post-liberalism as working class conservatism: a conversation with patrick deneen

Political philosopher Patrick Deneen’s conversation with Russian political philosopher Boris Mezhuev offers valuable insights into post-liberalism, its meaning and future prospects.  It was our colleague Boris Mezhuev at the Russian e-zine Russkaya Idea who first suggested this dialogue, and Russkaya Idea was also first to publish it. Here are Mezhuev’s introductory remarks to this landmark conversation which is published in full, below:
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“As we have written in a number of previous publications on our website, Patrick Deneen, author of the 2018 bestselling book Why Liberalism Failed, is considered the intellectual leader of so-called post-liberalism, a movement that challenges the principles of the liberal philosophy of the Enlightenment, the system of thought on which the political system of the United States and other Western democracies is formally based.  The liberal understanding of freedom as freedom from external obligations, as the severing of social ties not only with one’s fellow citizens, but also with past and future generations, inevitably leads to the moral and, subsequently, the political alienation of the elites and the common man.  As for its ideological design, it offers, on the one hand, the philosophy of the free market and, on the other, a philosophy of freely choosing one’s own identity. To both these individualisms Deneen counterposes what he calls in the interview we have published ‘working class conservatism.’ Professor Deneen hopes that Russian and American proponents of a socially oriented conservatism will be able, through dialogue, to find a common language. We hope so too, and we thank our colleagues from the Simone Weil Center, Susannah Black and Paul Grenier, for their help in organizing this conversation.”

Here.