The Economist Asia - 27.01.2018

70 The EconomistJanuary27th 2018

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1

O

VER the past four centuries liberalism

has been so successful that it has dri-

ven all its opponents off the battlefield.

Now it is disintegrating, destroyed by a mix

of hubris and internal contradictions, ac-

cording to Patrick Deneen, a professor of

politics at the University of Notre Dame.

The gathering wreckage of liberalism’s

twilight years can be seen all around, espe-

cially in America, Mr Deneen’s main focus.

The founding tenets of the faith have been

shattered. Equality of opportunity has pro-

duced a new meritocratic aristocracy that

has all the aloofness of the old aristocracy

with none of its sense ofnoblesse oblige.

Democracy has degenerated into a theatre

of the absurd. And technological advances

are reducing ever more areas of work into

meaningless drudgery. “The gap between

liberalism’s claims about itself and the

lived reality of the citizenry” is now so

wide that “the lie can no longer be accept-

ed,” Mr Deneen writes. What better proof

of this than the vision of 1,000 private

planes whisking their occupants to Davos

to discuss the question of“creating a

shared future in a fragmented world”?

Mr Deneen uses the term “liberalism”

in its philosophical rather than its popular

sense. He is describing the great tradition

of political theory that is commonly traced

to Thomas Hobbes and John Locke rather

than the set of vaguely leftish attitudes that

Americans now associate with the word.

But this is no work of philosophical cud-

than” (detail pictured), with its sketch of

thousands of atomised individuals con-

fronted by an all-powerful sovereign.

Mr Deneen makes his case well, though

he sometimes mistakes repetition for per-

suasion. He reminds the reader that, before

the advent of modern liberalism, philoso-

phers identified liberty with self-mastery

rather than self-expression, with the con-

quest of hedonistic desires rather than

their indulgence. He does an impressive

job of capturing the current mood of disil-

lusionment, echoing left-wing complaints

about rampant commercialism, right-wing

complaints about narcissistic and bullying

students, and general worries about ato-

misation and selfishness. But when he

concludes thatall thisadds up to a failure

of liberalism, is his argument convincing?

His book has two fatal flaws. The first

lies in his definition of liberalism. J.H. Hex-

ter, an American academic, believed his

fellow historians could be divided into

two camps: “splitters” (who were forever

making distinctions) and “lumpers” (who

make sweeping generalisations by lump-

ing things together). Mr Deneen is an ex-

treme lumper. He argues that the essence

of liberalism lies in freeing individuals

from constraints.

In fact, liberalism contains a wide range

ofintellectual traditions which provide dif-

ferent answers to the question of how to

trade off the relative claims of rights and re-

sponsibilities, individual expression and

social ties. Even classical liberals who were

most insistent on removing constraints on

individual freedom agonised about atomi-

sation. The mid-Victorians were great insti-

tution-builders, creating everything from

voluntary organisations to joint-stock

companies (“little republics” in the phrase

of Robert Lowe, a 19th-century British

statesman) that were designed to fill the

space between the state and society. Later

chewing. Most political theorists argue

that liberalism has divided into two inde-

pendent streams: classical liberalism,

which celebrates the free market, and left-

liberalism which celebrates civil rights. For

Mr Deneen they have an underlying unity.

Most political observersthink thatthe de-

bate about the state of liberalism has noth-

ing to do with them. Mr Deneen argues

that liberalism is a ruling philosophy, dic-

tating everything from court decisions to

corporate behaviour. Theory is practice.

The underlying unity lies in individual

self-expression. Both classical and left lib-

erals conceive of humans as rights-bearing

individuals who should be given as much

space as possible to fulfil their dreams. The

aim of government is to secure rights. The

legitimacy of the system is based on a

shared belief in a “social contract” be-

tween consenting adults. But this produces

a paradox. Because the liberal spirit me-

chanically destroysinherited customs and

local traditions, sometimes in the name of

market efficiency and sometimes in the

name of individual rights, itcreates more

room for the expansion of the state, as mar-

ketmaker and law-enforcer. The perfect ex-

pression of modern liberalism is provided

by the frontispiece of Hobbes’s “Levia-

Political thought

The problem with liberalism

How to revive the most successful idea of the past 400 years

Books and arts

Also in this section

71 How democracies die

72 Swearing is good for you

73 A memoir of the second world war

73 John Ashbery, American poet

Why Liberalism Failed. By Patrick

Deneen. Yale University Press; 248 pages;

$30 and £30

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