A liberal society thwarts the Aristotelian-Thomistic understanding of human flourishing, because liberalism fundamentally redefines what it means to be human.

Your-Daimonia is Not Eudaimonia: 

A Response to Robert Miller

by J. L. Liedl

"...one can work within the liberal system with the intention of loosening, slowly but surely, its grip on American society. In essence, one can be in a liberal regime without being of it. One can be pragmatic without being a liberal, all the while keeping his eyes affixed to the revitalization of authentic political communities in which eudaimonia, properly understood, is fully attainable."

Spring has sprung, and with it comes another academic eager to scribe a defense on behalf of the American experiment. Joining the ranks of professors Vincent Muñoz and Nathan Schlueter, Robert Miller of the University of Iowa College of Law has offered his own critique of Notre Dame professor Patrick Deneen’s assertion that America was built upon a foundation of “unsustainable liberalism.”

Originally detailed in a 2012 essay for First Things, Deneen describes this ideology as an abrupt departure from classical and medieval thought, one that enshrined anthropological individualism and voluntarism as the foundational premises of politics, reconceived man apart from and opposed to nature, and ultimately informs many of the cultural, political, and economic blights that plague American society today. From this perspective, the problem isn’t found on the left or the right of the American political spectrum; rather, the continuum itself, liberalism writ large, is the source of most of our modern troubles.

Needless to say, Deneen’s thesis is a controversial one, and has drawn its share of willing detractors, of whom Miller is just the latest. But whereas Muñozdefends the merits of the ideological liberalism implicit in the American founding, and Schlueter makes the case that the founders successfully fused Enlightenment philosophy with pre-modern thought into some kind of “natural law liberalism,” Professor Miller provides an as-of-yet unexplored angle: namely, that one can support a liberal political system without necessarily accepting liberal principles as axiomatic.

The difference, he tells us, is that of one between a pragmatic liberal and aphilosophical liberal. Thus, Miller, a self-declared “eudaimonist” in the Aristotelian-Thomistic mold, supports America’s liberal political system and institutions not on the basis of Lockean rights or Rawls’ theory of justice, as a philosophical liberal would be inclined to do, but because liberalism serves as the best model for maintaining peace and promoting individual well-being in a pluralistic society such as our own. For Miller, supporting America’s liberal political ethos isn’t a matter of principle, but of prudence. Pushing back against Deneen, Miller makes the case that for someone genuinely concerned with eudaimonia, that is, with human flourishing, accepting a liberal political order is not only a plausible stance, but the only justifiable position for genuine eudaimonists in contemporary America.

Miller’s argument is fatally flawed for two significant reasons. 

• First, he continuously understates the implicit pervasiveness of liberal ideology in American society, and, perhaps most tellingly, in his own thought. His thesis is intact only if liberalism is neutral, an ideology that causes other conceptions of man and society no harm, and that is clearly not the case. 
• Secondly, Miller consistently mischaracterizes the Aristotelian understanding of eudaimonia (or its Thomistic counterpart, felicitas), depriving this concept of its inherentlycommunal element in order to render it compatible with an atomized, individualistic, liberal society such as our own. 

The end result is an argument that both fails to convince the reader that liberal ideology is not alive and well in the US, and does equally little to rebut the premise that eudaimonia, at least as Aquinas described it, is a pursuit that is actively thwarted by the liberal ethos that permeates American society.

Liberalism is to America as Water is to the Sea ....

Eudaimonia, or Lack Thereof, In America ....

Pragmatic Eudaimonists in a Liberal Society ......

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Read more: ethikapolitika.org