PERHAPS THE MOST ARRESTING sentence in Patrick Deneen’s new book Regime Change: Towards a Postliberal Future is also the only one I noticed in bold type. “What is needed,” this professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame writes, “is the application of Machiavellian means to achieve Aristotelian ends.” That bracing desideratum occurs towards the beginning of the book’s third and concluding section, “What Is To Be Done?”
Many readers will recall that this question was made famous in a pamphlet called What Is to Be Done? Burning Questions of Our Movement. Its author was V. I. Lenin, a man who excelled in the application of Machiavellian means to achieve his own, not quite Aristotelian, ends.
follows Deneen’s 2018 bestseller, , which purports to explain why the Founding Fathers botched the task of providing the United States with a worthy constitution, largely because they relied on the “individualistic” philosophy of John
