In one sense you could say it simply achieved what it set out to do - to liberate people from any unchosen form of life. That's really at the heart of liberalism, the vision of a human being that isn't told what to be or who to be, what kind of job you should have, what your identity should be. This is the ideal, the human who can choose who they are. But the irony is that in order to make this real, we enter a condition in which we cease to really experience this freedom.

Political scientist Patrick J. Deneen examines the impending, inevitable collapse of liberalism - as the victim of its own revolutionary success in creating a society of hyper-individuated actors in a landscape without communal bonds - and calls for pursuing a 'unitary conception' of society and politics beyond the limits of ideology.

Patrick is author of the new book Why Liberalism Failed from Yale University Press.