Why Liberalism Failed by Patrick J Deneen, 198 pages
As the worldwide crisis of liberalism continues, Patrick Deneen offers an obituary. Liberalism, he avers, is in danger not because of its failures but because of its successes, having produced a mass of social atoms thoroughly "liberated" from any kind of community, governed by impersonal markets and governments. Such individuals, alienated even from themselves, can hardly have any confidence in such arrangements, or muster the will to defend them. To the contrary, they will form new tribes organized around personalities who promise to master the system, or tear it down. The logic of liberalism demands liberation from liberalism itself.
Why Liberalism Failed occupies an interesting middle ground between Edward Luce's The Retreat of Western Liberalism and DC Schindler's Freedom from Reality. Not quite as topical - and therefore disposable - as the former, analytically it is far stronger, while not nearly as powerful as the latter, it is far more readable.
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