Why Liberalism Failed

Why Liberalism Failed is a critique of economic liberalism as practiced by both American Democrats and Republicans. According to Deneen "we should rightly wonder whether America is not in the early days of its eternal life but rather approaching the end of the natural cycle of corruption and decay that limits the lifespan of all human creations."[1] The book argues that liberalism has exhausted itself, leading to income inequality, cultural decline, the erosion of freedoms, and the growth of powerful, centralized bureaucracies.[4]

In a review for The New York Review of Books, Robert Kuttner described the book as "convenient for conservatives looking to blame all ills on liberals", to oppose globalization and market fundamentalism, perceiving liberalism as "a dangerous betrayal of deeper sources of culture and civilization such as the family, the tribe, the nation, and the church".[2]

Writing in The Week, Damon Linker described it as "the most electrifying book of cultural criticism published in some time", adding that Deneen argues that liberalism failed because it succeeded. However, Linker wrote that he did not find "especially persuasive" the claim made in the book that the Western liberal world was nearing its end.[4]

Jennifer Szalai for The New York Times wrote that it "speaks to a profound discontent with the political establishment" and that Deneen echoes the popular 2016 election sentiment that both parties were the same. She adds that the book doesn't only attribute liberalism to one side but mostly to political elites orthodoxy dating to 500 years ago. She describes the book as "a deeply exasperating volume that nevertheless articulates something important in this age of disillusionment". Deneen proposes a more traditional society where "preferably religious communities tend to the land and look after their own" and is critical of a women's liberation that pushed them into capitalism.[3]

Park MacDougald wrote for New York that Deneen from a right-wing point of view criticizes liberalism not because of its materialist failures but from a philosophical standpoint and "what he sees as a liberal redefinition of the ancient and medieval concept of freedom, or libertas", that "liberalism's big innovation was to reject this classical understanding as unrealistic, unscientific, and oppressive". He concludes that "Why Liberalism Failed is a polemic, if an elegantly argued one, and it contains some of the drawbacks of the genre".[1]

The conservative political journal American Affairs has published commentaries on the book by Polish philosopher Ryszard Legutko and Harvard University Law professor Adrian Vermeule.[1][5][6]