Patrick J. Deneen

Is Academic Freedom Inherently Good?

Rarely do opinion pieces in college newspapers emerge as subjects of national controversy, but a recent essay by Harvard student Sandra Y.L. Korn has generated widespread denunciation among conservatives. Her essay—entitled “The Doctrine of Academic Freedom"*—argues for...

Equality, Tyranny, and Despotism in Democracy: Remembering Alexis de Tocqueville

Among conservatives and liberals alike, the French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville is perhaps the most often quoted political theorist of democracy. In the words of Harvey Mansfield and Delba Winthrop, Tocqueville’s two-volume work Democracy in America (1835) remains...

The Progressive Liberal Tradition

There is legitimate debate over whether “progressive liberalism” constitutes a radical departure from, and even betrayal of, the basic commitments of “classical liberalism,” or whether it represents the next logical step in liberalism’s development. Both positions have...

The Case for “Serfdom,” Rightly Understood

Last Saturday I had the honor of addressing the 50th anniversary meeting of the Philadelphia Society. The title of the meeting was “The Road Ahead—Serfdom or Liberty?” My remarks sought to suggest that conservatives should be...

Tocqueville on the Individualist Roots of Progressivism

A friend once described conservatives as people who agreed about one important thing–that at some point in the past, something went terribly wrong. After that, conservatives splinter into untold numbers of camps, since they disagree ferociously about the...

Counterfeiting Conservatism

Michael Oakeshott Conservatism is the “ism” that came into being to resist the existence of “isms.” This makes for potentially insurmountable challenges: How to evince a political belief that avoids the rigidity...

Homer and Political Philosophy

The Odyssey of Political Theory: The Politics of Departure and Return, by Patrick J. Deneen Patrick Deneen, an assistant professor of political science at Princeton University, sets out...

Who Closed the American Mind?: Allan Bloom, Burke, Multiculturalism

One crisp morning 26 years ago I was walking across the campus of the University of Chicago, where I had just enrolled as a first-year...

Patriotic Vision: At Home in a World Made Strange

  Patriotism exhibits an unarticulated agreement with Aristotle’s great and challenging assertion that “all men are by nature political animals.” According to Aristotle, humanity in full flourishing requires the goods that a political community affords—the...