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  • Liberalism’s Threat
  • Kennan Ferguson (bio)
Richard Flathman, Reflections of a Would-Be Anarchist: Ideals and Institutions of Liberalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998)

Richard E. Flathman is a dangerous liberal. He is dangerous not only to those who have historically rejected liberalism out of hand as hopelessly outdated or idealistic, though he does force such people to reconsider their objections. He is also dangerous to liberalism itself, for he identifies correlations between it and other theories of the state that other liberal theorists would prefer not to acknowledge, smuggles into it many conceptions of individualism that other liberal theorists would prefer to deny, and, perhaps most importantly, recognizes the contradictory impulses and intellectual paradoxes that keep it from being the coherent, consistent philosophical construct to which other liberal theorists would prefer to desperately cling. Worse, in their eyes, he appears to enjoy doing so.

Flathman’s most recent book, Reflections of a Would-Be Anarchist: Ideals and Institutions of Liberalism, teaches dangerousness even better than it teaches liberalism. In its ability both to answer those critical of the legitimacy of liberalism’s underpinnings and to reproach putative liberals for ignoring much of the complexity of those underpinnings, Reflections poses daunting challenges to liberals and antiliberals alike. It attempts to build a political theory that can answer the objections of the latter while challenging the verities of the former, that can be both institutional and democratic, that can pay proper attention both to common identities and individual differences.

This book is the third in what appears to be Flathman’s liberalism trilogy. Beginning with Toward a Liberalism (Cornell, 1989) and continuing with his justly acclaimed Willful Liberalism (Cornell, 1992), Flathman has constructed a liberalism that attends to the Nietzschean and Wittgensteinian reconfigurations of subjectivity and identity that underlie so much of twentieth- century philosophy. And yet he aspires to do so while protecting the sanctity of individual human action and freedom of association so historically central to liberalism. It is quite a hat trick, and even where Flathman is unsuccessful, his failures are more interesting and stimulating than the successes of most political theorists.

Put most simply, Flathman reconstructs liberalism as an individuality-confirming pluralism. A society pledged to the ideals of individuality, he argues, is a society most likely to construct institutions which allow plurality and encourage personal fulfillment. The groundbreaking (and most interesting) parts of Reflections concern how such a liberalism can be institutionalized. Where many political theorists take care to stay as abstract as possible and avoid seemingly incorrigible problems such as crime and education, Flathman embraces the chance to see how his liberalism plays out.

But the first third of the book is dedicated to a restatement and refinement the theoretical aspects of this liberalism. Flathman contrasts his liberalism with more popular (and better known) subspecies of liberal theory. The first, “agency liberalism,” descends from Montaigne and Mill to Hart and Berlin; it supports the achievement of individual passions and desires within the framework of a state meant to negotiate competing claims. The second, “virtue liberalism,” springs from Kant and Hegel to Rawls and Habermas; it privileges the alleged universality of reason and justice above and beyond particular desires or ambitions. A third possibility, “rights-based liberalism,” Flathman dismisses out-of-hand as a veiled version of either agency or virtue liberalism.

Flathman’s sort of liberalism, by contrast, is familiar to readers of Willful Liberalism: close to agency liberalism, but dedicated to the preservation of personal will (rather than, say, reason) as the underpinning of political action. Nietzsche and William James serve as progenitors of this individualist strain of liberalism, Michael Oakeshott its most prominent contemporary champion. Flathman’s liberalism takes pluralism as a constituent good, freedom of action as a institutional prerequisite, and individual actualization as a teleological aim.

Flathman’s liberalism fits in well within the historical trajectory of American democratic theory. And though he often refers to authors outside that tradition, the more radical anti- liberalism of those authors is undersold. Take Nietzsche, for example: Flathman repeatedly cites him, even champions his criticisms of the confinements that society inflicts upon the individual. But Flathman’s is not the radically contingent subject...

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