The political-science professor and leading postliberal thinker talks to Michael E. Hartmann more about “Moonlight” Graham, as well as “bounded philanthropy” and misanthropy, Madisonian pluralism and Tocquevillian association, and localism, including in giving.
Patrick J. Deneen is a professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame who teaches and writes about the history of political thought, liberalism, conservatism, and constitutionalism. Before joining Notre Dame in 2012, Deneen taught politics at Princeton University and government at Georgetown University, where he founded the Tocqueville Forum on the Roots of American Democracy. Earlier, from 1995 to 1997, he served as a special adviser to and speechwriter for Joseph Duffey, director of the U.S. Information Agency during the Clinton administration.
Deneen is regarded as an intellectual leader of “postliberalism”—which considers the contemporary liberal order’s emphasis on individual autonomy to be corrosive of community and traditional institutions like the family, religious and civic institutions, and localities, as well as of shared moral norms on which a healthy society depends. It urges a deeper appreciation of those institutions and their roles—and advocates a more-prominent inclusion of them in public discourse and policy debate about how best to pursue the common good, social solidarity, tradition, and human flourishing.
Some conservative critics worry that postliberalism’s rejection of liberalism goes too far, threatening individual liberty and the American constitutional tradition; postliberals counter that liberalism itself has undermined the institutions and ways of life necessary to sustain that liberty and tradition.
Deneen is the author of six and the co-editor of three books. He also co-edited the “Radical Conservatisms” book series that includes Jeremy Beer‘s 2015 The Philanthropic Revolution: An Alternative History of American Charity. Deneen’s books include 2018’s Why Liberalism Failed, an early version of the title for which was suggested by Beer and which was famously praised by Barack Obama, and 2023’s Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future.
In Deneen’s new American Odyssey: What An Ancient Story Reveals About Our Divided Souls— published by Creed & Culture, which was co-founded by Beer—he offers a compelling and entertaining account of a recurring American tension between rootedness and restlessness that maps unusually well onto issues in and surrounding philanthropy.
The pleasant Deneen was kind enough to join me for a recorded conversation last month. In the first part of our discussion, which is here, he talks about American Odyssey, the innate American tension between rootedness and restlessness, perfectibility and progressivism, utopianism, and how all these impulses have shaped grantmaking, as well as what “Moonlight” Graham in Field of Dreams might teach us, including about localism and the meaning of philanthropy.
The just more than 22-and-a-half-minute video below is the second part, during which we talk more about Graham, “bounded philanthropy” and misanthropy, Madisonian pluralism and Tocquevillian association, and localism, including in giving.
Referring to Graham, who returned to Chisholm, Minn., after his brief baseball career to become a small-town doctor and community pillar for the rest of his life, Deneen tells me, “This is—you want to talk about philanthropy—the love of humans.”
For Deneen, Graham’s life and work, which included regularly providing free medical services to needy families, parallels Odysseus’s rejection of immortality. Graham represents all the largely anonymous American citizens who quietly devote their lives to making particular towns and cities better. Deneen contrasts this with “the abstract love of humans” of contemporary philanthropy. Graham’s is “the love of actual human beings,” he says.
“This sense of philanthropy is, I would say, it’s a bounded philanthropy. It’s connected to real things, real people, real places,” he continues. “In this way, it doesn’t spin into … utopian perfectibility, potentially quite catastrophically damaging forms of philanthropy that seek transformation.”
Transformation-seeking philanthropy can be based in “misanthropy, a kind of dislike or even hatred of the current condition of humanity,” according to Deneen. “If philanthropy is born of misanthropy, it’s probably not philanthropy. It’s probably not born of a love of humanity.”
Chisholm, Minn., and Alexandria, Va.
Asked how we should think about James Madison’s pluralism being increasingly invoked to defend the nonprofit sector—almost conflating it with the American civil society Alexis de Tocqueville described and lauded—against criticism of the sector, Deneen compares and contrasts Madisonian pluralism with Tocquevillian association.
Most large nonprofit and interest-group organizations that effect what the defenders are contemplating as Madisonian pluralism—the Alexandria offices, mailing lists, P.O. boxes, etc.—constitute “maybe one form of how philanthropy operates today,” Deneen says. Tocquevillian association is something different. It involves actual people interacting in actual places, changing one another and developing some sense of common good—as opposed to competing organizations representing preexisting interests. Moonlight Graham was in and of Chisholm, Minn., for instance, without “a drop box or P.O. box in Alexandria, Virginia.”
Localities are “where the ‘primary schools’ of citizenship are being enacted and performed,” he says.
It doesn’t surprise me, and I don’t think it would surprise Tocqueville, that we’re not particularly talented in citizenship these days. If anything, we are very deprived in our ability to act like citizens, what he called the “art of association.”
And secondly, we’re not very good philanthropists. I mean, I hesitate to say this because I think there are still a lot of Moonlight Grahams out there. I think we’re still blessed with those people. I know a few here, but I think they are fewer and farther between than they used to be. Because again, we tend to suck up and sort of “strip mine” those people and then send them off to work in finance and consulting and bureaucracies.
Little and local
Exhorted to offer advice and guidance to grantmakers and givers, Deneen suggests—consistent with American Odyssey in general and the particular example of Moonlight Graham’s role in it—support of “that little struggling classical school in your town” rather than adding millions to Notre Dame, Harvard, Yale, or another immensely wealthy institution. At the small school, “your gift would be transformational” in a way that it wouldn’t be at the larger institution.
The likelihood of making a difference is “so immensely higher and more impactful and transformative” in such a local setting than in the way “so much of philanthropy tends to be … shifted to the big, wealthy, global” institutions.
