Who Were the Sea Peoples?

UPDATE: Sorry, I just saw I failed to link to Field's essay! Corrected. Laura K. Field, in a five-part essay attempting to trash Patrick Deneen's Why Liberalism Failed , accuses Deneen of sloppiness. For instance, she writes: "Bacon was not merely interested in 'torturing' nature to discover her secrets, as Deneen repeatedly alleges." I just re-checked my copy of Deneen, and: He never says Bacon was "merely" interested in "torturing" nature. This just happens to be the aspect of Bacon's thought he is interested in. The book is not a intellectual biography of Bacon, nor even an intellectual history of liberalism. So why would we expect a full picture of Bacon as a thinker? That itself might take up the whole book, and Deneen would never get around to discussing liberalism! He does mention this notion... just once . Not "repeatedly." Field writes: "I do not know where Deneen got the idea that Francis Bacon had no interest...

and no, he does not deny liberalism's accomplishments: "First, the achievements of liberalism must be acknowledged, and the desire to 'return' to a preliberal age must be eschewed. We must build upon those achievements while abandoning the foundational reasons for its failures. There can be no going back, only forward." -- Why Liberalism Failed , p. 182 This passage highlights a danger I noted in Oakeshott on Rome and America : while for several centuries Romans simply respected and followed the mos maiorum , the way of the ancestors, when their traditions began to break down, there arose a brand-new traditionalist ideology . Whereas previously Rome's traditions had been followed in an organic way, one which allowed them to also be organically modified, once they began to break down, a faction arose demanding that those traditions be turned into rules , and that those rules must be followed without deviation (and thus without allowing any organic response...

"[For Hobbes] the state is charged with maintaining social stability and preventing a return to natural anarchy... Human beings are thus, by nature, nonrelational creatures, separate and autonomous." -- Patrick Deneed, Why Liberalism Failed , 32 Proto-liberals like Locke and Jefferson and modern liberals like Mises and Rawls all start from a similar place: we are first and foremost human atoms, who only need enter into social groups in so far as it suits our interest to do so. Our original state was as free individuals, who "contracted" into social groups because we saw it was to our advantage. As Deneen notes, "Even marriage, Locke holds, is finally to be understood as a contract whose conditions are temporary and subject to revision..." (33). Or, as Mises put it: "The fundamental social phenomenon is the division of labor and its counterpart human cooperation. "Experience teaches man that cooperative action is more efficient and p...

Collecting some good quotes from Deneen, along with occasional commentary, in the interest of advancing my review, and your consciousness! "Liberalism has drawn down on a preliberal inheritance and resources that at once sustained liberalism but which he cannot replenish" (29-30). It is no sort of comeback to Deneen's view to point to the great material wealth produced by liberalism, since Patrick is quite aware of this wealth himself, and repeatedly acknowledges its existence. But in his view (and mine too) liberalism is analogous to the guy at the gym that has been popping steroids like mad for 10 years, who, when it is pointed out that he is getting himself into deep trouble, replies, "What?! Don't you see all the weight I can lift?" Why, yes we do, and it is the very thing that has raised your bench press poundage into the stratosphere that has gotten you into this fix. This is not to say we might not be wrong, just that it is foolish to point ...

Again, I highly recommend following this course : Deneen is uniformly worth reading. He opens with a very important point: "We are to liberalism as fish are to water: we swim in its currents without necessarily ever stopping to consider what water is." Liberalism is so much a taken-for-granted assumption in our culture that we hardly notice it. So, the right and left in America don't even question the supreme value of "autonomy": they merely disagree on how to best realize it. And when someone who was at one point , say, a libertarian, rejects liberalism as a whole, people tend to be certain he must have just switched to some other form of liberalism. (E.g., "Callahan has become a progressive.") And almost right away, Deneen gets at the heart of the matter: Thus, Locke and Paine reject the idea that tradition, custom, inheritance, or generational ties are a constitutive part of our natures. Rather, we can only understand our true nature by st...