Why Liberalism Failed

Culture is the shared heritage of thought, customs, activities, and creative endeavors that unite a particular community or society in a common life. Cultures tend to vary from place to place and throughout time. Deneen approves of the ancient idea of culture, which asserted that culture is a natural reflection of human nature and a valid means of fulfilling human needs and desires. Deneen argues that modern liberalism has broken away from this traditional understanding of culture by creating a homogenized monoculture based on atomized individuality above localized communities. He claims that liberalism is an “anticulture.”

The term “liberal arts” usually denotes a traditional humanistic education in fields such as philosophy, languages, philosophy, and art. Deneen argues that a traditional liberal arts education was predicated on the idea that humans needed to learn how to be virtuous and disciplined in order to be truly free. He criticizes liberalism for undermining the liberal arts in favor of what he calls the “servile arts” (See: Servile Arts entry below).

The defining term of the book, liberalism is the political ideology that centers individual rights and freedoms granted without reference to any personal links to family, friends, community, or larger society. Liberalism also claims that each individual is free to pursue what they decide is good for them with limited restraint or restriction and that this pursuit of personally defined happiness and success is the highest goal of human life. Deneen believes that modern liberalism’s focus on individuality and self-realization has supplanted the older, more communal notion of what it means to be free.

Liberty is a synonym for freedom and in modern parlance primarily refers to the condition of being without constraint. Throughout history, the meaning of liberty and what it means to be free has changed and fluctuated based on what an individual society considers important or necessary to human life and flourishing. Deneen argues that the traditional idea of liberty was centered upon an individual’s obligations and not just their rights, with humans requiring a special education or moral training in order to be truly free. Deneen asserts that, by contrast, liberalism’s ideal of liberty is a rupture from the older traditional understanding of the term.

Deneen uses the term “servile arts” to refer to “an education that makes liberal individuals servants to the end of untutored appetite, restlessness, and technical mastery of the natural world” (110-11). The servile arts are predicated on the idea that education is meant to be a means to better economic prospects and self-enrichment, in contrast to the more human-centric qualities Deneen attributes to a traditional education in the liberal arts (See: Liberal Arts entry above).