11 Quotes by Patrick J. Deneen

Rather than promoting unrealistic standards for behavior - especially self-limitation - that could at best be unreliably achieved, Machiavelli propsed grounding a political philosophy upon readily observable human behaviors of pride, selfishness, greed, and the quest for glory.

Among the greatest challenges facing humanity is the ability to survive progress.

To be free, above all, was to be free from enslavement to one’s own basest desires, which could never be fulfilled, and the pursuit of which could only foster ceaseless craving and discontent.

This is liberalism’s most fundamental wager: the replacement of one unequal and unjust system with another system enshrining inequality that would be achieved not by oppression and violence but with the population’s full acquiescence, premised on the ongoing delivery of increasing material prosperity along with the theoretical possibility of class mobility.

We are, he argues, becoming more shallow, not simply in a superficial way, but physiologically. The internet is making us dumber.2.

The “noble lie” proposes a story by which the denizens of the “ideal regime” proposed by Socrates at once believe in their fundamental equality as members of a common family and in the natural basis of their inequality.

What is conventionally called a populist revolution is better described as a global antimanagerial revolution.

Preserved in discrete human inheritances – arts, literature, music, architecture, history, law, religion – culture expands the human experience of time, making both the past and the future present to creatures who otherwise experience only the present moment.

Our main political choices come down to which depersonalized mechanism will purportedly advance our freedom and security – the space of the market, which collects our billions upon billions of choices to provide for our wants and needs without demanding from us any specific thought or intention about the wants and needs of others; or the liberal state, which establishes depersonalized procedures and mechanisms for the wants and needs of others that remain insufficiently addressed by the market.