In Book II of the Republic, Plato famously declares that “the city is the soul writ large.” Later he offers a taxonomy of soul “types” and the regimes they produce and reflect—aristocratic, timocratic, oligarchic, democratic, and tyrannical souls. But it was left to thinkers like Hobbes, Locke, and Kant to offer a philosophical anthropology appropriate to liberalism. As Jeffrey Church summarizes in Infinite Autonomy, the “self” who provides the raison d’être for liberalism is the individual, the “self-sovereign, rights-bearing person” (p. 1). In recent decades, however, skeptics have broken ranks with the congregation of liberal individualism. Communitarians, progressives, multiculturalists, and postmoderns have challenged the assumptions that undergird the liberal individual, deeming it illusory or subordinating it to the common good. Nonetheless, even if the atomistic individual, modeled on Robinson Crusoe's self-sufficient castaway, seems increasingly illusionary in light of recent findings in the fields of neuroscience, sociology, and philosophy, it is a drastic—and even dangerous—tactic to throw away the individual with the individualist bathwater. Surely, as Alasdair MacIntyre and others have noted, there is a middle way to be carved that recognizes the reality and importance of the individual while rooting individuals within the framework of robust communities of care.

Church's book makes an unlikely but valuable intervention in this thorny debate, announcing itself as a “defense of the individual” (p. 2). It proposes to engage this defense not by further elaborating the received discourses of liberalism but by taking on the titanic task of “harmonizing” the individual and the community. What is surprising about the author’s method is his recourse to two unlikely bedfellows, Hegel and Nietzsche. While Nietzsche's place in a defense of the individual is obvious, Hegel's role is more dubious. Yet the book essays not only to demonstrate Hegel's important contribution to a robust theory of individualism but also to show that Hegel and Nietzsche are “philosophical allies” on questions of selfhood and statehood (p. xi). In other words, Church endeavors to show that Hegel, the rational systematizer and preeminent apologist for the state, and Nietzsche, first among deconstructionists and individualist par excellence, can make a shared contribution to the dynamic tradition of liberalism. The theoretical challenges here are obvious, but Church finds a tenuous alliance between Hegel and Nietzsche with what the author calls the “historical individual.” With this model, he aims to synthesize the “aims of individuality within a historical community” (pp. 22–24). In short, from Hegel and Nietzsche, Church finds a kind of individuality that can withstand the challenges of communitarianism and historicism.

Philosophical bonds between the “evil twins” Hegel and Nietzsche (p. xi) can be illuminated more clearly in historical perspective. As Church points out in Chapter 1, Hegel himself observes that the individual has a history with three broad temporal and conceptual horizons. The individual emerges on the scene as a philosophical response to the premodern emphasis on tradition, authority, and revelation—factors that “stifled the development of human knowledge” by obstructing a direct encounter between the individual mind and the world (p. 10). Thus, rather than illiberal political projects aimed at “cosmic purposes,” Hobbes, Locke, and Hume, among others, sought to liberate the individual by constructing contractarian regimes that permitted individual desires while tempering dangerous passions. By the eighteenth century, Rousseau, Kant, and Fichte had recognized that the premises of this “natural model” of the individual resulted in a contradiction: In liberating the individual from artificial tradition, it had only enslaved the self to animalistic passions and reductive instrumentalism. These thinkers argued that the state should be arranged in a way that harnesses the power of reason to escape natural impulses. However, critics—most notably Hegel and Nietzsche—quickly realized that this “formal model” of the self idolized an abstract, unworldly reason that, at best, yields naive romanticism and, at worst, solipsism. Thus, they proposed a “historical” (or historicized) model of the individual whose undeniable autonomy is nonetheless “always already negotiated through … participation in an ethical community” (pp. 22–24). In the historical model, the self is neither the atomistic, sovereign self of the natural and formal models (whether deploying instrumental or moral reason) nor the non-self of premodernity subordinated to higher communal ends. Clearly, then, Church's historical schematic aims to offer a contemporary mode of navigating between the Scylla of atomism and the Charybdis of communitarianism.

The remaining chapters of Infinite Autonomy are devoted to explicating this “historical model” of the individual as articulated by Nietzsche and Hegel. Because Hegel argues that citizens are mere “accidents” over and against the state's “substance,” Church admits that he is a “strange choice as a champion of individuality.” Nevertheless, in both the Philosophy of Right and the Phenomenology of Spirit (Church denies any fundamental disjuncture between these texts), Hegel “defends an active citizenry” (p. 26). Rather than passive spectators or political subjects, human beings are individuals equipped with the power and agency to build meaningful worlds and legislate rules for themselves. In contrast to the traditional narrative of liberalism, however, these individuals are not found in nature. Human beings are only free individuals “by participating in community” (pp. 78–79). The free individual is an accomplishment of human political effort. Only certain kinds of communities provide the necessary conditions for robust subjectivity and agency.

Although Nietzsche, meanwhile, mercilessly assaults the “rainbow-bridge” of Hegel's dialectical system, Chapters 5 and 6 show that Nietzsche's defense of individuality accords with Hegel's in some important respects. Against traditional interpretations that read Nietzsche's portrait of the individual as a splendid “blonde beast,” austere nobleman, or purely aesthetic “life as literature” (pp. 111–12), Church proposes that the individual and its will to power realizes itself most perfectly in community. After all, Nietzsche’s “human subject,” a term more palatable to liberalism than Ubermensch, “longs to be a founder of communities, not simply a follower” (p. 139). Thus, the “self-narrating individual” is not a “radically solitary character” but an exemplar who can assist (liberal) citizens in constructing political communities rooted in both competition and friendship. In other words, Nietzsche, too, concludes that a certain kind of polity is necessary to foster individuality.

Yet what kind of political regime yields the conditions necessary for Hegelian-Nietzschean individuality? In Chapters 4 and 7, devoted to exploring the political implications of the historical self, Church seems to suggest that both Hegel and Nietzsche emerge as tentative supporters of “liberal democratic institutions” because they cultivate “the desire on the part of the individual to transcend his time and craft a unique self for himself” (p. 192). But it is also clear in both chapters that these two “evil twins,” while perhaps not so evil as previously supposed, maintain a rather acrimonious sibling rivalry—a rivalry that nonetheless promises rich rewards for liberalism if fully understood. For his part, Hegel does not idolize the monolithic state, despite the claims of his critics. Rather, he argues for a complex tapestry of “mediating institutions” in civil society that “provide the mechanism for mutual interdependence” between the unitary demands of the state and the endlessly fractured interests of modern commercial society (p. 85). Participation in associational life is an essential bulwark of an individualism that recognizes individual desires while also elevating, broadening, and even universalizing these concerns.

It proves more difficult to wedge Nietzsche into this quasi-republican reading of Hegelian political life. Nietzsche remains the champion of the “antipolitical individual” (p. 170). The (Hegelian) state necessarily marginalizes the individual and offers safe refuge for the odious “last men” who are embodied by nothing if not the banal tastes of the egalitarian democratic and commercial soul. Despite these presumably superficial differences, however, Church concludes that Nietzsche and Hegel share a common concern for the fate of the individual in a state determined to encroach on its autonomy. Conversely, they recognize the natural and prudential limits of individualism. A truly “infinite autonomy” is one embedded in a context of ethical and political relationships and, indeed, obligations. Even in the face of its myriad enemies, there is even still an individual, though it has had to jettison its natural and rational foundations.

Church's ambitious book succeeds along several metrics. First, although the notion of the liberal individual as a historical construct rather than a natural fact is not news, thanks to thinkers like Michel Foucault and Marx, Church's schematic is helpful, challenging the tired assumptions of both Hobbesian and neo-Kantian liberalism while avoiding the occasionally aimless deconstructions of poststructuralism. Second, while Hegel and Nietzsche share a continental philosophical tradition—and while attempts to marshal Hegel and Nietzsche, individually, in defense of liberal democracy are not new—Church's efforts to depict them not as antagonists but as brothers-in-arms in a common project to rescue the individual is a novel contribution both to continental political thought and to democratic/liberal theory. Finally, Church's full-throated defense of the individual even in an antifoundational and antiessentialist—and, according to some, antihuman—age is appreciated. That he manages to wage his campaign, articulating an individualism compatible with Nietzsche's (and our own) postfoundationalism, without resorting to the cynical irony of theorists like Rorty is admirable.

Nonetheless, certain questions remain unanswered in the book. First, although Church can convince readers that Hegel is not an unabashed statist and that Nietzsche avoids crass individualism, the consensus between the two thinkers that emerges from these interpretations is rather thin. The terms of the consensus especially manage to weaken Nietzsche's ethical project. In short, liberalism can certainly profit from the notion that certain “communal practices” are essential for individual flourishing. But in his effort to sublimate Nietzsche's explicit departure from Hegel, Church does not sufficiently elaborate what these institutions and practices might look like. Yet when Church does offer specific prescriptions—most notably when outlining Hegel's taste for mediating institutions like guilds and unions—he does not differentiate these proposals from similar ones made by a rich tradition of thinkers, often in much greater detail, that also remained explicitly comfortable with liberalism. If thinkers like Tocqueville are willing to embrace liberalism and associational life along with a rich account of the goods both yield, why is it necessary to enlist the theoretical support of two thinkers whose allegiance to liberalism is dubious at best? If Church's project aimed merely to show how Hegel and Nietzsche are actually misunderstood advocates of liberal individualism, it would be completely successful. In his ambition to prove that these thinkers offer unique contributions to liberalism, however, he neglects to differentiate them from other liberals who have trod this ground before. Most significantly, his “dependent variable” is unclear. It is obvious that Church defends both liberalism and individualism. But while the book begins as a defense of the individual, the relationship between these two goods becomes increasingly complicated as Church commences his interpretation of Nietzsche. Is it the case that liberalism yields authentic self-creation, or is it self-creation that yields liberalism? In other words, is the good toward which Church orients himself individualism or liberalism?

Ultimately, the author confronts the same challenge that faces other projects with his ambitious scope. It may be that he set before himself an impossible task. It is difficult not only to negotiate a detente between two philosophical antagonists, not only to show that two purported antagonists of liberalism are in fact among its most promising advocates, but also to attempt reconciliation between the goods of the individual and the common good in a way that satisfies both parties and renders both essential preconditions for the other. Just as many of the tensions between Nietzsche and Hegel remain richly unresolved, Church succeeds in demonstrating that political life in the West retains its vibrancy through the unending navigation of the tension between individual and community. Conversely, he shows that both liberalism and the autonomous individual are fragile gifts, subject to the whims of history. He thereby shows that contemporary liberals ought to exert the utmost effort to preserve the communal conditions necessary for individual flourishing. Perhaps this message, after all, is something first articulated in German. As such, although scholars interested in Nietzsche, Hegel, and continental thought in general will naturally find this erudite book worthwhile, it will be read most profitably by those who, like Tocqueville, are concerned for the fate of the individual in an illiberal age.