Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed argues that liberalism’s inherent flaws have ushered in its final days. In providing levels of individual freedom and prosperity that could never before have been imagined, it has sown the seeds of its own undoing. By making individual autonomy the highest priority, liberalism destroys the institutions that made it possible. Cultivating virtue and responsible citizenship are subordinated to mere consumerism. Inherited institutions—family, church, community—pass on a tradition of virtuous self-government, and with this the traits that serve as a necessary precondition for citizens to possess and sustain democratic self-rule. But with the ascendance of radical autonomy, liberalism is experiencing a deep crisis of purpose as it struggles to pursue ever more elusive goals.
Deneen spends several chapters discussing the erosion of liberalism in the individual’s relationship to the state, to technology, and to culture. But
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