Phillip Muñoz argues that the Founders believed that freedom came with responsibilities, and that rights were concomitant with duties.

Sustaining American Liberalism 

in Principle and Practice

by Vincent Phillip Muñoz

While we should reject misguided claims that our founders adopted political voluntarism, we should follow suggestions for strengthening civic life--and thereby sustain American liberalism--through local government, families, churches, and other civic associations.

In his response to my critique of his First Things article "Unsustainable Liberalism," my colleague Patrick Deneen says I do not adequately address his primary criticism of liberalism. Let me try again.
Deneen traces the ultimate cause of America's problems back to the belief that political legitimacy is derived from the voluntary choice of citizens. "Political voluntarism," he writes, "eventually pervades all human relationships, including those of family, locality, and religion." Under liberalism, he continues, "our basic outlook becomes one in which all relationships are subject to the perpetual calculus [of] whether they will redound to my personal benefit." In Deneen's story, the American founders adopted a voluntaristic conception of politics, which, over time, leads us to become calculating utility maximizers incapable of exercising moral virtue, sustaining healthy marriages, or worshipping God properly.
Moreover, liberalism, he says, leads us to fail to recognize and respect nature's teleological order. It replaces respect for human nature and natural limits with an ethic of technological domination that seeks to dominate nature in the service of material gratification. In Deneen's retelling, the "joyless quest for joy" becomes the descent into degeneration.
This is a serious indictment and, if true, one would probably join Deneen's condemnation of America's founding principles. In fact, what he says is true . . . of Hollywood. It is not true of America as a whole, and it is certainly not true of our founding principles. Deneen misstates these principles while committing himself to an excessively deterministic view of politics. His misdiagnosis of the causes of our problems leads to his unnecessarily radical, and deeply ironic, call for "vision" and "imagination." Still, I do believe my good friend offers keen awareness of what troubles our culture and, in his more restrained and moderate recommendations, points the way toward a more sustainable liberalism.
What are Our Founding Principles?

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