The most sustained criticism of liberalism targets not its institutions but its anthropology: the kind of person it presupposes and produces. Critics from the left, the right, and the communitarian centre converge on a single suspicion—that liberal **individualism**, far from liberating persons, leaves them isolated, unequal, and incapable of sustaining the shared meanings that make freedom worthwhile. This is not a complaint about liberty as such. It is a claim about the social conditions under which liberty degenerates into **atomization**, and about what gets lost when a political order treats the unencumbered chooser as the basic unit of moral concern.
The charge has a long pedigree. Karl Marx attacked the liberal rights of man as the rights of the "egoistic man separated from his fellow men and from the community" . A century later, Michael Sandel argued that John Rawls's liberalism rested on a self so stripped of constitutive attachments that it could not be the self anyone actually inhabits . Between those two poles sits a family of critiques that are often bundled together but are analytically distinct: a sociological complaint about social dissolution, a normative complaint about the neglect of community, and a political-economic complaint about the reproduction of **inequality** under formally equal rules.
The Marxist Charge
Rights of the Egoist
Marx's critique in "On the Jewish Question" (1843) is frequently reduced to a slogan, but its structure is precise. He distinguished political emancipation—the granting of equal citizenship—from human emancipation, which would require the overcoming of the social divisions that liberal politics merely formalizes. The rights liberalism celebrates, Marx argued, are rights of separation: the right to property is "the right of self-interest," and it teaches each person to see others not as the realization of freedom but as its limitation . The liberal citizen, in this account, lives a double life: a communal being in the abstract sphere of the state, an isolated egoist in civil society.
This critique has been revived in different registers. Contemporary left critics often look for what one survey calls liberalism's "bad seed"—the internal feature that undermines the values liberalism claims to uphold . Sometimes the seed is its tendency toward social disorganization; sometimes its embrace of a progress that licenses dispossession; sometimes its promotion of an apolitical **individualism** that demobilizes collective action. The common thread is that liberal freedom is real but thin, purchased at the price of the thicker solidarities through which people actually recognize one another.
Complicity with Capital
A more recent variant of the left critique targets not the metaphysics of rights but the political economy of liberal governance. The charge, as Eric MacGilvray summarizes it, is that liberalism is "complicit in the power structures of capitalism and imperialism" . On this view, the neutrality liberalism promises is illusory: a state that refuses to adjudicate between conceptions of the good will default to the distributions produced by markets, and those distributions are anything but neutral. The result is a regime that is formally egalitarian and substantively stratified, in which **inequality** is treated as a fact of nature rather than a political outcome.
Francis Fukuyama, hardly a radical, concedes the force of this line of attack in his 2022 book *Liberalism and Its Discontents*. He notes that progressives now decry liberalism as "neoliberalism," pointing to financial crises and growing **inequality** as evidence that the liberal compromise has broken down . What makes the critique potent is that it does not require rejecting liberal values outright. It asks only that liberals acknowledge that a regime of equal rights can coexist with, and even facilitate, radical disparities of power and resource.
The Marxist and post-Marxist critiques thus converge on a diagnosis that is difficult to dismiss: the liberal subject may be free in law, but the conditions under which that freedom is exercised are shaped by forces liberalism declines to name. Whether one calls this false consciousness or structural injustice, the complaint is that formal equality has served as an alibi for material hierarchy.
Communitarian Objections
The Unencumbered Self
The communitarian critique of the 1980s is often remembered as a quarrel between Sandel and Rawls, but its stakes were broader. Sandel's *Liberalism and the Limits of Justice* (1982) argued that Rawls's original position presupposed a self "antecedently individuated"—a chooser prior to all its ends, capable of standing back from every commitment and evaluating it from nowhere in particular. Sandel's counter-claim was that selves are partly constituted by their attachments: to family, class, nation, and cause. To bracket those attachments for the sake of impartiality is not to achieve neutrality but to misdescribe the persons doing the bracketing .
Amy Gutmann's survey of the debate notes an important shift in inspiration. The communitarian critics of the 1960s drew on Marx; those of the 1980s drew on Aristotle and Hegel . Alasdair MacIntyre's *After Virtue* (1981) and Charles Taylor's essays on atomism supplied the philosophical resources for a critique that was less about economic exploitation than about moral intelligibility. The claim was that liberal theory cannot account for obligations that are not chosen—duties of gratitude, solidarity, and inherited allegiance—and that a politics built on the primacy of choice will erode the very communities that make those obligations meaningful.
Atomization and Its Costs
The concept of **atomization** captures the sociological dimension of the communitarian worry. If persons are conceived primarily as separate rights-bearers, the ties that bind them become optional, revocable, and ultimately fragile. Taylor's critique of "atomistic" liberals charged that they defend the priority of individual rights over society while ignoring that the capacity to choose is itself sustained by social and cultural conditions that no individual creates . Freedom, on this account, is not a natural attribute but an achievement of institutions, traditions, and forms of mutual recognition that liberal theory tends to presuppose rather than defend.
The normative core of **communitarianism** is thus not a demand for conformity but a claim about the sources of moral motivation. MacIntyre's later work and Sandel's *Democracy's Discontent* (1996) both argue that liberal neutrality cannot adequately handle obligations of solidarity and religious duty because it must translate every moral tie into the voluntarist language of choice . The result is a public reason that systematically marginalizes precisely those commitments that many citizens experience as most constitutive of who they are.
Not all of this critique has worn well. Simon Caney's 1992 assessment in *Political Studies* argued that communitarians advance three distinct claims—descriptive, normative, and meta-ethical—and that liberals can accept the first two while the third, which holds that political principles must mirror "shared understandings," is untenable . Rawls himself denied that his theory required the metaphysical self Sandel attributed to him . Yet the debate left a permanent mark: few liberal theorists now write as if the self were wholly prior to its ends, and the language of community and constitutive attachment has entered the liberal vocabulary even where the communitarian label is refused.
The Problem of Inequality
Formal vs. Substantive
One of the sharpest criticisms of liberalism is that its commitment to equality is procedural rather than substantive. Liberalism promises equal concern and respect, equal rights before the law, and equal access to the political process. What it does not promise, and on some accounts cannot coherently promise, is a distribution of resources that would make those equalities meaningful. The result is a regime in which **inequality** is not an anomaly but a predictable output: markets allocate, inheritance transmits, and the formally equal citizen confronts a substantively unequal world.
Fukuyama's analysis of the contemporary discontents of liberalism places this dynamic at the centre. He observes that the breakdown of older class and cultural compromises has left liberalism exposed to attacks from both directions: progressives see neoliberalism's financial crises and widening **inequality** as evidence that the liberal centre cannot deliver on its promises, while conservatives see the elevation of personal autonomy as a threat to the institutions that once anchored social life . The irony is that both critiques accuse liberalism of the same underlying failing—an insufficient account of the conditions that make freedom sustainable.
The Desert Objection
A more philosophically demanding criticism concerns desert. Liberal theories of justice, particularly those in the Rawlsian tradition, tend to treat natural talents and social starting points as morally arbitrary. Rawls famously argued that the distribution of native endowments should be viewed as a common asset, and that inequalities are just only if they benefit the least advantaged. Critics on the right and in the communitarian tradition have seized on this as a denial of individual responsibility. If no one deserves their talents, the argument runs, then no one deserves the rewards those talents command—and the liberal state is left without a principled basis for distinguishing between the deserving and the undeserving.
This is the central thesis of a body of criticism that treats liberalism as internally inconsistent. One representative statement argues that liberal equality misdiagnoses the problem it aims to ameliorate and ends by "denying the plain fact of moral inequality among human beings" . Whether or not one accepts the conclusion, the objection exposes a genuine tension: a theory that brackets desert in the name of fairness may find itself unable to articulate why anyone should be held responsible for anything at all. The liberal response—that responsibility is a political and legal construct rather than a metaphysical fact—is coherent, but it concedes much of the critics' ground.
The inequality critique and the desert critique thus pull in opposite directions. The first says liberalism does too little to correct arbitrary disadvantage; the second says it does too much, dissolving the moral distinctions on which a coherent idea of justice depends. That both criticisms can be made against the same tradition suggests that the discontent runs deeper than any particular policy failure.
Conformity and Its Discontents
The Howe Indictment
Not all criticisms of liberalism come from its enemies. Some of the most biting have come from writers who considered themselves liberals of a certain kind. Irving Howe's 1954 essay "This Age of Conformity" attacked the intellectual culture of Cold War liberalism not for its principles but for its complacency. Howe wrote of a liberalism that "dominates, but without confidence or security," substituting "a blend of complacence and anxiety" for the élan it could no longer summon . The charge was that liberal anti-communism had become a consensus that rewarded caution and penalized radical dissent.
Howe's later quarrels with the New Left of the 1960s illustrate the difficulty of occupying this position. He criticized the student radicals for their disdain of systematic theory and their admiration for Castro, yet he also refused the neoconservative turn taken by former colleagues like Irving Kristol . The episode suggests that the criticism of liberalism from within—from those who accept its core commitments but reject its settled forms—is structurally unstable, perpetually vulnerable to being absorbed by one pole or the other.
The Postliberal Temptation
Fukuyama's warning is that the accumulation of these critiques has produced a political moment in which the extreme versions threaten to displace reform. He distinguishes between critics who seek a rebalancing of liberal principles and those who seek a postliberal order: the former remain within the tradition, the latter would abandon it . The danger is not that liberalism lacks critics but that the critiques have become so totalizing that they leave no room for the imperfect, compromising, institutionally embedded liberalism that actually exists.
This is where the **communitarian** and left critiques converge on a practical problem. Both identify real deficits in liberal theory and practice—deficits of solidarity, of substantive equality, of moral intelligibility. But the remedies they propose often require a degree of shared understanding that pluralistic societies cannot manufacture by decree. The criticism of liberalism is therefore most persuasive as a diagnostic tool and least persuasive as a blueprint. It reveals what liberalism cannot do while leaving open whether any other political order could do better.
The critics themselves are divided on this question. Marxists look forward to a post-capitalist community; communitarians look backward to thicker forms of belonging; postliberals of the right look to authority and inherited identity. What unites them is less a positive program than a shared conviction that the liberal self—autonomous, rights-bearing, procedurally equal—is an inadequate description of how human beings actually live.
What the Critics Get Wrong
The Internal Critique
The most effective response to the critics is not to deny their observations but to dispute their inference. That liberalism produces **atomization** may be true; that it is uniquely responsible for it is not. The dissolution of thick community is a feature of modernity as such—of urbanization, mobility, market exchange, and the pluralism that comes with them. Taylor's own work acknowledges that the atomism he criticizes is bound up with the very freedoms he values . The question is not whether liberalism causes dislocation but whether any alternative could avoid it without restoring forms of coercion that liberalism exists to prevent.
Similarly, the charge that liberalism neglects **inequality** often assumes that a more communitarian or socialist order would do better. That may be true in principle, but the historical record of actually existing alternatives is not encouraging. The liberal response is that the remedy for the failures of liberal institutions is more liberal politics—stronger redistribution, more robust public reason, better mechanisms of accountability—rather than a wholesale rejection of the framework that makes such remedies conceivable.
The Communitarian Rejoinder
Yet the critics have a point that liberals ignore at their peril. Caney's careful parsing of the communitarian argument concluded that the descriptive and normative claims are plausible and can be accepted by liberals, while the meta-ethical claim is untenable . That is a more generous verdict than the debate's tone often suggested. It implies that the real legacy of communitarianism is not a rival theory but a corrective: a reminder that liberal institutions depend on social conditions they cannot themselves generate, and that a politics that treats those conditions as given will eventually find them exhausted.
The **individualism** that critics attack is therefore best understood not as a simple error but as a temptation internal to liberalism itself. Liberalism can be read as a theory of the separate chooser, or as a theory of the institutional conditions under which persons with diverse and often unchosen commitments can live together without domination. The first reading is vulnerable to every critique surveyed here. The second is not immune to criticism, but it is considerably harder to dismantle.
The deepest criticism of liberalism may therefore be that it has never fully decided which of these readings it endorses. Its institutions presume the second; its popular self-understanding often celebrates the first. The gap between them is where the critics do their most effective work.