Recovering the Liberal Spirit: Nietzsche, Individuality, and Spiritual Freedom.

• Author: Powell, Aaron Ross

Recovering the Liberal Spirit: Nietzsche, Individuality, and Spiritual Freedom

Steven F. Pittz

New York: SUNY Press, 2020, 280 pp.

Liberalism, in the classical sense, has always suffered from a miasma of critics who claim they know better. Even as respect for the dignity of the individual, and the political and economic liberty it engenders, grew as a cultural and governing force producing the great fruits of prosperity and peace, communitarians of the left and right grumbled that something was rotten at its core. Liberalism might be good for the pocketbook, and it might be good for the hedonist, but it's bad for the soul. Its riches and lifestyle options, in other words, come at a spiritual cost. For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul?

Defenders of the liberal project have typically responded by doubling down on the twin benefits of wealth and choice. It's better for people to be richer, and nothing gets us richer faster than free and open markets. It's better for people to be free to author their own lives, and nothing enables that more than getting the coercive might of government out of the way--and also having some extra spending money. But that's, in a sense, merely restating the anti-individualist, pro-communitarian case. For the kind of person who believes man's telos is more expansive than "survival" or "happiness" and instead involves being a very particular sort of person, saying that liberalism expands choice and the resources to it is a knock against it, not a fact in its favor.

Enter Steven F. Pittz's Recovering the Liberal Spirit: Nietzsche, Individuality, and Spiritual Freedom, a rejoinder to such worries that admits the importance of spiritual growth and argues that liberalism's the best way to get it. His basic argument is that the "free spirit" is a robust and worthwhile alternative to communitarian forms of spirituality, that liberalism allows for and supports free spirits, and that as members of the liberal political project, free spirits bring value to the rest of us. Liberalism has its economic and political defenses. Pittz gives us a spiritual one.

As the title suggests, Pittz draws heavy inspiration from Nietzsche, but the discussion ranges widely enough, and with plenty of original ideas and analysis, that the book ought to be read by anyone interested in liberalism and its critics, and not just by Nietzsche scholars. He begins by setting out just what a free spirit is: "the...