The Giving Review: A conversation with Notre Dame’s Patrick J. Deneen – Part 1

This interview first appeared in the Giving Review

Patrick J. Deneen is a professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame who teaches and writes about the history of political thought, liberalism, conservatism, and constitutionalism. Before joining Notre Dame in 2012, Deneen taught politics at Princeton University and government at Georgetown University, where he founded the Tocqueville Forum on the Roots of American Democracy. Earlier, from 1995 to 1997, he served as a special adviser to and speechwriter for Joseph Duffey, director of the U.S. Information Agency during the Clinton administration.

Deneen is regarded as an intellectual leader of “postliberalism”—which considers the contemporary liberal order’s emphasis on individual autonomy to be corrosive of community and traditional institutions like the family, religious and civic institutions, and localities, as well as of shared moral norms on which a healthy society depends. It urges a deeper appreciation of those institutions and their roles—and advocates a more-prominent inclusion of them in public discourse and policy debate about how best to pursue the common good, social solidarity, tradition, and human flourishing.

Some conservative critics worry that postliberalism’s rejection of liberalism goes too far, threatening individual liberty and the American constitutional tradition; postliberals counter that liberalism itself has undermined the institutions and ways of life necessary to sustain that liberty and tradition.

Deneen is the author of six and the co-editor of three books. He also co-edited the “Radical Conservatisms” book series that includes Jeremy Beer‘s 2015 The Philanthropic Revolution: An Alternative History of American Charity. Deneen’s books include 2018’s Why Liberalism Failed, an early version of the title for which was suggested by Beer and which was famously praised by Barack Obama, and 2023’s Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future.

In Deneen’s new American Odyssey: What An Ancient Story Reveals About Our Divided Souls— published by Creed & Culture, which was co-founded by Beer—he offers a compelling and entertaining account of a recurring American tension between rootedness and restlessness that maps unusually well onto issues in and surrounding philanthropy.

The pleasant Deneen was kind enough to join me for a recorded conversation last month. The just more than 23-and-a-half-minute video below is the first part of our discussion; the second is here.

During the first part, he talks about American Odyssey, the innate American tension between rootedness and restlessness, perfectibility and progressivism, utopianism, and how all these impulses have shaped grantmaking, as well as what “Moonlight” Graham in Field of Dreams might teach us, including about localism and the meaning of philanthropy.

“We are more homeless at the moment than we are at home,” Deneen tells me, including in the “real sense of that term literally. I think a deep part of our political division right now is the growing sense of not being at home, especially by younger generations not being able to settle and buy homes, and make homes, and start families.

“Then there’s another way in which that homelessness manifests itself,” he says, “which I think is especially reflected in the kind of embrace of, or unavoidability of, contemporary forms of technology …. Even when we’re home, we tend to be on screens that have us elsewhere. We tend to be outside of our environments, at least mentally, psychically.”

In this respect, Americans are exhibiting an intensified version of the anxiety and restlessness that Alexis de Tocqueville identified in the 19^th Century, according to Deneen, who writes about Tocqueville and the tension between this rootedness of a home and this restlessness in his introduction to American Odyssey. The tension is intrinsic to the American character, and thus to its odyssey.

Since its founding, America has understood itself as something radically new—a novus ordo seclorum—Deneen describes. Tocqueville saw that even amid American prosperity, there was an underlying anxiety. People continually compare themselves with others, fear being overtaken, and pursue something better that lies just ahead. In this inherently progressive conception of time, the past is continually rendered obsolete; the present is merely a way station toward an improved future.

Asked whether large-scale, establishment philanthropy is an institutional expression of precisely this American restlessness—since its beginning in the Progressive Era, it has been preoccupied with transformation, scale, systems change, and improvement, rather than preservation—Deneen disclaims any expertise in philanthropy, but largely accepts the premise.

Citing Beer’s work, Deneen contrasts an older conception of simple, everyday charity—face-to-face, person-to-person, rooted in particular communities and ways of life—with modern philanthropy, expertly organized around progressive transformation and overcoming the “parochial” limitations of particular places.

The past, the present, and the perfectible future

Which brings the conversation to another topic about which Tocqueville wrote, and Deneen in turn writes in American Odyssey—Americans’ belief in perfectibility. Restlessness and perfectibility are “two qualities of American life that” Tocqueville sees as “really distinct from the Europe from which he’s coming,” Deneen says. They “are quite related. That restlessness—that sense there’s something beyond, outside, something around the corner that might be better—feeds into this belief in perfectibility.”

Here, too, isn’t establishment philanthropy an expression of precisely this belief in perfectibility?—a belief in and desire for it, after all, gave rise to progressive philanthropy’s “original sin” of supporting eugenics. Tocqueville wrote decades before the Progressive Era, Deneen answers, but “[a]lready, Tocqueville is seeing dynamics in the American character that we could say” showed up in that era. There may have been a “full realization of, an institutionalization of, these impulses in the Progressive Era. …

“This goes to and draws on this transformation of time that I think underlies a lot of what Tocqueville is seeing,” he adds later. Tocqueville “comes from a world in which the past and the present are so similar, notwithstanding the break of the French Revolution,” in which “one anticipates that the future will also be quite similar. … There’s a kind of continuity between” human beings’ “three experiences of time”—which are “the course of our life, and the course of studying that which precedes our life, and anticipating what comes after our life.”

In America, Tocqueville encounters “a world in which that’s all fractured,” Deneen describes. “The past is something that almost becomes a foreign country. It’s no longer relevant. The older you are, the less you are likely to know about the world that you live in now.” It’s “a complete inversion of a traditional society in which the older you are, the wiser you’ll be.” It’s “the younger people who are going to be more knowledgeable or at least more familiar with the transformations that take place.” There is “thus the belief that succeeding generations represent improvements on humanity—actual perfection, the greater moral, physical perfection of human beings … the Darwinian embrace of this idea of perfectibility.”

This sense of perfectibility might have fed the Progressive Era’s embrace of the idea of eugenics, he continues—“to take control of our own biology as a primary object of human progress, manipulating and ultimately shaping our own evolutionary destiny … Those talking about AI today describe it in precisely those terms. …

“Since Francis Bacon first imagined the possibility of making ourselves immortal, making ourselves disease-free, making ourselves into effectively God-like creatures,” Deneen goes on,

that has been the ambition—which is to reverse the fall, reverse the conditions of the fall, reverse the curse of the fall and thus, in some ways, is precisely … what resulted in our punishment in the Garden of Eden. … To have the knowledge of God and then to apply that knowledge to ourselves was very much the ambition.

Sounds, well, Utopian, no? Deneen invokes Thomas More’s pun: utopia is simultaneously the “good place” and “no place.” “I would say that the modern project of perfectibility eliminates the idea that this is ‘no place’ and rather thinks that ‘good place’ is going to be a real place in the very near future,” he says.

Odyssey and staying

The conversation turns from large-scale, transformative philanthropy toward localism, through Deneen’s discussion of his inclusion in American Odyssey of Archibald “Moonlight” Graham in Field of Dreams. Explaining the origin of American Odyssey, Deneen says the coincidence of Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey adaptation with America’s 250th anniversary suggested to him a deeper connection between Homer’s story and the American experience. American exploration itself can historically be understood in Odyssean terms, and Deneen uses American texts and films to explore themes of journeying, homecoming, and character.

Deneen believes that one important innovation of the Odyssey is its elevation of ordinary people as possible bearers of heroic virtue. Moonlight Graham in Field of Dreams provides an inspiring cinematic example. Graham’s short baseball career—one inning in the majors, without ever batting—ultimately matters less than the life he actually lived in Chisholm, Minn. It’s the place to where he returned afterwards, where he stayed, and the people of which he served as a small-town doctor and community pillar for the rest of his days.

Graham’s love of humankind—philanthropy—is expressed through that staying, that serving, and that community participation. He is the kind of figure Beer’s account of local charity would valorize.

In the conversation’s second part, Deneen talks more about Graham, “bounded philanthropy” and misanthropy, Madisonian pluralism and Tocquevillian association, and localism, including in giving.