Why Liberalism Failed
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Narrated by:
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Brian Holsopple
About this listen
Has liberalism failed because it has succeeded?
Of the three dominant ideologies of the 20th century - fascism, communism, and liberalism - only the last remains. This has created a peculiar situation in which liberalism's proponents tend to forget that it is an ideology and not the natural end-state of human political evolution. As Patrick Deneen argues in this provocative book, liberalism is built on a foundation of contradictions: It trumpets equal rights while fostering incomparable material inequality; its legitimacy rests on consent, yet it discourages civic commitments in favor of privatism; and in its pursuit of individual autonomy, it has given rise to the most far-reaching, comprehensive state system in human history.
Here, Deneen offers an astringent warning that the centripetal forces now at work on our political culture are not superficial flaws but inherent features of a system whose success is generating its own failure.
©2018 Patrick J. Deneen (P)2018 Audible, Inc.Listeners also enjoyed...
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- Unabridged
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In this major statement, the renowned international-relations scholar John Mearsheimer argues that liberal hegemony, the foreign policy pursued by the United States since the Cold War ended, is doomed to fail. It makes far more sense, he maintains, for Washington to adopt a more restrained foreign policy based on a sound understanding of how nationalism and realism constrain great powers abroad.
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Dense, fact filled, sober analysis and prescription
- By John Brynjolfsson on 12-15-18
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Our Divided Political Heart
- The Battle for the American Idea in an Age of Discontent
- By: E. J. Dionne
- Narrated by: Michael Kramer
- Length: 11 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Our Divided Political Heart will be the must-listen book of the 2012 election campaign. Offering an incisive analysis of how hyper-individualism is poisoning the nation's political atmosphere, E. J. Dionne Jr., argues that Americans can't agree on who we are because we can't agree on who we've been, or what it is, philosophically and spiritually, that makes us Americans.
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Good points and lots of good information
- By Jamie B on 08-15-12
By: E. J. Dionne
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The Idea of America
- Reflections on the Birth of the United States
- By: Gordon S Wood
- Narrated by: Robert Fass
- Length: 12 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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The preeminent historian of the American Revolution explains why it remains the most significant event in our history
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Sophisticated analyses
- By Roger on 01-25-12
By: Gordon S Wood
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Adam Smith
- Father of Economics
- By: Jesse Norman
- Narrated by: Jesse Norman
- Length: 13 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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A dazzlingly original account of the life and thought of Adam Smith, the greatest economist of all time. In Adam Smith, political philosopher Jesse Norman dispels the myths and caricatures, and provides a far more complex portrait of the man. Offering a highly engaging account of Smith's life and times, Norman explores his work as a whole and traces his influence over two centuries to the present day. Finally, he shows how a proper understanding of Smith can help us address the problems of modern capitalism.
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Most excellent book!
- By Harish G. Naik on 03-02-19
By: Jesse Norman
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Ill Fares the Land
- By: Tony Judt
- Narrated by: James Adams
- Length: 5 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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In Ill Fares The Land, Tony Judt, one of our leading historians and thinkers, reveals how we have arrived at our present dangerously confused moment. Judt masterfully crystallizes what we've all been feeling into a way to think our way into, and thus out of, our great collective dis-ease about the current state of things.
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Blah, Blah, Blah.
- By Michael on 07-15-10
By: Tony Judt
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Suicide of the West
- How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics is Destroying American Democracy
- By: Jonah Goldberg
- Narrated by: Jonah Goldberg
- Length: 16 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Only once in the last 250,000 years have humans stumbled upon a way to lift ourselves out of the endless cycle of poverty, hunger, and war that defines most of history. If democracy, individualism, and the free market were humankind’s destiny, they should have appeared and taken hold a bit earlier in the evolutionary record. The emergence of freedom and prosperity was nothing short of a miracle.
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Put some gratitude in your attitude
- By Amazon Customer on 04-25-18
By: Jonah Goldberg
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Last Call for Liberty
- How America's Genius for Freedom Has Become Its Greatest Threat
- By: Os Guinness
- Narrated by: Os Guinness
- Length: 14 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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The hour is critical. The American republic is suffering its gravest crisis since the Civil War. Conflicts, hostility, and incivility now threaten to tear the country apart. Competing visions have led to a dangerous moment of cultural self-destruction. This is no longer politics as usual, but an era of political warfare where our enemies are not foreign adversaries, but our fellow citizens. Yet the roots of the crisis are deeper than many realize. Os Guinness argues that we face a fundamental crisis of freedom, as America's genius for freedom has become her Achilles' heel.
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Thought Provoking Work On Liberty In America
- By Ezekiel on 05-28-19
By: Os Guinness
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The Irony of American History
- By: Reinhold Niebuhr
- Narrated by: Robert Blumenfeld
- Length: 5 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Forged during the tumultuous but triumphant postwar years when America came of age as a world power, The Irony of American History is more relevant now than ever before. Cited by politicians as diverse as Hillary Clinton and John McCain, Niebuhr's masterpiece on the incongruity between personal ideals and political reality is both an indictment of American moral complacency and a warning against the arrogance of virtue.
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Superlative Book
- By Amazon Customer on 01-29-10
By: Reinhold Niebuhr
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Why You Think the Way You Do
- The Story of Western Worldviews from Rome to Home
- By: Glenn S. Sunshine
- Narrated by: Patrick Lawlor
- Length: 8 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Why You Think the Way You Do traces the development of the worldviews that underpin the Western world. Professor and historian Glenn S. Sunshine demonstrates the decisive impact that the growth of Christianity had in transforming the outlook of pagan Roman culture into one that—based on biblical concepts of humanity and its relationship with God—established virtually all the positive aspects of Western civilization.
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"Christian's view of the western world"
- By Bradley on 03-21-10
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Theory and History
- An Interpretation of Social and Economic Evolution (LvMI)
- By: Ludwig von Mises, Murray Rothbard
- Narrated by: John Pruden
- Length: 10 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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Like F.A. Hayek, Ludwig von Mises moved beyond economics in his later years to address questions regarding the foundation of all social science. But unlike Hayek's attempts, Mises' writings on these matters have received less attention than they deserve. Theory and History, writes Rothbard in his introduction, "remains by far the most neglected masterwork of Mises". Here Mises defends his all-important idea of methodological dualism: one approach to the hard sciences and another for the social sciences.
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Without This Book, You Are Uneducated
- By Michael D. Rubin on 10-03-18
By: Ludwig von Mises, and others
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In Sacrifice, Rene Girard interrogates the Brahmanas of Vedic India, exploring coincidences with mimetic theory that are too numerous and striking to be accidental. The Bible reveals collective violence, similar to that which generates sacrifice everywhere, but instead of making victims guilty, the Bible and the Gospels reveal the persecutors of a single victim. Instead of elaborating myths, they tell the truth absolutely contrary to the archaic sense.
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solid, pithy Girard lectures transcribed
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What listeners say about Why Liberalism Failed
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- "gopwardog"
- 06-12-20
A Paean to a Better Future
In this controversial but brilliant and masterful work, Patrick J. Deneen diagnoses the political and economic ills around us as endemic to the liberal order that spawned them. He correctly condemns calls for increased progressive independence from communal and religious standards as causes of increasingly deracinated and despondent individuals. He likewise correctly attributes the financial hamster wheel on which more and more of us find ourselves sprinting to an increasingly globalized market long embraces by free market conservatives. Unfortunately, he incorrectly smears America’s Founding Fathers with misquotes and context tricks as progenitors of both problems. Likewise, he consistently relies on concocted ecological narratives aimed at driving socialism among the credulous yet preening elites who proudly proclaim, “Science is real” while ignoring scientific findings and gritty trade offs in favor of an airy and evanescent Druidical and pagan religiosity. Finally, he naively repeats the trope that Marxism magically vanished in 1989, in spite of overwhelming evidence that it continues to drive many of the political ills he despises. With those serious and significant flaws accounted for, however, the remaining argument is still a refreshing and healthy antidote to much of the rhetoric of woke social justice warriors on one hand and the plutocratic Davoisie on the other.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Sebastian Hosu
- 02-28-21
An Attempt at a Revolutionary Diagnosis
This book is easy to listen to. The prose flows well and the arguments are constructed through lots of repetition. It is hard to miss the points of the author. The narrator does a very fine job.
What is attempted in this book is grandiose. It is to convince the reader that all the modern ills of the world stem not from neoliberalism, progressivism or any other -ism that can be traced back a few decades or a century, but from design flaws deep within liberalism itself. Which liberalism, you may wonder. The very liberalism that is at the base of all western modern democratic countries. It should be mentioned at this point that, although this book attacks the Liberal world order it mostly describes modern America and is written very much from a contemporary American conservative perspective.
The arguments used are a mixture of traditionally socialist anti-capitalist points (alienation, atomisation, loss of community, consumerism, self-interest of the elites, GDP-growth-worship), a large dose of reactionary conservatism (cultural pessimism, moral panic, disregarding progress, importance of virtue), and a pinch of environmentalism (acknowledgement and fear of climate change). At its most interesting, the book brings all of these together and urges swift action for the sake of the future. Yet, when it comes down to telling us how, the way forward, according to the author, is, essentially, becoming virtuous communitarian Christians who read the Great Books of the western canon.
You might think I am exaggerating. Well... No. I really am not. The Catholicism of the author severely restricts his horizon and his political imagination. The final chapter of the book reads like a manifesto that calls good people to action. It encourages the formation of a post-liberal political paradigm. Yet, given how things have been presented up to that point, the author seems to wish much more for a pre-liberal world where his values would go uncontested.
If I am so unimpressed with this book's conclusion, why 3 stars?
It is an interesting window into the mind of a sophisticated conservative thinker who isn't afraid to criticize the market as much as he does the state. This is a refreshing approach that is worth anyone's time. Especially since the text is very accessible. That said, his grand theory, which equates rampant capitalism, technocratic managerial statism and excessive individualism with liberalism, is, however, so grand that it implodes under its own weight.
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- Joseph Osborne
- 04-03-21
Contradictions we feel...
...producing social unrest that seem unresolvable, Deneen connects to the “operating system” of Liberalism. Highly thought-provoking.
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- Mark E. Lassiter
- 10-10-22
Interesting Identification of the Problem...
Deneen's book was interesting, but didn't provide any concrete alternative solutions for going forward other than a kind of "let's hope for the best..."
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- Adam J Stricker
- 12-16-19
Must Read!
This book paints a clear picture of where we were, where we are, and where we are going in American culture. The author covers great thinkers and writers from Plato and Socrates to James Madison and Wendell Berry. It is a grave warning that we are getting closer to the end of democracy as we know it.
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- Chris
- 02-06-21
Thickening & humbling
Listened to this great book just after completing Rod Dreher’s Benedict Option (others too). I’m certainly new to this search, but I guess I’m a journey trying to understand, asking God to help me apply the ‘faith seeking understanding’ principle to my (our) current historical locus. As Deneen so frequently alludes to, we’ve lost touch with a deeper and richer (would argue Christ centered, hmm, ‘classical’) anthropology.
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- Anonymous User
- 01-19-20
Brilliant book.
This is once in a generation book. Chapter 2 should be mandatory reading in any Political Science course. Though the book is only for thinking people and not for casual readers with lesser minds.
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- Amazon Customer
- 03-22-22
Hey, that's where John Doyle got that from!
...was what I was thinking through the whole thing. Inspirational and revealing description of how we got to where we are politically.
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- k-man
- 02-18-19
Interesting take on recent political trends but...
Interesting perspective on recent political trends but ultimately unconvincing. The analytical reasoning is lacking at times unfortunately.
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- Patrick Powers
- 02-08-23
The water we swim in
The review title says it all; listening to this book is like being a fish, and having the concept of water explained to you. anyone interested in what is happening in the world right now should read this book.
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