J.S. Mill: Equiliberal

“For [Patrick] Deneen, the most nefarious influence in the history of liberal political thought is John Stuart Mill, son of Enlightenment radical James Mill, godson of utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham, and the author of the canonical 1859 liberal text, On Liberty.”

Shortchange for Regime Change

A specter is haunting Europe. No, a specter is haunting the world—the specter of illiberal democracy. In the space of just over 30 years, liberal triumph has given way to liberal decline. Liberal hubris—the confident announcement that History had ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991—has succumbed to liberal despair, the candid acknowledgment that if liberalism is to survive then it has to change, and it has to change quickly.

For some, principally its opponents, liberalism is dead already. It died when liberals exchanged tolerance for tyranny in the name of tolerance itself. The market fundamentalism of “neoliberalism,” the hegemonic form of liberalism in the world since the revolution of President Ronald Reagan and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, was a self-inflicted injury. Liberal societies, we know from the interwar years, cannot sustain vast economic inequalities without breaking down. Yet, the political and social instability experienced across the world in the wake of the global economic crisis of 2007-8—the chaos incurred by the debt crisis in Greece, the impassioned Brexit referendum in the United Kingdom, and the election of an unabashedly populist President Donald Trump in the United States of America, for example—was a result of greed and myopia rather than active self-abuse. The solipsistic individualism of “progressive” liberalism was, by contrast, self-immolation. Liberalism self-consciously destroyed itself in the 2010s and 20s for not being liberal enough. So, at least, the postliberal critics of liberalism argue.

According to the American political theorist, Patrick Deneen, one of liberalism’s fiercest and most uncompromising adversaries, it is time then for “regime change.”  It is time for a postliberal mode of governance, based on stability, order, and continuity, and the reconciliation of “the few” and “the many.” Liberalism in both its economic and “progressive” guises must be overthrown. Insensitive to bonds of obligation and the common good, the corrupt and self-serving meritocratic elites who currently rule must give way to reactionary national aristocracies attentive to the instinctive conservatism of the demos. Or so the argument goes.