Two weeks ago, Bishop Robert Barron of the Diocese of Winona-Rochester hosted University of Notre Dame political science professor Patrick Deneen on the Word on Fire’s “Bishop Barron Presents” series to discuss how we might redirect the focus of our politics to true human flourishing and the common good.
The conversation revolved largely around the themes of Deneen’s most recent books — Why Liberalism Failed and its sequel, Regime Change — namely the paradox of liberalism’s success and failure (which Deneen argues are one and the same), and the possibility of substantive change in our regime as understood through the ever-present conflict between “the few and the many.”
Speaking on the success of his book, Why Liberalism Failed, which former President Barack Obama said offered “cogent insights into the loss of meaning and community that many in the West feel,” Deneen said: “If there was anything about my book that many people tell me … resonated with them is [that] it helped them … connect the dots” between the different kinds of dysfunction affecting institutions, “starting with the family, all the way up to a political order.”
While Deneen’s work has been applauded by many, he has also been criticized by scholars on the progressive left and the libertarian right. He is a postliberal, after all, and has been equally critical of the laissez-faire approach to both society and economics. But he is also a self-described conservative — not in the vein of Margaret Thatcher or defenders of classical liberalism, but more in the style of Russell Kirk and Orestes Brownson.
One of the unique characteristics of Deneen’s postliberal conservatism is his understanding of the purpose of government, which harkens back to a much older conception rooted in the thought of Plato, Aristotle, St. Thomas Aquinas, and the like.
Agreeing with this alternative to the modern consensus that construes the purpose of government as being limited to the role of impartial “umpire,” Barron said: “The purpose of government is to make us good, and it has something to do with virtue.” He added that “freedom is not … simply doing what I want … No, it’s actually a kind of disciplining of desire to make the achievement of virtue possible.”
The paradox of liberalism, Deneen told Barron, is that, rather than eliminating the possibility for tyranny, or paving the way for self-mastery, it essentially democratizes tyranny. That is, it turns every individual into his or her own tyrant. Drawing from Plato’s Republic, he explained that “the tyrant appears to be the freest person in the world because the tyrant can do whatever he or she wants. The tyrant is defined, in a sense, by the modern understanding of liberty — they can do as they wish.”
Barron also agreed with this view: “The problem is that we’ve all become our own little tyrants.” He went on to maintain that what we have is “a society of the little tyrants who have no sense of cohesion or of a real common good.”
Another consequence of liberalism, Deneen articulated, has been the “bracketing” of “religious questions” and “questions of the good.” He and Barron agree that this is largely the product of the political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, who was arguably the first — or among the first — to reject the pursuit of a finis ultimus and summum bonum. In pluralistic societies like ours, said Deneen, “we can’t agree on what [the highest good] is.” Thus, he explained, the Hobbesian liberal project proposes that “we simply create a society in which we can have peace” by allowing people to pursue “whatever they value, whatever they believe,” which Deneen described as the “privatization of the good.”
The problem with this apparent solution to the challenge of pluralism and disagreement on matters of the good, Deneen told Barron, is that “even in a supposedly neutral society, a kind of … predominant worldview will come to dominate,” one which reduces every consideration to a “market calculation” and thereby creates a devotion to utility, materialism, comfort, and “wealth maximization.” Barron responded by asserting that “every society does, at least implicitly, have a summum bonum.”
Barron also observed that, within the liberal regime, there has been a continual “declension” in the public role of religion. He specifically focused on the “declension from Mario Cuomo to Andrew Cuomo,” highlighting the difference between the two governors’ approach to abortion as Roman Catholics. Whereas Mario felt the pressure to “privatize” his own Church’s teachings on the matter to support the policy as a public official, Andrew (just one generation later) was known for actively celebrating abortions.
Agreeing, Deneen described this “declension” as “the story from Hobbes to Cuomo,” which is essentially the story of liberalism in the modern West. But the alternative to this, he argued, is the Aristotelian view that “human happiness is an achievable condition, at least in the … form that can be achieved in this world.” Happiness, in this sense, refers to true human flourishing and the “condition of genuine liberty” which makes it possible. It is wholly dependent on the extent to which one is a “person of virtue” and what Barron describes as the “freedom from attachment to sin” and “freedom for the achievement of the good.”
Barron and Deneen are two of the leading public intellectuals of our time, and their conversation is demonstrative of a significant shift on the Right that, contrary to free-market absolutists and libertarian individualists, is animated by communitarian considerations and the pursuit of the common good.
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