Audience: Public

Some twenty-five years after the triumphalist claim that History had reached its culmination with the unchallenged dominion of the liberal order, gathering evidence suggests that we might instead be seeing the end of Liberalism. Crises of confidence in a host of core institutions – political, electoral, economic, educational, media, religious, familial – point not to piecemeal disorders, but to a common systemic origin. In a lecture drawn from a forthcoming book Why Liberalism Failed, Notre Dame political theorist Patrick Deneen argues that liberalism's failure is the predictable result of liberalism's success, and thus cannot be solved by more or better liberalism. Is there a way forward “After Liberalism”?

Join the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture January 26, 2017 for a public lecture in the Democracy and its Discontentslecture series featuring Patrick Deneen (University of Notre Dame). An audience question and answer session with Prof. Deneen will follow the lecture.

This event is cosponsored by the Woodrow Wilson Department of Politics at the University of Virginia and the Burke Society at UVA.

Patrick J. Deneen is Associate Professor of Political Science and holds the David A. Potenziani Chair of Constitutional Studies at the University of Notre Dame. His latest collection, Conserving America?: Essays on Present Discontents, considers the value and possibility of conserving a particular version of the United States. He has published articles, essays, and book reviews on topics ranging from ancient to modern political thought, democratic theory and practice, American political thought, political theology, Catholicism and American liberalism, literature and politics (including essays on Mark Twain, Henry Adams, Wendell Berry and Don DeLillo).