Why Liberalism Failed, published in 2018, is a provocative and bracing book of political theory. The author, a professor at the University of Notre Dame in the US, argues that liberalism -- a term which he spends much of the book defining -- is bankrupt and collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions. By "liberalism", he means Western democratic institutions which esteem and promote liberty (from which the word "liberal" is derived). He traces the intellectual roots of liberalism back to Bacon, Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau -- basically the social contract theorists. He claims that their state of nature was a fiction which has corrupted discourse ever since.
In an extremely interesting argument, he says that men never lived as "individual" in a state of nature; they were always social, as Aristotle pointed out long ago. They cannot surrender their freedom to the state, as social contract theorists contend, and still remain free. On this foundational error the two wings of liberal thought are founded: statism and individualism. Progressives believe that freedom is maximised by more and more interference by the state; conservatives dislike the state but treasure their individual freedom, which expresses itself in sexual licence.
He develops this insight to account for the cultural, moral and political decline of the West. The further he moves from political theory, the more controversial and idiosyncratic his analysis becomes, but it is very stimulating and refreshingly counter-cultural.
The intellectual framework within which Deneen moves is Catholic. But his analysis is not necessarily popular amongst fellow conservative Catholic intellectuals. "Liberalism", in his view, includes the foundational ideas of the American nation. Corrupt liberal ideas animated the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution, he says. Unsurprisingly, this has been heatedly disputed.