But what makes the book such a sobering read is the way the author regards Western democracy’s “progressive” ideologies as a contributor to the systemic failure.

Mr. Deneen is a trenchant critic of what he calls a “liberal anticulture.” He characterizes the current orthodoxy of humanities teaching as a “pastless present in which the future is a foreign land,” where the “hermeneutics of suspicion” expose the culture of the past as a “repository of repression.” Professors, “adopting a jargon comprehensible only to ‘experts,’ ” show their worth by “destroying the thing they studied” to redress past injustices to specific groups.

The broad-brush approach of “Why Liberalism Failed” is short on specifics. But the author might have chosen, for instance, out of countless examples, David Porter’s essay, “A Wanton Chase in a Foreign Place: Hogarth and the Gendering of Exoticism in the Eighteenth Century Interior,” a recommended text for art history courses at British colleges, such as the Open University. Mr. Porter focuses on the second engraving in the series “Marriage A-la-Mode,” by the 18th-century British painter and printmaker, William Hogarth. It shows an unhappy husband and wife in a fashionable interior. Hogarth satirizes the wife for her penchant for Oriental porcelain, because, according to Mr. Porter, to grant the validity of Chinese taste would “legitimate a regime not only of female aesthetic self-determination, but also of the autonomy of female desire more generally conceived.”

And so Hogarth joins the ever-lengthening list of misogynistic dead male artists. This doesn’t exactly encourage the study of his art — or having his prints on your wall. The last set of Hogarth’s six “Marriage A-la-Mode” engravings to appear at auction failed to sell last May at Weschler’s of Washington D.C. against a low estimate of $1,500, according to Artnet.

What Mr. Deneen identifies as liberal societies’ “pervasive amnesia about the past” has further undermined the traditional culture of collecting. “Salvator Mundi” might have achieved a one-off, landmark price (in an auction of contemporary art), but generally old masters are now far less fashionable with the superrich than they were in the days of the Czar of Russia. On Feb. 1, Sotheby’s annual evening sale of master paintings in New York raised $48.4 million, a seemingly substantial total, until one recalls that the company’s biannual evening auction of contemporary art in November raised $310.2 million.

Today’s art world, in fact, offers one of the most conspicuous manifestations of what Mr. Deneen identifies as “the extreme presentism of the contemporary era,” as well as its “new aristocracy” of economic winners.