Matthew Lowery

“A main agent of that liberation becomes commerce, the expansion of opportunities and materials by which not only to realize existing desires but even to create new ones we did not know we had. The state becomes charged with extending the sphere of commerce, particularly with enlarging the range of trade, production, and mobility. The expansion of markets and the infrastructure necessary for that expansion do not result from 'spontaneous order'; rather, they require an extensive and growing state structure, which at times must extract submission from the system's recalcitrant or unwilling participants.”
― Patrick J. Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed

“Individualism and statism advance together, always mutually supportive, and always at the expense of lived and vital relations that stand in contrast to both the starkness of the autonomous individual and the abstraction of our membership in the state.”
― Patrick J. Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed

“Unlike the ancient Romans who, confident in their eternal city, could not imagine a condition after Rome, the rising barbarism within the city forces us now to consider the prospect that a better way awaits.”
― Patrick J. Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed

“As social conditions become more equal, the number of persons increases who, although they are neither rich enough nor powerful enough to exercise any great influence over their fellow-creatures, have nevertheless acquired or retained sufficient education and fortune to satisfy their own wants. They owe nothing to any man, they expect nothing from any man; they acquire the habit of always considering themselves as standing alone, and they are apt to imagine that their whole destiny is in their own hands. Thus not only does democracy make every man forget his ancestors, but it hides his descendants, and separates his contemporaries from him; it throws him back forever upon himself alone, and threatens in the end to confine him entirely within the solitude of his own heart.”
― Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America: Volume 2