Date: Tue, 13 Apr 2004 21:35:59 -0700 (PDT)
From: "J.M. Adams" <ringfingers-AT-yahoo.com>
Subject: [postanarchism] Ferguson: "Liberalism's Threat: Review of 'Reflections of a Would-Be Anarchist'"


Liberalism's Threat 

by Kennan Ferguson 

Reviewing Richard Flathman, Reflections of a Would-Be
Anarchist: Ideals and Institutions of Liberalism
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998) 

1.	

     
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rejected liberalism out of hand as hopelessly outdated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. 
2.	

     
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. 
3.	

     
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. 
4.	

     
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. 
5.	

     
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. 
6.	

     
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. 
7.	

     
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 that is Nietzsche's
hallmark; it is instead a moderately pre-formed
liberal subject. Flathman happily takes from Nietzsche
a decisive distrust of the demands of groups,
communities that seeks to alter or destroy certain
kinds of individuals or aspects of selves. But
Nietzsche's concomitant distrust of the ossification
of selves themselves, his suspicion of the standards
of individuals, are left behind. The fulfillment of
self that so concerns Flathman, faithful to the spirit
of Emerson and Thoreau, trumps the self-overcoming so
central to a self politicized in a Nietzschean way. 
8.	

     
What makes Flathman dangerous to traditional
conceptions of liberalism is his recognition of the
costs of social and political activities that travel
under the rubric of liberalism. He deflates the
arguments of those who purport to support plurality
while undermining or destroying those aspects of
pluralism that have any sort of vitality or resistance
to them. He similarly notes the tendency of theorists,
ranging from Rawls to Rorty, to attempt to "settle"
societal identities while pretending to champion
difference. But while he shows how these are
problematic aspects of such a theory, Flathman
ultimately sides with liberalism, notwithstanding
these costs. 
9.	

     
This is most obvious in the middle third of
Reflections, when he discusses the existence and
persistence of law in liberal societies. Flathman does
not accept formalized rule-following blindly; indeed
he criticizes the tendency to naturalize and
universalize law. Using Wittgenstein's Philosophical
Investigations as a touchstone, Flathman identifies
the linkages between unthinking rule-following and the
need for commonality and unity within any system of
meaning. On the one hand, Flathman notes, we want to
be critical of following laws for their purely formal
aspect; we want to censure and perhaps disobey immoral
laws. On the other hand, however, those laws form, in
Oakeshott's words, "a mode of moral association" that
provides the practical groundwork for judgments in a
liberal society. (Like its predecessors, this book
exhibits a somewhat relentless preoccupation with
Michael Oakeshott. While Flathman's loyalty is
laudable, the Oakeshott he gives us resembles
Oakeshott not so much as Flathman--not an unfavorable
substitution.) 
10.	

     
What kind of foothold can the liberal theorist find
against the force of law? For Flathman, the admittedly
difficult but still possible solution is a skeptical
fealty: acceptance of the value of law as a system of
rules, commingled with forthright acknowledgment of
its historical contingency and occasional
capriciousness. This kind of Aristotelian solution is
admittedly unsatisfying, in that it realizes neither
the inclination toward universalism that underlies law
itself nor the faith in free political action that
radical critics of legalism hold. Yet it is
pragmatically supported, argues Flathman, by the
simultaneous necessity of institutions and autonomy.
Though Flathman never phrases it as such, this same
tension underlies his entire liberal project: a
realistic and honest liberal theory will never resolve
the competing demands of institutionalization and
freedom, but will always be negotiating this
opposition. 
11.	

     
This theme is less obvious in Flathman's pure
theorizing than it is in the institutional
instantiations of liberalism that he turns to in the
final third of the book. Flathman examines how
education and policing are institutions structured to
promote certain kinds of political subjects and
repress others. He thus recognizes liberal
institutions as constituted primarily to restrain
freedoms, a state of affairs that his anarchic
tendencies decry. But his anarchic tendencies do not
carry the day, here; he also recognizes that such
institutions are central to a substantively civil
society, and he thus wants to incorporate them into
his political theory. Indeed, he goes even further.
One of the great strengths of this book is a
recognition which Flathman's previous work on
liberalism lacked (as do virtually all books defending
liberalism): the degree of overlap between liberal
theory and the contemporary politics of right
conservativism. 
12.	

     
This linkage is best represented in Flathman's chapter
on the centrality of policing to liberalism. Like most
liberal theorists, Flathman recognizes this activity
as central to a theory of state-individual relations,
but unlike them he conceives of "policing" as not only
the traditional, institutional definition (as the
state-sponsored use of force) but also in its
Foucaultian incarnation (as regimes of meaning which
preclude freedoms in the service of uniformity).
Flathman recognizes that policing is primarily
responsible for most "betrayals and disfigurations" of
liberalism (p. 105). He also recognizes that the
function of policing is to enforce norms, a project
that he finds unpalatable. 
13.	

     
Yet Flathman also recognizes the indispensability of
police as a proper institutional response to others
who would impose on his own rights to free action.
Though he finds himself disliking that activities of
policing, he finds them pragmatically necessary and
functionally appropriate, and thus an important
component of liberal society. He thus ultimately finds
himself finding himself in concordance with
law-and-order types like James Q. Wilson. There are
obvious objections to Flathman's principles--he, like
Wilson, finds the relationship between criminality and
policing to be an unproblematically direct one, he
fails to question the correlation between enforcement
and dissuasion, nor does he wonder how his "own rights
to free action" may be particular--but to insist on
them is to miss a larger point of liberalism: it is
(already) profoundly connected to the orderings that
underlie these institutions. The ideals and
institutions of liberalism reinforce one another,
giving each other anchors and authorizations to action
that would be otherwise lacking. Put most critically,
liberalism thus serves to support pre-existing
political disparities; put most generously, liberalism
is concerned with everyday, real-world problems. 
14.	

     
These connections show how central is Flathman's
liberalism, notwithstanding the misleading title of
the book. Anarchism is one political theory seriously
undertheorized by Flathman. For all the professed
antinomian and anarchistic tendencies that sustain his
love of freedom, Flathman lacks the confident (many
would say "overconfident") optimism in human action
that has provided the foundations of serious
anarchistic thought through Proudhon to Goldman to
Wolf. I cannot think of any anarchistic,
neo-anarchistic, or even "would-be anarchistic"
justifications for supporting "coercive and violent
police interference in the lives and activities of
criminals and others whom I regard as threats to me"
(p. 135), however many such justifications may arise
from liberal theory. Flathman may be haunted by the
ideas of anarchism, but they rarely show through in
his actual idealisms. 
15.	

     
And yet Flathman's undermining of the ideals of
liberalism may well be more subversive to normative
theory than are any anarchistic theories. By
developing a liberalism that by its very nature cannot
be satisfactory, Flathman creates a profoundly
challenging construct: a ceaselessly
self-interrogatory political theory. Its ultimately
unsettled state may well be not only liberalism's
central weakness, but its central strength as well.
The best and most interesting kinds of liberalism, as
well as the best and most interesting selves, are
those that perpetually examine themselves, that are
both internally critical and investigatory, that
cannot find an ultimate resting-point from whence they
can wreak a supercilious form of havoc. Flathman's
liberalism represents one of the best possibilities of
liberalism, which may ultimately prove to be the most
dangerous game a political theory can play. 

Kennan Ferguson's previous essay for Theory & Event,
entitled "How Peoples Get Made," appeared in Volume 1
No. 3. He teaches in the Department of Government and
International Affairs at the University of South
Florida. 

http://muse.jhu.edu.proxy.lib.sfu.ca/journals/theory_and_event/v002/2.3r_ferguson.html


===="Being at one is god-like and good, but human, too human, the 
        mania
     Which insists there is only the One, one country, one truth and
         one way."

- Friedrich Hölderlin, 1799


	
		
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