Article

Has liberalism ruined everything?

Cass R. Sunstein
Harvard University, Cambridge, USA.
csunstei@law.harvard.edu

Abstract There has been considerable recent discussion of the social effects of
‘‘liberalism,’’ which are said to include a growth in out-of-wedlock childbirth, repu-
diation of traditions (religious and otherwise), a rise in populism, increased reliance on
technocracy, inequality, environmental degradation, sexual promiscuity, deterioration
of civic associations, a diminution of civic virtue, political correctness on university
campuses, and a general sense of alienation. There is good reason for skepticism about
these claims. Liberalism is not a person, and it is not an agent in history. Claims about
the supposedly adverse social effects of liberalism are best taken not as causal claims at
all, but as normative objections that should be defended on their merits. These
propositions are elaborated with reference to three subordinate propositions: (1) liber-
alism, as such, does not lack the resources to defend traditions; (2) liberalism, as such,
hardly rejects the idea of ‘‘constraint,’’ though the domains in which liberals accept
constraints differ from those of antiliberals, and vary over time; (3) liberalism, as such,
does not dishonor the idea of ‘‘honor.’’ There is a general point here about the difficulty
of demonstrating, and the potential recklessness of claiming, that one or another ‘‘ism’’
is causally associated with concrete social developments.
Contemporary Political Theory (2019). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41296-019-00342-y

Keywords: liberalism; causal explanation; freedom; promiscuity

Do abstract ideas move history? Do ‘‘isms’’? John Maynard Keynes thought so

(Keynes, 1936, p. 383):
The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right
and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood.
Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves
to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of
some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are
distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. I am
sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with
the gradual encroachment of ideas.

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 Sunstein

Perhaps so. Republicanism inspired the American Revolution, as well as an

assortment of social and cultural changes (Wood, 1991). Nazism, an unruly
collection of abstract ideas, helped move a nation and in some respects the world.
The same is true for Communism. Christianity has had transformative effects not
only on individual lives but also on morality and norms; among other things, it can
be seen as social movement, and it has decisively informed social movements of
multiple kinds. Capitalism has promoted economic growth and affected social
norms insofar as it insists on private property and freedom of contract (Hirschmann,
1977).
These propositions themselves raise many questions. Ideas are not agents, and
their apparent success or failure might reflect something else, such as economics,
technology, or demography. Adolf Hitler was an agent; Nazism was not. It is
important to add that most ‘‘isms’’ can be understood in dramatically different
ways, and that they may be wide tents. (Nazism is an exception.) Republicanism
can take many different forms, emphasizing (for example) populist or represen-
tative conceptions of self-government, and with radically different views about the
separation of church and state. It is possible to endorse socialism, or at least the
general idea, while having diverse views about freedom of speech, freedom of
religion, democracy, and even property rights. Devout Christians embrace a wide
assortment of positions about countless questions, political and otherwise,
emphatically including the separation of church and state. Capitalism takes many
different forms, with a stronger or weaker commitment to some kind of welfare
state. One cannot embrace capitalism while despising the idea of private property,
but one can do so while abhorring or celebrating Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New
Deal, the Endangered Species Act, or the Affordable Care Act.
In recent years, and with an apparent view to contemporary events, some people
have mounted vigorous attacks on what they call ‘‘liberalism’’ (for a prominent
example, see Deneen, 2018).1 I shall be focusing mostly on attacks from the
political right, because they have an especially high degree of salience in the
current era, and because they seem to be resonating in influential quarters. But it
would be equally possible to focus on such attacks from the left, which often
overlap in their conception of what liberalism is, and what is wrong with it. They
also tend to emphasize what liberalism has done, or made possible, or made
impossible in the world. They are styled as causal claims, urging that because of
liberalism, X happened, and also Y, and Z. To that extent, they do not purport to be
normative claims, urging that as a matter of principle, liberalism is inferior to some
illiberal, antiliberal, or nonliberal accounts. The causal claims seem, in some
places, to be substitutes for normative claims—a form of sociology, rather than
political philosophy, but a form of sociology being practiced by political
philosophers.
I shall be arguing here that that these causal claims are not adequately defended,
and are most unlikely to be correct. Those who object to liberalism would do much
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 Has liberalism ruined everything?

better to explain, in normative terms, what is wrong with it, or what is the right
conception of liberalism, or what would be better than liberalism.
It is especially challenging to get traction on the claims of liberalism’s critics,
because within the universe of ‘‘isms,’’ liberalism includes such a wide range of
positions.2 John Locke thought differently from Adam Smith, and John Rawls
fundamentally disagreed with John Stuart Mill, and Immanuel Kant, Benjamin
Constant, Jeremy Bentham, Friedrich Hayek, Joseph Raz, Milton Friedman, Ronald
Dworkin, and Jeremy Waldron are not easy to put in the same category. Some
liberals, like Hayek and Friedman, emphasize the problems with centralized
planning; other liberals, like Bentham and Raz, are not focused on that question at
all. Isaiah Berlin, Jürgen Habermas, Robert Nozick, Susan Moller Okin, and
Martha Nussbaum all count as liberals. Many of the great practitioners of
liberalism—from James Madison and Alexander Hamilton to Abraham Lincoln to
Franklin Delano Roosevelt to Martin Luther King, Jr., to Margaret Thatcher and
Ronald Reagan—did not commit themselves to foundational philosophical
commitments of any kind (such as deontology or utilitarianism).
In these circumstances, any account of what liberalism ‘‘is’’ might turn out to be
interpretive (Dworkin, 1985), rather than a matter of simply finding something.
(This is true of many isms, of course.) Alternatively, any such account might
amount to an argument in favor of one specification of liberalism rather than
another. A strong candidate for the best account might begin (I think) with an
insistence on the equal dignity of human beings,3 with an acknowledgement that
equal dignity can be understood in different ways, or grounded in either
deontological or utilitarian traditions.4
There is also a complex and somewhat awkward relationship between liberalism
as a philosophical position and liberalism as a political practice. The latter can be
found in ‘‘neoliberalism,’’ often understood as a call for economic liberty and
respect for free markets. ‘‘Liberalism’’ is frequently taken to be synonymous with
‘‘neoliberalism,’’ hardly a position that would be located on the left. The European
understanding of ‘‘liberalism,’’ as a political practice or an assortment of political
positions, is very different from the American understanding. In the United States,
the term is often associated with what are now generally speaking left-of-center
political positions in the United States, including (for example) insistence on sex
equality, respect for same-sex marriage, movements for a ‘‘living wage,’’ support
for the Affordable Care Act, support for restrictions on certain forms of (what some
people consider to be) hate speech, claims for rigid separation of church and state,
support for the Green New Deal, openness to immigration, and insistence on a left-
of-center orthodoxy at universities. It is most unclear what these positions have to
do with each other. It is equally unclear whether all or any of them can be
connected in any sense with the work of Locke, Kant, Mill, Bentham, Hayek, Raz,
or Rawls.5

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 Sunstein

But put these various claims to one side. Because of the diversity of views that
can be found within the liberal tent,6 it is not easy, and it is I think reckless, to
speak of ‘‘the logic of liberalism’’ (even if it is responsible to speak of the logic of
Benthamite or Hayekian thinking, or the logic of Mill’s On Liberty). At a
minimum, we need a specification of what liberalism is.7 And if liberalism is
characterized in certain ways, it might turn out to be especially unappealing, even
to liberals themselves.
It should not be surprising to see that some critics of liberalism offers accounts
that defenders of liberalism would not embrace or even recognize.8 As Daniel
Kahneman and Amos Tversky observed in another context, ‘‘The refutation of a
caricature can be no more than a caricature of a refutation’’ (Kahneman and
Tversky, 1996, p. 584). Defenders of liberalism might respond: ‘‘If liberalism
means what you say, I wouldn’t much like it, either.’’ To that response, critics of
liberalism might answer that their own account is actually true to liberalism in both
theory and practice, or that the account embraced by defenders of liberalism is not
meaningfully different from the account(s) that they reject. It might turn out to be
difficult for such critics to defend those answers.9
My main focus here is not on normative claims, but causal claims about what
liberalism has done, brought about, or ruined. A much-discussed example is Patrick
Deneen, who holds liberalism responsible for ‘‘deregulation, globalization, and the
protection of titanic economic inequalities,’’ as well as ‘‘personal and especially
sexual autonomy’’ (Deneen, 2018, p. 63). Deneen and others who are unfriendly to
liberalism on normative grounds have been making arguments about the social
effects of ‘‘liberalism,’’ which are said to include a growth in out-of-wedlock
childbirth, lower marriage rates, higher divorce rates, repudiation of traditions, a
rise in populism, economic inequality, deterioration of civic associations, political
correctness, hostility or indifference to religion, and a general sense of social
alienation and rootlessness (Deneen, 2018). These are often styled as empirical
claims, with the apparent or implicit suggestion that ‘‘liberalism’’ is both a
necessary and a sufficient condition for an assortment of what are taken to be
negative outcomes or trends.
In some circles, the suggestion seems to be resonating. Many people appear to
believe that it provides an important clue to what is ailing liberal democracies, and
perhaps to why they are destined to collapse, or at least to be transformed into
something that is not quite liberal. It is important to emphasize that these claims are
not meant as laments. They are largely meant as celebrations.
The problem is that liberalism is not a person or an agent. It is a constellation of
ideas. A causal explanation of negative outcomes or trends must depend on the
identification and investigation of competing hypotheses and an encounter with the
evidence.10 In the abstract, we cannot rule out the possibility that in some sense
liberalism is responsible for one or another trend, just as we cannot rule out the
possibility that the real culprit is misogyny, racism, feminism, capitalism, atheism,
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 Has liberalism ruined everything?

rock music, political correctness, television, economic growth, modern birth

control, the iPhone, Facebook, or the internet. Even so, the idea that ‘‘liberalism’’ is
responsible for lower marriage rates, the rise of Donald Trump, Brexit, the stalling
of Brexit, same-sex marriage, high rates of economic growth, low rates of
economic growth, or speech codes on university campuses is puzzling and even
reckless.
To defend such ideas, we would need a specification of what liberalism is.11
Deneen contends that the ‘‘deepest commitment of liberalism is expressed by the
name itself: liberty.’’ That is far from sufficient, not least because the idea of liberty
can be specified in many different ways. Many liberals would point to respect for
persons or dignity. Raz refers to autonomy (controversially), but that is not at all
the same as liberty as Deneen understands it. For those who think that liberalism is
most deeply committed to liberty, it would not be unfair to point to Mill’s On
Liberty, but Mill’s deepest commitment was to a form of utilitarianism, from which
his ‘‘harm principle’’ followed.
We would also need an account of how it brought about or led to the relevant
outcomes. It would hardly be enough to observe, for example, that defenders of
same-sex marriage invoke something like Mill’s harm principle, or that Bentham
was enthusiastic about immigration. I do not deny some possibilities here. If, for
example, liberalism is understood to call for free markets and private property, it
can be associated with economic growth. But even here, and with apologies to
Keynes, the idea that ‘‘liberalism’’ caused economic growth depends on a too
simple understanding of how social processes work.
I am aware that I have been offering some brisk notes on a complex topic. In this
space, I am not going to go far beyond them, but I will offer an elaboration with
reference to some lively and provocative remarks by Yoram Hazony in his 2019
Vaughan Lecture, delivered at Harvard Law School (Hazony, 2019). Hazony’s
remarks are worth engaging not only for their own sake, but also because they
overlap with, and offer a window on, broad strands of thinking about liberalism and
its consequences. It is important to emphasize that Hazony makes plausible and
plausibly appealing arguments in favor of the claims of tradition, constraints, and
(especially) the important idea and practice of honor. We could accept these claims,
and embrace some form of traditionalism, while also rejecting Hazony’s view
about what liberalism has done.
Hazony’s central goal is to provide a vivid narrative about the United States
from the 1940s to the present. The tale involves some kind of ‘‘Fall,’’ in which
something that he characterizes as bad and potentially dangerous (Enlightenment
rationalism and liberalism) has been triumphing over something that he charac-
terizes as good (traditionalism). In the process, rationalism and liberalism have
been crushing both conservatism and religion. The result is a revolution that, if not
deflected, ‘‘will end with the destruction of the Western democracies.’’ The
apocalyptic tone is not atypical of those who speak of liberalism as a baleful
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 Sunstein

historical force (though for some writers, a large-scale collapse, even a kind of
apocalypse, seems to be welcome).12
To make progress on the empirical arguments here, let us consider three
subordinate claims.
First: Hazony says that ‘‘liberalism has proved itself either unwilling or unable
to successfully defend almost any inherited political ideals or norms, no matter how
beneficial or useful they may be, once a focused attack on them has been under way
for twenty or thirty years.’’ He adds that we have witnessed ‘‘the serial destruction
of all inherited concepts.’’
That, I think, is a challenging claim to defend. Literally countless inherited
concepts are alive and well. Consider some inherited ideals, norms, and concepts
that (many) liberals have defended in the face of focused attack: republican self-
government; checks and balances; freedom of speech; freedom of religion; freedom
from unreasonable searches and seizures; due process of law; equal protection;
private property.13
Once more: Liberalism is a constellation of ideas. Its proponents are fully able to
defend inherited political ideals and norms.14 They often do exactly that. To be
sure, they do not think it adequate to say that an ideal has been in place for a long
time. But they agree that if an ideal has longevity on its side, there might be a lot to
say in its favor. Both Hayek and Burke offered powerful arguments on that count,
and nothing in liberalism is inconsistent with those arguments (Hayek, 1984). In
fact many liberals embrace them (Sunstein, 2009).
Second: Hazony argues that societies need not only freedom but also constraints.
He is certainly right on that count. But is it right to suggest that the ‘‘famous
capacity for self-constraint has been disappearing’’? To come to terms with that
question, we need to ask: Self-constraint with respect to what? In important places,
there appear to be increases in self-constraint, and liberals of various kinds have
supported them. As candidates, consider sexual violence, lynching, physical abuse
of children, sexual harassment, smoking, drinking, littering, antisemitism, and
spitting. All of these are more constrained, in important places, than they were in
the 1940s. We can see self-constraint as disappearing only if we focus on specific
areas of life in which that has happened. If we did, we would see less self-constraint
with respect to X and Y and Z – but more with respect to A and B and C. It would
take a great deal of work, and some kind of metric or index, to establish that there is
less self-constraint now than there was in (say) 1945.
Because this point seems difficult to dispute, we might conclude that the
problem lies not in the weakening of constraints in general, but the weakening of
specific kinds of constraints. Perhaps the real claim is about the weakening of the
constraints of tradition, taken as such. If so, there is reason to be doubtful, for
reasons taken up below. Perhaps the real claim is about the weakening of
constraints in specific areas. Sex and marriage are possible examples. To know
whether constraints are disappearing in those areas, we would need data, and recent
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 Has liberalism ruined everything?

evidence strongly suggests that in the domain of sex, constraints are growing, not
loosening; there seems to be a kind of ‘‘sex recession’’ (Julian, 2018). Is liberalism
responsible for that? But to return to my general theme: It is challenging to connect
the loosening of constraints, in any particular area, to liberalism as such. To be
sure, we might be tempted to think that liberals are committed to freedom of
choice, broadly speaking, and that that commitment has led to, and helped
facilitate, practices that some recent critics of liberalism find troubling or worse.
(Candidates include divorce, abortion, promiscuity, and same-sex marriage.) The
question remains: Can we really offer some kind of causal chain between liberalism
(in what form?) and those practices?
Hazony claims that conservative thought suggests that people need constraint as
well as freedom. That is true and important. Liberalism suggests the same thing.
Liberals famously call for prohibitions on harm to others (Mill, 2002).15 But
liberals have also emphasized pre-commitment strategies of multiple kinds (Elster,
1979)16 and solutions to collective action problems, which law and norms also
provide. Many examples, invoked by critics of liberalism, are easily fitted within
liberal accounts of constraint via law and norms (Ullmann-Margalit, 1977). Some
liberals vigorously defend constraints on freedom, pointing to both autonomy and
welfare (Conly, 2012).
Third: Hazony is entirely right, and onto something deeply important, in
emphasizing the importance of honor. But it is not easy to defend the proposition
that ‘‘honor has largely disappeared because it violates the Enlightenment sense
that all must be regarded as equals’’ (Hazony, 2019). The term ‘‘the Greatest
Generation’’ was coined in 1998 (by a liberal), and it is used to describe and honor
those who fought and won World War II (Brokow, 1998). The term has become
common, a matter of ordinary language, and hurray for that. You can believe that
all human beings have equal dignity, while also honoring James Madison, Abraham
Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosa Parks, John McCain, and all those who
fought for our nation at war. There is no inconsistency there. It is not simple to find
a form of liberalism that suggests that it is no longer ‘‘possible to justify publicly
praising certain choices and not others’’ (Hazony, 2019).17
Let me speak a bit more broadly. Enlightenment rationalism is not a person.
Liberalism is not an agent in history. It is not easy to defend the proposition that
either is responsible for the legalization of abortion, same-sex marriage, or the
elimination of prayer from the public schools.
Liberals need not disagree with Burke’s famous words: ‘‘We are afraid to put
men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason; because we suspect
that this stock in each man is small, and that the individuals would do better to avail
themselves of the general bank and capital of nations and of ages’’ (Burke, 1999).
Many liberals are keenly aware that there are good reasons for Burkeanism. If a
practice has stood the test of time, it might well be contributing to important social
goals. If many people have endorsed a practice, we have epistemic reason to think
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 Sunstein

that it makes sense (Hayek, 1984; Sunstein, 2007; also see the discussion of the
Condorcet Jury Theory in Sunstein, 2009). But with respect to a longstanding norm
or practice, it is always fair, and often good, to ask: Why?18
I return to my more general point. Some people see history as a war of ‘‘isms’’ –
liberalism, conservatism, traditionalism, Marxism. They are committed to7 a kind
of ‘‘Ismism,’’ which I understand to amount to a claim that concrete historical
developments are a product of some ism, or a conflict between or among isms,
whether or not those contentions have been or can be grounded in causal
demonstrations of any kind. The narratives they offer tend to be grand and
sweeping (and to many people seductive, even thrilling). They see the movements
of societies as a result of the triumph of some set of abstract ideas, without showing
how those ideas actually produced those movements, and without paying attention
to the need to identify microfoundations and mechanisms.
The resulting accounts are often Manichean. The relevant isms tend to be
concoctions rather than expositions. Those who speak in these ways tend to see one
ism as very bad, and another as very good. If their accounts are meant as an
explanation of how history has unfolded, they tend to be highly speculative – vivid,
arresting tales that overlook what usually moves years and decades, which are
specific events, specific discoveries, specific interactions, specific technology, and
specific people, few of them (perhaps none of them) marching to the tune of some
ism.19 To be sure, Keynes was undeniably right to say that ideas matter. As an
assortment of ideas, liberalism matters a great deal. But to what, exactly?
We might be able to connect Hayekianism (or for that matter Keynesianism)
with concrete policies and possibly even large-scale movements. But many
historical accounts of the bad done by some ism, and the good promised by another,
are really not historical explanations at all. Instead they are normative accounts.
They are not about what caused what. They are not causal. They are statements of
conviction—opposition to one ism and support for another. If anything, the word
‘‘conviction’’ understates matters. I have said that some people seem to find various
attacks on liberalism to be thrilling. One reason is that those attacks sound like a
cry to a titanic struggle, a battle, perhaps an apocalypse. Another reason is that they
purport to engage with the deepest issues and the very foundations of things. It is as
if in ‘‘liberalism’’ we can find something like the root of a conspiracy, or the source
of multiple collapses and falls, leading to the worst of what is around us.
These causal claims are unearned. It is difficult to show that the worst of what is
around us is a product of a theory. We might well disagree about how to identify
what the worst is, but it is imperative to try, and also to see what can be done about
it as a matter of both theory and practice. If liberalism’s contemporary critics reject
liberalism, they should specify what they take it to entail, and engage with it on its
merits. Normative claims should be defended on normative grounds, and not by
reference to implausible or insufficiently defended claims about causation.

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 Has liberalism ruined everything?

Acknowledgements

This essay grows out of a commentary on the Vaughn Lecture at Harvard Law
School, delivered in March 2019 by Yoram Hazony, titled ‘‘A Confederacy of
Prodigies: On the Ascending of Reason and the Extinction of Conservatism in
America,’’ and posted here: https://americanmind.org/essays/conservative-
rationalism-has-failed/. For their immense generosity and graciousness on the
occasion, the author is grateful to Dr. Hazony, Jack Goldsmith, also a commenter at
the event, and Mary Ann Glendon, the organizer of the event, with particular thanks
to Hazony for his kindness. Special thanks, too, to Goldsmith, Martha Nussbaum,
Lisa Disch, and two anonymous reviewers for superb comments on an earlier draft,
and to Ethan Lowens for excellent research assistance. Readers are asked to make
allowances for broad, brief, and somewhat informal remarks on some very large
topics.

Notes

1 Hazony (2018), also has a spirited attack on liberalism, opposing it to nationalism. Relevant in
general is the discussion of ‘‘soft obscurantism’’ in Elster (2011).
2 For an especially valuable account see Nussbaum (2011). For a helpful overview, see Bell (2014).
Rawls (1993) remains defining; it is often ignored or mischaracterized in contemporary debates. As
Nussbaum puts it, ‘‘the concept of political liberalism is simply ignored in a large proportion of
discussions of welfare and social policy, as are the challenges Rawls poses to thinkers who would
base politics on a single comprehensive normative view’’ (Nussbaum, 2011, p. 6). For an early
statement, see Larmore (1987). Also valuable is Holmes (1984) and Holmes (1995). A clear and
broad overview can be found in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2018).
3 This is an emphatically tentative suggestion; there are reasonable alternative candidates. A version of
this view can be found in Dworkin (1978). See also the brief but highly suggestive remarks about
respect for persons in Nussbaum (2011):

Respect is thus closely linked to the idea of dignity, to the idea that humanity has worth and not
merely a price. Equal respect would then be respect that appropriately acknowledges the equal
dignity and worth that persons have as ends. Although this idea has a definite ethical content, it has
long been recognized (for example, in the framing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights)
that one may endorse it for political purposes without thereby endorsing a comprehensive Kantian
doctrine or any other specific comprehensive doctrine: thus one may endorse it while believing a
form of religious doctrine that Kant would not accept, or while holding a view about freedom of
the will that is not Kant’s. Equal respect is a political, not a comprehensive, value. . . .

Deneen also makes a brief, supportive reference to the centrality of dignity: ‘‘Liberalism in theory
builds upon a longstanding effort in Western thought to limit despotic political power, an effort
born of the recognition of the inviolable dignity of the individual. It has failed in this aim in
practice, but those commitments are worthy of defense and continued efforts’’ (Hogan, 2018, n.p.).
4 ‘‘It is certainly possible for consequentialist and welfarist views to be reformulated as forms of
political liberalism’’ (Nussbaum, 2011, p. 7). A committed Hayekian might endorse political
liberalism and also emphasize respect for persons and dignity (though Hayek himself was, I think, a

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 Sunstein

welfarist). Some critics of liberalism speak of its commitment to something like a ‘‘disembodied
self.’’ For an influential view, see Sandel (1998). This proposition is being revived by some
contemporary writers. ‘‘Human beings are thus, by nature, nonrelational creatures, separate and
autonomous’’ (Deneen, 2018, p. 32). In my view, this understanding of liberalism is confused and
wrong. Bentham, Mill, and Hayek, for example, did not believe in anything of the sort, and nor do
such diverse contemporary liberal thinkers as Martha Nussbaum, Jürgen Habermas, and Jeremy
Waldron. (For one response to this objection, see Rawls, 1985.)
5 There is also an occasional claim that liberalism amounts to a kind of religion, and not a good one
(Deneen, 2018, p. 5). It is fair to say that some people on the political left are willing to engage in
something like witch-hunts, and also that some words used to describe some religious practices (such
as ‘‘rituals’’) can be applied to some of what some liberals seem to do. But what does this have to do
with Kant or Bentham or Hayek? And what is the definition of religion such that liberalism counts as
one? To be sure, some liberals are perfectionists and defend something like a comprehensive view
(Raz, 1987). One could define people as embracing a religion if they do that. But I speculate that the
claim that liberalism amounts to some kind of religion is not really about liberal perfectionism. It is
best understood as a form of rhetoric, or perhaps as a way of trying to win some imagined debate.
6 Some critics of liberalism do, of course, offer an account of what liberalism is, but sometimes with
few citations and often with no engagement with actual liberal arguments; the resulting account is
often barely recognizable. In his book on liberalism, Deneen (2018), makes no reference at all to
Hayek, Larmore, Nussbaum, or Raz, and offers just one brief, obscure reference to Rawls (Deneen,
2018, p. 135). It is worth noting that with that reference, Deneen takes the appeal of the ‘‘original
position’’ to come from the fact that ‘‘this scenario was embraced by those of liberal dispositions
precisely because they anticipated being its winners. Those inclined to deracination, rootlessness,
materialism, risk-taking . . . in effect assured their own success’’ (Deneen, 2018, p. 135). Aside from
being highly speculative, and not very nice, the suggestion is hard to understand. People inclined to
materialism and risk-taking should not particularly love the ‘‘original position’’ or the ‘‘difference
principle.’’
7 For a puzzling choice, see the suggestion that liberalism is committed to ‘‘the idea of a self that’s
self-creating. In order to foster this self, all boundaries and barriers have to be erased. Culture has to
be flattened; national boundaries have to be erased; the family has to be rewritten.’’ (Hogan, 2018,
n.p.). For example, Rawls and Hayek were hardly committed to that singularly unappealing program.
8 See Deneen (2018) for what seems to me the baffling suggestion that the ‘‘logic of liberalism thus
demands near-limitless expansion of the state and the market.’’ (It is relevant, if perhaps a bit harsh,
to refer the reader here to Elster 2011.) Rawls (1987) is relevant to those who think that liberalism
embodies a comprehensive view of or is hostile to religion. For a related but somewhat different
perspective, see Sunstein (1994).
9 See Nussbaum (2011) and the pointed emphasis, in favor of political rather than perfectionist
liberalism, on ‘‘the price of denigrating and expressively subordinating many citizens who are willing
to live with others on terms of equality and reciprocity’’ (Nussbaum, 2011, p. 38).
10 For example: ‘‘The loosening of social bonds in nearly every aspect of life – familial, neighborly,
communal, religious, even national – reflects the advancing logic of liberalism and is the source of its
deepest instability’’ (Deneen, 2018, p. 30). Perhaps that is true. But the author offers no evidence for
his large claim (‘‘in nearly every aspect of life’’), nor does he show that any such consequences are a
reflection of the claimed logic of liberalism.
11 Recall that Deneen (2018) contends that the ‘‘deepest commitment of liberalism is expressed by the
name itself: liberty.’’ That is far from clear. Many liberals would emphasize mutual respect. Raz
(1987) refers to autonomy, which he does not identify with liberty as antiliberals understand it. For
relevant discussion with a very different conclusion from Mill’s ‘‘harm principle,’’ see Conly (2012).

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 Has liberalism ruined everything?

12 This is so of Deneen (2018), and it is noteworthy that his prophecy of some kind of major upheaval,
or collapse, seems, in some circles, to be welcome, exciting, in a sense even thrilling: ‘‘Liberalism
created the conditions, and the tools, for its own worse nightmare . . . Sacrifice and patience are not
the hallmarks of the age of statist individualism. But they will be needed in abundance in order for us
to usher in a better, doubtless very different, time after liberalism’’ (Deneen, 2018, pp. xxvi–xxvii).
Also, note these comments: ‘‘already there is evidence of growing hunger for an organic alternative
to the cold, bureaucratic, and mechanized world liberalism offers’’ (Deneen, 2018, p. 191), and
‘‘After a five hundred-year philosophical experiment that has now run its course, the way is clear to
building anew and better. The greatest proof of human freedom today lies in our ability to imagine,
and build, liberty after liberalism’’ (Deneen, 2018, p. 198). Deneen is no Marxist, but there is
something in these words, and in various forms of Ismism, that have the same emotional tenor, the
same kind of excitement, the same claims of historical inexorability (in the preferred directions), as
Marxism.
13 Joseph Raz is the most prominent current defender of contemporary liberal perfectionism, with his
focus on a liberal account of autonomy (see Raz, 1987). He could easily be taken as a principal target
of the kind of antiliberalism that I am exploring here. But in important respects, Raz is speaking in
favor of inherited ideals. Note too that Raz is no defender of unconstrained choosing: ‘‘Autonomous
life is valuable only if it is spent in the pursuit of acceptable and valuable projects and relationships.
The autonomy principle permits and even requires governments to create morally valuable
opportunities and to eliminate repugnant ones’’ (Raz, 1987, p. 173).
14 Deneen (2018) suggests that ‘‘liberalism aims to deconstruct’’ certain ‘‘social forms’’ required by
democracy, ‘‘particularly shared social practices and commitments that arise from thick commu-
nities.’’ Many people who embrace the liberal tradition insist on the importance of those shared
practices and commitments. For an influential version, which could be understood in many different
ways, see Ostrom (1990).
15 For those who believe in the claims of tradition, Mill is a fair (normative) target. The challenge is to
defend the proposition that Mill or Millianism – which should not be identified with liberalism – is
causally responsible for actual outcomes that they abhor.
16 Deneen (2018) contends that liberalism believes that ‘‘fulfilling the sovereignty of individual choice
in an economy requires the demolition of any artificial boundaries to a marketplace.’’ It is not clear
what is meant by this, for many liberals are enthusiastically in favor of numerous ‘‘artificial
boundaries to a marketplace’’; their numbers include Hayek himself.
17 Admittedly, some complexities are raised by the account in Rawls (1971), at least insofar as Rawls’
‘‘original position’’ suggests that people are not morally responsible for many of their characteristics,
including their willingness to work hard.
18 To be sure, committed Burkeans, and some traditionalists, would have problems with that question.
Pascal offered one response: ‘‘Those whom we call ancient were really new in all things, and
properly constituted the infancy of mankind; and as we have joined to their knowledge the
experience of the centuries which have followed them, it is in ourselves that we should find this
antiquity that we revere in others’’ (1910, pp. 444, 449). Bentham similarly acknowledged that old
people have more experience than young people, but insisted that ‘‘as between generation and
generation, the reverse of this is true.’’ In fact, ‘‘the wisdom of the times called old’’ is ‘‘the wisdom
of the cradle.’’ Bentham deplored the ‘‘reigning prejudice in favor of the dead,’’ and also the
tendency to disparage the present generation, which has a greater stock of knowledge than ‘‘untaught,
inexperienced generations’’ (1952, p. 44).
19 For seemingly far afield research that seems to me to support the claim I venture in the text, see
Salganik et al (2006), Salganik and Watts (2008), and Salganik and Watts (2009). For some
theoretical and empirical support for this view, see Sunstein (2019). I am bracketing a number of

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 Sunstein

questions here. As noted, some isms can be connected, causally, with certain outcomes; Nazism and
Communism are evident examples. Even here, however, the causal connections are far from simple.

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