George Scialabba's take on Patrick Deneen isn't a "quietly devastating" "unwinding" of his book - at least if your snippet is anything to go by - so much as a failure to understand the essence of the Post-Liberal critique of liberal individualism. He goes down a silly and tendentious rabbit hole about Christian history which completely misses the big picture. The critique of Western liberal individualism (as it turned out anyway) is that:
1) hardly anyone really wants the Equality implied as the ideal end-state of liberal democracy; they just want the nice feeling they get about themselves from saying the word.
2) very few people can really cope well with the 21st c. hyper-liberal version of Freedom either; it's too hard, too disorienting, too lonely and conflicts with the huge human need to feel like an insider of a group. https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/
John Gray would have written a much more penetrating one.
How the Left Forgot the Petty Bourgeoisie is an excellent piece.
George Scialabba's take on Patrick Deneen isn't a "quietly devastating" "unwinding" of his book - at least if your snippet is anything to go by - so much as a failure to understand the essence of the Post-Liberal critique of liberal individualism. He goes down a silly and tendentious rabbit hole about Christian history which completely misses the big picture. The critique of Western liberal individualism (as it turned out anyway) is that:
1) hardly anyone really wants the Equality implied as the ideal end-state of liberal democracy; they just want the nice feeling they get about themselves from saying the word.
2) very few people can really cope well with the 21st c. hyper-liberal version of Freedom either; it's too hard, too disorienting, too lonely and conflicts with the huge human need to feel like an insider of a group. https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/
John Gray would have written a much more penetrating one.