For Deneen, “liberalism has failed because liberalism has succeeded,” but which liberalism is he referring to? There are no references to Adam Smith, nor to the Vienna School or the Chicago School. It soon becomes clear that he presents a vision of “progressive liberalism,” in the Anglo-Saxon sense, which has captivated many current “progressive” parties, such as the U.S. Democratic Party.
“Progressivism” seeks to transform human life and the world. To do so, it requires a liberated individual and a controlling State. Hobbes, in his Leviathan, identified these two realities: the State composed of autonomous individuals and those individuals, in turn, “contained” within the absolute, even tyrannical, State.
Liberalism has given rise to three revolutions: (1) freedom, understood as human liberation from an established authority; (2) the emancipation of culture from arbitrary traditions; and (3) human dominion over nature through science and economic prosperity.
Progressive liberalism rejects human self-limitation and forgets the Aristotelian and Thomistic principles of self-control and the virtues necessary to achieve happiness. Liberalism rejects the limits of natural law and does not recognize a fixed human nature.
It was Francis Bacon—Hobbes was his secretary—who claimed humanity’s capacity to “dominate” or “control” nature, even proposing the attainment of immortality. Later, Rousseau, Marx, Mill, and others followed this idea, eventually leading to the “transhumanists.”
“Conservative” liberals emphasize the need to master scientific nature and the economy, but they stop short of extending this project to human nature. “Progressive” liberals approve any technical means of freeing humans from the human nature of their own bodies. This is a debate that remains open today.
Another progressive aspect, derived from Hobbes and Rousseau, is the idea that “natural man” is a cultureless creature, a stable primitivism that separates nature from culture. From this arises the anti-culture so heavily promoted in education, eliminating sexual and economic norms and “liberating” or anesthetizing the human will, which succumbs especially to consumption, hedonism, and short-term thinking.
The book is not easy to follow; at times it is arid, but it contains interesting insights. According to Deneen, “progressive” liberalism is unsustainable in every respect, since it cannot perpetually impose an order on a collection of autonomous individuals with ever fewer constitutive social norms, nor can it provide endless material growth in a finite world.