Patrick Deneen is a Leftist. He invents a reductio ad absurdum that all “liberalism”, from Locke to Marx, are based on a near eschcatalogial obsession of atomized autonomous individuals freed from “family, tradition, religion, local community and even the limits of nature” to reach some religious apotheosis. This false dilemma fallacy ignores that Deneen’s critique is the same critique the collectivist Leftists use against classical liberalism more broadly, and conservatism in the American and Burkean vein more specifically. It isn’t that Locke and Marx are alike, but that they are different that explains why the later fails then, just as Deneen’s ideology fails nascently, as Kim R. Holmes observes (which is quoted in full due to the limitations of Twitter’s/X’s embeds).
I have a shorter and more correct answer. “Liberalism” failed because it deviated from classical liberalism (limited government and all that) and drifted into progressive socialist and Identitarian territory, derived not from Locke but from Marx, Gramsci and Marcuse. A reason why many post-liberals like Deneen don’t acknowledge that is because their social and economic worldview is functionally closer to those guys than to Locke, Jefferson and Madison.
Is should be noted that it was less of a deviation than a corruption. The “classical liberalism” was, particularly in the Anglospheric vein, a distillation of how society has already developed and the tradition that the good people shared in common. It was not a rejection of such community values, but an exemplar of those values themselves! Rather than an embrace of hyper-individualism, idjits such as Rousseau and Marx simply sought a different collective for individuals created from the individuals that would be greater than a sum of those individuals (e.g. “Volonté Générale”). Indeed, the two lines of thought are quite at odds:
As expected, I hit a nerve with this point.
It would behoove some of the responders to study intellectual history. The break and divide between the moderate (Locke, Scottish and English Enlightenments to the American founders on the one hand, and the radical (Rousseau, French Revolution, Kant, Hegel and Marx) Enlightenment traditions on the other, would make it easier to understand. Socialism and Marxism grew out of the latter and ended up hating the “bourgeois” classic liberals of the moderate Enlightenment. Yes, it became a kind of intellectual historical civil war inside the liberal tradition, but frankly the radicals largely won that war (in defining the left) once Marx and his associates and heirs hit the scene.
There were tremendous amounts of crossovers, and the lines are not straight (they never are in intellectual history), but this explains why Dewey and even Wilson are more aligned with the New Left of the 1960s and its Marcuse versions that with what Madison and Jefferson believed. (PS. Look for similarities and not just differences)
It was not some “external” takeover. The American left was and is wholly in line with what was happening in Europe. The postmodern left takeover of the universities in the 1960s and 1970s was nearly complete in certain departments. It happened so easily because the break in liberalism had already occurred.
Honestly, does anyone forget that socialists routinely call classic liberals fascists? They do that because they consider them to be an intellectual enemy of the highest order and in some quarters the greatest enemy of all.
Marx hated “bourgeois” liberals as the hand maidens of capitalism. So did the New Left of the 1960s. Some Post-liberal conservatives do so as well, and as such are fusing offshoots of the radical Enlightenment with strains of European cultural conservatism.
There are examples of this, observable to anyone capable of reading history. Edmund Burke provides several contrasts to demonstrate that. Burke was not a Tory, but a Whig and specifically an “Old Whig” who disagreed not only with the more mild “New Whigs” like Charles James Fox, but vociferously against the radical madness of the French Revolution, while holding true the same values as (most) the Founding Fathers of the American Revolution. And yes, “most”, would be appropriate here since some traded the very values and traditions that served as the soil from which classical liberalism grew for the madness of the French Revolution. Yuval Levin aptly describes this in his book “Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, & the Birth of Right and Left”.
The sum result is that the rejection of the Founders and Burke’s “Old Whigs” requires an embrace of people like Rousseau and Marx, as well as their pseudo-intellectual descendents, rather than a rejection of them.
This fusion of radical left and right worldviews against classic liberalism started in the 19th century in Europe. The radical leftists and old European conservatives both rebelled against Western style English and American liberalism.
Its intellectual denizens came from left and right and sometimes fused these two elements together in their war on classic liberalism.
They include Comte, Proudhon, Marx, Engels, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Moeller van den Bruck, Carl Schmitt, Ernst Junger, Vilfredo Pareto, Giovanni Gentile, Georges Sorel, Maurice Barrès, Charles Maurras, and Heidegger, among others.
It’s no accident that Sartre and other Marxists were inspired by Heidegger. In one way or another, he and the others all go back to Rousseau, Kant, and Hegel, (not Locke), although it would not be accurate or fair to ascribe to those forerunners the various perversions to which their ideas were later put.
It was this intellectual ferment that gave us fascism, Nazism, and communism in the 20th century, all united by their disdain for classic liberalism.
And those ideologies, when put into practice, failed, as will Denee’s Postliberalism if it ever truly were.
