Alain de Benoist's Against Liberalism (Counter-Currents, 2019) presents a fundamental challenge to the dominant political paradigm of our time, not from the familiar angles of Left or Right, but from a deeper philosophical critique that questions liberalism's very conception of human nature and social organisation. His argument deserves serious consideration not because it offers easy answers, but because it identifies contradictions within liberal democracy that may ultimately undermine the very values liberals claim to defend.
At the heart of de Benoist's critique lies a profound objection to liberalism's foundational myth: the abstract, autonomous individual who exists prior to society and enters into social contracts purely for personal advantage. This philosophical anthropology, inherited from thinkers like Hobbes and Locke, treats human beings as essentially atomised units whose primary relationship to others is transactional.
This conception is not merely theoretical, it has practical consequences that reshape society in liberalism's image. When we begin with the premise that individuals are naturally separate and self-sufficient, we create institutions that reinforce this separation. Markets become the primary mechanism for human interaction, reducing complex social relationships to economic exchanges. Politics becomes a process of aggregating individual preferences rather than deliberating about common goods.
The result is what de Benoist identifies as the gradual dissolution of all intermediate social bonds, family, community, region, tradition, and culture, that historically provided meaning, identity, and belonging. These are swept away not by deliberate destruction but by being rendered irrelevant in a system that recognises only individual rights and market efficiency.
De Benoist's analysis reveals how liberal market logic extends far beyond economics to become a comprehensive worldview that commodifies every aspect of human existence. When market principles become the template for all social organisation, everything must be justified in terms of individual choice, competition, and efficiency.
This market fundamentalism creates what Karl Polanyi called "the great transformation," the subordination of society to economic logic rather than the embedding of economics within social relationships. Labour becomes a commodity to be bought and sold. Land becomes real estate divorced from place-based communities. Culture becomes lifestyle choices to be consumed. Even democracy becomes a marketplace where voters shop for policies that serve their individual interests.
The liberal promise is that this universal commodification will maximise individual freedom and choice. But de Benoist argues that it actually produces a profound impoverishment of human experience. When everything is reduced to market transactions, we lose access to forms of value that cannot be priced: honour, duty, belonging, tradition, sacred meaning, and collective purpose.
Perhaps de Benoist's most penetrating insight concerns the tension between liberalism and democracy. While liberal democracy presents itself as a unified system, these two elements often work at cross-purposes. Democracy implies collective decision-making about shared concerns, while liberalism prioritises individual rights that cannot be overridden by majority will.
This tension manifests in practice as the progressive removal of more and more areas of life from democratic deliberation. Economic policy is handed over to independent central banks and market mechanisms. Social issues are resolved by courts applying abstract rights rather than popular deliberation. International agreements constrain domestic democratic choices. The result is what de Benoist calls "soft totalitarianism," not the direct oppression of traditional authoritarianism, but the elimination of spaces where genuine political choice is possible.
Contemporary liberal democracy increasingly resembles what Sheldon Wolin termed "managed democracy," a system that maintains democratic forms while evacuating democratic substance. Citizens vote, but their choices are constrained by economic imperatives, constitutional limitations, international agreements, and technocratic expert knowledge that ordinary people cannot challenge. Democracy becomes a ritual that legitimises outcomes predetermined by market logic and technocratic expertise.
Liberalism presents itself as the defender of diversity and pluralism, but de Benoist argues that it actually produces a profound homogenisation of human experience. The liberal individual may choose from many lifestyle options, but all these choices are structured by the same underlying logic of individual preference satisfaction and market competition.
This creates what we might call "diversity within uniformity," surface differences that mask deeper convergence around liberal values. Whether you choose to be religious or secular, traditional or progressive, urban or rural, you must do so as an individual making consumer choices in a marketplace of options. The substantive differences between ways of life are gradually eroded as all must conform to liberal procedural requirements.
Traditional communities that organize themselves around non-liberal principles, whether based on kinship, religion, custom, or place, find themselves under constant pressure to justify their practices in terms of individual rights and rational choice. Those that resist this translation are marginalised as backward, oppressive, or irrational.
Liberal theory claims to provide a neutral framework within which different conceptions of the good life can coexist. But de Benoist reveals this neutrality as itself a substantive philosophical position that privileges certain forms of life over others. The liberal state may not officially endorse particular religions or cultural practices, but it shapes society in ways that systematically advantage some ways of life while undermining others.
Communities that depend on traditional authority, collective decision-making, or non-market forms of exchange, find themselves disadvantaged in a system designed around individual rights and market competition. The liberal claim to neutrality thus masks what is actually a quite specific vision of human flourishing, one that valorises choice, mobility, rational calculation, and individual achievement while devaluing rootedness, tradition, authority, and collective solidarity.
This false neutrality extends to liberalism's approach to cultural difference. Multiculturalism is celebrated, but only insofar as different cultures conform to liberal principles of individual rights and democratic procedures. Cultural practices that conflict with liberal values are not truly tolerated but must be reformed or abandoned.
De Benoist's critique extends to liberalism's relationship with the natural world, which follows the same logic of commodification that governs human relationships. Nature becomes "natural resources" to be efficiently allocated through market mechanisms. Environmental problems are solved through technological innovation and market incentives rather than fundamental changes in our relationship to the natural world.
This approach treats environmental degradation as a technical problem to be solved while maintaining the basic structure of globalised capitalism. But de Benoist suggests that ecological crisis reflects deeper problems with liberalism's anthropocentrism and its reduction of value to human utility. A genuine ecological politics would require recovering forms of value and relationship that liberalism has systematically undermined.
De Benoist's critique might seem to lead to despair or reaction, but his intent is neither nostalgic nor destructive. Rather, he seeks to clear intellectual space for thinking beyond liberalism's conceptual limitations. This involves recovering suppressed traditions of political thought that begin from different premises about human nature and social organisation.
This might include: federalism that respects genuine regional and cultural differences; forms of democracy that prioritise deliberation about common goods rather than aggregation of individual preferences; economic arrangements that embed markets within social relationships rather than subordinating society to market logic; and cultural policies that preserve meaningful diversity rather than reducing difference to lifestyle choices.
Such alternatives would not mean abandoning legitimate liberal insights about the dangers of arbitrary power or the importance of protecting individuals from oppression. But they would situate these concerns within broader frameworks that also recognise human needs for community, meaning, and belonging that pure liberalism cannot satisfy.
https://counter-currents.com/2025/06/a-critical-look-at-the-philosophical-roots-of-liberalism/