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Rather than reject liberalism for its excesses, we should take up the more modest task of recovering the principles of liberalism once embraced by our founding fathers and Abraham Lincoln.

Our Founding liberal principles aren’t the best invocation against inhuman practices like slavery and abortion because they also produce self-aggrandizement, individualism, willfulness, and a conception of liberty as the absence of constraint.

The solution to the political and moral crisis of our time does not lie in abandoning liberalism or in defending Lockeanism. It rests in the recovery of natural law liberalism—a sustainable public philosophy that is true to reason, to nature, and to Christian belief.

“Natural law liberalism” is a chimera that cannot and does not exist in the American tradition.

To reject the presence of natural law in documents of the Founding era is to embrace both cynicism and romanticism.

While we should reject misguided claims that our founders adopted political voluntarism, we should follow suggestions for strengthening civic life—and thereby sustain American liberalism—through local government, families, churches, and other civic associations.

The Founders’ vision of the “common good” was not the pre-modern natural law conception of an objective human good, but a conception of “mutual advantage” shaped by the social contract framework. This logic of liberalism has driven our country to its current political and cultural problems.

There is no distinctive Catholic political philosophy today, and Robert Reilly’s call to man the battlements of classical liberalism is an attempt to short-circuit the possibility of a real revival of Catholic political thought in America.

When it comes to Christianity, the Enlightenment, and the American Founding, Patrick Deneen and Robert Reilly are both right.

To suppose that the Founders set up a republic to vitiate the virtue on which its existence depended requires the belief that they were either stupid (by creating a Hobbesian regime and not noticing) or immoral (by doing it while cleverly lying about what they were doing). The first in a two-part series.

Nothing has so limited the scope of politics as has Christianity by placing man’s end in the transcendent. The Founders did not think that the summum bonum could be reached through political means, not because they were Hobbesian but because they were Christian. The second in a two-part series.

Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed is a provocative attempt to explain what’s wrong with our culture, how this came to be, and what might be done about it. Although his historical account of liberalism is unpersuasive, he offers a prescient analysis of the current moment and insightful prescriptions for constructive action.

Patrick Deneen poses good questions but begs others. The second installment in the Public Discourse symposium on Why Liberalism Failed.

We are not Hobbesian atoms of self-will, not until liberalism makes us so. Human beings have ever been human by virtue of their relations with others, and by virtue of the bonds of duty and memory that these relations imply.

If we want a different politics, ultimately we must offer a different moral imagination for ourselves, our children, and theirs.

The new antiliberals are not wrong to worry about the dire state of American politics and culture. But they persistently fail to adequately ask, much less clearly answer, three pressing questions that must be part of any adequate treatment of the problem, and they virtually ignore the thoughtful conservative alternatives to antiliberalism that do address these questions.

Conservative critics of “liberalism” are right to identify major flaws in liberal theory. But a deeper appreciation of those flaws should prevent us from blaming the American political tradition for them. Liberal theory is so erroneous that neither the Founders nor any other Americans could ever really put it into practice.

Once we recognize the insufficiency of liberal political theory, we should turn back to classical political philosophy, which offers us a deeper understanding of the American tradition and invaluable guidance in reforming our contemporary politics.

An oddity about our current debates over liberalism and America is that both sides view the American Founding, and thus America, as fundamentally influenced by classical liberal ideology. They only disagree over whether classical liberalism is good or bad. But the historical record shows that liberal ideology was one influence among many, not that it was the definitive one.

Liberal doctrines necessarily require disenfranchising and punishing those who hold rival beliefs. Liberal ideology is jealous, and will have no other gods before it. American conservatives should reject this revolutionary liberalism and the attempts to make it the central principle of our national heritage. We need not deny that liberal ideas influenced the Founding, but we ought to follow our forefathers in tempering them.

A new book systematically defends the American Founding against those who believe it was destined to end in nihilism.

David French, Sohrab Ahmari, and others who are debating the future of conservatism are right to think that the challenges facing our nation are grave. Still, we need not feel forced into cheering for one side or the other, into viewing this as a matter of “teams.” We conservatives need to keep the main focus on ideas, not personalities, and engage each other both robustly and charitably. We need to think prudently about practical steps we should take—here and now, given all the givens—that will promote the common good.