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In the ancient world . . . the dominant definition of liberty involved recognition that it required an appropriate form of self-governance. . . . To be free, above all, was to be free from enslavement to one’s own basest desires, which could never be fulfilled, and the pursuit of which could only foster ceaseless craving and discontent.

— Patrick Deneen Why Liberalism Failed (2018)

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Among the greatest challenges facing humanity is the ability to survive progress.

Why Liberalism Failed (2018)

Elections provide the appearance of self-governance but mainly function to satiate any residual civic impulse before we return to our lives as employees and consumers.

Why Liberalism Failed (2018)

To be free — liberal — was an art, something learned not by nature or instinct but by refinement and education. And the soul of the liberal arts was the humanities, education in how to be a human being.

Why Liberalism Failed (2018)

Preserved in discrete human inheritances—arts, literature, music, architecture, history, law, religion—culture expands the human experience of time, making both the past and the future present to creatures who otherwise experience only the present moment.

Why Liberalism Failed (2018)

This is liberalism’s most fundamental wager: the replacement of one unequal and unjust system with another system enshrining inequality that would be achieved not by oppression and violence but with the population’s full acquiescence, premised on the ongoing delivery of increasing material prosperity along with the theoretical possibility of class mobility.

Why Liberalism Failed (2018)

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Patrick Deneen (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.