Patrick Deneen

Patrick Deneen
Born	Patrick J. Deneen
Awards	American Political Science Association 1995 Leo Strauss Award for Best Dissertation in Political Philosophy
Academic background
Alma mater	Rutgers University; B.A. English, 1986; Ph.D., Political Science, 1995
Thesis	The Odyssey of Political Theory (1995)
Doctoral advisor	Wilson Carey McWilliams
Other advisors	Benjamin R. Barber
Influences	Wilson Carey McWilliams, Benjamin R. Barber, Alexis de Tocqueville, Christopher Lasch, Wendell Berry
Academic work
Discipline	Political science
School or tradition	Communitarianism Participatory Democracy Conservatism Catholicism
Institutions	Princeton University Georgetown University University of Notre Dame
Website	patrickjdeneen.com

Patrick J. Deneen (born 1964) is an American political theorist who is Professor of Political Science and holds the David A. Potenziani Memorial College Chair of Constitutional Studies at the University of Notre Dame.

Life and career

Born in 1964, Deneen was educated at Rutgers University, earning a B.A. in English Literature (1986) and a Ph.D. in Political Science (1995). He taught at Princeton University (1997–2005) as an assistant professor. Deneen joined the faculty at Georgetown University in 2005 and was the Tsakopoulos-Kounalakis Associate Professor of Government until 2012. He began his current position at Notre Dame in 2012. His dissertation, “The Odyssey of Political Theory,” was awarded the 1995 American Political Science Association Leo Strauss Award for Best Dissertation in Political Philosophy.

Deneen is a scholar of democracy, liberalism, classical and modern political thought, and American political thought. He is the sole author of four monographs, co-editor of three volumes, and author of numerous academic articles. He has also written for publications including First Things, The American Conservative, The New Atlantis, and Front Porch Republic. Deneen's 2018 book Why Liberalism Failed (Yale University Press) was recommended by former President Barack Obama as part of his summer reading list. Obama wrote that “'Why Liberalism Failed' offers cogent insights into the loss of meaning and community that many in the West feel, issues that liberal democracies ignore at their own peril.” The book has been translated into eight languages to date: German, Spanish, Croatian, Korean, Japanese, Hungarian, Czech, and Portuguese.

From 1995-1997 he was Speechwriter and Special Advisor to Joseph Duffey, the Director of the United States Information Agency appointed by President William Jefferson Clinton.

Deneen was Founding Director of the Tocqueville Forum on the Roots of American Democracy housed in the Government Department at Georgetown University from 2006-2012. The Tocqueville Forum was founded in 2006 “to promote civic knowledge and promote inquiry.” The Tocqueville Forum hosted many prominent speakers on the Georgetown campus, including the late Associate Justice Antonin Scalia, “Red Tory” Phillip Blond, New York Times Columnist David Brooks, and the late Cardinal Francis George. In addition to invited speakers, main activities of the Tocqueville Forum were student conversations with visiting guests, a regular reading group, the student journal “Utraque Unum,” and an annual student retreat.

Deneen has lamented the loss of knowledge about history among his students, having written the following in 2016:

My students are know-nothings. They are exceedingly nice, pleasant, trustworthy, mostly honest, well-intentioned, and utterly decent. But their brains are largely empty, devoid of any substantial knowledge that might be the fruits of an education in an inheritance and a gift of a previous generation.

He blamed the loss of cultural inheritance as an “intended consequence” of the contemporary educational system and philosophy. Deneen held that the fault lie in an effort to produce students who would be ideal for modern jobs in a globalized capitalist economy. “What our educational system aims to produce is cultural amnesia, a wholesale lack of curiosity, history-less free agents, and educational goals composed of content-free processes....” He concluded the essay by expressing his affection and hopes for his students:

I love my students – like any human being, each has enormous potential and great gifts to bestow upon the world. But I weep for them, for what is rightfully theirs but hasn’t been given. On our best days, I discern their longing and anguish and I know that their innate human desire to know who they are, where they have come from, where they ought to go, and how they ought to live will always reassert itself. But even on those better days, I can’t help but hold the hopeful thought that the world they have inherited – a world without inheritance, without past, future, or deepest cares – is about to come tumbling down, and that this collapse would be the true beginning of a real education.

Deneen was a founding editor of the web magazine "Front Porch Republic," for which he continues to serve as contributing editor. The journal drew inspiration from the writings of Wendell Berry, reflected in its motto: "Place. Limits. Liberty." Deneen wrote first posting of the website, published March 2, 2009, entitled "A Republic of Front Porches," which was later re-published in revised form in the 2018 book, Localism in the Mass Age: A Front Porch Republic Manifesto. . Along with the journal "The American Conservative," David Brooks in 2012 classified "Front Porch Republic" as a "paleoconservative" publication influencing the future of conservatism. He described its authors as "suspicious of bigness: big corporations, big government, a big military, concentrated power and concentrated wealth. Writers at that Web site, and at the temperamentally aligned Front Porch Republic, treasure tight communities and local bonds. They’re alert to the ways capitalism can erode community. Dispositionally, they are more Walker Percy than Pat Robertson."

Deneen has attributed a number of influences for his form of Catholic communitarianism, including his Ph.D. advisor Wilson Carey McWilliams; Wendell Berry; Christopher Lasch; and Alexis de Tocqueville.

Political engagements

Deneen was a featured speaker at the 2019 National Conservatism Conference in Washington, DC. In his address, he was in part critical of “National Conservatism,” arguing that American nationalism had been a major aim and achievement of Progressive philosophers such as Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Herbert Croly. He endorsed a nation that was active in supporting more local forms of association: “The nation should be above all devoted to efforts to sustain, foster and support the communities that comprise it, and to combat, where necessary and possible, the modern forces that have proven to be so destructive of those constitutive communities.”.

In October 2019, Deneen tweeted praise for a speech by United States Attorney General Wiliam Barr on religious freedom, in which Barr blamed “secularism and the doctrine of moral relativism” for undermining the “moral discipline” fostered by religion, consequently leading to rising rates of mental illness, suicide, and drug overdoses.

In November 2019, Deneen met publicly with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and “spoke highly of Hungary’s family policy measures,” though acknowledged “I do not know [them] in detail.”

In September 2017, and again in June 2020, Deneen responded to charges leveled by “conservative liberals” of lack of loyalty to American liberal founding principles. Accused in 2017 by Robert Reilly of undermining the patriotism of Catholic students, he defended the development of a Catholic public philosophy that challenged American liberalism; and accused in 2020 of hostility to the individualism of American founding principles by George Will and C. Bradley Thompson, he pointed to a non-liberal, more communitarian strand in the American tradition.

In July 2020, Deneen engaged in two public debates with libertarian conservatives. At the website “The American Compass,” Deneen debated with former CKE Restaurants CEO Andrew Puzder on the social responsibilities of corporations, in which Deneen argued for greater civic, consumer, and environmental corporate responsibility. He also debated conservative columnist Jonah Goldberg on the consequences of liberalism, arguing that liberalism had increased social isolation, political fragmentation, and economic inequality.

Publications

Books

• The Odyssey of Political Theory (Rowman & Littlefield, 2000)
• Democratic Faith (Princeton University Press, 2005)
• Conserving America? Thoughts on Present Discontents (St. Augustine Press, 2016)
• Why Liberalism Failed (Yale University Press, 2018)

External links

• Official website