Why Liberalism Failed QUOTES

21 " The sole object and justification of this indifference to human ends—of the emphasis 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 "

― Patrick J. Deneen , Why Liberalism Failed

23 " Both sides regard generational inequality as an aberration, rather than recognizing it as a key achievement of the liberal order. "

― Patrick J. Deneen , Why Liberalism Failed

25 " Liberalism’s appeal lies in its continuities with the deepest commitments of the Western political tradition, particularly efforts to secure liberty and human dignity through the constraint of tyranny, arbitrary rule, and oppression. In this regard, liberalism "

― Patrick J. Deneen , Why Liberalism Failed

27 " Advanced liberalism is eliminating liberal education with keen intent and ferocity, finding it impractical both ideologically and economically. Students are taught by most of their humanities and social science professors that the only remaining 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. "

― Patrick J. Deneen , Why Liberalism Failed

29 " These maladies include the corrosive social and civic effects of self-interest—a disease that arises from the cure of overcoming the ancient reliance upon virtue. "

― Patrick J. Deneen , Why Liberalism Failed

31 " By ancient and Christian understandings, liberty was the condition of self-governance, whether achieved by the individual or by a political community. Because self-rule was achieved only with difficulty—requiring an extensive habituation in virtue, particularly self-command and self-discipline over base but insistent appetites—the achievement of liberty required constraints upon individual choice. "

― Patrick J. Deneen , Why Liberalism Failed

33 " selfishly, so liberalism teaches a people to hedge commitments 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 religion. Liberalism encourages loose connections. "

― Patrick J. Deneen , Why Liberalism Failed

35 " Sacrifício e paciência não são as marcas distintivas da era do individualismo estatista. "

― Patrick J. Deneen , Why Liberalism Failed

37 " 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 Princeton 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 partake of the offerings of modern liberal society. The period of separation lasts usually about a year, at the end of which the young person must choose between the two worlds. An overwhelming 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 free individuals. One said, ‘We will have to consider ways of freeing them.’ Perfect liberal consent requires perfectly liberated 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 particular 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, however unreflective, is ‘tacit consent,’ yet membership in a traditional community is ‘oppression’ or ‘false consciousness. "

― Patrick J. Deneen , Why Liberalism Failed

39 " 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 achievement of the autonomous individual. "

― Patrick J. Deneen , Why Liberalism Failed