Are there similarities between Sandel and Deneen

ChatGPT said:

yes — but with an important caveat

the similarity is:

both diagnose liberalism as a hollowing force:

• both think the liberal imaginary (autonomous chooser, unencumbered self, thin procedural public reason, neutrality) erodes substantive goods and shared life.

• both think that the “self” we imagine in liberal theory is abstract, and produces pathologies.

That is the core overlap.

Sandel’s Against the proceduralist Rawlsian move:
→ “persons are always situated — you can’t strip them of thick attachments and then ask them to deliberate as if they were unencumbered.”

Deneen’s Against the liberal anthropology move:
→ “liberalism is built on a false anthropology, and its telos is anti-culture and anti-virtue.”

That’s the same chronicity-diagnosis:
liberalism tells us a false story about what beings we are.

the difference is:

Sandel is still inside the “Harvard communitarian” project.
He speaks as a reformer of liberalism.
He wants to tweak the normative machinery.

Deneen wants to leave liberalism behind.

Sandel tries to “thicken” the moral substrate of liberalism.
He believes there is something redeemable via public reasoning about the good.

Deneen thinks the whole thing is a civilizational mistake.
He is a post-liberal and sees the future as regime change.

bluntly:

Sandel is still a neighbor of Rawls.

Deneen wants to end Rawls.

and there’s one more subtle difference:

Sandel’s critique has a Habermasian flavor:
→ deliberative democracy, shared reasoning, contestation of goods.

Deneen’s has a quasi-Aristotelian-catholic integralist flavor:
→ moral formation, virtue rehabilitation, community through authority.

Sandel wants a more conversational polity.

Deneen wants a different anthropology producing a different order.

So yes, same diagnosis of liberal thinness.

But Sandel is immanent critique.
Deneen is transcendent critique.

Does Deneen want to rewrite the constitution?

ChatGPT said:

in effect: yes.
but he rarely says the sentence “we must rewrite the constitution” in that explicit a register.

what he says in Regime Change (and what he means) is that the constitutional order as it stands is liberal — and thus structurally self-destructive. And therefore the “solution” is a transition to a post-liberal constitutional order.

that is constitutional refounding.

you can’t get to what he wants merely by new personnel and new rhetoric.
he wants a different regime.

and “regime” for him is not a gov-of-the-day word.
he uses it in the Aristotelian sense:
a constitution = a way of life embodied in institutions and offices and habits and aims.

so: would Deneen support

• a constitutional convention?

• redefinition of the separation of powers?

• changes to judicial review?

• changes to the Bill of Rights?

he’s not fully detailed (he likes to stay on anthropological/diagnostic altitude) but the logic of Regime Change lands there.

he wants a new substantive telos (common good / virtue) constitutionalized.

and that means:
the current constitution’s grounding logic must be abandoned.

the current U.S. constitution is built on:

• Lockean property

• rights-bearing individuals

• limited government protecting liberty

Deneen thinks that anthropology is false and disintegrative.

so yes: Deneen wants constitutional transformation.

Just not the technocrat’s “let’s add an amendment.”
He wants a replacement regime anthropology instantiated into law and institution.

that’s a deeper thing than “rewrite some clauses.”
it’s closer to:

→ found a new constitutional order.

You said:

Are there historical or contemporary examples of the kind of society he wants.

ChatGPT said:

there is no single canonical real-world example that is the Deneen vision.

and this is actually very telling.

he is gesturing toward an imagined retrieval of pre-liberal forms — but he never names a society that embodied his preferred synthesis without also carrying other “baggage” he can’t accept.

1) he sometimes gestures to Ancient Greek polis life

because Aristotle is his root.
but Greek polities were slave societies and hierarchical and not Christian.

2) he sometimes gestures to medieval Christendom

because he wants virtue cultivation, teleology, embeddedness.
but he cannot embrace actual medieval society with its ethnic hierarchies and papal imperium intact.

3) he sometimes uses the “small town America / Amish / front porch” imagery

but that is completely parasitic on a modern legal/market infrastructure.

4) his real inspirations are imaginal not empirical

he is painting a portrait of a society that treats:

• virtue as formative

• community as prior to individual choice

• the state as a moral educator*

• but NOT (in his words) authoritarian in the modern statist sense

You could say:

he wants an Aristotelian polis with modern technology but without liberal anthropology.

closest contemporary analogues?

maybe:

• Orban’s “illiberal democracy” (but Deneen hedges, because it’s too obviously majoritarian power politics)

• Catholic integralist thought experiments (he’s friend-adjacent to this intellectual milieu, but hedges for plausible deniability)

• some conservative communitarian localism experiments in the U.S. (Front Porch Republic universe)

but none of those is exactly “what he wants.”

the core truth:

the regime Deneen wants has never existed in the form he wants it.

because he wants:

• the communal norms of pre-liberal societies

• the moral anthropology of classical virtue ethics

• the civilizational project of Christianity

• AND the administrative state’s capacity to shape a population

but WITHOUT the liberal constraints that are what made the modern administrative state possible.

It’s a synthetic chimera.

Deneen is not actually doing historical retrieval.

He is doing post-liberal speculative political theology in constitutional language.

final way to put it:

if Rawls is a utopian of procedure,
Deneen is a utopian of re-embedded life.

Neither of their ideal regimes has ever fully existed.

Deneen’s fantasy of polity is a never-was modernity that somehow still got Aristotle + Christianity + national sovereignty + modern administration but not liberal anthropology.

You said:

_Catholic integralist thought experiments_ (he’s friend-adjacent to this intellectual milieu, but hedges for plausible deniability)

So he may or may not be theocratic?

ChatGPT said:

he is theocrat-adjacent without ever calling himself a theocrat.

And to be fair: the word “theocracy” is not one he would own.
He dislikes liberalism’s entire vocabulary for naming and policing that boundary.

So we have to be precise:

1) Deneen wants Christianity to be the civilizational source code

He believes the anthropology of the human that the West needs is Christian → not neutral.

That is already a move away from a liberal secular state toward something more like:

a civilizational Christianity structured into political life.

2) He is adjacent to, sympathetic with, and in the same room as integralists

Integralism is theocratic in the Thomistic Catholic sense:
political power subordinated to spiritual authority.

He has collaborated with / platformed / praised people who are literally explicit integralists.

But he is careful to not directly affirm the full “subordination to the Church” clause.

3) he wants a state that forms souls

this is the line that matters.

Liberalism says the state should not define the good life.

Deneen says the state must shape citizens toward the good.

That is not procedural neutrality.
That is moral tutelage via political authority.

so is he a theocrat?

If “theocrat” means:

someone who wants institutionalized formal church rule over the state

→ probably not (he would deny this, and his proposals do not explicitly call for it)

If “theocrat” means:

someone who wants the state to enforce a religiously-derived anthropology of the human, with political authority shaping virtue on that basis

→ yes, functionally yes.
That’s his project.

the accurate answer is:

Deneen is not an integralist, but he is post-liberal in a way that gives integralism a legitimate seat at the table.
He is creating a political space where integralism becomes plausible again.

He is not “theocracy” in the old-fashioned sense.

He is “post-liberal Christian moral constitutionalism that needs a strong state to produce virtue.”

That is low-key theocratic.
Just in modern clothes.

You said:

* AND the administrative state’s _capacity_ to shape a population but WITHOUT the liberal constraints that are what made the modern administrative state possible.

How can this circle be squared

ChatGPT said:

ah.
that circle cannot be squared without one of two moves.

Deneen has to tacitly do one of the following:

either

1. smuggle liberal technique back in while rhetorically rejecting liberal anthropology

or

2. import pre-liberal authority structures (religion / tradition / hierarchy) to legitimate the use of state technique

There is no third.

Because the modern administrative state is literally the outgrowth of:

• impersonal law

• rationalized bureaucracy

• standardization

• rights claims

• population statistics

• universalism

You can’t get that machinery from Aristotle or Aquinas.
You get it from Weber and the liberal juridical revolution.

So Deneen’s project requires:

A) keep the machinery (bureaucracy, state capacity, coercive regulation)

B) replace the software (anthropology) with Aristotelian-Christian teleology

This is what all post-liberalisms run up against.

Who legitimated the machinery in the first place?
→ the very liberal logic he despises.

So Deneen must:

• retain the administrative state

• deny the ontology that justifies its authority

Thus his only options (if he wants coherence) are:

Option 1: build a new metaphysics that authorizes the admin state

e.g. “the state is the organ of the common good / virtue”

= Catholic integralism lite
(a new “throne and altar” but in policy clothing)

Option 2: deny that the modern administrative state is necessary

i.e. become a genuine small-is-beautiful localist

= Amish / Kuyperian subsidiarity world
(but he doesn’t really want that because he wants national power)

Meaning: he can’t have both

(a state that shapes the population)
and
(a non-liberal justification for the state)
without drifting into moral authoritarianism.

This is the rub.

The liberal state was legitimized by the idea that it does not dictate the good.

If Deneen wants it to dictate the good, he has to provide a substantive source of final authority.

Which leads to:

• Church

• Nation

• Tradition

• Sovereign Leader

Pick one or combine them.

Those are the only historically attested ways to legitimate a moralizing state.

And that’s why the circle looks square-able rhetorically,
but analytically:
it collapses into soft theocracy or soft nationalism.