Translated from German with the help of AI. The original is the authoritative version.
It has become rather quiet around Patrick Deneen. The arguably most prominent thinker of postliberalism has said remarkably little in recent months. For July a new book is announced, this time not about liberalism but about Homer's Odyssey and the question of what this myth reveals about the state of the American soul.
And that at a time when a declared postliberal sits in Washington as vice president.
Only a few years ago Deneen became known to a wider audience with books like Why Liberalism Failed (2018) and Regime Change. Toward a Postliberal Future (2023). In them the political scientist formulated a radical critique of liberalism that culminated in the provocative thesis that liberalism was at its end, not because it had been defeated by another ideology, but because it had won.
The parallel deepening crisis of liberal democracy seemed to lend his diagnosis further plausibility, and today, with the crisis sharpening further, some are inclined to understand postliberal critique as a description of our present. By now even a left-wing version of postliberalism is being discussed, which is a strange turn when one considers what „postliberal” stands for politically. As if the authoritarian temptation could simply be relabelled: the post-structuralist re-reading of Carl Schmitt by Chantal Mouffe already failed at such a relabelling attempt.
Liberalism is not yet dead
As convincing as Deneen’s critique may be in some respects, its conclusion that liberalism has come to its end is just as wrong. The conclusion depends on the premise that liberalism has fully unfolded its inner logic and so reached its historical end-state. That presupposes that there was such a thing as the one liberal logic in the first place. In truth, „liberalism” was from the start a field of competing readings, a contested space, never a monolithic project.
Deneen’s critique of liberalism is a rehash of a 20th-century philosophical-historical discussion about the end of history that reaches from Alexandre Kojève through Jakob Taubes to Francis Fukuyama. Following this tradition, Deneen pictures liberalism too much like a computer programme. Political ideologies are unstable formations made up of a few basic convictions and temporary manifestations, which we grasp as ideological foundations, plus numerous short-term attachments. They never exist in the singular, only in variants.
A glance at history shows how these elements shift over time, come into conflict with each other, or get reinterpreted. The history of liberal ideas too is marked by such conflicts and changes, which Deneen certainly knows. All the more astonishing, therefore, that Deneen assumes an intellectual end-state, as if further development were excluded.
Whatever the political payoff of intellectually issued death certificates, we have to note: intellectual life does not simply stop, and liberalism is not simply done. On the contrary: liberal intellectual life in particular feels livelier again today. More and more people engage critically with liberalism, including liberals themselves, as Samuel Moyn’s Liberalism Against Itself (2023) and the debate around it show. Ironically, even postliberalism contributes to more and more thinking about liberal thought. Perhaps postliberals have simply underestimated the productive side effect of their critique.
Nature and telos
The second big problem with Deneen is that he wears himself out on a questionable picture of liberalism. This understanding — not to say caricature — is widespread even among liberals because it corresponds to a canonical understanding of liberalism. Even so, one cannot simply reduce liberalism to this understanding without essentialising it. Or put more positively: the liberal tradition is much richer than Deneen presupposes in his critical works.
What serves as polemic in his rhetoric also undermines his argument. This can be shown by way of Deneen’s critique of „classical liberalism”. The classical tradition, said to begin with John Locke, rests according to Deneen on the assumption that the human being still has a nature but no longer a telos. The later-emerging progressive tradition of liberalism, by contrast, assumes a telos but denies a human nature. Both variants, Deneen reproaches, rest on a rejection of the pre-modern tradition, in which it was assumed that the human being has both a nature and a telos. Man’s telos was derived from his nature, a view found in Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, and many other classical and Christian thinkers.
Although this opposition is not entirely wrong, on closer inspection it proves to be a polemical distortion. For the history of liberal ideas also knows the unity of nature and telos. That Deneen in his books hardly, or only very patchily, engages with or refers to that strand of the liberal pre-tradition is therefore somewhat telling — especially when he wants to mark the contemporary self-narrative of liberalism as a misreading of history.
The philosophical line from Plato and Aristotle through Descartes and Spinoza — the latter a central leading thinker of liberalism — continues into modernity through Hegel and Marx. Remarkably, Deneen remains largely silent on Spinoza and Hegel, and from Marx takes only what suits his argument.
Postliberals will object that many liberals themselves no longer know this line of tradition. In the present canon of liberalism these thinkers do not appear, and even where some knowledge of them still exists, a polemical treatment of them is often cultivated. To this day Plato is treated by many liberals as „the intellectual ancestor of totalitarianism”, which is of course nonsense. About the treatment of Hegel and Marx not many words need be lost: both have been removed from the liberal canon and banished to a liberal anti-canon.
Spinoza, however, is often passed over — which is astonishing, since he defines the purpose of the state expressly as freedom and strongly influenced the much-claimed John Locke. The state should enable its citizens to unfold body and mind in safety. From this telos, the nature of the human being is not separated either, since to human nature his capacity for reason belongs inseparably. Aristotle already understood the human being as „zoon logikon” and at the same time as „zoon politikon”. But Spinoza also knew that the state cannot force its citizens to reason without itself acting unreasonably. The state must rather be so constituted that rational and ethical action becomes possible.
So it is reason on which the human being must place his hope in order to realise the telos of freedom. To what extent the human being already lives in rational conditions can in turn be checked against the concrete shape of the state. Admittedly: that is already Hegel, not yet Spinoza. Hegel was interested in how far the human being can realise his telos — the freedom of all human beings — in bourgeois society. The criterion of this examination was no Prussian ideal or wishful image (that would be rather an ideological criterion), but a philosophical one: reason. In this sense one has also to understand the famous sentence from the Philosophy of Right (1820): „What is rational is real; and what is real is rational.” The sentence states the philosophical criterion of the investigation, not its object. The object is the rationality at work in the state and its distortion by modern conceptions of the state, which behind their picture of the human being forget the human being.
A few decades later Marx will take this up and ask how the individual can still realise his freedom in bourgeois society. In view of industrialisation and mass proletarianisation he will conclude that this society does not provide the conditions for the freedom of all. It is the new mode of production along the law of capital accumulation that leads people into new dependencies and unfreedoms: wage-earners become dependent on capitalists, and capitalists on capital. But Marx will hold on to the telos of freedom and also to the human capacity for reason, that is, to his nature.
Even this brief sketch shows: one cannot, within the tradition of philosophical thought, speak of a separation of nature and telos carried out by liberalism — as long as one does not simply ignore or skip over the relevant thinkers. Deneen’s critique would, however, collapse like a house of cards if he admitted that. He would lose the caricature of liberalism he absolutely needs in order to set postliberalism against liberalism and to formulate a postliberal answer to the crisis of liberalism. His critique of liberalism is therefore not a real critique but a learned form of polemic.
Liberalism will survive its crisis; it just will not be the same liberalism
If the thesis of the end of liberalism is wrong, it does not follow that everything can stay the same. Political traditions do not survive by preserving themselves but by changing.
Liberalism is undoubtedly in a deep crisis. But crises are not necessarily end points. They are moments of self-examination. They force one to question one’s own premises, recognise one’s blind spots, and take one’s own promises more seriously than one has so far.
Perhaps the mistake then lies not in liberalism having been too consistent, but in not having been consistent enough. Freedom was often reduced to freedom of choice, reason to procedural neutrality, equality to formal legal equality. The moral and social substance that a liberal order has to carry was often lost from sight. Where freedom is no longer understood as a common practice but as the mere absence of bond, emptiness arises. And emptiness produces counter-movements.
But precisely here lies also a possibility for renewal. Liberalism was never only a theory of the limitation of power. It was always also a theory of self-government by free and rational human beings. It presupposed trust in the capacity for public reason. And if this trust is shaken today, the task is not to give it up but to ground it anew.
That means treating liberalism not as a closed ideology but as an open tradition. A tradition that can take up critique without giving itself up. A tradition that does not dismiss the question of nature, reason, and telos as a pre-modern relic but poses it anew. And a tradition that recognises that freedom cannot exist without social conditions, without bonds, without institutional stability.
If liberals understand the present crisis as an occasion for self-critique and intellectual renewal, then liberalism will survive its crisis, it just will not be the same liberalism. That need not be a bad thing, given that the liberalism does not exist. There is only one problem to which liberal thinking wants to respond: under what conditions can the human being really be free?
Historically this question has been answered differently by liberalism. And today, in times of great need, liberals have to work out new answers to it again. For this they have more resources than they are aware of, and than their postliberal enemies like. If liberals use these resources, there is reason for hope of a better liberalism.
