Freedom and Its Conditions: Discipline, Autonomy, and Resistance.

By Richard E. Flathman. New York: Routledge, 2003. 224p. $75.00 cloth, $22.95 paper.

Richard Flathman's most recent exposition of his continued engagement with the philosophy and politics of freedom has two objectives. Taken in reverse order, the second objective is “to broaden and enrich the theoretical resources available to thinking under the ideological rubric of liberalism” (p. 5). To this end, the chapters of this book are readings of thinkers not typically part of the liberal canon—Foucault, Montaigne, Nietzsche, and the philosopher Stuart Hampshire. Flathman's achievement on this score is admirable, a valuable lesson to those of us in political theory too ensnared in our own particular archives to reach out and engage texts and thinkers commonly associated with tendencies and orientations we do not endorse. Indeed, the author pursues this objective as a kind of exercise of self-criticism, drawing out the changes his readings of Foucault, Montaigne, Nietzsche, and Hampshire have effected on his thinking about freedom as set out in four previous books. In this way, Freedom and Its Conditions might be understood performatively, as practicing precisely that sort of disciplined resistance (to past ways of thinking or settled views, in this case) he finds necessary for freedom.

Accordingly, Flathman's first objective in the book is to understand the relations among freedom, discipline, and resistance. His major contention is that freedom is not necessarily or categorically incompatible with discipline and resistance. Although the author does not put it in quite these terms, the claim here can be framed in terms of the problem of linking the three concepts together: We can understand freedom and discipline together (in Lockean terms as freedom within reason or in Kantian terms as autonomy, say) and we can understand freedom and resistance together (perhaps as negative freedom in a Hobbesian sense or in light of the struggles emphasized in radical theory), but it seems difficult to think of freedom in terms of both discipline and resistance. So, on the one side, there is freedom within reason and order, a way of thinking about freedom that risks emphasizing conformity at the expense of creativity or “free-spiritedness” (a kind of robust and creative independence that Nietzsche celebrates and Flathman values). And, on the other side, there is freedom as resistance, a way of thinking that too easily slides into extremes of egoism, self-assertion, and anarchy. Flathman's solution to the problem of linking up freedom, discipline, and resistance is to prioritize freedom as resistance and value discipline as it helps sustain the capacity to resist.

His argument proceeds from two premises (dealt with at length in his earlier work). The first is that freedom is to be understood as primarily a condition of individual persons (a premise noncontroversial to liberals but hotly contested if not downright rejected by the rest of us). The second (taken in part from Stanley Benn and William Weinstein) is that talk about freedom is significant when something is at stake, that is to say, when something or someone is trying to prevent us from doing what we want. Together these ideas form the background of a notion of freedom as agonistic, a view of freedom “not, or not exclusively, as unobstructed or unopposed thinking and doing but as a triumph over conflicting and antagonistic forces” (p. 21). These forces, moreover, are just as, if not more likely to be, within selves as they are between or among them, an idea Flathman develops through a reading of Foucault's account of the care of the self and enhances in the course of his reflections on Montaigne, Nietzsche, and Hampshire.

Among the attributes of agonistic freedom resulting from these readings are two that I mention here. First, rather than relying on the notion of a unified or sovereign self, Flathman's agonistic freedom conceives the self as fragmented or dispersed, produced out of continuing interactions among diverse impulses, affects, beliefs, and intensities. Reason is not the ruler, much less the primary attribute, of this self. Freedom, in other words, does not depend on reason coming in to control unattractive appetites. Instead, freedom is the benefit or ideal or aspiration that the self endeavors to produce as it seeks to build affiliations among those aspects of itself it values and to exclude or control those aspects of itself it finds alien. The free self is thus born out of internal conflict. Conflict is freedom's condition of possibility, the very condition that inspires freedom, that gives to freedom its soaring quality, that special dimension some call creativity or overcoming and others of us call transcendence.

Second, the free self produces itself self-consciously through specific practices of discipline or cultivation. It actively chooses to adopt particular modes of discipline, even though these modes are of course given to it by its context. Although Flathman does not endeavor to distinguish among forms of discipline, in his reading of Montaigne, he emphasizes skepticism as a disciplinary practice entailing specific efforts to doubt, suspend judgment, and search for alternatives. He also tends to associate self-discipline with intensive, perhaps even martial, arts of the self, frequently drawing upon a language of combat. As he notes in the course of his discussion of Nietzsche, “even the domains of inquiry and reflection, often characterized as peacefully contemplative, are arenas of conflict and discord. And to the extent that my quests for knowledge involve me in interactions with other persons, those relationships will always have a competitive or conflictual as well as a sometimes cooperative character” (p. 68). One might say that if Hobbes linked freedom to a war of all against all, then Flathman understands it along the lines of war of all within all. Put too simply, within each of us are impulses to conform and to act out, impulses to submit uncritically, and impulses to dominate and disrupt. The free self must thus discipline itself to fight on both these fronts. When victorious, this self can celebrate and be celebrated for its individuality and singularity.

To be sure, some will be unsatisfied to find that the conditions of freedom Flathman considers do not include the bare minimum of economic freedom. Others, however, will take heart from his insistence that embodiment is an obvious condition of human freedom. At the very least, his innovative rethinking of the liberal's free individual should force liberalism's critics to cease invoking the straw men of autonomous, unified, decontextualized, sovereign selves and take more seriously the aspirations to freedom at the heart of liberal theory. Faced with the author's arguments, we need to ask ourselves whether, in light of our acceptance of Nietzsche's dictum that there is no doer behind the deed, we want to embrace the project of creating this doer or whether the very idea that the doer creates itself, as Flathman suggests, fails to grapple with the magnitude of the critique of the subject central to poststructuralist thought. Is there a middle ground here? Approached from a different angle, is Flathman's insistence on agents as the sources of acts preferable to ways of thinking that conceive Acts as prior to and outside of those who might perform them? An interesting intersection here might be found in the rare and exceptional character of freedom for Flathman and of Acts for thinkers like Alain Badiou and Slavoj Zizek.

Freedom and Its Conditions is also a welcome contribution to current debates because of its insistence on the link between discipline and resistance. Some today (Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, for example) associate the failure of discipline with a kind of liberatory refusal, a refusal that, like stupidity or the slackening of a rope, finds freedom in what might be called failure, giving up, or simple noncompliance for reasons that may or may not be conscious. In my view, Flathman's arguments present a vital counter to such positions, suggesting that refusal or noncompliance should not be thought of as the same as freedom, that freedom requires something more, again, something transcendent.