Why Liberalism Failed

Patrick Deneen's 2018 argument that liberalism is failing not in spite of its successes but because of them — and that its dissolution of communities, traditions, and shared goods cannot be remedied from within liberal premises.

Liberalism as self-defeating ideology: The book's three-part structure: (1) Liberalism's theory — it emerged to liberate individuals from unchosen communities (family, place, faith, tradition) and succeeded. (2) Liberalism's anti-culture — the culture industry and consumer capitalism that results from liberalism's success is not the failure of liberalism but its product. (3) Liberalism's version of education — the liberal arts college has become a factory for producing interchangeable mobile individuals bereft of particular allegiances, not a site of genuine formation. The book refuses to choose between left and right liberalism, arguing both are expressions of the same underlying individualist anthropology.