"Conserving America?: Essays on Present Discontents"

Conserving America?: Essays on Present Discontents (Dissident American Thought Today)
by Patrick J. Deneen.
St. Augustines Press; 1 edition (November 30, 2016)

"Opinions about America have taken a decisive turn in the early part of the 21st century. Some 70% of Americans believe that the country is moving in the wrong direction, and half the country thinks that its best days are behind it. Most believe that their children will be less prosperous and have fewer opportunities than previous generations. Evident to all is that the political system is broken and social fabric is fraying, particularly as a growing gap between wealthy haves and left-behind have-nots increases, a hostile divide widens between faithful and secular, and deep disagreement persists over America's role in the world. Wealthy Americans continue to build gated enclaves in and around select cities where they congregate, while growing numbers of Christians compare our times to those of the late Roman empire, and ponder a fundamental withdrawal from wider American society into updated forms of Benedictine monastic communities. The signs of the times suggest that much is wrong with America. This collection of thematic essays by Notre Dame political theorist and public intellectual Patrick Deneen addresses the questions, is there something worth conserving in America, and if so, is America capable of conservation? Can a nation founded in a revolutionary moment that led to the founding of the first liberal nation be thought capable of sustaining and passing on virtues and practices that ennoble? Or is America inherently a nation that idolizes the new over the old, license over ordered liberty, and hedonism over self-rule? Can America conserve what is worth keeping for it to remain--or even become--a Republic?"

Extended Debate: Robert R. Reilly and Patrick Deneen

• Did the Founders Build Better or Worse Than They Knew?, by Jeffrey S. What's Wrong With The World 10/29/17.
• Fools or Scoundrels? A Response to Patrick Deneen, by Robert R. Reilly. Public Discourse 10/16/17. "To suppose that the Founders set up a republic to vitiate the virtue on which its existence depended requires the belief that they were either stupid (by creating a Hobbesian regime and not noticing) or immoral (by doing it while cleverly lying about what they were doing)." The first in a two-part series.
• Christianity and American Founding Principles: A Response to Patrick Deneen and Robert Reilly, by S. Adam Seagrave. Public Discourse 10/3/17. "When it comes to Christianity, the Enlightenment, and the American Founding, Patrick Deneen and Robert Reilly are both right."
• Corrupting the Youth? A Response to Reilly, by Patrick J. Deneen. The Public Discourse 09/19/17. "There is no distinctive Catholic political philosophy today, and Robert Reilly’s call to man the battlements of classical liberalism is an attempt to short-circuit the possibility of a real revival of Catholic political thought in America."
• For God and Country by Robert Reilley. Claremont Review of Books 07/31/17.

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Reviews and Related Discussions

• America, What’s Left of It: A Conversation with Patrick Deneen. Patrick Deneen joins this edition of Liberty Law Talk to discuss his latest book, Conserving America? Essays on Present Discontents. Law and Liberty February 2015.
• Review: Conserving America? Essays on Present Discontents, by Lee Trepanier. Voegelin View 08/24/17.
• Conserving America: On the Recovery of Political Theory, by Brian Jones. The Imaginative Conservative 05/23/17.
• Conservatism in America: A long-read Q&A with professor of political thought Patrick Deneen, with James Pethokoukis. American Enterprise Institute. 06/29/17.
• On Not Conserving Liberalism, by Mark Mason The University Bookman Winter 2017.