Patrick J. Deneen (born 1964) is an American political theorist, author, and public intellectual, who serves as a professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame. In 2018, he came to prominence with the publishing of his book, Why Liberalism Failed.
Life and career
Born in 1964, Deneen was educated at Rutgers University, earning a B.A. in English literature (1986), and began his Ph.D. in political science at the University of Chicago's Committee on Social Thought, studying there for one year before returning to Rutgers (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 five 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 multiple languages: German, French, Polish, Spanish, Arabic, Croatian, Lithuanian, Korean, Japanese, Hungarian, Czech, and Portuguese. Deneen's 2023 book Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future, discusses how liberalism can be replaced with a form of post-liberal conservatism that strives for the "common good."
From 1995 to 1997, he was Speechwriter and Special Advisor to Joseph Duffey, the director of the United States Information Agency appointed by President Bill 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 to 2012. The Tocqueville Forum was founded in 2006 "to promote civic knowledge and promote inquiry". The Tocqueville Forum hosted speakers on the Georgetown campus including Associate Justice Antonin Scalia, "Red Tory" Phillip Blond, New York Times columnist David Brooks, and 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 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.