The postliberal war on economics (Phil Magness, Feb 06, 2026, The Argument)
In a 2007 blog post, Deneen predicted an impending societal collapse from environmental degradation, noting “in all likelihood we’ll experience some severe civilizational dislocation in coming months and years as a result of peak oil.”
Peak Oil Theory was a trendy doctrine from the 2000s that foresaw an imminent natural resource depletion, whereupon fossil fuel energy production would enter into a rapid and irreversible decline. Widespread shortages and economic collapse would soon follow as our oil-dependent economy could no longer sustain consumption at current levels.
It has since fallen by the wayside among environmentalists as new fossil fuel exploration and better extraction technologies vastly expanded the world’s estimated oil reserves. Green activists today have shifted their arguments to emphasize climate change as their leading concern, even arguing for intentional fossil fuel sequestration on the grounds that the Earth’s atmosphere cannot handle the emissions that would arise from currently known oil reserves.
But for Deneen, the snapshot claims of late 2000s Peak Oil Theory provided the “eureka” moment that led him to develop postliberalism. He recounted this much on his blog:
[W]hen I learned about “peak oil” – that is, the imminent depletion of roughly half the world’s oil reserves, and by far the easiest accessible and cheapest stuff – it finally made sense to me why a political philosophy that I had long held to be fundamentally false – modern liberalism – nevertheless had prospered for roughly the past 100 years and had gone into hyper-drive over the past half-century.
Modern liberalism – the philosophy premised upon a belief in individual autonomy, one that rejected the centrality of culture and tradition, that eschewed the goal or aim of cultivation toward the good established by dint of (human) nature itself, that regarded all groups and communities as arbitrarily formed and therefore alterable at will, that emphasized the primacy of economic growth as a precondition of the good society and upon that base developed a theory of progress (material as well as moral), and one that valorized the human will itself as the source of sufficient justification for the human mastery of nature, including human nature (e.g., biotechnological improvement of the species) – is against nature, and therefore ought not to have “worked.”
In this telling, the posited resource limitations of Peak Oil Theory revealed not just the source of the coming environmental disaster, but its culpable party, which is to say liberalism — and specifically economic liberalism — itself.
The explosion of economic prosperity from the 18th-century stirrings of the Industrial Revolution to the present day depended upon fossil fuel in the literal sense. In Deneen’s reasoning, that fuel came from a limited resource that would soon be depleted. The Great Enrichment of the modern era, and indeed humanity’s escape from the multi-thousand-year Malthusian Trap of hunger and stagnation, only came about through artificial means that elevated humanity’s economic consumption beyond its “natural” state.
From Darwinism to Marxism to PostLiberalism, no bad idea has done more damage than Malthusianism.
