Readers of George Kateb's previous work will recognize the author's familiar voice in this collection of papers from the last 17 years or so. By turns earnest (“I know that I preach,” [p. 12]) and cavalier (“I know I am being arbitrary,” [p. 125]), Kateb is intent on plumbing the pernicious irrationalities that seduce us away from his favored stance, democratic individuality. His approach is literary, freewheeling, elliptical. Theorists fond of analytic philosophy will be impatient with how blurry and peremptory his claims can sound. Still, his is an instructive sensibility.

Kateb reviles the abstract phantoms on behalf of which people wreck their—and others'—lives. Patriotism, he asserts, “is a readiness to die and to kill for what is largely a figment of the imagination” (p. 8). Nations “are fiction: their bonds tend to degenerate into kitsch, which favors crime and aggression” (p. 324). Even Thomas Hobbes is not enough of an individualist: He “tries to see through everything except national feeling. He cannot shake free of the sickest of all sick political thoughts, the abstract we. To want nationhood … is to want war and death” (p. 324). In his crusade against sanguinary phantoms commanding self-immolation, Kateb sounds like Max Stirner, who is curiously absent here. Instead, Kateb appeals to Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau (he imagines that few theorists read them [p. 245]), also to Friedrich Nietzsche. He summons us to our better selves and demands that we pursue the rigorous business of becoming who we really are, while being respectful of others pursuing the same lonely quest: no “herd” (pp. 27, 324) affiliations for him.

Let us face facts: In the name of patriotism and nationalism, people cheerfully shower in gruesome torrents of blood. Kateb heaps disdain on religion and masculinity, too. However, I see no argument here for thinking such ideals necessarily pernicious. Indeed, some will play “gotcha!” and insist that Kateb boasts his own ardent constitutional patriotism. He prizes democracy, constitutionalism, and the rule of law. He is furious with the Bush administration for betraying these precious ideals and contemptuous of their intellectual allies (p. 83). He is anyway leagues away from this dry self-mockery: “Nature,” declares Emerson in his “Spiritual Laws” (Essays: First Series [1841]), “will not have us fret and fume. She does not like our benevolence or our learning much better than she likes our frauds and wars. When we come out of the caucus, or the bank, or the Abolition-convention, or the Temperance-meeting, or the Transcendental club, into the fields and woods, she says to us, ‘So hot? my little Sir.’ ” All these causes, including those officially dear to Emerson, are suspect. Kateb does not go so far.

Similarly, Kateb rails against war, but does not bite bullets, if you will forgive the phrase, by telling us which if any wars are worth fighting and why. He notices that “only war could end” slavery (p. 258). It is easy enough—too easy, because they were also fighting for family and friends, not invidious abstractions but concrete individuals—to condemn the Confederate soldiers, loyal to a wretched cause. What about the Union soldiers? Should the North have fought? More generally, was bloodshed warranted in the struggle against slavery? In “A Plea for Captain John Brown,” Thoreau lampoons his fellow Americans as mechanically trudging through the motions of life. He ecstatically embraces the putative martyr and his little band: “These men, in teaching us how to die, have at the same time taught us how to live…. It is the best news that America has ever heard.” I surmise that Kateb would discard Thoreau's ecstasy as necrophilia. Regardless, Kateb does not admire those soldiering in a worthy cause. “If I am told that what I cherish and benefit from depends on the willingness of others to risk death and to die,” he says airily (p. 330), “all I can say is that I must admit to living exploitatively.”

Kateb wants to secure a moral or political individualism by underwriting it with an analytic individualism. He thinks, that is, that once we agree that only individuals are real, we will rouse from our dogmatic slumbers and get on with the difficult business of living our own lives. This call to demystifying arms shows up already in his introductory essay, which suggests that the essays collected here are united in attempting to uncover three dreadful motivations. First come aesthetic values, the search for the beautiful or the sublime, not in works of art but in society itself. There is no reason, insists Kateb, to think that a society can be apprehended as a unified artistic whole—and so ideologues and totalitarians try desperately to turn it into one. Second come existential values, in particular the desire to secure a Promethean “human stature” by steamrolling over what should be our ultimate moral commitment to “human status” or dignity. In their wake comes, third, an anti-instrumental stance, leading us to prize action for its own sake, or for what it displays, as against the ends it realizes. This unholy trinity, he thinks, and not any purported social forces, illuminates how and why our politics founders so spectacularly. Similarly, he later asserts that “to a great extent,” understanding political disasters means understanding the “motivations” of leaders and followers (p. 385). That, he says, is moral psychology.

I do not suppose that Kateb means to mimic Margaret Thatcher, who once announced “there is no such thing as society,” nor that he is aping his allegedly hard-headed colleagues' affinity for methodological individualism and microfoundations. Regardless, it is confusing to set moral psychology over and against social context or even to portion the terrain between them. Each depends on the other. Racism cannot be “aversion to the color and/or the facial features of others” (p. 65), lest your aversions to suntans or acne qualify. Totalitarianism cannot be “explained … as a fanatical response to the crisis of meaninglessness” (p. 338). Kateb occasionally concedes the importance of social context (pp. 245, 274). I fear that such concessions remain undigested, arguably indigestible, in his focus on motivations.

Both the referents and the enabling conditions of individual mental states are richly sociological. Rousseau famously argued that you cannot experience indignation without the concept of wrongful injury. More concretely, if you chafe at being mistreated as a junior faculty member or wonder sadly why your dissertation committee demands that you write like a Bulgarian bureaucrat about to flunk English as a second language, your mental states depend on the existence of universities, of tenure, of (indefensible) norms of scholarly prose, and so on. Yes, those mental states have family resemblances to some available without those social conditions. But only family resemblances.

So, too, for enabling conditions: Kateb labors mightily to show that a deep Western “anger at the world” (p. 206) drives modern technology. Maybe that is in the mix, though I am inclined to doubt it. It cannot be nearly enough: Something must be said about the state of scientific knowledge, of engineering techniques, of mining and manufacturing, and of markets. (Kateb might pause to wonder how he can make sense of “the West” as an analytic category.)

Individualism itself has a characteristic social structure. It depends on the demise of ascriptive roles and the rise of elective ones and on other arrangements too. Without the likes of marriage for love, labor markets, Protestant theology, geographic mobility, and enough wealth and architectural innovations to offer privacy at home, it would not be possible for anyone to think the thoughts, celebrate the possibilities, and adopt the stances that Kateb does. So society cannot be the opposite of democratic individuality.

Alas, then, that the occasional arresting insights studding these papers do not begin to yield a satisfactory defense of the quirky individualism Kateb has been championing for some time.