Balkinization  

Monday, December 19, 2022

Deneen and Vermeule on liberalism

Andrew Koppelman

I’m a liberal who takes conservatives seriously.  A lot of the work I do aims to engage respectfully with conservative thought.  I try to stay open to the strongest arguments on the other side.  For instance, when I wrote Burning Down the House: How Libertarian Philosophy Was Corrupted by Delusion and Greed, a critique of libertarianism, I was surprised to find that I had more sympathy for some of Hayek’s arguments than I had expected to.

So when the Notre Dame Law Review invited me to a conference on “Liberalism, Christianity, and Constitutionalism,” I was happy to have the opportunity to engage with the most prominent contemporary Christian critics of liberalism, Patrick Deneen and Adrian Vermeule.  My forthcoming paper is now on SSRN.

The engagement was disappointing.  I have written about my admiration for some of Vermeule’s earlier work, but their critiques of liberalism – more sustained in Deneen than in Vermeule – do not rise to that standard.

Both of them claim that liberalism’s relentless logic tends to destroy communities and traditions.  Their descriptions of liberalism are distorted.  The allegations of logic and inner necessity promise that we will be given some account of the alleged mechanism.  The language of historical inevitability is reminiscent of Marx.  He however developed a detailed, articulate account of the alleged inner logic of capitalism, in order to show that it would inevitably alienate and immiserate the working classes.  Marx turned out to be wrong.  But at least one could tell what he was claiming.

Deneen, who offers more detail, emphasizes the harm that neoliberal economics has done to working class incomes, and the harm that the sexual revolution has done to working class family structure.  The harms are there, but Deneen is unfamiliar with the pertinent social science, misdescribes the causal processes at work, misattributes the harms to liberalism, and embraces quack remedies.  Both writers echo earlier Christian flirtations with Marxism: philosophical errors lead idealists to gullibly embrace authoritarian kleptocrats who do not give a damn about the people the idealists are trying to help.

Older Posts
Newer Posts
Home