“We shall not shock anyone, we shall merely expose ourselves to good-natured or at any rate harmless ridicule if we profess ourselves inclined to old-fashioned and simple opinion according to which Machiavelli was a teacher of evil.”  -  Leo Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli

Patrick Deneen subscribes to the Straussian history of politics that views Machiavelli’s philosophy as the revolutionary break with classical and Christian philosophy, one that replaced the cultivation of virtue with the channeling of vices, a project that subordinated the sublime “high” to the solid “low.” Over the next five hundred years, this liberal project has taken over and transformed the world in its own image. Deneen sees it as fundamentally flawed and seeks a radical break from it.

To achieve this break, he proposes a bold and ambitious thesis: “Liberalism has failed—not because it fell short, but because it was true to itself. It has failed because it has succeeded.” Justifying this requires three tasks: first, demonstrating that liberalism has indeed failed; second, proving that this failure is because of inherent flaws of liberalism, and not because of a faulty implementation or some exogenous factors; third, to provide an alternative path forward that is superior to liberalism.

Everywhere Deneen looks, he sees the failures of liberalism. If Brexit and Trump’s triumph are failures of liberalism, so are rising inequality and decline in living standards. The decline in the trust of institutions is caused by liberalism, but also cultural homogenization, climate change, social alienation, and anxiety among college students. By casting such a wide net, Deneen pushes himself in a corner where he must come up with a very compelling narrative, one that can hold liberalism culpable for all these varied ills.

Deneen fights his way out of the cul-de-sac by tracing the origins of liberalism to two fundamental principles, first, Machiavelli’s rejection of the Classical but also the Christian idea of virtue as the basis for government. Instead, Machiavelli recommended, “that liberty and political security were better achieved by pitting different domestic classes against one another, encouraging each to limit the others through “ferocious conflict” in the protection of their particular interests rather than by lofty appeals to a “common good” and political concord. By acknowledging ineradicable human selfishness and the desire for material goods, one might conceive of ways to harness those motivations rather than seeking to moderate or limit those desires.”

Liberalism’s second principle is the conception of humans as “by nature, non-relational creatures, separate and autonomous.” The state creates, grants, and enforces our individual rights, and all other bonds are merely provisional, and can be withdrawn if they feel onerous “without broader consideration of the impact.”

This radical individualism weakens all ties - political, social, even familial, and mutates a human into the liberal caricature of the atomic individual. Interestingly, this atomized individual is easy prey to “the depredations of the other,” making him demand for a stronger state. But the stronger state further weakens the social bonds, creating the need for an even stronger state, and so on. Statism and individualism aren’t opposites, instead, they are complementary; “Statism enables individualism, individualism demands statism.”

Deneen discovers the true cause of our social ills as the application of these two abstract liberal principles to real human lives. He argues that in a society that values Machiavellian self-interest, and not self-restraint or concern for community, is it really surprising that bankers seeking ever greater profits brought down the global economy to a near-collapse in 2008? In a world of weak social bonds, can one expect unique cultures to survive beyond caricatures of “authentic” food and music? Isn’t climate change merely a consequence of the unleashing of our vices of gluttony, greed, and selfishness? If self-interest is the supreme virtue, then why is inequality bad, especially if you are a part of the “new aristocracy”? Isn’t anxiety and cynicism among college students justified when they recognize that they will soon be sorted by a cruel, impersonal, economic system that neatly categorizes a few as winners while discarding the rest? And indeed, are these situations perversions of liberalism? Or, as Deneen believes, they are merely liberalism taken to its logical extreme?

After delivering a reasonably convincing, though certainly overly broad, even repetitive, critique of liberalism, one expects Deneen to come up with an alternative. After all, as Saul Alinsky noted, the price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative. But Deneen turns coy. He is adamant that a return to pre-liberal past, irrespective of its desirability, is impossible; there is no going back. Inspired by Rod Dreher’s Benedict Option, Deneen suggests that instead of building grand ideologies, those dissatisfied with liberalism should focus their efforts on creating communities that “build-up of practices of care, patience, humility, reverence, respect, and modesty,” where virtue emerges not from abstract ideas but from lived experiences.

I find this solution underwhelming. Firstly, small Benedictine communities are not scalable solutions for modern societies that encompass tens or hundreds of millions, even billions of individuals. If liberalism is indeed broken, then the right thing to do wouldn’t be to walk away but to fashion an alternative that must, by necessity, be built using existing liberal institutions including the state. Secondly, I wonder to what degree will such communities be tolerated. Will France allow a  Muslim Benedictine community that practices and teaches a moderately severe form of Sharia? Will a Christian Benedictine community in the UK be allowed to teach their children that marriage is only between a man and a woman and there are only two genders? How free will such communities be actually to “foster new forms of culture”, especially if the new culture goes against liberalism backed by the power of the state? And if the culture of such communities will not be allowed to go beyond repackaged liberalism, then how exactly are they a solution to the crisis of liberalism?

Reading through Deneen’s book, it’s hard not to draw parallels to Machiavelli. If Machiavelli claimed that medieval polities were built on a false understanding of human nature, then Deneen argues that the liberal project also is built on another false understanding of human nature. Like Machiavelli, Deneen never allows inconvenient facts or alternative interpretations to break his narrative. For example, while he mentions that some scholars regard liberalism as a natural development of Christian ideals of the middle ages, he then chooses to ignore it without justification. He disregards the conflict, or at least the tension between two strands of liberalism, the classical liberalism, and the left-liberalism. Most interestingly, if Machiavelli provided the ideological ammunition to take down the Christian political philosophy, isn’t Deneen, keenly aware of Machiavelli’s action, consciously performing a similar role against liberalism?

If Machiavelli gave us liberalism, what gifts does Deneen bear?