Make the Holy Roman Empire Great Again

The first thing to note about the book’s title is that the Liberalism that Failed is not that found in the Democratic Party. This is not a Republican tirade against Democrats. The Liberalism here is the old use of the term, the liberalism of John Locke and the Founding Fathers. It isn’t the Democrats that have failed. It’s also the Republicans and, indeed, the entire American Experiment.

What has caused this failure? The very successes of liberalism—from our political system to the massive technological advances—have led to a collapse of society. Look around. Whatever social ills exist do so because liberalism has succeeded all too well. Truly, pick your poison and Deneen is here to show you that the problem you just described arose because of the triumph of liberalism and that your idea that more liberalism will solve the problem is foolish at best.

As a result, the book is incredibly repetitive. I read it with a reading group and every single student thought the book would have been vastly better as a journal article.

Tedium aside, does the argument hold? Somewhat.

Deneen notes, quite correctly, that there is a sharp break in the conception of the idea of “liberty” during the Enlightenment. It is one of those breaks where it sure would be nice if we just had two different English words to describe the two different meanings, but, alas, we do not.

Calling them the ancient view of liberty and the modern view of liberty is clunky, but accurate. The ancient view of liberty was that we were liberated from our degraded lives, living like animals, when we found ourselves free to live lives of a higher order. The modern view of liberty is that I am free when we remove any external constrains on allowing me to do what I want to do.

Deneen explains the problem of the rise of the modern view of liberty:

[The] classical and Christian emphasis upon virtue and the cultivation of self-limitation and self-rule relied upon reinforcing norms and social structures arrayed extensively throughout political, social, religious, economic, and familial life. What were viewed as the essential supports for a training in virtue—and hence, preconditions for liberty from tyranny—came to be viewed as sources of oppression, arbitrariness, and limitation.

Therein lies the fundamental problem. Deneen dresses it up a bit, but stripped to its essence, Deneen is noting that the modern view on liberty has completely destroyed all the norms and social structures that used to make it possible to live as free people in the ancient sense of liberty.

It is an interesting argument. Is it true?

Deneen gets into horrible trouble in this book when he tries to explain his vision of the better society. If Liberalism is so bad, is he arguing that we should just go back to those good old days before the Enlightenment? Well, he doesn’t want to say that, and in a rather “Stamp your foot when you say that” conclusion insists that he is not saying we should go back. We have to go forward.

But, why can’t we go back? Well, Deneen knows you aren’t going to like going back. Why not? Because back means we get rid of all the evil things liberalism has brought. Things like, you know, the internet, which has destroyed your need for a local community. And penicillin, which is a perfect example of humans trying to assert control over nature. Deneen doesn’t want to get rid of the internet and penicillin. So, we aren’t going back. Just forward.

How does that work? In a very telling remark, Deneen explains one of the problems with the Liberal vision, nicely echoing Edmund Burke.

Liberalism’s founders tended to take for granted the persistence of social norms, even as they sought to liberate individuals from the constitutive associations and education in self-limitation that sustained these norms. In its earliest moments, the health and continuity of families, schools, and communities were assumed, while their foundations were being philosophically undermined.

Now replace “Liberalism’s founders” with “Patrick Deneen.” And replace the list of things that pre-liberalism had created with the things liberalism has created. How exactly is Deneen any different than the early Liberals?  Deneen wants to assume that in the Brave New World he imagines, we get to keep all the benefits of liberalism and just get rid of the things he doesn’t like.

Which leads one to wonder: what are the things in our Liberal World Order that Deneen wants to keep and what are the things he wants to abandon? What will be the shape of this new society? Do we get to keep the internet? Do Marvel movies still get made? Does Deneen still get to teach at Notre Dame?

He is surprisingly silent on how all this is supposed to work. And that points directly to the fact that Deneen is being rather disingenuous in this book. We can see this in the strange case of Martin Luther.

As Deneen frequently notes, the original sin of liberalism is the idea that we are primarily individuals, not members of a community.

Liberalism is most fundamentally constituted by a pair of deeper anthropological assumptions that give liberal institutions a particular orientation and cast: 1) anthropological individualism and the voluntarist conception of choice, and 2) human separation from and opposition to nature.

Now where in the history of the West is the first articulation of this idea of anthropological individualism, this idea that the individual is the fundamental deciding unit? Martin Luther, of course. In a series of tracts, Luther stands against Europe and declares that we are all priests before God, that we do not need a priestly caste to intercede with us before God, that the Bible should be translated into the language which the people can read, and that every individual with the help of the Holy Spirit can interpret that Scripture. Luther is obviously the ultimate villain in Deneen’s argument. What gave Luther the right to assert this vision of autonomous individuals before God?

So, it is not a surprise that in the paragraph immediately following the passage just quoted, Deneen notes the originator of individualism is…Thomas Hobbes. OK, that was a surprise. A few paragraphs down we find John Locke. What happened to Luther? Deneen pulls a fascinating sleight of hand. In the paragraph immediately following the one above, he writes:

The first revolution, and the most basic and distinctive aspect of liberalism, is to base politics upon the idea of voluntarism—the unfettered and autonomous choice of individuals. This argument was first articulated in the protoliberal defense of monarchy by Thomas Hobbes.

Note the insertion of the word “politics” into the sentence. Luther wasn’t (only) talking about politics, see, so it makes sense to talk about Hobbes and Locke.

OK, not that big of a deal. In the endless examples of individualism which Deneen discusses, he is certainly allowed to talk about political individualism too. So, he must discuss the problem with Luther elsewhere, right?

Where does Martin Luther, the founder of individualism and thus liberalism get mentioned in Deneen’s book? Curiously he is only mentioned once in the entire book. On page 223. In the Index. Note: that does not mean that the Index only gives one place where Luther is mentioned. It means the Index is the only place the name Martin Luther appears at all. The Index lists page 112 after Luther’s name, but Luther is not mentioned on page 112. Nor anywhere else in the book for that matter.

This is rather curious. How did Luther end up in the Index if his name is not even in the book? Well, it turns out there is a sentence on page 112 in which it would have been quite easy to have slipped Luther’s name:

[The Liberal arts] reflect, instead, a pre-modern understanding—one found in the teachings of such authors as Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero, and in the biblical and Christian traditions, articulated not only in the Bible but in the works of Augustine, Aquinas, Dante, More, and Milton.

But Luther isn’t in that list on p 112, though the index would suggest that maybe he was there in an earlier draft. And, lo and behold, Milton, the person with the six letter name in that list on page 112 is (obviously totally coincidentally) not listed in the Index.

Why does this absence of Luther matter? It tells us something interesting. Imagine Deneen’s book as he could have written it with Luther front and center. Reading the book, you can even imagine a whole extra chapter about the problems of Individualism in religion. You see when people got this crazy idea that they could stand before God as individuals, they remove all the societal authority the Universal Church had to rein in society in order to help us retain that ancient source of liberty. If Deneen’s argument in this book is right, then the Protestant Reformation, not Hobbes and Locke, was the break point.

Why doesn’t Deneen just say this? It would show his cards.

This book isn’t just a complaint about a secular liberal order; it is a complaint about a fractured religious order. And once you see that, you realize why the book does not end in a clarion call to move to a beautiful vison of the future. Deneen wants to bring back the Holy Roman Empire, a society in which there is just one Church, the true Church, the Church of Rome, with the power to limit all the damages of liberalism causing all the social ills of the world around us. Of course we get to keep the internet, but it will no longer have all the degrading locations to visit. Of course we get to keep modern medicine, but not those things that fundamentally degrade the human being. Of course Deneen gets to keep teaching at Notre Dame, but it will be a religious school again.

But, if Deneen had said all that, we wouldn’t all be talking about this book. Indeed, one might think the Protestants would have just rolled their eyes at it. And in modern America, Deneen needs the help of the Protestants to bring about his vision. Hopefully they won’t notice where this is heading until it is too late.

In the end, this is an incredibly disappointing book. One hopes that next time, maybe Deneen will have the courage of his convictions and write a more honest book.