What does it mean to live in a liberal democracy? How and why did we modify the term ‘democracy’ with ‘liberal’? What critiques are being offered today of both liberalism and democracy, and what sorts of resources does the liberal democratic tradition draw on to respond to these critiques? Join the Rosendale Library this February and March for six discussion sessions that will help us answer these (and more!) questions. We’ll begin our series with brief readings from the history of the liberal democratic tradition, followed by an overview of one of the primary defenses of liberalism today, John Rawls’ book A Theory of Justice. Following that, we’ll investigate some of the important conservative critiques of liberalism, including the book that J. D. Vance claims decisively influenced his thought, Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed.
This is a six-part discussion group, Thursday evenings 5:30-6:30, February 27-April 10 (PLEASE NOTE: we will take March 20 off).
Readings
Session 1: Two Variations of Liberalism Readings: 1. Excerpts from John Locke, The Second Treatise on Government (1689) 2. Excerpts from John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859)
Session 2: Contemporary Liberalism 1: Welfare Liberalism Reading: Excerpts from John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (1971)
Session 3: Contemporary Liberalism 2: Libertarian Liberalism Reading: Excerpts from Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974)
Session 4: What’s Wrong with Liberalism? The Critique from Within Reading: Mark Lilla, The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics (2017) Part 1, Part 2, Conclusion
Session 5: What’s Wrong with Liberalism? Critiques from the Right and Left Readings: 1. Excerpts from Patrick Deneen, Why Did Liberalism Fail? (2019) 2. “The Liberal Order Is the Incubator for Authoritarianism”: A Conversation with Pankaj Mishra,” LA Review of Books, November 15, 2008.
Session 6: Notes on the Future? Reading: Excerpts from Patrick Deneen, Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future (2023) Readings Part 1; Part 2; Part 3; Endnotes
The readings selected for this series revolve around recent challenges to the way in which we think about politics and practice it together in the United States, most of which surround the “liberalism” part of liberal democracy. The proposed discussion series breaks down into two sections.
First we’ll consider what we mean by liberalism by looking at several representative texts from the tradition. Following that, we’ll read some contemporary critiques of liberal philosophical foundations emergent in the political disputes of the past decade. For both of these units, we will consider conflicting viewpoints and try to find our own positions on these questions. One important goal for us is to bring diverse members of our community together in a forum where we can work through potential differences on these questions and seek common ground.
We begin with a survey of the different ways we might imagine liberalism. Beginning with some selections from foundational texts in the tradition like John Locke’s Second Treatise on Government, and John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, we’ll then move to consider excerpts from two important recent works which delimit the boundaries of liberalism today: John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice, and Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia. The latter two texts map the difference between defenses of the welfare state and libertarian arguments for small governments, respectively.
Our fourth session will take up selections from a recent book by Mark Lilla, The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics. Lilla, who identifies as a liberal, charts the decline of American liberalism explaining how it went from the successes of FDR’s coalition to the pitfalls of today’s identity politics. Lilla very much wants to save liberalism, and his book argues this is possible.
The fifth session approaches liberalism from the outside. Excerpts from Patrick Deneen’s important 2019 book Why Did Liberalism Fail? makes the case from the political right that liberalism has exhausted itself and produced income inequality, nihilism, fewer freedoms, and atomized, disassociated citizens. We’ll also read Pankaj Mishra’s critique from the left, which argues that liberalism is fatally tied up with the legacies of imperialism and racism.
Our final session considers selections from Patrick Deneen’s recent book Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future. Deneen is arguably the most articulate spokesperson for the intellectual right in America today, and his new book sketches out what he hopes moving beyond liberalism – perhaps in
a Trump Administration – has in store for us.