Page 86 - The Economist Asia January 2018

70
Books and arts The Economist January 27th 2018
Also in this section
71 How democracies die
72 Swearing is good for you
73 A memoir of the second world war
73 John Ashbery, American poet

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Political thought than” (detail pictured), with its sketch of
The problem with liberalism thousands of atomised individuals con-
fronted by an all-powerful sovereign.
MrDeneen makeshiscase well, though
he sometimes mistakes repetition for per-
suasion. He remindsthe readerthat, before
the advent of modern liberalism, philoso-
phers identified liberty with self-mastery
rather than self-expression, with the con-
Howto revive the mostsuccessful idea ofthe past400 years
quest of hedonistic desires rather than
VER the past four centuries liberalism their indulgence. He does an impressive
Ohas been so successful that it has dri- Why Liberalism Failed. By Patrick job of capturing the current mood of disil-
ven all its opponents off the battlefield. Deneen. Yale University Press; 248 pages; lusionment, echoing left-wing complaints
$30 and £30
Nowitisdisintegrating, destroyed by a mix about rampant commercialism, right-wing
of hubris and internal contradictions, ac- complaints about narcissistic and bullying
cording to Patrick Deneen, a professor of chewing. Most political theorists argue students, and general worries about ato-
politics at the University ofNotre Dame. that liberalism has divided into two inde- misation and selfishness. But when he
The gathering wreckage of liberalism’s pendent streams: classical liberalism, concludes that all this adds up to a failure
twilightyearscan be seen all around, espe- which celebrates the free market, and left- ofliberalism, is his argument convincing?
ciallyin America, MrDeneen’smain focus. liberalism which celebrates civil rights. For His book has two fatal flaws. The first
The founding tenets of the faith have been Mr Deneen they have an underlying unity. lies in his definition ofliberalism. J.H. Hex-
shattered. Equalityofopportunityhas pro- Most political observers think that the de- ter, an American academic, believed his
duced a new meritocratic aristocracy that bate about the state ofliberalism has noth- fellow historians could be divided into
has all the aloofness of the old aristocracy ing to do with them. Mr Deneen argues two camps: “splitters” (who were forever
with none of its sense of noblesse oblige. that liberalism is a ruling philosophy, dic- making distinctions) and “lumpers” (who
Democracy has degenerated into a theatre tating everything from court decisions to make sweeping generalisations by lump-
ofthe absurd. And technological advances corporate behaviour. Theory is practice. ing things together). Mr Deneen is an ex-
are reducing ever more areas of work into The underlying unity lies in individual treme lumper. He argues that the essence
meaningless drudgery. “The gap between self-expression. Both classical and left lib- of liberalism lies in freeing individuals
liberalism’s claims about itself and the erals conceive ofhumans as rights-bearing from constraints.
lived reality of the citizenry” is now so individuals who should be given as much In fact, liberalism contains a wide range
wide that “the lie can no longer be accept- space as possible to fulfil their dreams. The ofintellectual traditionswhich provide dif-
ed,” Mr Deneen writes. What better proof aim of government is to secure rights. The ferent answers to the question of how to
of this than the vision of 1,000 private legitimacy of the system is based on a trade offthe relative claimsofrights and re-
planes whisking their occupants to Davos shared belief in a “social contract” be- sponsibilities, individual expression and
to discuss the question of “creating a tween consentingadults. Butthisproduces social ties. Even classical liberalswho were
shared future in a fragmented world”? a paradox. Because the liberal spirit me- most insistent on removing constraints on
Mr Deneen uses the term “liberalism” chanically destroys inherited customs and individual freedom agonised about atomi-
in its philosophical rather than its popular local traditions, sometimes in the name of sation. The mid-Victorians were great insti-
sense. He is describing the great tradition market efficiency and sometimes in the tution-builders, creating everything from
ofpolitical theory that is commonly traced name of individual rights, it creates more voluntary organisations to joint-stock
to Thomas Hobbes and John Locke rather room forthe expansion ofthe state, as mar- companies (“little republics” in the phrase
than the setofvaguelyleftish attitudes that ketmaker and law-enforcer. The perfect ex- of Robert Lowe, a 19th-century British
Americans now associate with the word. pression of modern liberalism is provided statesman) that were designed to fill the
But this is no work of philosophical cud- by the frontispiece of Hobbes’s “Levia- space between the state and society. Later 1