Deneen's argument is not difficult, nor is it subtle, but it is powerful and to my eye, largely correct.
Liberalism argued for a new understanding of liberty—one that was radically individualist and self-interested, and that saw all relationships, responsibilities, and interconnections, both to other human beings and to nature itself, as voluntaristic and consent-based, else they would be—in the crassest sense—illiberal.
Indeed, this voluntarism and freedom from all norms and obligations became a liberal right. Yet liberty and rights, even if the latter grants the former, are inevitably in tension wherever humans live in conditions of co-presence. For rights to life, this form of liberty, and so on to obtain, the very same radically individualist and self-interested liberty of other individuals to take away this right must be rescinded. After all, under conditions of total, unchecked liberty, there are no effective rights, including the right to liberty—anyone bigger and stronger than you may plausibly do to you anything that they like, and your choices are similarly constrained by the fact of having to fight with them for limited resources.
Thus, the liberal regime of individual freedom and individual rights requires on its face both unlimited resources and a disinterested and rational authority superseding all others, whose job it is to deprive of the particular liberty to sin against others' liberty those who would commit such sins.
But the liberal discourse on liberation from traditional norms and authorities (and their tendencies to circumscribe this new kind of liberty) dictates that this depriving authority must not simply consist of other individuals in social networks of authority (e.g. folk culture, family, and so on) because these tend of course to be both "illiberal" in their normative tendencies and calls for self-regulation, as well as biased in favor of the liberty and rights of some (say, kin and countrymen) over others. Thus, for rational, liberal reasons, this authority must instead be itself be rationalized—an abstract, non-individual authority legitimized through rationalized, abstract, public means, and oriented toward the severing of traditional norms and ties and the protecting of the fundamental right to do as one pleases in all cases but for those negatively sanctioned by this same sole and rational authority.
Hence the modern state—as a guarantor of both this conception of liberty and of rights—which is meant to be superior, by way of these rational and legitimating processes and more liberal orientation, to traditional authorities, precisely on grounds of compatibility with liberal values of liberty and rights. And hence the inevitable tension—the more the state deprives some of liberty to protect others' rights (including those of the general public), the more claims of encroachment upon liberty and rights come to the fore. Since the state is nobody's friend and is, like everything else, voluntaristically consented-to as an exercise of liberty, nobody is happy when it doesn't (in fact, can't) deliver on liberalism's promise. And since there is only one authority by which to and legitimized to pursue and settle such claims—the very same state, which proceeds directly from the only legitimate means to legitimize such authorities—its authority grows and grows beyond all susceptibility to liberal legitimation practices of any kind.
In short, under liberalism, we don't want just anyone running our lives; we want an impartial, disembodied authority without self-interest and without the illiberal tendencies of traditional regimes to do so. This authority is the state. And we want it to guarantee both our modern conception of liberty and our rights to this liberty, but we all bristle when the state must also attempt to guarantee these to others, to the detriment of our own; our liberty necessarily tramples on others' rights and can't thus be absolute, while others' liberties trample on our rights and must similarly be curtailed. Given that our relationships under conditions of liberty are purely voluntaristic, we have no interest in breaking the bread of informal norms constitution (which would of course be illiberal self-regulation) with our esrtwhile competitors and antagonists, and taking both our own liberty for granted as a right, we constantly appeal to this authority—the only one to which, in the absence and rejection (on grounds of illiberalism) of traditional authorities biased in our favor, we are willing to submit—the state. And of course everyone is in the same boat.
And the state, as the abstracted yet rational and impartial us, and thus empowered to further articulate itself as a matter of demand and granted legitimacy, responds by implementing ever finger-grained logics and ever larger canons of distinguishable cases and controls, largely through an alienated market, while also working hard to continue to enable endless resource availability in the interest of liberty availability, so as to try to integrate, on the whole, and as is our demand—the unintegrable: the modern conception of liberty as maximal freedom of the individual from all norms and constraints, along with the modern understanding of this liberty as a right.
As a result, the state grows because we implicitly demand that it must as we all appeal to it for our own liberty and rights. "Conservatives" emphasize the importance of liberty and rights (but these can be disinterestedly guaranteed only by the state) while "liberals" emphasize the importance of a strong state (precisely in the service of said liberty and rights), but in the end, these two views amount to the same thing—individual liberty—to consume and from restrictions by non-state actors—is a right to be guaranteed by the state. The former must be maximized (conservatives) and so therefore, the latter must also be maximized (liberals). The two work together, in effect, to enlarge both radical individualism and the state that guarantees it.
Along with this growth (which is, after all, spurred by all making the same demands simultaneously, often with diverging forms of self-interest, meaning that we as individuals alone never win), the sense thus grows that we have inadequate liberty and (at the same time, paradoxically) inadequately protected rights, in no small part due to the ever-ballooning and overwhelming state and the falling away of all other relationships and ties as they are understood ever-more to be illiberal in nature. Indeed, ultimately both sides inevitably narrow our sphere of relatedness—more free individualism, hence more state—until at the end the state is our primary practical relationship in an otherwise isolated, individualist life—the relationship that offers the greatest guarantees, to which we are compelled to be the most practically committed, and with which we spend the most time in life-defining interactions.
At the most basic level, the problem with liberalism is thus a matter of ideological and cultural values—of a broken logic and, Deneen argues, a faulty anthropology. We have loyalties to multiple, conflicting things—the individual *and* society, liberty *and* rights, diversity *and* unity—as well as a conception of rights that can't be sustained—the right to be free from the constraints of nature and of others (even though they have the same rights to liberty), etc. To try to rectify these, we turn not to the wisdom of the ages or to human and thus culturally interested elders, seeing in these things illiberal and illegitimate calls for self-sacrifice and self-regulation (both sides at one time or another), but rather to the very same logic, values, and institutions that have produced the problem in the first place.
Indeed, under liberalism, the sole uncontradicted and unparadoxical value is that we must attempt to reconcile all of these paradoxes and constraints rationally and impersonally so as not to sacrifice liberty or rights to the caprice of traditional illiberal forms or to relationships of patronage and obligation. In so doing, we erect and empower a cold, impersonal structure, beset by paradoxes and every bit as ungainly and uncomfortable as the contradictions that it embodies and that gave rise to it. The more inefficient and bloated it gets, the more we are compelled to appeal to it for redress because under liberalism, this is the only acceptable appeal that we can make while still calling ourselves good citzens of the modern, liberal era and not foreshortening the opportunity in some way to avail ourselves of our liberal due. There is no longer any other controlling authority, and even if there were, our liberal values would compel us to agree to empower the state as part of the deal that we strike to avoid being subject to illiberal traditional authorities and indeed to the illiberalism of nature and its contstraints.
If this sounds an awful lot like Max Weber's classic discourse on bureaucracy and the iron cage, it is; what we have here is in many ways deeply in keeping with Weber's work, made readable and historicized for our epoch and for classical liberalism as a particular case or instance of the general principle, with a more involved discussion of anthropological assumptions and shifts. The nice thing is that while to tackle Weber and, say, Economy and Society, you've got to read thousands and thousands of plodding pages, Deneen gives it to us in a form that many more contemporary minds will be able to grok and digest quickly.
So if you've ever wished that you could convey Weber's argument—and the reason for his hopelesness about the modern era—to friends that weren't big on reading vast tomes from social socience and philosophy... Well, Deneen has just made the job easy for you. Hand it to them and say, "this is the fundamental problem with our time that I've been trying to convey to you ever since I first encountered it in grad school."
Where Deneen and Weber differ is in the area of prescriptions; Weber is essentially hopeless at the end on this point, believing that in a giant game of the prisoner's dilemma or the tragedy of the commons, no one is likely to willingly and consciously risk sacrificing their own perceived advantage or newfound freedoms from constraint first or indeed ever; rationality and human society together, as part and parcel of the process of a contemporary "disenchanted world," give rise to the inevitable (and inevtably to) the "iron cage"—a cage that we erect around ourselves in the name of human liberty. Deneen has other suggestions, though it is hard to see why Weber's view is wrong and Deneen's is more plausible given what we know empirically at this point about human nature. Excavating all of this is left as an exercise to the reader.
In argument quality terms, Deneen is bit muddy on the whole, about as muddy as I've probably been here. The argument lacks the precision, progression, and sharpness of some of the more classic works in this area. But at the same time, eschewing the precision, progression, and sharpness is part and parcel of what makes this work infinitely more brief and at the same time a more readable account for more general audiences.
In any case—recommended; well worth the purchase price and resulting discussion.
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Prophetic but a bit of a slog
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