Willful Liberalism in America

The ethos of freedom in question is an agonal ethos, an ethos that celebrates freedom not, or not exclusively, as unobstructed or unopposed thinking and doing but as a triumph over conflicting and antagonistic forces within the self (and between or among selves).

—Richard E. Flathman, Freedom and its Conditions¹

Nature is upheld by antagonism. Passions, resistance, danger, are educators. We acquire the strength we have overcome.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Conduct of Life²

This essay explores problems of personalism and impersonalism in Richard Flathman’s theory of willful liberalism and Ralph Waldo Emerson’s theory of self-reliance. The idea that these problems—and these thinkers—might be productively thought in relation to each other springs from personal experience and unanswered questions. The relevant experience was writing a dissertation on the traditions of American political thought under Flathman’s supervision, and the relevant questions revolve around Flathman’s general avoidance of these traditions—with the important exception of William James—in his influential efforts to reconstruct an alternative tradition of liberalism focused on individual agency and will rather than founded on rule and law.

More specifically, the relevant questions revolve around Flathman’s avoidance of Emerson, whom Harold Bloom has described as “our central man” and George Kateb dubs “the American Shakespeare.”³ Emerson’s work would seem to provide a rich resource for Flathman’s strong voluntarism and its focus on the individual as “actor, initiator, producer, creator,” rather than the explainer, justifier, and deliberator celebrated in so much contemporary democratic theory.⁴ Like Flathman’s willful liberalism, Emerson’s self-reliance offers an antidote to the moralism of so much contemporary political theory and its commitment to the prescriptive voice. In thinking about what I might offer a symposium commemorating Flathman’s work, I continually returned to a series of questions. Couldn’t Emerson’s work contribute to Flathman’s project to “broaden and enrich the theoretical resources available to thinking under the ideological rubric of liberalism?”⁵ Isn’t Emerson, moreover, an important part of the constellation of thinkers that Flathman has engaged at length in this project? Emerson directly influenced Nietzsche and James, for example, and, like Flathman, Emerson had an almost unending admiration for Montaigne. Both Emerson and Flathman strongly endorsed Montaigne’s dislike of theoretical “inculcation,” which Montaigne described as the practice of “repeating, in connection with every subject, in full length or breadth, the principles and premises for general use, and restating ever anew their common and universal arguments and reasons.”⁶ Considering such important intellectual proximities, why was Flathman’s engagement with Emerson limited to a few scattered, but mostly admiring, remarks about Emerson as a lover of “individuality, plurality, and freedom,” a theorist of self-enactment, or a nineteenth-century proponent of a vitalistic Lebensphilosophie?⁷ The avoidance is all the more thought-provoking once Flathman came to describe willful liberalism as a form of perfectionism.

Of course, the absence of encounter itself is not much to go on, and by itself it hardly qualifies as avoidance. Why should Flathman or anyone else account for the theories he doesn’t engage, for the theorists he decided to pass by without dialectical embrace? “To do is to forego,” as Nietzsche would have it. But there is also something more anecdotal that provokes these questions for me. As a student of Flathman’s working on American political thought I had a distinct impression that Flathman deeply disapproved of elements of Emerson’s thinking, not to mention that of his followers Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau. This essay has given me the opportunity to consider some of Flathman’s possible reasons for doing so.

The purpose of this essay, then, is to stage in a preliminary way an uninitiated encounter between Flathman’s strong voluntarist liberalism and Emerson’s theory of self reliance (as self-overcoming), a staging that will first help account for Flathman’s avoidance of Emerson, but that I hope will also suggest a productive and critical line of inquiry for those interested in Flathman’s important attempts to construct a theory—and a tradition—of willful liberalism. I will...