Patrick Deneen, Liberal Democracy, and Viktor Orbán

Patrick Deneen, Liberal Democracy, and Viktor Orbán

Patrick Deneen's critique of liberalism extends considerably beyond the concerns about loneliness he expressed at the Hannah Arendt Forum.

In his influential 2018 book Why Liberalism Failed, Deneen argued that liberalism has failed not because it betrayed its founding principles, but because it fulfilled them. By emphasizing individual autonomy, personal choice, and liberation from inherited obligations, liberalism has, in his account, weakened families, religious communities, traditions, and the institutions necessary for human flourishing.

Deneen has increasingly associated himself with post-liberal political movements, including those inspired by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.

In July and August 2025, Deneen participated in discussions at MCC Feszt in Esztergom, Hungary, including a panel on post-liberalism with Chad Pecknold, Gladden Pappin, and István Kiss.

The participants challenged the liberal political order and discussed Hungary's emphasis on national sovereignty, traditional families, religion, and border protection as an alternative. Deneen has previously described Hungary's government as an example for American conservatives.

Orbán explicitly embraces the description "illiberal democracy," arguing that democratic government need not rest upon liberal individualism. His critics, however, contend that his government has weakened judicial independence, media pluralism, and institutional checks on executive power.

Orban was resoundingly defeated earlier this year, but despite Orbán’s political setback, Deneen has not publicly renounced his support for Orbán’s model. In interviews and writings, he continues to frame liberalism as having “failed” in undermining social cohesion and national belonging, and he envisions a “post liberal future” rooted in traditional, communitarian, and conservative principles. 

This background creates an important tension with Deneen's Forum address. Arendt warned that loneliness and mass society could prepare the ground for totalitarian domination. Deneen draws upon that warning to criticize liberal individualism, while expressing sympathy for a political alternative whose concentration of power raises its own questions about freedom and pluralism.

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Friendship in Politics on Display

Roger Berkowitz opened the Forum by arguing that political friendship means sharing a world with people whose convictions differ profoundly from our own. He invited Patrick Deneen, whose political philosophy challenges some of the liberal commitments that Arendt's defenders hold dear. 

The invitation itself becomes an example of the solidarity that is the theme of this year's Forum. Deneen's talk was an interesting take on the theme of Solidarity.  

Patrick Deneen on Loneliness, Liberalism, and the Threat of Totalitarianism

 

Patrick Deneen on Loneliness, Liberalism, and the Threat of Totalitarianism

The 20th Hannah Arendt Forum, Bard College — Thursday, October 15, 2026

Patrick Deneen, political philosopher at the University of Notre Dame and prominent critic of modern liberalism, addressed the Hannah Arendt Forum on Thursday with a warning about the growing loneliness and social isolation of modern society. Drawing on the writings of Kurt Vonnegut and Hannah Arendt, Deneen argued that the erosion of human relationships threatens not only individual happiness but also the survival of political freedom.

Deneen began by acknowledging Arendt's influence on his intellectual development. Since graduate school, he explained, her writings have served as a North Star in his thinking about politics and its contemporary crises.

He then turned to a fellow Indiana resident, Kurt Vonnegut. Deneen, originally from Connecticut, has lived in Indiana for fifteen years. Vonnegut, born in Indianapolis, repeatedly explored the costs of modern civilization, particularly the loneliness produced by the dissolution of traditional communities.

Vonnegut was immersed in the horror of war. Captured by the Germans during World War II in the freezing Hell of the Battle of the Bulge, he was taken to Dresden the day before the firebombing of that city. He survived the inferno in a meat processing plant, slaughterhouse five, under the city. More than 25,000 Germans died in the attack.  The firestorm and its aftermath  profoundly shaped his writing. Vonnegut's most famous book is Slaughterhouse Five about the Dresden bombing. Yet Deneen argued that Vonnegut ultimately identified loneliness as one of humanity's greatest modern afflictions.

In a commencement address at Smith College, Vonnegut provocatively described loneliness rather than cardiovascular disease as America's leading killer.

His 1976 novel Slapstick, or Lonesome No More! explored the same concern. Vonnegut drew inspiration from anthropologist Robert Redfield's concept of the "folk society," a relatively small, stable community held together by kinship, shared history, inherited traditions, and relationships extending across generations.

Vonnegut believed human beings naturally longed for such communities. Their disappearance left people increasingly isolated despite the apparent freedoms and material benefits of modern life.

Deneen argued that contemporary social science has repeatedly confirmed this deterioration of human connections. Americans are less likely than previous generations to marry, have children, participate in religious communities, join civic associations, or maintain extensive personal relationships.

Trust has declined, while social media has expanded contact without necessarily providing meaningful human connection.

He cited the U.S. Surgeon General's report on loneliness and isolation, which associated loneliness with a 26 percent increased risk of premature death and social isolation with a 29 percent increase. The report compared the mortality risks associated with insufficient social connection to those of smoking fifteen cigarettes daily.

Deneen jokingly suggested that perhaps people should smoke cigarettes with their friends. 

But the consequences of loneliness extend beyond physical and psychological health. Here Deneen turned to Hannah Arendt and The Origins of Totalitarianism.

He urged his audience to read the final pages of Arendt's monumental work, where she examined the conditions that make totalitarian domination possible.

Arendt recognized that totalitarian movements do not simply impose themselves upon healthy societies. They emerge within societies whose traditional relationships and institutions have already deteriorated.

Individuals who once belonged to families, associations, religious communities, and political organizations become members of an anonymous mass society. Their isolation makes them vulnerable to movements promising belonging, meaning, and collective identity.

Deneen quoted Arendt's warning that loneliness, once largely confined to marginal circumstances such as old age, had become an everyday experience for enormous numbers of people.

For Arendt, this transformation was politically dangerous. The isolated individual, deprived of meaningful relationships and a place in the common world, becomes susceptible to totalitarian domination.

Deneen suggested that modern liberal societies should take this warning seriously rather than congratulate themselves on having escaped the authoritarian catastrophes of the twentieth century.

The very freedoms that liberal societies celebrate may coexist with forms of social disintegration that undermine the foundations of political liberty.

He then considered Arendt's admiration for the ancient Greek polis, the political community in which citizens appeared before one another, spoke, acted, and created a shared public world. 

The polis was not simply an administrative arrangement. It was a place where human actions acquired meaning through their recognition and remembrance by others.

Deneen compared Arendt's polis with Vonnegut's folk society. Both represented forms of human association that gave individuals a place within a larger community and connected their lives to a shared history.

Yet Deneen emphasized that neither thinker was simply nostalgic for an imagined golden age. Vonnegut did not propose recreating traditional village life, nor did Arendt advocate restoring ancient Athens.

Both recognized the achievements of modern freedom while questioning whether liberal societies had adequately preserved the relationships that make freedom meaningful.

Their challenge was to recover forms of association capable of counteracting modern loneliness without abandoning the genuine accomplishments of liberal civilization.

Deneen's argument is a provocative contribution to the Forum's theme of solidarity. Solidarity cannot exist among people who have lost the habits, institutions, and relationships that allow them to recognize one another as members of a common world.

His warning was that loneliness is not merely an unfortunate personal condition. It is a political danger.

A society of increasingly isolated individuals may possess extraordinary material wealth, personal liberty, and technological sophistication while losing the human connections necessary to sustain democratic life.

For Deneen, Vonnegut and Arendt present an unsettling possibility: the greatest threat to a free society did not arise from its enemies, but from the unintended consequences of its own successes.

Solidarity: Roger Berkowitz Opens the 20th Hannah Arendt Forum

 

Roger Berkowitz opened the 20th annual Hannah Arendt Forum at Bard College with a deceptively simple question: “What are we fighting for?” The theme of this year's gathering, Solidarity, grew directly from last year's exploration of joy. Berkowitz argued that joy cannot remain a private experience. Loving the world means accepting responsibility for the people with whom we share it.

We live in an age when solidarity is proclaimed everywhere—with Ukraine, Gaza, Israel, immigrants, workers, and victims of injustice. Yet our common world seems increasingly fractured. Berkowitz asked whether our declarations of solidarity actually bring people together or simply reinforce the divisions between them.

His answer, drawn from Hannah Arendt, was that genuine political solidarity requires friendship. Not friendship understood as intimacy or agreement, but the willingness to share a world with people who think differently, challenge us, and sometimes disappoint us.

Berkowitz distinguished three responses to human suffering: pity, compassion, and friendship.

Pity, he argued, looks down upon suffering from above. Drawing on Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, he described the Grand Inquisitor, who claims to love humanity while denying people their freedom. The Inquisitor offers bread and security in exchange for obedience. His pity becomes an instrument of domination.

Compassion is different. Dostoevsky's Jesus stands silently before the Inquisitor, offering unconditional love rather than judgment or coercion. Berkowitz quoted Augustine: Volo ut sis—“I want you to be.” Compassion recognizes another person's humanity without demanding that the person change.

But compassion alone cannot create political solidarity. It remains personal and largely silent. Politics requires speech, action, and participation in a common world.

Berkowitz turned to Arendt's experiences helping Jewish refugees in Paris during the 1930s. She discovered that refugees needed more than charitable assistance. They needed work, education, games, singing, reading, and discussion—activities through which people could recover their dignity, freedom, and joy.

He also drew on Arendt's On Revolution, contrasting the French Revolution's emphasis on relieving suffering with the American founders' effort to establish institutions of political freedom. Pity for the poor could justify coercion, while republican institutions offered citizens opportunities to speak and act together.

Friendship provides another possibility. Arendt believed that genuine political friendship emerges through conversation, particularly between people who disagree. Friends do not necessarily share opinions. They share a world and try to understand how that world appears to one another.

This does not mean overlooking evil. Berkowitz emphasized Arendt's insistence upon judgment rather than automatic forgiveness or moral condemnation. Some actions make reconciliation impossible. But judgment considers individuals and circumstances rather than dividing humanity into permanent categories of good and evil.

The forum's program of discussion, music, dancing, and shared experiences was intended to demonstrate this understanding of solidarity.

Berkowitz concluded by returning to Augustine, extending “I want you to be” into a political affirmation: “I want us to share a world.”

Solidarity, he argued, is not simply standing against injustice. It is the patient, difficult, and sometimes joyful work of building a common world with people who are different from ourselves.

Last week Berkowitz published A World We Share: Hannah Arendt and the Power of Friendship in a Broken World, a fascinating exploration of Arendt's view of friendship and a life devoted to friendship and her friends.  I reviewed the book here.

A World We Share: Hannah Arendt and the Power of Friendship in a Broken World by Roger Berkowitz--A Review

For several months I have anticipated the new book A World We Share: Hannah Arendt and the Power of Friendship in a Broken World by Roger Berkowitz. I was not disappointed. The book opens with a sad and dramatic episode showing the fragility of friendship. Berkowitz invited a speaker to a conference who, by the time of the conference, had been elected to the German Parliament as a member of Alternativ fur Deutschland (AfD). The conference went well with students engaging with the controversial speaker.  But after the conference, a colleague who Berkowitz considered a friend signed an open letter in The Chronicle of Higher Education condemning him—without calling or in any way getting in touch.

Tensions between friends are precisely a theme of the book. Hannah Arendt lost long-time close friends after publishing an article questioning Zionism after World War II and more so after Ardent published Eichmann in Jerusalem the most condemned and misunderstood of her many books and articles.  Berkowitz knits together the various threads of this sad tale in Chapter 6, echoing his own hurtful experience of a friend who denounced him publicly without any prior private exchange.  At the same time, Arendt’s “Genius for friendship” is also woven through the entire text, maintaining friendship through and beyond negative experiences.  Arendt saw friendship not as romantic love, which fuses two people into one, but as a relationship that preserves each person’s independence based on trust and respect. Friendship allows individuals to “appear before one another as free and distinct beings,” creating the conditions for dialogue, mutual understanding, and the “unity of a plurality” in political community. Which makes friendship a political virtue, modeling the trust and openness necessary for a shared world.

Although I have read all of Arendt’s books and collected essays, I have not read many of her letters.  After reading this book, I moved Between Friends: The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy 1949-1975 to my “To Be Read” shelf.  Berkowitz devotes Chapter 5 of A World We Share to Arendt’s women friends.  In my mind, Arendt seemed very much like Marie Curie in holding a respected place among groups of accomplished men in the gender-segregated world of knowledge.  So, to read about Arendt sharing her complicated life with women navigating the patriarchal world of the mid-century was fascinating. 

For me, the center of the book, the part I most looked forward to reading, is Chapter 7 titled “From Love to Respect”. Why a chapter on Love? For centuries, Love and Friendship have been systematically contrasted (or defined by contrast?) by philosophers. As opposed to love (eros) which means being attracted to the essence of the beloved, the inner self, “…what we respect in a friend is not their inner self but their persona, says Hannah Arendt, the Roman term for the public face through which one’s dignity resounds.” As I read this chapter, I was hearing lines from The Four Loves by C.S. Lewis. In it, he explains the four Greek words for love which we call friendship, eros, family love, and charity. Lewis says the posture of friendship is side by side: two sharing a walk or some activity. They look out into the world and discuss what they see. In Eros, the lovers are face to face: they look at and into each other.  

As Berkowitz states at the opening of chapter 7, “Arendt’s writing does not offer a theory of friendship. She did, however, identify three defining characteristics of friendship: sustained conversation, duration, and respect. … As she wrote, friendship ‘is between two: a cutout of the world.’ … in friendship, two people carve out a space in the world—a homeland of conversation and mutual recognition where truth can appear not as doctrine but as something revealed between them. … Unlike love which can erupt suddenly and fade just as quickly, friendship depends on duration. … the intimacy and trust friendship nurtures cannot be rushed; it requires the slow accumulation of shared experiences and tested trust that develops over years, even decades. … Indeed, friendship is often strongest between those who fundamentally disagree.”

Yet despite those contrasting definitions, both Arendt and Lewis envisage the possibility of a confluence between love and friendship. Arendt describes her husband Heinrich Blucher as the love of her life and her friend. Lewis believed friendship could “turn into love” both metaphorically and actually. The friends turn toward each other when they become lovers. It was another delight of reading this book that I could compare two very different authors I admire very much on the same subject.

The final Chapter of the book titled “Common Ground” ties together the limits and value of friendship.  Berkowitz presents a story about the NPR reporter Zack Mack and his conspiracy theory believing father and how they came to share what they could of their very different lives through shared interests.  The ability to find and share common ground, to forgive, to work together for love of a common world glows at the center of all of Arendt’s works. Through this book I now know that glow is from inside Arendt herself. At the close of the book, I found myself wanting the book to be much longer. Agreeing with C.S. Lewis when he said, “You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.” But I will keep reading Arendt and discussing her works in the Virtual Reading Group, so the discussion, unlike the book, does not end.

 

 

The Square and the Tower by Niall Ferguson--A Review

 

I am accustomed to thinking of modern life as a world of networks. The internet and social media make networks almost impossible to ignore. But in The Square and the Tower, Niall Ferguson argues that networks are not primarily a modern phenomenon. They have always existed, and understanding them can change the way we understand history.

The title comes from Siena, where the open Piazza del Campo—the square—sits beside the Torre del Mangia—the tower. For Ferguson, they represent two different ways human beings organize themselves: networks and hierarchies. The tower is government, church, army, corporation—the formal structures of authority. The square is the less formal world of friendships, families, intellectual circles, merchants, conspirators, correspondents, revolutionaries, and eventually Facebook.

History, Ferguson asserts, has traditionally been written from the tower. We study kings, presidents, generals, governments, and institutions because hierarchies keep records. Networks are harder to see. Yet again and again, networks have changed the world.

Ferguson ranges enormously widely, from the Renaissance and Reformation through the Enlightenment, revolutionary movements, the Rothschild banking network, imperialism, the world wars, the Cold War, and Silicon Valley. Martin Luther did not simply challenge the Catholic Church; his ideas spread through a network made vastly more powerful by the printing press. Revolutionary movements depended upon networks. Financial power depended upon them. So did scientific and intellectual revolutions.

One of Ferguson's most useful ideas is the importance of the highly connected person—the node through which an extraordinary number of relationships pass. Some people matter historically not simply because of their formal position but because they connect people who otherwise would not be connected. 

C.S. Lewis says this brilliantly in his essay "The Inner Ring." He opens the essay with a passage from Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace showing a purple-faced general waiting on a mere captain who was part of an exclusive network.

Power can come from where you stand in a network as much as from where you stand in a hierarchy. That idea immediately made me think of Phillips Payson O'Brien's The Strategists and his portraits of Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Churchill, and Franklin Roosevelt.

Seen through Ferguson's lens, their networks provide an interesting measure of their effectiveness. Hitler and Mussolini created powerful and hateful fascist networks that helped carry them to power. But power increasingly isolated them. Hitler ended in his bunker, surrounded by a shrinking circle while the state and military he commanded collapsed around him. Mussolini similarly lost the network that had sustained him and died violently at the hands of his own countrymen.

Stalin is more complicated. He rose through networks as well as the Communist hierarchy, but his paranoia repeatedly destroyed the human connections around him. He managed during the existential crisis of the German invasion to restrain some of that paranoia and listen to capable military commanders. The Soviet Union survived and eventually defeated Nazi Germany. Afterward, Stalin again descended into increasingly poisonous suspicion and isolation.

Churchill and Roosevelt were the opposite. Both were extraordinary networkers. They cultivated politicians, military leaders, journalists, advisers, friends, and correspondents across decades. During the war they became principal nodes in each other's networks. Their correspondence and personal meetings created a relationship that connected two enormous political and military systems. Roosevelt died in 1945, widely beloved, just before victory in Europe. Churchill lived another twenty years and died one of the most revered figures of the century.

Networks certainly do not explain everything about those five men or the outcome of the Second World War. But Ferguson gave me another way of looking at O'Brien's portraits. The ability to create networks may help people acquire power; the ability to maintain them may help determine how effectively they use it.

That is what I liked most about The Square and the Tower. Ferguson did not merely give me another history. He gave me another way of looking at history.  And those are the history books I value most.

Rereading Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare

 Earlier this year I reread Julius Caesar, probably for the fourth time in forty years. I first encountered the play as an undergraduate, and I can trace something important in my life back to that reading: it led me to Shakespeare. I read Romeo and Juliet in high school but it did not resonate then. Reading Julius Caesar a decade later after seven years in the Army I was enchanted.

I knew almost nothing about Roman history then compared with what I know now. Today I can see everything Shakespeare changed. He compressed events, moved things around, invented conversations, and gave Mark Antony a funeral oration that Antony never delivered, nor could have. The real Anthony was much less cerebral, much more soldier.

None of that diminishes the play for me.

Antony's speech remains my favorite passage in Shakespeare. I have read it again and again, and I still marvel at what happens to those Roman citizens as Antony speaks. "Brutus is an honourable man" begins almost respectfully and gradually becomes devastating. Antony never tells the crowd what to think. He leads them there. It was probably my first great lesson in the power of rhetoric—and in what a writer can do with words.

And Julius Caesar opened the door.

Over the next forty years I kept walking through it. I read the histories, tragedies, comedies, and sonnets. I found Hamlet, Macbeth, and King Lear, hardly original choices for favorites, but I don't feel any need to be original about Shakespeare. They are loved because they deserve to be loved.

What has changed is me.

I read Lear differently five years ago than I could have at thirty. An old man raging against the loss of power, the betrayal of children, the deterioration of the body, and finally death meant one thing when I was an undergraduate. It means something else after four more decades of living. The words haven't changed. I have.

That may be one reason Shakespeare has stayed with me. His characters don't become smaller as I grow older. They become larger. Macbeth's ambition, Hamlet's inner conflict, Lear's terrible pride and grief, Brutus's disastrous idealism—I understand more of them because life has given me more with which to understand them.

Next on my list Julius Caesar is Richard III. For all his flaws, he is a soldier.

There are writers I have admired and writers I have loved. Shakespeare is something beyond either category. He has been part of my reading life for more than forty years.

I began with Julius Caesar as an undergraduate.

I'm still reading him.

And I'm still enchanted.

Partly Strong, Partly Broken by Nathaniel Popkin

 

Nathaniel Popkin’s Partly Strong, Partly Broken is a novel about a Jewish congregation, but it is really about the much larger question of what it means to belong to a community when almost everyone in that community disagrees about what it means to belong to a community. Especially to a Jewish community.

At the center is a lesbian rabbi trying to hold together a congregation filled with competing convictions, grievances, friendships, histories, and political commitments. She is pulled in multiple directions, particularly because of her determination that Jewish responsibility extends beyond the boundaries of the Jewish community. Around her, Popkin creates a collection of wonderfully imperfect people whose relationships unfold through Torah study, book discussions, friendships, sexual relationships, family tensions, and tragedy.

Running through the novel is Cain’s question after killing Abel: “Am I my brother’s keeper?” Popkin never supplies an easy answer. Instead, he keeps asking variations of it. What do Jews owe one another? What do they owe their neighbors? What does a congregation owe the larger community? What does Israel mean to American Jews? And what happens when obligations to one group appear to conflict with obligations to another? I remember the question of Cain coming up in Torah Study in my synagogue.  One guy folded his arms across his chest and said, "Who is my neighbor?"  

One of the pleasures of the novel is that these questions emerge from recognizable Jewish lives, not abstractions. Popkin can be very funny. Theo and Celia spend years as friends before finally becoming lovers after Theo asserts himself in public. After a lot of sex inside a vacation house Celia brings him to, Theo is not sure he wants a blow job by the pool. Throughout the book, the rabbi frets about her relationship with her lover--a Palestinian Arab woman who lives in Israel.  And when the rabbi goes to the beach to have a day alone before the high holy days, she drives her Subaru--of course.

The novel ends just as news of the slaughter on October 7 reaches America.  All of the various conflicts remain unresolved as events in Israel threaten to make every existing division within the congregation deeper. Popkin does not resolve anything. We know that these people are going to continue arguing because the questions they are arguing about cannot be settled. 

I read Partly Strong, Partly Broken while traveling through Europe just before the Jewish High Holy Days, and it made the book personal. I found myself thinking about what kind of Jew I am, what I mean when I call myself a believer, and how much I actually want to belong to any religious community.

Popkin has written an engaging novel about American Jewish life, but also something larger: a novel about the difficult difference between having an identity and accepting the obligations that come with it.

And like the best Jewish arguments, it ends without ending.