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Patrick Deneen

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The Christian Roots of Good Old-Fashioned American Individualism

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Social conservatives used to have a much more nuanced understanding of the development of modern liberalism out of the medieval Christian world. Our insistence on individual immortality, an idea hammered home by the almost preposterous teaching of the resurrection of the body, ought to make Christians dyed-in-the-wool individualists.

Vindicating the Founders . . . Again

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The political theory of the American founding is not quite the “cure for what ails us,” but, as Thomas G. West’s books demonstrate, it can serve as a kind of preventive medicine against the psychological sickness of radical individualism.

Three Questions for the New Antiliberals

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The new antiliberals are not wrong to worry about the dire state of American politics and culture. But they persistently fail to adequately ask, much less clearly answer, three pressing questions that must be part of any adequate treatment of the problem, and they virtually ignore the thoughtful conservative alternatives to antiliberalism that do address these questions.

On Christian Liberty and Lockean Liberty: A Grateful Response to Micah Watson, Samuel Gregg, and Anthony Esolen

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If we want a different politics, ultimately we must offer a different moral imagination for ourselves, our children, and theirs.

Patrick Deneen, The Little Sisters of the Poor, and Libertas Idiotica

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We are not Hobbesian atoms of self-will, not until liberalism makes us so. Human beings have ever been human by virtue of their relations with others, and by virtue of the bonds of duty and memory that these relations imply.

Patrick Deneen and the Problem with Liberalism

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Patrick Deneen poses good questions but begs others. The second installment in the Public Discourse symposium on Why Liberalism Failed.

Prisoners in the American Cave

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Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed is a provocative attempt to explain what’s wrong with our culture, how this came to be, and what might be done about it. Although his historical account of liberalism is unpersuasive, he offers a prescient analysis of the current moment and insightful prescriptions for constructive action.

Not Hobbesian but Christian: Why Patrick Deneen’s Misinterpretation of the American Founding Matters

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Nothing has so limited the scope of politics as has Christianity by placing man’s end in the transcendent. The Founders did not think that the summum bonum could be reached through political means, not because they were Hobbesian but because they were Christian. The second in a two-part series.

Fools or Scoundrels? A Response to Patrick Deneen

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To suppose that the Founders set up a republic to vitiate the virtue on which its existence depended requires the belief that they were either stupid (by creating a Hobbesian regime and not noticing) or immoral (by doing it while cleverly lying about what they were doing). The first in a two-part series.

Christianity and American Founding Principles: A Response to Patrick Deneen and Robert Reilly

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When it comes to Christianity, the Enlightenment, and the American Founding, Patrick Deneen and Robert Reilly are both right.

Corrupting the Youth? A Response to Reilly

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There is no distinctive Catholic political philosophy today, and Robert Reilly’s call to man the battlements of classical liberalism is an attempt to short-circuit the possibility of a real revival of Catholic political thought in America.
Public Discourse

Liberalism’s Logic and America’s Challenge: A Reply to Schlueter and Muñoz

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The Founders’ vision of the “common good” was not the pre-modern natural law conception of an objective human good, but a conception of “mutual advantage” shaped by the social contract framework. This logic of liberalism has driven our country to its current political and cultural problems.
Public Discourse

Sustaining American Liberalism in Principle and Practice

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While we should reject misguided claims that our founders adopted political voluntarism, we should follow suggestions for strengthening civic life—and thereby sustain American liberalism—through local government, families, churches, and other civic associations.
Public Discourse

Natural Law Liberalism Beyond Romanticism

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To reject the presence of natural law in documents of the Founding era is to embrace both cynicism and romanticism.
Public Discourse

Beyond Wishful Thinking: A Response to Schlueter

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“Natural law liberalism” is a chimera that cannot and does not exist in the American tradition.
Public Discourse

Sustainable Liberalism

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The solution to the political and moral crisis of our time does not lie in abandoning liberalism or in defending Lockeanism. It rests in the recovery of natural law liberalism—a sustainable public philosophy that is true to reason, to nature, and to Christian belief.
Public Discourse

Better than Our Philosophy: A Response to Muñoz

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Our Founding liberal principles aren’t the best invocation against inhuman practices like slavery and abortion because they also produce self-aggrandizement, individualism, willfulness, and a conception of liberty as the absence of constraint.
Public Discourse

Why Social Conservatives Should Be Patriotic Americans: A Critique of Patrick Deneen

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Rather than reject liberalism for its excesses, we should take up the more modest task of recovering the principles of liberalism once embraced by our founding fathers and Abraham Lincoln.
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