In recent years, an old critique of liberalism has, once again, settled on the intellectual horizon, this time under the new label of ‘postliberalism.’ Its pioneer is Patrick Deneen, whose 2018 book, Why Liberalism Failed, argues that liberalism is in decline because it has become too successful. After a critical glimpse at the development of American liberal society, he asserts that ‘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 deformations of its claims yet realisations of liberal ideology.’ In the pursuit of equality, liberalism generates unprecedented amounts of social inequity; in the pursuit of freedom from the state, liberalism generates an omnipotent, managerial Leviathan; in the pursuit of human dignity, it generates atomised, lonely, depressed individuals. For Deneen, liberalism is the modern evil that will, sooner or later, destroy itself.
Such a theme sounds alarmingly familiar. Already in the eighteenth century, the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume wrote much of his political essays from the underlying concern that a liberal society may consume itself. But Deneen’s critique of liberalism also reflects a broader critical discourse surrounding bourgeois modernity. Two hundred years earlier, it was of course Marx and Engels who theorised that capitalism will, eventually, bring about its own end through a dynamic of class polarisation. After the Holocaust, Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer hoped to show that the Enlightenment contained the seed of its self-destruction and, ultimately, the metaphysics of totalitarianism. In each case, bourgeois modernity is said to devour itself over time.
However, what is problematic with this critical discourse is that Deneen and his predecessors all conceive of the universe of modernity as the product of a single ‘Big Bang’ event. For Marx, the material relations of capitalism carry the day: everything else is a mere superstructure. Similarly, for Adorno and Horkheimer, it was the Enlightenment that forms the sinful essence of modernity and the totalitarian ‘disenchantment’ of the world. In the case of Deneen, the critique of social inequality, globalisation, unconstrained technological advancement, and environmental damage all centre around a critique of liberalism. Indeed, in Deneen’s symbolic narrative, in which a Rousseauan, idyllic harmony is taken over by the rise of liberalism, liberalism seems to be dangerously conflated with things more to do with modernity than liberalism per se: the state, globalisation, technological advancement, and beyond.
Whether for rhetorical gain, or out of a carelessness with regard to the intrinsic complexity of history, or maybe both, such representation seriously distorts our understanding of liberalism. Modernity is a historical dynamic with many constitutive parts, none of which should be viewed as king or be interpreted without reference to the others. It unfolded through multiple processes of change—including a deepening of the commercial and monetary economy, the disruption of local relationships, the rise of central administration, and the unravelling of Christian metaphysics in philosophy—and it is within this framework of change that liberalism first emerged. While this observation does not mean that liberalism has not informed the substance of modernity, it does mean that our current problems and crises cannot be defeated by the simplistic move of a radical turn away from liberalism and its social arrangements.
Still, ‘postliberalism’ seeks to navigate society on the path away from liberalism and return to a world where Christian ideals enjoyed primacy. Ironically, however, it is precisely by suggesting that our current liberal mode of social organisation can be abandoned that Deneen and his creed reveal the way in which it can be defended. While the iron wheel of time cannot be rolled back to those archaic days before modernity, when meaning and community allegedly thrived, contemporary liberalism can certainly be replaced with an alternative that is better suited to the dynamic social configurations of modernity. In this respect, what liberals can do is ask themselves how they can steer the march of time in a way that protects everyone against the forces of modernity that are hostile to their freedoms, dignity, and identities; how can individuals and groups both live with modernity and not be swept away by it?
In contrast with the postliberal mind and its Romantic obsession with self-deceptive ideas about the ‘recovery’ of past ages, liberalism must ask itself such complicated questions. Accordingly, liberalism is hard, if done properly. It requires empathy, solidarity, thought, and action, independent from the great power structures of the modern world. To be sure, liberalism has been done rather poorly for some time. It has pretended that all that mattered was one’s freedom to do as one likes and forgotten that it must also endeavour to retain meaning and happiness in people’s lives. Under the postliberal manipulation of time, which makes liberalism appear responsible for the tragedy of modernity, one may easily direct all their disappointments against this one great enemy, liberalism, and turn against it. To survive, liberalism must recognise that it is as much an adaptable response to modernity as it is a part of it.
This article was originally published in OPR’s Issue 11: Time.
Ábris Béndek is a student in political philosophy at Sciences Po Paris and a visiting student at the University of Cambridge.