
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.
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The Lost History of Liberalism challenges our most basic assumptions about a political creed that has become a rallying cry - and a term of derision - in today's increasingly divided public square. Taking listeners from ancient Rome to today, Helena Rosenblatt traces the evolution of the words "liberal" and "liberalism", revealing the heated debates that have taken place over their meaning. In this timely and provocative book, Rosenblatt debunks the popular myth of liberalism as a uniquely Anglo-American tradition centered on individual rights.
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Educative and informative
- By Amazon Customer on 06-05-19
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Anti-Pluralism
- The Populist Threat to Liberal Democracy
- By: William A. Galston
- Narrated by: Matthew Josdal
- Length: 5 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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The Great Recession, institutional dysfunction, a growing divide between urban and rural prospects, and failed efforts to effectively address immigration have paved the way for a populist backlash that disrupts the postwar bargain between political elites and citizens. Whether today's populism represents a corrective to unfair and obsolete policies or a threat to liberal democracy remains up for debate. To respond to today's crisis, good leaders must strive for inclusive economic growth while addressing social and cultural issues, including demographic anxiety, with frank attention.
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Informative, but a bit shallow
- By JayJay on 07-14-18
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Conservatism
- A Rediscovery
- By: Yoram Hazony
- Narrated by: Richard Ferrone
- Length: 16 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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The award-winning political theorist Yoram Hazony argues that the best hope for Western democracy is a return to the empiricist, religious, and nationalist traditions of America and Britain—the conservative traditions that brought greatness to the English-speaking nations and became the model for national freedom for the entire world. Conservatism: A Rediscovery explains how Anglo-American conservatism became a distinctive alternative to divine-right monarchy, Puritan theocracy, and liberal revolution.
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An essential read for conservatives
- By Peter on 10-24-22
By: Yoram Hazony
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The Benedict Option
- A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation
- By: Rod Dreher
- Narrated by: Adam Verner
- Length: 8 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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The light of the Christian faith is flickering out all over the West. American churches are beset by a rapidly secularizing culture, the departure of young people, and watered-down pseudo-spirituality. Political solutions have failed, as the self-destruction of the Republican Party indicates, and the future of religious freedom has never been in greater doubt. The center is not holding. The West, cut off from its Christian roots, is falling into a new Dark Age.
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Framing is wrong. But not all bad
- By Adam Shields on 04-20-17
By: Rod Dreher
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Liberalism as a Way of Life
- By: Alexandre Lefebvre
- Narrated by: Christopher Douyard
- Length: 8 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Where do you get your values and sensibilities from? If you grew up in a Western democracy, the answer is probably liberalism. Conservatives are right about one thing: liberalism is the ideology of our times, as omnipresent as religion once was. Yet, as Alexandre Lefebvre argues in Liberalism as a Way of Life, many of us are liberal without fully realizing it—or grasping what it means.
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A must-read for people who care about the future.
- By Dr. W. Roy Whitten, Director, Whitten & Roy Partnership on 02-01-25
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The Fractured Republic
- Renewing America's Social Contract in the Age of Individualism
- By: Yuval Levin
- Narrated by: Kevin T. Collins
- Length: 11 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Americans today are frustrated and anxious. Our economy is sluggish and leaves workers insecure. Income inequality, cultural divisions, and political polarization increasingly pull us apart. Our governing institutions often seem paralyzed. And our politics has failed to rise to these challenges. No wonder, then, that Americans - and the politicians who represent them - are overwhelmingly nostalgic for a better time.
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Started out strong but finished weak
- By isaiah on 09-29-16
By: Yuval Levin
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The Virtue of Nationalism
- By: Yoram Hazony
- Narrated by: JD Zimmer
- Length: 9 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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In The Virtue of Nationalism, Yoram Hazony contends that a world of sovereign nations is the only option for those who care about personal and collective freedom. He recounts how, beginning in the sixteenth century, English, Dutch, and American Protestants revived the Old Testament's love of national independence, and shows how their vision eventually brought freedom to peoples from Poland to India, Israel to Ethiopia.
By: Yoram Hazony
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The Prophets of Doom
- By: Neema Parvini
- Narrated by: Sebastian Abineri
- Length: 8 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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Linear and progressive views of history have dominated the popular imagination for the past seventy years in a worldview wedded to the inexorable rise of globalization and GDP growth at any cost. However, the end of the Cold War failed to produce the end of history as hoped, a fact brought home to many by Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
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Would rather have AA read it
- By Kindle Customer on 03-29-25
By: Neema Parvini
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The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order
- By: Samuel P. Huntington
- Narrated by: Paul Boehmer
- Length: 16 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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For anyone interested in foreign affairs, this book will catalyze debate, and not only for Mr. Huntington's concluding scenario for World War III. He sees how this could happen if the U.S. mishandles an increasingly xenophobic and truculent China. Chinese assertiveness, Huntington argues, rises out of its felt grievances against a relatively weakening West. After China, the gravest challenge to the West is resurgent Islamic identity.
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The Most Important Book You'll Read This Year
- By Donald on 10-21-04
What listeners say about Why Liberalism Failed
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- Christopher C. Hull, Ph.D.
- 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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1 person found this helpful
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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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5 people found this helpful
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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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1 person found this helpful
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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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