-
scientific data—including the first large-scale intelligence
tests administered to a population that was seen as represent-
ative of, or even superior to, the average citizen, namely large
numbers of troops during World War I—revealed consist-
ently low I.Q. scores among broad swaths of the American
populace. A steady stream of similar evidence led a great
many leading social scientists of the 1920s and 1930s to call for
a wholesale change in government.5
No less a figure than the 1934 president of the American
Political Science Association—Walter J. Shepard—called for
a fundamental reconsideration of America’s traditional “faith”
in democracy. The best evidence showed that the people were
guided not by knowledge and wisdom but by ignorance and
whim: “Not the reason alone, but sentiment, caprice, and pas-
sion are large elements in the composition of public opinion.
. . . We no longer believe that the ‘voice of the people is the
voice of God.’ ”6 Concluding that democracy was indefensi-
ble—for reasons similar to those suggested by Brennan, Cap-
lan, Friedman, and others—Shepard urged his fellow political
scientists to disabuse themselves of their unjustified faith in
the public: the electorate “must lose the halo which has sur-
rounded it. . . . The dogma of universal suffrage must give
way to a system of educational and other tests which will ex-
158
clude the ignorant, the uninformed, and the anti-social ele-

ments which hitherto have so frequently controlled elec-
tions.”7 Even John Dewey, who had once declared his own
“democratic faith,” in a long debate with Walter Lippmann
acknowledged that the public was unlikely to be able to rise to
the level of civic knowledge and competence demanded in a
period of ever more complexity, and suggested that Whitman-
like poets would be needed to provide a suitable and accessible
“presentation” of the complex political and scientific informa-
tion needed by the citizenry of a complex modern society.8
Concern over “democratic competence” of ordinary
citizens has given rise not only to explicit critiques of democ-
racy but to efforts to constrain democratic rule even by those
who otherwise claim the democratic mantle. By one measure,
progressive liberals appear strenuously to endorse democracy,
and have been responsible for introducing many measures
that increase more direct forms of democratic governance.
Belief in greater direct popular control—evinced in such
proposals as the initiative, recall, and referendum—were
evidence of Progressive Era belief in the wisdom of the mul-
titudes. Calls for education—with Dewey in the lead—were
accompanied by claims that “the true Kingdom of God” was
on the verge of realization.9
However, at the same time, a seemingly contradictory
urge was evinced by many of the same progressives. Accom-
panying calls for more democracy were concomitant calls for
less popular influence over policy making. Progressives were
behind movements for more professionalization in govern-
ment, above all civil service reform, with accompanying
examinations and reduction in the numbers of political
159
appointees within administrations (thereby severing the very

electoral connection that progressives elsewhere sought to
maximize). Progressives were the great proponents of a
growth in government bureaucracy—the professionalization
of politics—and the “science” of administration. Progressives
were also in the vanguard of the promotion of the social sci-
ences—including especially political science—as the best and
most objective means of determining and implementing
rational and objectively sound public policy in preference to
the passing whims of the electorate. Major figures in the dis-
cipline like Woodrow Wilson sought to advance the scientific
study of politics in the early years of the twentieth century,
laying the groundwork for the rise of social scientific method-
ology as the necessary replacement of value-laden policy.
Early figures in the institution of political science—such as
Charles E. Merriam, Harold D. Lasswell, and George E. G.
Catlin—called for the scientific study of politics as the pre-
requisite for objective public policy. “Nothing is more liable
to lead astray,” wrote A. Gordon Dewey of Columbia Univer-
sity, “than the injection of moral considerations into essen-
tially non-moral, factual investigation.”10 Popular opinion was
understood to give direction to those charged with policy
creation. Democracy was thus limited to the expression of
preferences, the collection of individual opinions that could
then be collated and inform expert crafting of appropriate
policy by expert administrators. Elton Mayo—a major social
scientist in the 1920s—declared, “A world over, we are greatly
in need of an administrative elite.”11 Armed with objective
data from the social scientists, a credentialed, bureaucratic
elite was expected to take cues from, and at times to lead and
160
direct, irrational and ignorant democratic masses to accept

objectively good public policy.
founding constraints
Consistent findings of civic ignorance and incompetence,

indifference and misinformation are held by yesterday’s and
today’s social scientists to be like the molecular makeup of
water or laws of physics: measures of an objective and largely
unalterable reality. Ironically, in an age in which science is
interested in the ways that human activity is altering some ba-
sic assumptions about the natural world—especially climate
change—a basic assumption of social science is that measure-
ments of political “competence” are reflections of given facts.
A deeper commitment to liberal ends renders such social sci-
entists insensate to the ways that liberalism itself has fostered
just such a “citizenry,” that its main aim was to shape a liberal
populace shaped primarily by individual interest and commit-
ments to private ends. Whether social scientists conclude from
measurements of civic ignorance and indifference that democ-
racy should be jettisoned or that efforts at “civic education”
should be increased, the basic assumption is the same: liberal-
ism can correct what most contemporary liberals can’t recog-
nize that liberalism itself created. The ignorance of its own
history and aims—the “presentism” of liberals—is one of lib-
eralism’s greatest defenses against recognition that it generates
a civic catastrophe that it then claims it must cure by the
application of more liberalism.
The persistent absence of civic literacy, voting, and public
spiritedness is not an accidental ill that liberalism can cure; it
161
is the outcome of liberalism’s unparalleled success. It is an aim

that was built into the “operating system” of liberalism, and
the findings of widespread civic indifference and political il-
literacy of past and present social scientists are the expected
consequences of a successful liberal order.
For all of the differences between the progressives and
the Framers, there nevertheless exists this striking continuity,
at base a shared commitment of their common liberalism:
both classical and progressive liberals are dominated by think-
ers who praise the rule of the electorate even as they seek to
promote systemic governmental features that will minimize
electoral influence in the name of good policy outcomes. In-
deed, it is curious and perhaps erroneous to debate the
“democratic competence” of the American public, given that
the system of government explicitly designed by its Framers
was not to be democratic. The authors and defenders of the
Constitution argued on behalf of the basic law by explicitly
rejecting the notion that the Constitution would result in a
democracy. They sought to establish a republic, not a democ-
racy. As Madison famously wrote in Federalist 10, “hence it is
that democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence
and contention: have ever been found incompatible with per-
sonal security or the rights of property; and have in general
been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their
deaths. Theoretic politicians, who have patronized this
species of government, have erroneously supposed that by re-
ducing mankind to perfect equality in their political rights,
they would at the same time be perfectly equalized and as-
similated in their possessions, their opinions, and their
passions.”12
162
Madison argued in particular that the dangers of

democracies—conceived as small-scale direct democracies (in
his mind, roughly corresponding to the size of the smallest
American states) with a high level of participation by the
citizenry—could be avoided by two recourses: first, by “the
representative principle” of the new science of politics; and
second, by “extending the sphere,” that is, creating a large-
scale political entity that would minimize the possibilities for
civic combination (“faction”), increase the numbers of inter-
ests, and discourage political trust and activity among the
citizenry. Even while retaining an electoral connection that
would lodge ultimate sovereignty in the people, Madison was
clear that representatives should not be excessively guided by
the will of the people: the desired effect of representation, he
argued, is “to refine and enlarge the public views by passing
them through the medium of a chosen body of citizens, whose
wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country.”13
The best interest of the nation, according to James Madi-
son in Federalist 10, was defense of “the first object of govern-
ment,” which was protection of “diversity in the faculties of
men.” The public realm existed for the sake of differentiation
of the individual from others. In Madison’s eighteenth-century
view, government existed to “protect” individual pursuits
and the outcomes of those pursuits, particularly as those indi-
vidual differences would be manifest in unequal and varied
attainments of property. Government exists to protect the
greatest possible sphere of individual liberty, and does so
by encouraging the pursuit of self-interest among both the
citizenry and public servants. That “ambition must be made
to counteract ambition” is conceived as the way by which
163
separated and divided powers will prevent any particular per-

son from centralizing and seizing power; but at the same time,
the government itself is to be given substantial new powers to
act directly on individuals in order at once to liberate them
from the constraints of their particular localities, as well as to
promote especially expansion of commerce as well as the
“useful arts and sciences.”
This political technology of liberalism aimed to liberate
individuals from partial loyalties to particular people and
places, and rather make us into individuals who, above all,
would strive to achieve our own individual ambitions and de-
sires. Part of the new technology of modern republicanism is
what Madison called the “enlarged orbit,” which not only
would give rise to political leaders of “fit character” but would
inculcate civic indifference and privatism among the citizen-
ry. Madison hoped one consequence of enlarging the orbit
would be heightened levels of mutual distrust among a citi-
zenry inclined to advance particular interests, rendering them
less likely to combine and communicate: “Where there is a
consciousness of unjust or dishonorable purposes, communi-
cation is always checked by distrust in proportion to the
number whose concurrence is necessary.” A portrait arises of
citizens who each face a large mass of fellow citizens whom
they are inclined to mistrust, and a class of representatives
who—while elected by the citizenry—take it upon themselves
to govern on the basis of their views of the best interest of the
nation.
It was Madison’s hope that once the populace recognized
its relative powerlessness in the public realm, the people
would instead focus their attention on achievable private aims
164
and ends. The political realm would attract the ambitious and
those drawn to power, but would direct the growing power of
the central government to increase individual prospects for
the private ambitions of the individual, encouraging at the
same time liberation from interpersonal ties and connections,
fostering mistrust toward others so that interpersonal rela-
tions would be tenuous, fleeting, and fungible. One of the
ways that it was hoped that modern republicanism would
combat the ancient problem of political faction was not by
commending public spiritedness but rather by fostering a
“mistrust of motives” that would come about due to the large
expanse of the republic, constantly changing political dynam-
ics, the encouragement to “pluralism” and expansion of diver-
sity as a default preference, and thus the shifting commit-
ments of the citizenry. The ancient commendation of virtue
and aspiration to the common good was to be replaced by the
basic motivation of modern republicanism—the pursuit of
self-interest that leads to the overall increase of power and
thus fulfillment of desires.
The resulting liberal polity thus fosters a liberal society—
one that commends self-interest, the unleashed ambition of
individuals, an emphasis on private pursuits over a concern
for public weal, and an acquired ability to maintain psychic
distance from any other human, including to reconsider any
relationships that constitute a fundamental limitation on our
personal liberty. If Madison largely believed that this expres-
sion of individual differentiation would be manifest mainly
through property, we can easily discern how this “external”
form of differentiation was eventually “internalized” to forms
of personal identity that would similarly require an active and
165
expansive government to “protect the diverse faculties of

men”—or whatever identity one might wish to assume. The
idolization of “diversity” in the form of personal identity was
sewn into the deepest fabric of the liberal project, and with it
the diminution of a common civic and fostering of a common
weal. The only common allegiance that would remain was to
a political project that supported ever more individuation,
fragmentation, and expansion of “diversity of faculties.”
p u b l i c g r e at n e s s f o r p r i vat e e n d s
The very origins of mass democracy, then, appear to be bound

up with efforts to minimize the creation of an engaged demo-
cratic citizenry. The dominant American political narrative—
consistent from the time of the Founding to the Progressive
Era and even to the present day—was simultaneously one that
valorized democratic governance while devising structures
that insulated government from excessive popular influence.
More recent examples of the diminution of popular input and
control over governance include the rise of “blue-ribbon com-
missions” and the growing influence of quasi-governmental
but largely insulated agencies like the Federal Reserve.
Classical and progressive liberals shared not only the
ambition of constraining democratic practice and active citi-
zenship but a substantive vision of what constituted “good
policy.” Good policy for the Founders and progressives alike
were those that promoted the economic and political strength
of the American republic and the attendant expansion of pow-
er in its private and public forms. Liberalism sought not the
taming and disciplining of power, along with the cultivation
166
of attendant public and private virtues like frugality and tem-

perance, but institutional forms of harnessing power toward
the ends of national might, energy, and dynamism. As Pub-
lius—the pseudonym chosen by Federalist authors Madison,
Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay—explains in defending the
Constitution’s bestowal of flexible powers upon the central
government, unforeseeable future circumstances, particularly
in the realm of foreign affairs, require the potential for the
central government to wield incalculable, hence unlimited,
power. “There ought to be a CAPACITY,” writes Hamilton
in Federalist 34, “to provide for future contingencies, as they
may happen; and as these are illimitable in their nature, so it
is impossible safely to limit that capacity. . . . Where can we
stop, short of an indefinite power of providing for emergen-
cies as they arise?”14 It is, in fact, the very nature of the regime
being planned—specifically, a commercial republic—that will
prove an attraction for foreign ambitions, hence require the
provision of “indefinite power”: “If we mean to be a commer-
cial people,” continues Hamilton, “it must form a part of our
policy, to be able one day to defend that commerce.”15 The
argument echoes Machiavelli’s: the Prince must have access
to act with limitless power in defense of the State; the State’s
unleashed ambitions will lead to national wealth and great-
ness, making it more likely that other nations will seek to ap-
propriate and invade; and thus, by a kind of iron syllogism,
the ambition for national greatness and wealth makes the ac-
cumulation of unlimited power necessary and inescapable.
The Founders were aware that if their architecture was
well designed, people’s allegiance would shift from their natu-
ral affections for their local places and light instead on the
167
power and magnificence of the capital. For this to occur,

the intuitive understanding of liberty as the practice of self-
government would need to be replaced by the experience of
liberty as expanding “diversity of faculties”—whether un-
bounded increases in property and wealth or the experience
of “more Being” that philosopher Richard Rorty described as
the consequence of advancing liberal democracy. The Found-
ers would not be surprised that a populace shaped by the
modern form of private, material, individual, expressive lib-
erty would displace allegiance to local and civic liberty, and
that all attention and focus would be redirected to Washing-
ton, D.C., as the source and guarantor of expressive liberty.
This end would be advanced through an electoral
arrangement that the Framers hoped would ensure the elec-
tion to national office of men of particular distinction. The
“enlarged orbit” of the nation and the prospects for greatness
at the federal level would prove a draw to men of singular
ambition whose interests aligned with the project of Ameri-
can national greatness. In an argument meant to dismiss fears
of antifederalists that the central government would usurp the
activities of the states, Hamilton actually confirmed that this
was exactly the aim of the new federal government, thereby
revealing the type of character that he believed would be
drawn to the central government:
I confess I am at a loss to discover what temptation the persons
intrusted with the administration of the general government
could ever feel to divest the States of the authorities of that
description. The regulation of mere domestic police of a state
appears to me to hold out slender allurements to ambition.
Commerce, finance, negotiation, and war seem to compre-
168
hend the objects which have charms for minds governed by

that passion: and all the powers necessary to those objects
ought in the first instance to be lodged in the national deposi-
tory. . . . It is therefore improbable that there should exist a
disposition in the federal councils to usurp the [local] powers.
. . . The possession of them . . . would contribute nothing to
the dignity, to the importance, and to the splendor of the na-
tional government.16
Hamilton’s argument points to an expected tendency in the

new constitutional order, one promising, over time, that the
role of the central government would be to increase the sphere
of individual freedom through its particular auspices, and that
the populace would eventually come to regard not only the
central government as the protector of its freedoms but more
direct and local forms of self-governance as obstacles to that
freedom.
While many conservatives today claim that the Constitu-
tion sought to preserve a federalism that would ensure strong
identification with more local identities, the underlying argu-
ment of The Federalist contradicts that claim. The Federalist
lays out the conditions that would ensure that the populace
would come eventually to identify more with the central than
with the local and state governments. Both Madison and
Hamilton acknowledge that humans naturally have greater
affection for that which is in nearest proximity to them-
selves—albeit with an important caveat. Madison writes in
Federalist 46 “that the first and most natural sentiment of the
people will be to the governments of their respective states,”
while in Federalist 17 Hamilton writes, “It is a known fact in
human nature, that its affections are commonly weak in pro-
portion to the distance of diffusiveness of the object.”17 Both
169
acknowledge that it is an abiding aspect of human nature to

prefer what is close and more immediately “one’s own” to that
which is distant and less familiar.
To this forthright claim, however, each adds an important
qualification. Hamilton goes on in Federalist 17 to reinforce
this natural propensity to prefer what is near at hand, with an
important exception: “Upon the same principle that a man is
more attached to his family than to his neighborhood than to
the community at large, the people of each state would be apt
to feel a stronger bias towards their local governments, than
towards the government of the union, unless the force of that
principle should be destroyed by a much better administration of the
latter.”18 Madison echoes this stipulation in Federalist 46: “If,
therefore, as has been remarked, the people should in the fu-
ture become more partial to the federal than to the state gov-
ernments, the change can only result from such manifest and
irresistible proofs of better administration, as will overcome
all their antecedent propensities.”19 Better “administration”
will cause the natural fidelity to the close, the local, the famil-
iar, to be “destroyed”; and by better administration, what is
meant is governance by competent, enlightened, and effec-
tual leaders who can effectuate the main commitments of the
regime.
Unsurprisingly, Hamilton admits that this exception to
the natural attraction of humans for the more local circum-
stance is likely to apply under the arrangements of the
national system to be created by the Constitution. The con-
centration in the central government of men so disposed to
regard as mere “slender allurements” the activities of the state
governments is among the reasons that led Hamilton to con-
170
clude that it is to be expected that over time the federal gov-

ernment is likely to be better administered than those of the
particular—that is, the state—governments. In Federalist 27
he includes the larger electoral districts and likelihood of at-
tracting “select bodies of men” as among the “various reasons
[that] have been suggested, in the course of these papers, to
induce a probability, that the general government will be better
administered than the particular governments.”20 Reading this
conclusion of Federalist 27 back into or forward to the caveat
expressed in papers 17 and 46, we see that Publius clearly be-
lieves and intends that better administration at the federal
level will lead to the displacement of local loyalties and en-
gagement, and the redirection of attachments to the central
government.
There can be little doubt who was right concerning where
our attention would be focused: the authors of The Federalist
understood that local devotions could ultimately be overcome
by the power of the state to increase the “diversity of faculties,”
and to claim this definition of liberty as the only one worth
possessing and pursuing. To be a democratic citizen entitled
one to the expansion of individual ambitions and experiences,
and one’s civic duty was fulfilled by supporting a government
that constantly advanced forms of expressive individualism.
“Progressives” thus have had little success reining in the ex-
pansion of the private realm devoted to increasing acquisition
of property and economic power. “Conservatives” have like-
wise had little success thwarting the expansion of individual
expressivism, especially thwarting the advance of the sexual
revolution. If anyone wants to know why the Republicans
have failed to make the federal government smaller and to
171
devolve power back to the states in significant ways (as they

have claimed they seek to do at least since Goldwater, if not
since FDR), we should recognize that such a reversal would
go against the logic and the grain of the regime. It was
designed so that power would accumulate at the center, and
especially designed to attract to the center the most ambi-
tious—those who will endeavor by dint of their constitutional
ambitiousness to ensure that power continues to accumulate
at the center. Commerce and war are the activities that most
define the center, and those activities which accordingly have
increasingly come to define the nation.
For all their differences, what is strikingly similar about
the liberal thinkers of the Founding Era and leading thinkers
of the Progressive Era were similar efforts to increase the “or-
bit” or scope of the national government concomitant with
increases in the scale of the American economic order. Only
in the backdrop of such assumptions about the basic aims of
politics could there be any base presupposition in advance of
the existence of “good policy”—and that policy tended to be
whatever increased national wealth and power. In this sense—
again, for all their differences—the Progressives were as much
heirs as the Founders to the modern project of seeing politics
as the means of mastering nature, expanding national power,
and liberating the individual from interpersonal bonds and
obligations, including those entailed by active democratic
citizenship.
The Founders and the Progressives alike sought to
increase the influence of the central government over dispa-
rate parts of the nation, while increasing economic efficiency
and activity by means of investment in infrastructure and
172
communication. Just as the Founders could promote the

“useful arts and sciences” as one of the main positive injunc-
tions of the Constitution, so the progressive John Dewey’s
praise of Francis Bacon as “the real founder of modern
thought” would be frequently manifest in his praise of tech-
nological advance as tantamount to the advance of democracy
itself.21 For all of Dewey’s valorization of “democracy,” it
should not be forgotten that his definition of democracy is
bound up in whatever outcome would ultimately favor
“growth.” For the Founders and the Progressives alike, the
expansion of what Madison described as “the empire of rea-
son” should be paramount, and on that basis stated trust in
popular government was to be tempered above all by foster-
ing a res idiotica—a populace whose devotion to the Republic
was premised upon its expansion of private ends and expres-
sive individualism.
i l l i b e r a l d e m o c r a c y, r i g h t ly
understood
Writing of the township democracies he visited during his

journey to America in the early 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville
expressed amazement over the intense commitment Ameri-
cans exhibited toward their shared civic lives: “It is hard to
explain the place filled by political concerns in the life of an
American. To take a hand in the government of society and to
talk about it is his most important business and, so to say, the
only pleasure he knows.”22 Even as Tocqueville was to predict
that the course of American democracy would lead to
“individualism,” isolation, and civic passivity, he observed in
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practice a phenomenon almost wholly its opposite: “[If] an

American should be reduced to occupying himself with his
own affairs, at that moment half his existence would be
snatched from him; he would feel it as a vast void in his life
and would become incredibly unhappy.”23
Tocqueville observed practices of democratic citizenship
that had developed antecedent to America’s liberal founding.
Its roots and origins, he argued, lie in the earlier Puritan roots
of the American settlement, and in particular from the widely
shared understanding of Christian liberty that he believed
served as inspiration for the practices of democracy. Early in
Democracy in America, Tocqueville describes “a beautiful
definition of liberty” that he drew from Cotton Mather’s
Magnalia Christi Americana, or The Ecclesiastical History of
New-England:
Nor would I have you to mistake in the point of your own
liberty. There is a liberty of corrupt nature, which is affected
by men and beasts, to do what they list; and this liberty is in-
consistent with authority, impatient of all restraint; by this lib-
erty, Sumus Omnes Deteriores [we are all inferior]; ’tis the grand
enemy of truth and peace, and all the ordinances of God are
bent against it. But there is a civil, a moral, a federal liberty,
which is the proper end and object of authority; it is a liberty
for that only which is just and good, for this liberty you are to
stand with the hazard of your own lives.24
Tocqueville here approvingly cites a distinction that can be

traced to classical antiquity, between a liberty understood as
license—“doing as one lists”—and liberty understood as the
consequence of self-discipline, and in particular, free choice
made on behalf of the good. Tocqueville commends a more
contemporary articulation of a classical and Christian notion
174
of liberty of doing what is consonant with the “just and the

good,” and not the liberal understanding that defines liberty
as acting as one likes, so long as no one is physically harmed.
This form of liberty, as the Mather citation suggests, is
consistent with authority, authority that now seeks to order
society so that citizens are encouraged to make only those
decisions and undertake actions that are oriented toward the
“just and good.”
While liberals would come to see such authoritative
ordering of society as the opposite of freedom—as “Puritani-
cal”—Tocqueville on the contrary understood that the politi-
cal translation of this form of liberty naturally entailed a
certain kind of democratic practice. Democracy inspired by
this “beautiful definition of liberty” demanded the discipline
of self-rule, the especially challenging practice of political
and personal self-limitation. Democracy required the abridge-
ment of the desires and preferences of the individual, particu-
larly in light of an awareness of a common good that could
become discernible only through ongoing interactions with
fellow citizens. Indeed, Tocqueville held that the very idea of
the self as an “individual” was fundamentally transformed
through such interactions: “Feelings and ideas are renewed,
the heart enlarged, and the understanding developed only by
the reciprocal action of men upon one another.”25
For Tocqueville, such claims were more than merely
theoretical: he believed that there was a straight line of
influence from the Puritan understanding of liberty to the
democratic practices of the townships of New England that he
witnessed during his travels through the northeastern states.
Observing the practice of self-rule—of a people imposing laws
175
upon themselves directly—Tocqueville concluded that “the

strength of free peoples resides in the local community. Local
institutions are to liberty what primary schools are to science:
they put it within the people’s reach; they teach people to ap-
preciate its peaceful enjoyment and accustom them to make
use of it.”26 He stressed that it was the nearness and immediacy
of the township that made its citizens more likely to care and
take an active interest not only in their own fates but in the
shared fates of their fellow citizens. By contrast, he noted a
striking lack of attentiveness to more distant political centers
of power, including both state and an even more distant
federal government, where only a few ambitious men might
govern but which otherwise was of little concern to the active
citizens within the township. Tocqueville would have regarded
a citizenry that was oblivious to local self-governance, but
which instead directed all its attention and energy to the mach-
inations of a distant national power, not as the culmination of
democracy but as its betrayal.
Tocqueville argued that self-rule was the result of practice
and habituation, and the absence of such self-rule would bring
not the flourishing of freedom but reduction to servitude to
distant rulers. Democracy, in his view, was defined not by
rights to voting either exercised or eschewed but by the ongo-
ing discussion and disputation and practices of self-rule in
particular places with familiar people over a long period of
time. Tocqueville did not regard such rule as utopic or with-
out imperfections: “It is incontestable that people will often
manage public affairs very badly, but their concern therewith
is bound to extend their mental horizon and shake them out
of the rut of ordinary routine.” Democracy is not simply the
176
expression of self-interest but the transformation of that what

might have been narrow interest into a capacious concern for
the common good. This can be effected only through the
practice of citizens simultaneously ruling and being ruled by
themselves: democracy “is not the laws’ creation, but the
people learn to achieve it by making the laws.”27
Today’s liberal critics of democracy—especially the ema-
ciated forms of spectator politics that we call democracy—in
effect condemn the deformed and truncated demotic actions
of a degraded citizenry that liberalism itself has created. Lead-
ing liberals offer such degradation as evidence for the need to
further sequester popular energies, offering instead the satis-
factions of the private realm which will be further secured by
the distant operation of elected plutocrats and bureaucratic
functionaries of the liberal state.28 Today’s liberals who call for
encouraging democratic participation through more exten-
sive forms of civic education focused on national politics ne-
glect the extent to which their cure is the source of the ills
they would redress. It remains unthinkable that redress of
civic indifference would require efforts to severely limit the
power of the central state in favor of real opportunities for
local self-rule. But those who readily display evidence of civic
indifference or ignorance as evidence either for the need to
limit or educate the citizenry unavoidably do so in the deeper
commitment to strengthening the identification of politics
with the actions of the liberal state, and by so doing, ensure
the further degradation of citizenship.
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
177
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 il-
liberal progeny of the liberal order itself.
178
Conclusion: Liberty after Liberalism
L
i b e r a l i s m has failed because liberal-
ism has succeeded. As it becomes fully
itself, it generates endemic pathologies
more rapidly and pervasively than it is
able to produce Band-aids and veils to
cover them. The result is the systemic
rolling blackouts in electoral politics,
governance, and economics, the loss of confidence and even
belief in legitimacy among the citizenry, that accumulate not
as separable and discrete problems to be solved within the
liberal frame but as deeply interconnected crises of legitimacy
and a portent of liberalism’s end times.
The narrowing of our political horizons has rendered us
incapable of considering that what we face today is not a set
of discrete problems solvable by liberal tools but a systemic
challenge arising from pervasive invisible ideology. The
problem is not in just one program or application but in the
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C o ncl u s i o n
operating system itself. It is almost impossible for us to con-

ceive that we are in the midst of a legitimation crisis in which
our deepest systemic assumptions are subject to dissolution.
The “Noble Lie” of liberalism is shattering because it
continues to be believed and defended by those who benefit
from it, while it is increasingly seen as a lie, and not an espe-
cially noble one, by the new servant class that liberalism has
produced. Discontent is growing among those who are told
by their leaders that their policies will benefit them, even as
liberalism remains an article of ardent faith among those who
ought to be best positioned to comprehend its true nature.
But liberalism’s apologists regard pervasive discontent, politi-
cal dysfunction, economic inequality, civic disconnection, and
populist rejection as accidental problems disconnected from
systemic causes, because their self-deception is generated by
enormous reservoirs of self-interest in the maintenance of the
present system. This divide will only widen, the crises will
become more pronounced, the political duct tape and eco-
nomic spray paint will increasingly fail to keep the house
standing. The end of liberalism is in sight.
This denouement might take one of two forms. In the
first instance, one can envision the perpetuation of a political
system called “liberalism” that, becoming fully itself, operates
in forms opposite to its purported claims about liberty, equal-
ity, justice, and opportunity. Contemporary liberalism will
increasingly resort to imposing the liberal order by fiat—
especially in the form of the administrative state run by a
small minority who increasingly disdain democracy. End runs
around democratic and populist discontent have become the
norm, and backstopping the liberal order is the ever more vis-
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C o ncl u s i o n
ible power of a massive “deep state,” with extensive powers of

surveillance, legal mandate, police power, and administrative
control. These methods will continue to be deployed despite
liberalism’s claim to rest on consent and popular support.
Such a conclusion is paradoxical, not unlike Tocqueville’s
conclusion in Democracy in America, in which he envisions
democracy culminating in a new form of despotism.
But the instabilities that surely would accompany this
outcome suggest a second possible denouement—the end of
liberalism and its replacement by another regime. Most peo-
ple envisioning such scenarios rightly warn of the likely
viciousness of any successor regime, and close to hand are the
examples of the collapse of the Weimar Republic and the rise
of fascism, and Russia’s brief flirtation with liberalism before
the imposition of communism. While these brutal and failed
examples suggest that such possibilities are unlikely to gener-
ate widespread enthusiasm even in a postliberal age, some
form of populist nationalist authoritarianism or military au-
tocracy seems altogether plausible as an answer to the anger
and fear of a postliberal citizenry.
While growing discontent in Western liberal democra-
cies suggests that either outcome is a realistic possibility,
neither is to be wished for in the form it is likely to take. Yet
the failure of liberalism itself invites this outcome, even as the
unwillingness of liberalism’s defenders to perceive their own
complicity in fostering widespread discontent among their
fellow citizens only makes such a lamentable outcome more
likely. Liberalism’s defenders today regard their discontented
countrymen as backward and recidivist, often attributing
to them the most vicious motivations: racism, narrow
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C o ncl u s i o n
sectarianism, or bigotry, depending upon the issue at hand.

To the extent that liberalism regards itself as a self-healing,
perpetual political machine, it remains almost unthinkable for
its apologists to grasp that its failure may lead to its replace-
ment by a cruel and vicious successor. No serious effort to
conceive a humane postliberal alternative is likely to emerge
from the rear-guard defenders of a declining regime.
after liberalism
Imagining a humane alternative to either liberalocratic des-

potism or the rigid and potentially cruel authoritarian regime
that may replace it seems at best a parlor game, at worst a
fool’s errand. Yet engaging in the activity once central to po-
litical philosophy—the negotiation between the utopian and
realistic, begun by Plato in the Republic—remains essential if
the grimmer scenarios of a life after liberalism are to be avoid-
ed, and something potentially better brought into being. If
today only the barest outlines may be discerned amid a land-
scape so completely shaped by our liberal age, tentative first
steps are required. The destination is unknown and unfore-
seeable, and the journey will probably require generations to
complete.
I conclude by taking three of those initial steps.
• First, the achievements of liberalism must be ac-

knowledged, and the desire to “return” to a prelib-
eral age must be eschewed. We must build upon
those achievements while abandoning the founda-
tional reasons for its failures. There can be no go-
ing back, only forward.
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C o ncl u s i o n
• Second, we must outgrow the age of ideology.

Of the three great modern ideologies, only the
oldest and most resilient remains, but liberals
mistook the fall of its competitors for the end of
history rather than the pyrrhic victory it really was.
The gap between liberalism’s claims about itself
and the lived reality of the citizenry widens to the
point that the lie can no longer be accepted. In-
stead of trying to conceive a replacement ideology
(or returning to some updated version of an alter-
native, such as a renascent Marxism), we should
focus on developing practices that foster new
forms of culture, household economics, and polis
life.
• Third, from the cauldron of such experience
and practice, a better theory of politics and society
might ultimately emerge. Such a theory must
eschew liberalism’s ideological dimensions yet be
cognizant of its achievements and the rightful
demands it makes—particularly for justice and
dignity. The outlines of such a theory are already
discernible, guided by liberalism’s own retention
of essential concepts from a preliberal age—
especially that of liberty—and reinforced by expe-
rience and practice essential for a humane life.
This first step toward a new theory is the most ten-
tative, but it faces in a confident direction, given
the perpetual appeal of certain basic political ideals
that have been present in the Western tradition
since antiquity.
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C o ncl u s i o n
no return
Like all human projects, liberalism is not without its achieve-

ments. Living within its cave, liberal humanity has been too
self-congratulatory about its successes; hence the need to
show in these pages its deeper costs. But if we hope to create
a humane postliberal future, we cannot pretend that the age
of liberalism did not happen or that its basic contours can
simply be jettisoned in some sort of restoration of an idyllic
preliberal age. That age never existed—though, at the same
time, the past can and ought to instruct as we move forward
toward new possibilities. Any steps toward a postliberal age
must begin with a sympathetic appreciation of liberalism’s
appeal and an effort to realize the admirable ideals that liber-
alism often only promised.
While liberalism pretended to be a wholly new edifice
that rejected the political architecture of all previous ages, it
naturally drew upon long developments from antiquity to the
late Middle Ages. A significant part of its appeal was not that
it was something wholly new but that it drew upon deep res-
ervoirs of belief and commitment. Ancient political philoso-
phy was especially devoted to the question of how best to
avoid the rise of tyranny, and how best to achieve the condi-
tions of political liberty and self-governance. The basic terms
that inform our political tradition—liberty, equality, dignity,
justice, constitutionalism—are of ancient pedigree. The ad-
vent of Christianity, and its development in the now largely
neglected political philosophy of the Middle Ages, empha-
sized the dignity of the individual, the concept of the person,
the existence of rights and corresponding duties, the para-
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C o ncl u s i o n
mount importance of civil society and a multiplicity of asso-

ciations, and the concept of limited government as the best
means of forestalling the inevitable human temptation toward
tyranny. Liberalism’s most basic appeal was not its rejection of
the past but its reliance upon basic concepts that were foun-
dational to the Western political identity.
The architects of liberalism embraced the language and
terms of the classical and Christian traditions even as they
transformed both meaning and practice. They especially
rejected the classical and Christian understanding of human
beings as fundamentally relational creatures—“social and po-
litical animals”—and proposed that liberty, rights, and justice
could best be achieved by radically redefining human nature.
The result was an advance in rendering the political longings
of the intellectual West vastly more accessible and popular,
but at the cost of establishing a political world that under-
mined those ideals. Liberalism’s break with the past was
founded on a false anthropology; yet at the same time, those
ideals have been rendered more universal and secure in sig-
nificant part through the growing discontent with liberalism’s
failure to realize them.
A vast disconnect once existed between the philosophy of
the West and its practices. The ideals of liberty, equality, and
justice coexisted with extensive practices of slavery, bondage,
inequality, disregard for the contributions of women, and ar-
bitrary forms of hierarchy and application of law. Liberalism
was a sign of the profound success of the West’s most funda-
mental philosophical commitments, a manifestation of a
widespread demand that daily practices should more closely
conform to ideals.
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C o ncl u s i o n
Yet while advancing these ideals, liberalism ultimately be-

trayed them through its disfiguring conception of human na-
ture and the politics, economics, education, and application of
technology that resulted from it. Today, as in past centuries, a
vast disconnect exists between our stated ideals and our prac-
tices, but unlike past eras, the ideological nature of liberalism
makes our current disconnection difficult to perceive, because
now the failure to achieve those ideals is endemic to liberalism
itself. The word “freedom” is embraced as the fundamental
commitment of our age, but in vast swaths of life, freedom
seems to recede—many citizens, for instance, believe they have
little actual control over or voice in their government. Motiva-
tion by many voters in advanced democracies reflects not the
confident belief that their voice is being heard, but the convic-
tion that their vote is against a system that no longer recog-
nizes the claim to self-rule. At the same time, freedom in areas
such as consumer choice expands exponentially, leading many
to take on too much debt to feed ultimately unfulfillable crav-
ings. We effectively possess little self-government, either as
citizens over our leaders or as individuals over our appetites.
Citizens under liberalism are assured of our civic potency while
experiencing political weakness and engaging in infinite acts of
choice that are only deeper expressions of thralldom. We have
endless choices of the kind of car to drive but few options over
whether we will spend large parts of our lives in soul-deadening
boredom within them. All the while, liberalism claims that we
are free, and in spite of pervasive misgivings and growing dis-
content, we believe in an equivalence of word and deed.
Part of moving toward a postliberal age is recognizing
that while liberalism’s initial appeal was premised upon lauda-
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C o ncl u s i o n
tory aspirations, its successes have often been based on a dis-

figurement of those aspirations. Its defenders often point to
the liberation of women from conditions of inequality as a
significant example of liberalism’s success, and regard any cri-
tique of liberalism as a proposal to thrust women back into
preliberal bondage. Yet the main practical achievement of this
liberation of women has been to move many of them into the
workforce of market capitalism, a condition that traditional-
ists like Wendell Berry as well as Marxist political theorists
like Nancy Fraser regard as a highly dubious form of libera-
tion.1 All but forgotten are arguments, such as those made in
the early Republic, that liberty consists of independence from
the arbitrariness not only of a king but of an employer. Today
we consider the paramount sign of the liberation of women to
be their growing emancipation from their biology, which frees
them to serve a different, disembodied body—“corporate”
America—and participate in an economic order that effec-
tively obviates any actual political liberty. Liberalism posits
that freeing women from the household is tantamount to
liberation, but it effectively puts women and men alike into a
far more encompassing bondage.
Liberalism arose by appeal to an ennobling set of political
ideals and yet realized new and comprehensive forms of
degradation. Put less charitably, the architects of liberalism
intentionally appropriated widely shared political ideals and
subverted them to the advantage of those most capable of
benefiting from new definitions of liberty, democracy, and re-
publicanism.2 Building on liberalism’s successes means recog-
nizing both the legitimacy of its initial appeal and the deeper
reasons for its failure. It means offering actual human liberty
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C o ncl u s i o n
in the form of both civic and individual self-rule, not the er-
satz version that combines systemic powerlessness with the
illusion of autonomy in the form of consumerist and sexual
license. Liberalism was both a boon and a catastrophe for the
ideals of the West, perhaps a necessary step whose failures,
false promises, and unfulfilled longings will lead us to some-
thing better.
the end of ideology
Liberalism was launched with the claim that it would “take

men as they are,” grounding a new politics upon a clear-
sighted realism about human nature. Yet its claims about
humans “as they are” were premised upon the fiction of radi-
cally autonomous humans in a State of Nature. The political,
social, and economic order shaped around this disfigured view
of human nature succeeded in remaking people in this image,
but the project had the predictable effect of liberating them
from the reality of relational life. Liberalism has always been
animated by a vision of how humans “ought” to live, but it
masked these normative commitments in the guise of neutral-
ity. Like its competitor ideologies, it called forth a massive
political and economic apparatus to fulfill its vision—in the
process both reshaping and damaging humanity. A more
humane politics must avoid the temptation to replace one
ideology with another. Politics and human community must
percolate from the bottom up, from experience and practice.
One of liberalism’s most damaging fictions was the theory
of consent, an imaginary scenario in which autonomous, ra-
tional calculators formed an abstract contract to establish a
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C o ncl u s i o n
government whose sole purpose was to “secure rights.” This

view of consent relegated all “unchosen” forms of society and
relationships to the category of “arbitrary” and thus suspect if
not illegitimate. Liberalism today has successfully expanded
itself from a political project to a social and even familial
one, acting most often as solvent upon all social bonds. Yet as
liberalism faces more challenging frontiers—especially those
religious institutions that fundamentally reject liberal
premises—we witness an increasingly visible and active gov-
ernment advancing its project through efforts to control
religious and familial practice and belief.3
Liberalism takes the fundamental position that “consent”
to any relationship or bond can be given only when people are
completely and perfectly autonomous and individual. Only
then are they able to consciously and purposefully engage in
forms of utilitarian relationality, and also thereby capable of
remaking such bonds when they prove to be unsatisfactory. I
recall a chilling conversation when I was teaching at Prince-
ton University about a book that had recently appeared about
the Amish. We were discussing the practice of Rumspringa—
literally, “running around”—a mandatory time of separation
of young adults from the community during which they par-
take of the offerings of modern liberal society.4 The period of
separation lasts usually about a year, at the end of which the
young person must choose between the two worlds. An over-
whelming number, approaching 90 percent, choose to return
to be baptized and to accept norms and strictures of their
community that forbid further enjoyment of the pleasure of
liberal society. Some of my former colleagues took this as a
sign that these young people were in fact not “choosing” as
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C o ncl u s i o n
free individuals. One said, “We will have to consider ways of

freeing them.” Perfect liberal consent requires perfectly lib-
erated individuals, and the evidence that Amish youth were
responding to the pull of family, community, and tradition
marked them as unfree.
Liberalism renders such ties suspect while papering over
the ways in which it has shaped its own youth to adopt a par-
ticular form of life, set of beliefs, and worldview; these are
never subject to appraisal by any standards outside liberalism
itself. The traditional culture of the Amish (one can also think
of other examples) gives its young a choice about whether
they will remain within that culture, but only one option is
seen as an exercise of choice. Acquiescence to liberalism, how-
ever unreflective, is “tacit consent,” yet membership in a tra-
ditional community is “oppression” or “false consciousness.”
Under this double standard, religious, cultural, and
familial membership is an accident of birth. Yet for modern
humanity in the advanced West and increasingly the world,
liberalism is equally an unwitting inheritance, and any
alternatives are seen as deeply suspect and probably in need of
liberal intervention. Liberalism further overlooks the way
that culture itself is a deeper form of consent. Culture and
tradition are the result of accumulations of practice and expe-
rience that generations have willingly accrued and passed
along as a gift to future generations. This inheritance is the
result of a deeper freedom, the freedom of intergenerational
interactions with the world and one another. It is the conse-
quence of collected practice, and succeeding generations
may alter it if their experience and practices lead to different
conclusions.
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C o ncl u s i o n
The sustenance of existing cultural and religious practices

and the building of new communities will require far more
conscientiousness than the passive acquiescence now fostered
toward liberalism itself. It is an irony (and arguably a benefit
of a liberal age) that today it is liberalism itself that silently
shapes an unreflective population, and that the development
of new cultures is what requires conscious effort, deliberation,
reflectiveness, and consent. This is true especially for reli-
gious communities in an age in which liberalism has become
increasingly hostile to self-imposed limitations and strictures
that it finds abhorrent, particularly, but not only, in the do-
main of personal and sexual autonomy—a stance that many
see as betrayal of liberalism rather than its culmination. But
this very conflict, by showing the lengths to which liberalism
will go to reshape the world in its own image, shows the need
for alternative communities and new cultures that will live
outside the gathering wreckage of liberalism’s twilight years.
the advent of postliberal practice and

t owa r d a n e w b i rt h o f t h e o ry
Already there is evidence of growing hunger for an organic

alternative to the cold, bureaucratic, and mechanized world
liberalism offers. While especially evident in the remnants
of orthodox religious traditions—not only in self-contained
communities like the Amish but increasingly in growing
international movements of Catholics, Protestants, Jews,
and others—there is also growing interest in proposals for a
“Benedict Option,” most interestingly proposed and explored
in the book of that name by Rod Dreher.5 The building up of
191
C o ncl u s i o n
practices of care, patience, humility, reverence, respect, and

modesty is also evident among people of no particular reli-
gious belief, homesteaders and “radical homemakers” who—
like their religious counterparts—are seeking within house-
holds and local communities and marketplaces to rediscover
old practices, and create new ones, that foster new forms of
culture that liberalism otherwise seeks to eviscerate.6
Often called a counterculture, such efforts should better
understand themselves as a counter-anticulture. Building a
culture in the midst of today’s anticulture is a profound chal-
lenge because of the flattened cultural wasteland produced by
modern liberalism, as well as its jealous hostility to competi-
tors. A culture is built from the bottom up, and like an organ-
ism, it maintains its DNA by passing itself on to subsequent
generations. A self-conscious effort to build a new culture
exists in basic contradiction to more organic origins and
development of cultural practice. Yet the unique context of
liberalism’s blighted cultural landscape demands something
new. Ironically, given the default choice-based philosophy that
liberalism has bequeathed to us, what might someday become
a nonvoluntarist cultural landscape must be born out of vol-
untarist intentions, plans, and actions.
Such efforts should focus on building practices that sus-
tain culture within communities, the fostering of household
economics, and “polis life,” or forms of self-governance that
arise from shared civic participation. All such practices arise
from local settings that resist the abstraction and deperson-
alization of liberalism, and from which habits of memory and
mutual obligation arise. While culture is cultivated and passed
on in the most immediate way in households, it is developed
192
C o ncl u s i o n
in and through a community of families and centers especial-

ly on rituals surrounding birth, coming of age, marriage, and
death. Culture takes into account local circumstances, often
drawing sustenance and inspiration from facts of local geog-
raphy and history. It passes memory down through genera-
tions via story and song, not the sort packaged in Hollywood
or on Madison Avenue, but arising from voices in particular
places. And as the word suggests, it is nearly always linked to
“cult,” understanding the local to be bound to and ultimately
an expression of the universal and eternal, the divine and
sublime. Such practices give rise to the only real form of di-
versity, a variety of cultures that is multiple yet grounded in
human truths that are transcultural and hence capable of
being celebrated by many peoples.
A counter-anticulture also requires developing economic
practices centered on “household economics,” namely, eco-
nomic habits that are developed to support the flourishing of
households but which in turn seek to transform the house-
hold into a small economy. Utility and ease must be rejected
in preference to practices of local knowledge and virtuosity.
The ability to do and make things for oneself—to provision
one’s own household through the work of one’s own and one’s
children’s hands—should be prized above consumption and
waste. The skills of building, fixing, cooking, planting, pre-
serving, and composting not only undergird the indepen
dence 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
193
C o ncl u s i o n
culture-destroying ignorance and laziness induced by the

ersatz freedom of the modern market.
Along with the arts of household economics is the greater
challenge of minimizing one’s participation in the abstract
and depersonalizing nature of the modern economy. The
skills and dispositions gained in the household should be ex-
tended to an economy of households, in which friendships,
places, and histories are relevant considerations in economic
transactions. An economy that prizes facelessness fosters citi-
zens who cannot see, hear, or speak properly about critical
relationships to one another and to the world. Our economy
encourages a pervasive ignorance about the sources and des-
tinies of the goods we buy and use, and this ignorance in turn
promotes indifference amid an orgy of consumption. Like
liberal politics, the economy promotes a concern solely for
the short term, hence narrows our temporal horizon to
exclude knowledge of the past and concern for the future.
Such an economy creates debtors who live for the present,
confident that the future will take care of itself while consum-
ing the goods of the earth today in ways that make it less
likely that that future ever exists. Local markets, by contrast,
foster relations built over time and in place, and necessarily
point us beyond individual calculation. Sellers and buyers
make their exchanges with an awareness of how their rela-
tionships help build a better community, aware that some
profit will be reinvested at home for the benefit of friends,
neighbors, and generations yet unborn.
A greater emphasis upon household economics and
local exchange must be accompanied by greater political
self-governance. Today we measure political health by the
194
C o ncl u s i o n
percentage of the voting-age population that actually votes,

and while this percentage has grown in the past few elections,
even this supposed sign of civic health hovers between 50 and
60 percent. Yet the national obsession with presidential elec-
toral politics and the reduction of political conversation and
debate to issues arising in the federal government are signs
more of civic dis-ease than of health. Politics is reduced large-
ly to a spectator sport, marketed and packaged as a distraction
for a passive population. 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.
When Tocqueville visited America in the late 1820s, he
marveled at Americans’ political do-it-yourself spirit. Unlike
his fellow Frenchmen, who were passively acquiescent to a
centralized aristocratic order, Americans would readily gather
in local settings to solve problems. In the process they learned
the “arts of association.” They were largely indifferent to the
distant central government, which then exercised relatively
few powers. Local township government, Tocqueville wrote,
was the “schoolhouse of democracy,” and he praised the com-
mitment of citizens to secure the goods of common life not
only for the ends they achieved but for the habits and prac-
tices they fostered and the beneficial changes they wrought
on citizens themselves. The greatest benefit of civic participa-
tion, he argued, was not its effects in the world, but those on
the relations among people engaged in civic life: “Citizens
who are bound to take part in public affairs must turn from
the private interests and occasionally take a look at something
other than themselves. As soon as common affairs are treated
195
C o ncl u s i o n
in common, each man notices that he is not as independent of

his fellows as he used to suppose and that to get their help he
must often offer his aid to them.”7
For a time, such practices will be developed within inten-
tional communities that will benefit from the openness of
liberal society. They will be regarded as “options” within the
liberal frame, and while suspect in the broader culture, large-
ly permitted to exist so long as they are nonthreatening to the
liberal order’s main business. Yet it is likely from the lessons
learned within these communities that a viable postliberal
political theory will arise, one that begins with fundamentally
different anthropological assumptions not arising from a sup-
posed state of nature or concluding with a world-straddling
state and market, but instead building on the fact of human
relationality, sociability, and the learned ability to sacrifice
one’s narrow personal interest not to abstract humanity, but
for the sake of other humans. With the demise of the liberal
order, such countercultures will come to be seen not as
“options” but as necessities.
Still, the impulse to devise a new and better political the-
ory in the wake of liberalism’s simultaneous triumph and de-
mise is a temptation that must be resisted. The search for a
comprehensive theory is what gave rise to liberalism and
successor ideologies in the first place. Calls for restoration of
culture and the liberal arts, restraints upon individualism and
statism, and limits upon liberalism’s technology will no doubt
prompt suspicious questions. Demands will be made for com-
prehensive assurances that inequalities and injustices arising
from racial, sexual, and ethnic prejudice be preemptively
forestalled and that local autocracies or theocracies be legally
196
C o ncl u s i o n
prevented. Such demands have always contributed to the

extension of liberal hegemony, accompanied by simultaneous
self-congratulation that we are freer and more equal than
ever, even as we are more subject to the expansion of both the
state and market, and less in control of our fate.
By now we should entertain the possibility that liberalism
continues to expand its global dominion by deepening ine-
quality and constraining liberty in the name of securing their
opposite. Perhaps there is another way, starting with the ef-
forts of people of goodwill to form distinctive countercultural
communities in ways distinct from the deracinated and deper-
sonalized form of life that liberalism seems above all to foster.
As the culmination of liberalism becomes more fully visible,
as its endemic failures throw more people into economic, so-
cial, and familial instability and uncertainty, as the institutions
of civil society are increasingly seen to have been hollowed
out in the name of individual liberation, and as we discover
that our state of ever-perfected liberty leaves us, as Tocqueville
predicted, both “independent and weak,” such communities
of practice will increasingly be seen as lighthouses and field
hospitals to those who might once have regarded them as pe-
culiar and suspect. From the work and example of alternative
forms of community, ultimately a different experience of po-
litical life might arise, grounded in the actual practice and
mutual education of shared self-rule.
What we need today are practices fostered in local set-
tings, focused on the creation of new and viable cultures, eco-
nomics grounded in virtuosity within households, and the
creation of civic polis life. Not a better theory, but better
practices. Such a condition and differing philosophy that it
197
C o ncl u s i o n
encourage might finally be worthy of the name “liberal.”

After a five hundred–year philosophical experiment that has
now run its course, the way is clear to building anew and
better. The greatest proof of human freedom today lies in our
ability to imagine, and build, liberty after liberalism.
198
Notes
preface
1. Václav Havel, “The Power of the Powerless,” in Open Letters:
Selected Writings, 1965–1990 (New York: Vintage, 1992), 162.
2. Wilson Carey McWilliams, “Democracy and the Citizen: Com-
munity, Dignity, and the Crisis of Contemporary Politics in
America,” in Redeeming Democracy in America, ed. Patrick J. Deneen
and Susan J. McWilliams (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas,
2011), 27.
introduction
1. Adrian Vermuele, Law’s Abnegation: From Law’s Empire to the Ad-
ministrative State (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016).
2. Thomas L. Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree (New York:
Anchor, 2000), 7.
3. From a response essay to David Brooks “Organization Kid,” by a
member of Notre Dame class of 2018, in my course Political Philosophy
and Education, August 29, 2016. Paper in author’s possession.
4. Wendell Berry, “Agriculture from the Roots Up,” in The Way of
Ignorance and Other Essays (Emeryville, CA: Shoemaker and Hoard,
2005), 107–8.
5. Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our
Brains (New York: Norton, 2010).
199
n o t e s t o pa g e s 1 5 – 3 3
6. Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from

Technology and Less from Each Other (New York: Basic, 2011).
7. Lee Silver, Remaking Eden: How Genetic Engineering and Cloning
Will Transform the Family (New York: HarperPerennial, 1998); Mark
Shiffman, “Humanity 4.5,” First Things, November 2015.
c h apter 1 . un sustainable liberalism

An early version of parts of this chapter was previously published as
“Unsustainable Liberalism” in First Things, August, 2012. I am grateful
for permission to republish portions of that original essay.
1. The best guide to the premodern origins of many institutions
commonly thought to have their origins in the early-modern liberal tra-
dition remains Charles Howard McIlwain’s The Growth of Political
Thought in the West: From the Greeks to the End of the Middle Ages (New
York: Macmillan, 1932). See also his Constitutionalism, Ancient and Mod-
ern (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1940). Another helpful source
is John Neville Figgis, Studies of Political Thought: From Gerson to Grotius
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1907).
2. Brian Tierney, The Idea of Natural Rights: Studies on Natural Rights,
Natural Law, and Church Law, 1150–1625 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans,
1997); Paul E. Sigmund, Natural Law in Political Thought (Lanham, MD:
University Press of America, 1981); Richard Tuck, Natural Rights Theories:
Their Origins and Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1982); Larry Siedentop, Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western
Liberalism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014).
3. Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, ed. and trans. David Wooton
(Indianapolis: Hackett, 1995), 48.
4. Francis Bacon, Of the Advancement of Learning, in The Works of
Francis Bacon, 14 vols., ed. James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, and
Douglas Denon Heath (London: Longmans, 1879), 3: 294–95.
5. Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History,” The National Interest,
Summer 1989.
6. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Edwin Curley (Indianapolis:
Hackett, 1994), 229.
7. Ibid., 143.
8. John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, ed. C. B. MacPherson
(Indianapolis: Hackett, 1980), 40.
200
n o t e s t o pa g e s 3 6 – 5 3
9. Francis Bacon, Valerius Terminus, Of the Interpretation of Nature,

in Spedding, Ellis, and Heath, The Works of Francis Bacon, 3: 218.
chapter 2 . un iting
i ndividualism and statism
1. Bill Bishop, The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded
America Is Tearing Us Apart (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt,
2008); Marc J. Dunkelman, The Vanishing Neighbor: The Transformation
of American Community (New York: Norton, 2014); Charles A. Murray,
Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010 (New York: Crown
Forum, 2012); Robert D. Putnam and David E. Campbell, American
Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us (New York: Simon and Schus-
ter, 2010).
2. Bertrand de Jouvenel, The Pure Theory of Politics (Indianapolis:
Liberty Fund, 2000), 60.
3. Locke, Second Treatise of Government, ed. C. B. McPherson (Indi-
anapolis: Hackett, 1980), 32.
4. Thus the Constitution positively charges Congress “to promote
the Progress of sciences and useful arts.”
5. John Stuart Mill, “Considerations on Representative Govern-
ment,” in On Liberty and Other Essays, ed. John Gray (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2008), 232.
6. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political Origins of
Our Time (Boston: Beacon, 2001). More recently, a similar argument has
been made by Brad Gregory in his magisterial The Unintended Reforma-
tion: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society (Cambridge: Belknap
Press of Harvard University Press, 2012).
7. See especially Polanyi, The Great Transformation, 45–58.
8. Ibid., 147.
9. Among the most powerful indictments of industrialism are to be
found in the writings of southern authors, and thereby often dismissed
as defenses of an unjust economic order. See, for instance, The Twelve
Southerners, I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition
(New York: Harper, 1930), and Wendell Berry’s response to this indict-
ment in The Hidden Wound (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1970).
10. E. F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mat-
tered (New York: Harper and Row, 1975); Stephen Marglin, The Dismal
201
n o t e s t o pa g e s 5 3 – 6 2
Science: How Thinking Like an Economist Undermines Community

(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008).
11. John M. Broder and Felicity Barringer, “The E.P.A. Says 17
States Can’t Set Emission Rules, New York Times, December 20, 2007,
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/20/washington/20epa.html?_r=0.
12. John Dewey, Individualism, Old and New (Prometheus, 1999),
37, 39.
13. Herbert Croly, The Promise of American Life (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1965), 280.
14. Walter Rauschenbusch, Theology for the Social Gospel
(Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1997).
15. The Obama campaign’s original “Life of Julia” ad has been re-
moved from the campaign’s website (https://www.barackobama.com/
life-of-julia/). Most search results now direct one to various spoofs and
critiques of the original ad. Stories about the ad are still available, and
provide a general description of the campaign spot. See, for example,
http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/oh-julia-from-birth
-to-death-left-and-right.
16. Marglin, The Dismal Science.
17. Hannah Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism (New York:
Harcourt, Brace, 1951); Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom (New York:
Farrar and Rinehart, 1941); Robert A. Nisbet, The Quest for Community:
A Study in the Ethics of Order and Freedom (Wilmington, DE: ISI, 2010).
The publication record of Quest for Community is revealing. Published by
Oxford University Press in 1953, it went out of print until the late 1960s,
when it became popular with the New Left. Thereafter, it went out of
print again until 2010, when it was republished—with a new introduc-
tion by conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat—by the
conservative Intercollegiate Studies Institute press. Nisbet’s argument
has never found a true political home in America, wandering between
the New Left and the social conservatives on the right. Yet that his book
continues to find readers suggests that his analysis remains relevant, even
with the eclipse and fall of fascism and communism. See E. J. Dionne,
Why Americans Hate Politics (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), 36.
18. Nisbet, The Quest for Community, 145.
19. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. George
Lawrence (New York: Harper and Row, 1969), 672.
202
n o t e s t o pa g e s 6 4 – 7 7
c h a p t e r 3. liberalism as anticu lture

1. Mario Vargas Llosa, Notes on the Death of Culture: Essays on Spec-
tacle and Society (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015), 58.
2. Polanyi, The Great Transformation. See also William T. Cav-
anaugh, “ ‘Killing for the Telephone Company’: Why the Nation-State
Is Not the Keeper of the Common Good,” in Migrations of the Holy:
God, State, and the Political Meaning of the Church (Grand Rapids, MI:
Eerdmans, 2011).
3. A quietly beautiful expression of this view, captured after its pass-
ing, is offered by the part-time political scientist and full-time Vermont-
er Charles Fish, who wrote of his farming forebears: “For Grandmother
and my uncles, there was an imagined coexistence of the hand of God
and the workings of nature that was midway between divinity and the
operations of mechanical laws. They would have been uncomfortable if
pressed to describe the relationship between the two or to declare wheth-
er they believed there was none. When weather or disease caused dam-
age, it was nature, not God, that was named, but nature was not simply a
malevolent force. While they had to fight her as she sought to dissolve
the artful bonds which held things in useful forms, they also felt they
were cooperating with her as they made use of her powers of renewal and
growth. They would have listened without objection to the phrase ‘har-
nessing the power of nature,’ but it is unlikely that in their hearts they
ever thought they could do it except in the most partial way. Through
nature they could accomplish fine things, but that nature herself was ever
under their control would have struck them as not quite blasphemous but
erroneous and perhaps presumptuous. There was much to remind them
that they were not the lords of creation. . . . What fell to their hands to
do they did with all their strength and craft, but they knew they worked
at the center of a mystery, the motions of which they could neither influ-
ence nor predict.” Charles Fish, In Good Hands: The Keeping of a Family
Farm (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995), 102–3.
4. John Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy (1920; New York: New
American Library, 1950), 46.
5. Ibid., 48.
6. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 508.
7. Ibid., 548.
8. Ibid., 557–58.
203
n o t e s t o pa g e s 7 8 – 8 1
9. Thomas Hobbes, On the Citizen, ed. and trans. Richard Tuck and
Michael Silverthorne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998),
102.
10. Thomas Jefferson, A Summary View of the Rights of British Amer-
ica. Set Forth in Some Resolutions Intended for the Inspection of the Present
Delegates of the People of Virginia. Now in Convention. By a Native, and
Member of the House of Burgesses. (Williamsburg: Clementina Rind, 1774).
11. Berry’s understanding is best grasped not through his essays but
through his fiction. Based in the fictional location of Port William, Ber-
ry’s fiction portrays an idyllic (though not perfect) communal setting in
which strong ties between people and to place and land are its promi-
nent features. As Berry has described his own fiction, “by means of the
imagined place . . . I have learned to see my native landscape and neigh-
borhood as a place unique in the world, a work of God, possessed of an
inherent sanctity that mocks any human valuation that can be put on it.”
Berry, “Imagination in Place,” in The Way of Ignorance, 50–51.
12. Wendell Berry, “Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community,” in
Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community: Eight Essays (New York: Pan-
theon, 1994), 120.
13. Ibid., 120–21.
14. Ibid., 157.
15. Lest it appear that this critique of liberal “standardization”—
most often in the form of national, and increasingly international, legal
imposition—implies that the left or Democratic Party is the sole perpe-
trator, see as a counterexample the article “Bullies along the Potomac”
by Nina Mendelson in the New York Times, July 5, 2006, http://www
.nytimes.com/2006/07/05/opinion/05mendelson.html. Mendelson re-
lates that the Republican-controlled Congress—far from insisting
upon states’ rights—had in a five-year span beginning in 2001 enacted
twenty-seven laws “that preempt state authority in areas from air
pollution to consumer protection,” including one law entitled the
National Uniformity for Food Act. Or, in the domain of education, con-
sider the standardizing effect of President Bush’s landmark No Child
Left Behind program, or attraction of the standardization in the area of
higher education that was threatened by President Bush’s secretary of
education Margaret Spellings’s Commission on the Future of Higher
Education.
204
n o t e s t o pa g e s 8 1 – 9 1
16. Berry’s stance shares significant resemblance with many of the

criticisms and concerns of the intellectual historian Christopher Lasch.
See Lasch’s The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics (New York:
Norton, 1991) and The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy
(New York: Norton, 1994).
17. The defense of local diversity begins, but does not end, with
agricultural diversity. Such diversity is necessary not only for reasons of
good husbandry but further, as a means of avoiding the susceptibility of
homogenous systems to cataclysmic events—whether natural or man-
made, such as in the case of terrorism. See Berry, “Some Notes for the
Kerry Campaign, If Wanted,” The Way of Ignorance, 18. Berry was under
little illusion that Kerry would heed his advice, and it seems he was cor-
rect in that estimation.
18. In this sense, Berry’s critique of externally imposed “logic” is
similar to the critiques of Michael Oakeshott. See “Rationalism in Poli-
tics,” in Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (New York: Basic, 1962),
and The Politics of Faith and the Politics of Scepticism (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1996).
19. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “A World Split Apart,” in Solzhenitsyn
at Harvard, ed. Ronald Berman (Washington, DC: Ethics and Public
Policy Center, 1980), 7.
20. Stephen Gardner, “The Eros and Ambitions of Psychological
Man,” in Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith after
Freud (Wilmington, DE: ISI, 2006), 244.
21. Simone Polillo, “Structuring Financial Elites: Conservative Bank-
ing and the Local Sources of Reputation in Italy and the United States,
1850–1914,” Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2008, 157. This study
was brought to my attention by Matthew Crawford in Shop Class as Soul
Craft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work (New York: Penguin, 2010).
22. Cited in Polillo, “Structuring Financial Elites,” 159.
23. “No Longer the Heart of the Home, the Piano Industry Quietly
Declines,” New York Public Radio, January 6, 2015, http://www.thetakeaway
.org/story/despite-gradual-decline-piano-industry-stays-alive/.
c h a p t e r 4 . technology and the loss of liberty

1. Brett T. Robinson, Appletopia (Waco, TX: Baylor University
Press, 2013).
205
n o t e s t o pa g e s 9 4 – 1 0 8
2. Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to our

Brains (New York: Norton, 2010).
3. Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from
Technology and Less from Each Other (New York: Basic, 2011).
4. Neil Postman, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology
(New York: Vintage, 1993).
5. Ibid., 28.
6. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New
York: Free Press, 1992); Francis Fukuyama, Our Posthuman Future: Con-
sequences of the Biotechnology Revolution (New York: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 2002).
7. Daniel J. Boorstin, The Republic of Technology: Reflections on Our
Future Community (New York: Harper and Row, 1978), 5.
8. Stephen Marche, “Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?” Atlantic,
May, 2012.
9. Richard H. Thomas, “From Porch to Patio,” Palimpsest, August
1975.
10. This practice echoes the call by John Winthrop in his oft-cited
but rarely read sermon “A Model of Christian Charity” for the kind of
community by the emigrating Puritans whose members would be knit
closely together in the bonds of Christian charity: “Now the only way to
avoid this shipwreck, and to provide for our posterity, is to follow the
counsel of Micah, to do justly, to love mercy, to walk humbly with our
God. For this end, we must be knit together, in this work, as one man.
We must entertain each other in brotherly affection. We must be willing
to abridge ourselves of our superfluities, for the supply of others’ neces-
sities. We must uphold a familiar commerce together in all meekness,
gentleness, patience and liberality. We must delight in each other; make
others’ conditions our own; rejoice together, mourn together, labor and
suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and com-
munity in the work, as members of the same body.” John Winthrop, “A
Model of Christian Charity,” in The American Puritans: Their Prose and
Poetry, ed. Perry Miller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 83.
11. Stephen Marglin, The Dismal Science: How Thinking Like an Econ-
omist Undermines Community (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
2008), 18.
12. Boorstin, The Republic of Technology, 9.
206
n o t e s t o pa g e s 1 1 7 – 2 2
c h a p t e r 5. liberalism against liberal arts

1. Clark Kerr, The Uses of the University, 5th ed. (Cambridge: Har-
vard University Press, 2001), 199.
2. https://www.utexas.edu/about/mission-and-values.
3. In his classic statement about The Two Cultures, C. P. Snow is able
to justify with ease why humanists should study the sciences but strug-
gles to articulate grounds why scientists should study the humanities.
C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1965).
4. See the contrast drawn by Ruthellen Josselson between “the
hermeneutics of faith and the hermeneutics of suspicion,” in “The
Hermeneutics of Faith and the Hermeneutics of Suspicion,” Narrative
Inquiry 14, no. 1 (2004): 1–28.
5. For a fuller discussion of this history, see Anthony Kronman,
Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the
Meaning of Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), especially
chapters 3–4.
6. A locus classicus that wed radical feminism with optimistic belief in
technology’s ability to alter human nature remains Shulamith Firestone,
The Dialectic of Sex (New York: Morrow, 1970).
7. Steven Levy, “GU NAACP President Discusses Diversity
Issues,” Hoya, October 19, 2010. “I feel [that] money and the lack of it,
as well as the lack of opportunity to participate in our consumerist, cap-
italist society and economy, proves difficult. For many minorities, they
find that they’re not located on the same playing field as the rest of
the nation.” http://www.thehoya.com/gu-naacp-president-discusses-
diversity-issues/#.
One study has shown that there is a significant disadvantage in elite
college admissions for students who have held leadership positions in
areas that do not conform to expectations of “capitalist society.” Russell
Nieli summarizes the study: “Participation in such Red State activities
as high school ROTC, 4-H clubs, or the Future Farmers of America
was found to reduce very substantially a student’s chances of gaining
admission to the competitive private colleges in the NSCE database on
an all-other-things-considered basis. The admissions disadvantage was
greatest for those in leadership positions in these activities or those win-
ning honors and awards. Being an officer or winning awards ‘for such
207
n o t e s t o pa g e s 1 2 3 – 2 4
career-oriented activities as junior ROTC, 4-H, or Future Farmers of

America,’ say Espenshade and Radford, ‘has a significantly negative as-
sociation with admission outcomes at highly selective institutions.’
Excelling in these activities ‘is associated with 60 or 65 percent lower
odds of admission.’ ” Russell Nieli, “How Diversity Punishes Asians,
Poor Whites, and Lots of Others,” Minding the Campus, July 12, 2010.
https://www.princeton.edu/~tje/files/Pub_Minding%20the%20
campus%20combined%20files.pdf.
8. Wilson Carey McWilliams, “Politics,” American Quarterly 35,
nos. 1–2 (1983): 27. A recent confirmation of this assessment can be found
in this statement by political scientist James Stimson: “When we observe
the behavior of those who live in distressed areas, we are observing not the
effect of decline on the working class, we are observing a highly selected
group of people who faced economic adversity and chose to stay at home
and accept it when others sought and found opportunity elsewhere. . . .
Those who are fearful, conservative, in the social sense, and lack ambition
stay and accept decline.” In other words, the disadvantaged status of the
white working class is the workers’ own fault. Cited by Thomas B. Edsall,
“The Closing of the Republican Mind,” New York Times, July 13, 2017.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/13/opinion/republicans-elites-trump
.html.
9. Matt Reed, a community college dean, acknowledged his opposi-
tion to the likes of Allan Bloom in the 1980s, but wonders where such
conservative defenders of the humanities have gone in the wake of aggres-
sive financial cutbacks in the humanities by conservative legislators: “I can
only imagine Allan Bloom’s response to the Florida bill. Any conservative
culture warrior worthy of the name should be apoplectic at the idea of
letting legislators dictate curriculum. At this point, conservatives have
given up on the idea of maintaining an intellectual tradition, and have set-
tled on cost reduction as a good in itself. They’ve decided that rather than
defending Edmund Burke, it’s easier just to run Intro to Business online
and call it a day.” “Remember the Canon Wars?” Inside Higher Ed, April
11, 2013, https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/confessions-community
-college-dean/remember-canon-wars. See also Jonathan Marks, “Con-
servatives and the Higher Ed ‘Bubble,’ ” Inside Higher Ed, November 15,
2012, https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2012/11/15/conservative-focus
-higher-ed-bubble-undermines-liberal-education-essay.
208
n o t e s t o pa g e s 1 2 7 – 5 6
10. The history of institutional name changes is instructive: https://

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_university_and_college_name_changes
_in_the_United_States.
11. Wendell Berry, “Faustian Economics: Hell Hath No Limits,”
Harper’s, May 2008, 37–38.
c h a pter 6 . th e new aristocracy

1. Murray, Coming Apart.
2. Locke, Second Treatise of Government, 23, 26.
3. F. A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty, ed. Ronald Hamowy
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 96.
4. Ibid., 95–96.
5. Tyler Cowen, Average Is Over: Powering America Past the Age of
the Great Stagnation (New York: Dutton, 2013), 258.
6. Ibid.
7. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, in Gray, On Liberty and Other Essays,
12–13.
8. Ibid., 65.
9. Ibid., 67.
10. Ibid., 68.
11. Ibid., 72.
12. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. J. G. A.
Pocock (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), 76.
13. Ibid., 29, 49.
14. Robert B. Reich, “Secession of the Successful,” New York Times,
January 20, 1991; Christopher Lasch, The Revolt of the Elite and the Be-
trayal of Democracy (New York: Norton, 1994).
15. Murray, Coming Apart; Robert A. Putnam, Our Kids: The Ameri-
can Dream in Crisis (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2015).
c h a p t e r 7. th e degradation of citizenship

1. Fareed Zakaria, “The Rise of Illiberal Democracy,” Foreign Af-
fairs, November–December, 1997, 22–43. Zakaria subsequently expand-
ed this essay in his book The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at
Home and Abroad (New York: Norton, 2007).
2. William Galston, “The Growing Threat of Illiberal Democra-
cy,” Wall Street Journal, January 3, 2017, http://www.wsj.com/articles/
the-growing-threat-of-illiberal-democracy-1483488245.
209
n o t e s t o pa g e s 1 5 7 – 7 0
3. Jason Brennan, Against Democracy (Princeton: Princeton Univer-

sity Press, 2016). In the wake of the 2016 election of Donald Trump,
Brennan wrote in a Washington Post article, “Most voters are systemati-
cally misinformed about the basic facts relevant to elections, and many
advocate policies they would reject if they were better informed. We get
low-quality government because voters have little idea what they are
doing”; “The Problem with Our Government Is Democracy.”
4. Bryan Caplan, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies
Choose Bad Policies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007); Jeffrey
Friedman, “Democratic Incompetence in Normative and Positive
Theory: Neglected Implications of ‘The Nature of Belief Systems in
Mass Publics,’ ” Critical Review 18, nos. 1–3 (2006): i–xliii; Damon Root,
Overruled: The Long War over Control of the U.S. Supreme Court (New
York: St. Martin’s, 2014).
5. Edward A. Purcell, The Crisis of Democratic Theory: Scientific Nat-
uralism and the Problem of Value (Lexington: University Press of Ken-
tucky, 1973), 98.
6. Walter J. Shepard, “Democracy in Transition,” American Political
Science Review 29 (1935): 9.
7. Ibid., 18.
8. John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (1927; Athens, Ohio:
Swallow, 1954), 183–84.
9. John Dewey, “My Pedagogic Creed,” in The Early Works of John
Dewey, 1882–1898, ed. Jo Ann Boydston, vol. 5 (Carbondale: Southern
Illinois University Press, 1967–72).
10. Quoted in Purcell, The Crisis of Democratic Theory, 95.
11. Quoted ibid., 103.
12. James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay, The Federal-
ist, ed. George W. Carey and James McClellan (Indianapolis: Liberty
Fund, 2001), no. 10, p. 46.
13. Ibid.; emphasis mine.
14. Ibid., no. 34, p. 163.
15. Ibid., no. 34, p. 164.
16. Ibid., no. 17, p. 80.
17. Ibid., no. 46, p. 243; ibid., no. 17, p. 81.
18. Ibid., no. 17, p. 81; emphasis mine.
19. Ibid., no. 46, p. 244.
210
n o t e s t o pa g e s 1 7 1 – 8 9
20. Ibid., no. 27, p. 133; emphasis mine.

21. “It is no accident that the growing organization of democracy
coincides with the rise of science, including the machinery of the tele-
graph and locomotive for distributing truth. There is but one fact—the
more complete movement of man to his unity with his fellows through
realizing the truth of life”; John Dewey, “Christianity and Democracy,”
in Boydston, Early Works, 4: 9.
23. Ibid.
24. Quoted ibid., 46.
25. Ibid., 515.
26. Ibid., 57.
27. Ibid., 243–44.
28. Jason Brennan writes, “[The] decline in political engagement is
a good start, but we still have a long way to go. We should hope for even
less participation, not more. Ideally, politics would occupy only a small
portion of the average person’s attention. Ideally, most people would fill
their days with painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry,
and porcelain, or perhaps football, NASCAR, tractor pulls, celebrity
gossip, and trips to Applebee’s. Most people, ideally, would not worry
about politics at all.” Brennan, Against Democracy, 3.
conclusion
1. Wendell Berry, “Feminism, the Body and the Machine,” in What
Are People For? (New York: North Point, 1990); Nancy Fraser, Fortunes
of Feminism: From State-Managed Capitalism to Neo-Liberal Crisis (New
York: Verso, 2013).
2. Cavanaugh, “ ‘Killing for the Telephone Company.’ ”
3. In addition to aggressive efforts to narrowly define religious free-
dom as “freedom of worship” under the Obama administration, con-
sider efforts to define the relationship of parents and children in liberal
political terms and thus to put them under the supervision of the state.
See, for instance, Samantha Goldwin, “Against Parental Rights,” Co-
lumbia Law Review 47, no. 1 (2015).
4. Tom Shachtman, Rumspringa: To Be or Not to Be Amish (New
York: North Point, 2007).
211
n o t e s t o pa g e s 1 9 1 – 9 6
5. Rod Dreher, The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a

Post-Christian Nation (New York: Sentinel, 2017).
6. Shannon Hayes, Radical Homemakers: Reclaiming Domesticity from
a Consumer Culture (Left to Right, 2010).
212
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219
Index
abortion, 39 Brexit, viii, 10, 156

abstraction, 16–17 brood parasitism, 89
academic freedom, 124 bureaucracy, 8
administrative state, 158, 180 Burke, Edmund, 53, 81, 143, 144,
Against Democracy (Brennan), 157 147–48
alienation, 9–10 Bush, George W., 204n15
Alone Together (Turkle), 94–95
Amish, 105–7, 189–90, 191 Calvin, John, 112
anticulture, 64–90 Caplan, Bryan, 157, 158
apocalypticism, 92 Carr, Nicholas, 94
Aquinas, Thomas, 35, 36, 112 Catlin, George E. G., 160
Arendt, Hannah, 59 centralization, 26, 30, 61–63, 101, 108,
aristocracy, 27, 134–41 164–72, 195
Aristotle, 35, 36, 68, 79, 99, 112, 156 Christianity, 55, 110; afterlife stressed
Augustine, Saint, bishop of Hippo, in, 26; liberal education and,
112 112–13, 128–29; liberalism
automobiles, 104–5 contrasted with, 27; liberalism
Average Is Over (Cowen), 140–41 grounded in, 19, 23, 184–85; liberty
and, 129, 174–75; marriage in, 33;
Bacon, Francis: Dewey’s admiration virtue stressed in, 22, 24, 25, 99,
for, 72, 173; mastery of nature 116
sought by, 14, 26, 36, 47, 71, 117, 131 Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 112
Bellamy, Francis, 47 citizenship, 154–78
Benedict Option, The (Dreher), 191 civil service reform, 159–60
Berry, Wendell, 14, 78–82, 95–96, Civil War, American, 52–53
129, 132, 187 climate change, 14–15, 92, 140, 161
Bloom, Allan, 208n9 Coming Apart (Murray), 134
Boorstin, Daniel J., 98, 108 communism, 5, 59, 60, 181; collapse
Brennan, Jason, 157, 158, 211n28 of, 6
221
I nd e x
computers, 15 education, 110–30
consent, 188–90 elections, 1, 3, 168, 176; diminished
conservatives: Constitution invoked faith in, 2; Locke’s proposals for,
by, 18, 169; environmental 146–47; presidential, 8; proposals
standards attacked by, 53; liberal to restrict, 158–59; turnout in,
goals advanced by, 19, 35–37, 46, 195
83, 120; markets revered by, 45, 53, Ellul, Jacques, 95
58, 63; mastery of nature sought “End of History, The” (Fukuyama),
by, 36–37, 72; sexual revolution vs., 28, 97
171; statism decried by, 45, 58; environmentalism, 14, 53, 109, 111
traditional curriculum and, 120, epistocracy, 157
124–25 Escape from Freedom (Fromm), 59
Considerations on Repressive Ethics (Aristotle), 35
Government (Mill), 50 European Union, 156
Constitution, U.S., 18, 101, 162, 167, executive branch, 8, 144–45
169, 170
constitutionalism, 23, 31 Facebook, 103–4
consumerism, 65, 194 factions, 102, 163, 165
Copts, 122 fascism, 5, 60, 181
courts, 1 federalism, 23, 169
Cowen, Tyler, 140–41 Federalist, 101, 142, 162, 163, 167, 169,
Crawford, Matthew, 88–89 171
Crisis of Democratic Theory, The Federal Reserve, 166
(Purcell), 158 financial crisis, 85–88, 109, 126–27,
“critical thinking,” 115, 130 132
Croly, Herbert, 54–56 Firestone, Shulamith, 207n6
Fish, Charles, 203n3
Dante Alighieri, 112 Frankenstein (Shelley), 92
“deep state,” 181 Fraser, Nancy, 187
Democracy in America (Tocqueville), freedom of association, 7
61–62, 174, 181 free speech, 3, 7, 124
democratic competence, 159, 161–62 French Revolution, 43
depersonalization, 16–17 Friedman, Jeffrey, 157, 158
Descartes, René, 25–26, 81 Friedman, Thomas, 10
Dewey, A. Gordon, 160 Fromm, Erich, 59
Dewey, John: custom and tradition “From Porch to Patio” (Thomas),
devalued by, 71–72; democracy 105
viewed by, 159, 173; human Fukuyama, Francis, 21, 28, 97–98
perfectibility viewed by, 36, 54, 55;
as individualist, 47, 54, 56; as Galston, William, 156
statist, 45, 47, 55 Gardner, Stephen, 84
Dismal Science, The (Marglin), 107 Germany, 181
diversity, 18, 89, 111, 122, 124, 132 globalization, 12–13, 28, 30, 65, 132;
“diversity of faculties,” 142, 166, 168, alienation heightened by, 3, 10,
171 178; conservative support for, 63;
“Do Machines Make History?” criticism of, 53; inexorability of, 10,
(Heilbroner), 98 14, 98
Douthat, Ross, 202n17 Goldwater, Barry, 172
Dreher, Rod, 191 “Great Books,” 120, 125
222
I nd e x
Great Transformation, The (Polanyi), Jouvenel, Bertrand de, 48
51–52 judicial system, 1
Greece, ancient, 22, 99
Kennedy, John F., 138
Hamilton, Alexander, 9, 55, 167, Kerr, Clark, 117
168–71 Kerry, John, 205n17
Havel, Václav, xv Kurds, 122
Hayek, Friedrich, 139
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, Lamar, Mirabeau, 114
98 Lamont, Thomas, 86
Heidegger, Martin, 120 Lasch, Christopher, 149, 205n16
Heilbroner, Robert, 98 Lasswell, Harold D., 160
Hmong, 122 legislative branch, 8, 144–45
Hobbes, Thomas, 36, 38–39, 48, 58, Leviathan (Hobbes), 32, 38–39, 57–58
78, 112; criticism of, 81; custom and Levin, Yuval, 144
tradition devalued by, 25–26, 85; liberal education, 12–13, 110–11, 113,
monarchy defended by, 31–32; 117, 128, 130, 133
pursuit of power viewed by, 40; libertarians, 144
state of nature viewed by, 31, 57, Lippmann, Walter, 159
67, 108, 134; timelessness and, 73 Locke, John, 47; economic progress
homogeneity, 66, 69, 86; inevitability viewed by, 139, 140, 151; Founders
of, 10; liberalism linked to, 3, influenced by, 45, 78; freedom
17–18, 30, 80–81, 89–90, 111, 124 through law viewed by, 48–50;
household economics, 193, 197 ideal rulers viewed by, 136–38, 151;
social contract viewed by, 32–33,
identity politics, 111, 122, 132 48, 57, 82, 108, 112
indebtedness, 133, 186, 194 Luther, Martin, 112
individualism: liberalism
underpinned by, 31; statism linked Machiavelli, Niccolò, 24–25, 100,
to, 17, 43–63 167
Individualism Old and New (Dewey), Madison, James, 101–2, 141–42,
54 162–66, 167, 169–70, 173
inequality, 2, 10, 12, 27, 56, 135, 141, Magnalia Christi Americana (Mather),
185; as aberration, 152, 180; in 174
ancient Greece, 22; conservatism Marche, Stephen, 103–4
linked to, 63; Hayek’s view of, 139; Marglin, Stephen, 107
liberalism linked to, 3, 21, 63, 197; marriage, 33, 39, 68, 134
liberty consistent with, 9; Locke’s Marx, Karl, 9, 36, 53, 141
view of, 137–38, 140; progressivism Mather, Cotton, 174
vs., 142–43; racial, 196; sexual, 187, Matrix, The (film), 109
196 Mayo, Elton, 160
initiative petition, 159 McWilliams, Wilson Carey, xv,
insurance, 106–8 122–23
“Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?” Mendelson, Nina, 204n15
(Marche), 103–4 Merriam, Charles E., 160
Mill, John Stuart, 36, 45, 50, 144–47,
Jay, John, 167 148, 151
Jefferson, Thomas, 54–55, 78, 137 “Model of Christian Charity, A”
Josselson, Ruthellen, 207n4 (Winthrop), 206n10
223
I nd e x
modernity, 23, 24, 51, 74, 107 Quest for Community, The (Nisbet),
monarchy, 27 59–61
multiculturalism, 18, 89, 111, 122, 124,
132 rationality, 26, 136–37
Mumford, Lewis, 95 Rauschenbusch, Walter, 55–56
Murray, Charles, 134, 149–50, 152 Rawls, John, 135
Reagan, Ronald, 138
National Uniformity for Food Act recall elections, 159
(2005), 204n15 Reconstruction in Philosophy (Dewey), 72
natural law, 35, 36, 83 Reed, Matt, 208n9
Nazism, 59 referenda, 159
Nieli, Russell, 207n7 Reflections on the Revolution in France
Nisbet, Robert, 59–61 (Burke), 147–48
No Child Left Behind Act (2001), Reich, Robert, 149
204n15 religion: as alternative to liberalism,
Northwest Ordinance (1787), 114 189, 191; criticism of, 126; freedom
of, 3, 7; Mill’s view of, 144
Oakeshott, Michael, 205n18 Remaking Eden (Silver), 97
Obama, Barack, 56, 125 representation, 163
Ohio University, 113–14 Republic (Plato), 5, 68, 152–53, 182
On Liberty (Mill), 144–47 republicanism, 101, 102, 103, 105, 162,
Origins of Totalitarianism, The 164–67, 187
(Arendt), 59 Republic of Technology, The (Boorstin),
98, 108
paideia, 22 restraint, 115
Paine, Thomas, 144 Rome, ancient, 22
placelessness, 70, 77–78, 130, 132 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 172
Plato, 5, 68, 112, 152–53, 156, 182 Root, Damon, 157
Player Piano (Vonnegut), 140 Rorty, Richard, 36, 47, 168
pluralism, 165 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 36, 67–68
Polanyi, Karl, 51–52 Rubio, Marco, 125
political philosophy, 99 rule of law, 1, 34, 82
Politics (Aristotle), 68 Russia, 171
popular culture, 89
Postman, Neil, 96 science and technology, 13–16,
postmodernism, 120, 122 91–109, 173
poststructuralism, 120 Second Treatise of Government
poverty, 21 (Locke), 32–33, 136–38
“Power of the Powerless, The” self-interest, 29
(Havel), xv separation of church and state, 23
presentism, 70, 73, 74, 76, 130, 161 separation of powers, 23
professionalization, 159–60 sexuality, 79, 147, 171, 188, 191;
Progressivism, 18–19, 142–43, 159–60, Aristotle’s view of, 68;
166; Founders’ liberalism likened commodification of, 58, 69;
to, 172–73 liberalism and, 63, 121, 142; in
property rights, 3, 136, 163, 165, 171 schools, 39, 83–85, 122
Purcell, Edward A., 158 Shallows, The (Carr), 94
Puritans, 174, 175 Shelley, Mary, 92
Putnam, Robert, 149–50, 152 Shepard, Walter J., 158–59
224
I nd e x
Silver, Lee, 97 totalitarianism, 59
slavery, 22, 50, 52–53, 185 transhumanism, 36
Smith, Adam, 47 Trump, Donald J., xiii, 10, 156
Snow, C. P., 207n3 Tuchman, Barbara, vi
social contract, 1, 32–33, 48–49, Turkle, Sherry, 94–95
72–73, 112 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 54
social media, 94–95, 103–4
Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr, 82–83 universities, 82–85, 110–30
state of nature, 16, 31, 57, 67, 100, University of Texas, 114, 118
108, 134, 188 Uses of the University, The (Kerr),
STEM (science, technology, 117
engineering, and mathematics), utilitarianism, 37, 52, 167, 189
111, 116, 121, 124–25
Stoicism, 26 Vargas Llosa, Mario, 64
subsistence economy, 136 veil of ignorance, 135
suburbia, 104–5 Vico, Giambattista, 81
Summa Theologiae (Aquinas), 35 virtue, 22, 24–25; self-interest
surveillance, 7, 29, 39, 63 substituting for, 29; as set of limits,
128
Technological Society, The (Ellul), 95 voluntarism, 31–34
technology, 13–16, 91–109, 173 Vonnegut, Kurt, 140
Technopoly (Postman), 96
Thomas, Richard, 105 Walker, Scott, 125
Tocqueville, Alexis de, 20, 40, 197; Weimar Republic, 181
American civic engagement Whiggism, 27
viewed by, 173–74, 195–96; Wilson, Woodrow, 160
individualism and statism linked Winthrop, John, 206n10
by, 61–62, 181; presentism viewed women’s movement, 187
by, 74–77; types of liberty
distinguished by, 174–77 Zakaria, Fareed, 156
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W H Y L I B E R A L I S M FA I L E D

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Foreword by James Davison Hunter and

New Haven and London

Copyright © 2018 by Patrick J. Deneen.

Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for educa-

Set in Janson type by IDS Infotech, Ltd.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017937443

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-­1992 (Per-

Foreword James Davison Hunter and John M. Owen IV ix

Introduction: The End of Liberalism 1

two. Uniting Individualism and Statism 43

th ree. Liberalism as Anticulture 64

fo ur. Technology and the Loss of Liberty 91

fi ve. Liberalism against Liberal Arts 110

si x. The New Aristocracy 131

se ven . The Degradation of Citizenship 154

Conclusion: Liberty after Liberalism 179

The Yale University Press series Politics and Culture begins

disil­lusionment with progress in effecting equal justice for all;

Scholars have launched radical critiques of liberalism be-

authoritarian illiberalism that would promise citizens power

While I end this volume by calling on political philoso-

This short book was written in a brief span—after several dec-

of parts of these chapters. I especially thank Steve Wrinn for

were some of the hallmarks of this ascendant order and, by all

liberal state expands to control nearly every aspect of life

achieve. Rather than seeing the accumulating catastrophe as

This may be a moment for more than mere institutional tink-

which we have swum, unaware of its existence. Liberalism is

Citizens of advanced liberal democracies are in near revolt

nominally under their control. Our government readily com-

ble words of Alexander Hamilton, concerned with “com-

Civic unhappiness is mirrored in economic discontent. Citi-

maintains and extends this alienation but adds a profound

Whether people want the world “reaching into” individuals,

simultaneously is both liberalism’s handmaiden and its en-

The rising generation is indoctrinated to embrace an econom-

pit of failure. To simply work hard and get decent grades

Advanced liberalism is eliminating liberal education with

science and technology

Today’s students are especially encouraged to study a discipline

for liberating humanity from various forms of bondage were

issue such as climate change, ignoring that our crisis is the

making us ever more into the creatures that liberalism sup-

Liberalism’s success today is most visible in the gathering

tion and abstraction advanced via two main entities—the state

claims of “multiculturalism” or, today, “diversity.” Having

The most challenging step we must take is a rejection of the

gressivism rightly decries conservatism’s nostalgia for a time

practices more than theories, the building of resilient new

conceived and developed over long centuries preceding the

corresponding social and political arrangements that sought to

proposed remediating the presence of custom and tradition

tionary reconception of politics, society, science, and nature

opportunity and social interaction that today culminate in

correction and its belief in progress and continual improve-

but which it cannot replenish. The loosening of social bonds

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Per-

disillusionment with progress in effecting equal justice for all;

If I am right that the liberal project is ultimately self-

limits. We can either elect a future of self-limitation born of the

based upon the accumulated calculations of self-maximizing

from time. It depicts a history-less and timeless condition, a