Foreword / James Davison Hunter and John M. Owen IV -- Introduction: the end of liberalism -- Unsustainable liberalism -- Uniting individualism and statism -- Liberalism as anticulture -- Technology and the loss of liberty -- Liberalism against liberal arts -- The new aristocracy -- The degradation of citizenship -- Conclusion: liberty after liberalism.

"Of the three dominant ideologies of the twentieth century--fascism, communism, and liberalism--only the last remains. This has created a peculiar situation in which liberalism’s proponents tend to forget that it is an ideology and not the natural end-state of human political evolution. As Patrick Deneen argues in this provocative book, liberalism is built on a foundation of contradictions: it trumpets equal rights while fostering incomparable material inequality; its legitimacy rests on consent, yet it discourages civic commitments in favor of privatism; and in its pursuit of individual autonomy, it has given rise to the most far-reaching, comprehensive state system in human history.Here, Deneen offers an astringent warning that the centripetal forces now at work on our political culture are not superficial flaws but inherent features of a system whose success is generating its own failure."--Publisher's description.