Patrick J. Deneen is an American political theorist of Irish ancestry, born on July 21, 1964, who grew up in a Catholic household and is a practicing Catholic parishioner at St. Joseph Parish in South Bend, Indiana. He is the son of an insurance executive. He earned a B.A. in English literature from Rutgers University in 1986 (summa cum laude with Honors, student commencement speaker), studied one year at the University of Chicago's Committee on Social Thought, studied at Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland, and received a Ph.D. in political science from Rutgers University in 1995 (dissertation The Odyssey of Political Theory, directed by Wilson Carey McWilliams; recipient of the American Political Science Association's Leo Strauss Award for Best Dissertation in Political Theory). His career includes serving as a speechwriter and special advisor to Joseph Duffey, Director of the United States Information Agency (1995-1997); Assistant Professor of Government at Princeton University; Tsakopoulos-Kounalakis Associate Professor of Government at Georgetown University (2005-2012), where he was also the founding director of the Tocqueville Forum on the Roots of American Democracy (2006-2012); and currently, Professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame, holding the David A. Potenziani Memorial College Chair of Constitutional Studies, and serving as Faculty Associate in the Minor in Constitutional Studies and the Tocqueville Program for Inquiry into Religion and American Public Life. Key publications include The Odyssey of Political Theory (2000), Democratic Faith (2005), Conserving America? Essays on Present Discontents (2016), Why Liberalism Failed (2018, blurbed by Barack Obama), and Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future (2023). He is the founding editor and a contributing editor of Front Porch Republic. Deneen is a leading postliberal thinker and critic of liberalism, arguing it has caused societal fragmentation, erosion of communal bonds, social isolation, political fragmentation, and economic inequality; he advocates for traditional, localized governance, communitarianism, and a postliberal future, influenced by Wilson Carey McWilliams, Wendell Berry, Christopher Lasch, and Alexis de Tocqueville, and associated with Catholic communitarianism. He met Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán in 2019. Controversies include accusations from libertarians like George Will of hostility to American liberal founding principles and individualism, which Deneen countered by emphasizing non-liberal communitarian traditions in America, and a debate with Jonah Goldberg on liberalism's consequences. Personally, he is married to Inge Deneen, has three children, and resides in South Bend, Indiana, in a house formerly owned by Notre Dame legend Edward 'Moose' Krause.