Progressives and communitarians have long criticized liberalism's evacuation of spiritual life. Steven F. Pittz's Recovering the Liberal Spirit: Nietzsche, Individuality, and Spirituality mounts a novel defense against these critiques. Pittz counters them by appealing to an ideal he argues is internal to the liberal tradition, namely, the “free spirit.” Free spirits, according to Pittz, are those rare individuals capable of achieving spiritual fulfillment outside of familial, religious, and political bonds. In contrast to communitarians and progressives, Pittz argues that freedom from traditional social bonds is precisely what makes spiritual fulfillment possible for these individuals. Counterintuitively, Pittz locates the source for this liberal ideal in the illiberal thought of Friedrich Nietzsche. This puts Pittz on fresh but shaky scholarly ground.

Pittz begins Recovering the Liberal Spirit with an examination of the free spirit ideal (chapter 1, “The Free Spirit”). Drawing primarily on section 34 of the first volume of Nietzsche's Human, All Too Human, Pittz argues that the free spirit is defined by a Pyrrhonian skepticism: she suspends her judgment with regard to traditional moral, religious, and political dogmas. This suspension of judgment generates in her a state of calm reflection and grounds her spiritual freedom. Pittz goes on to argue that Pyrrhonian skepticism is an arduous practice and therefore only achievable by an elite few. In chapter 2, “A Safe Distance from Politics,” Pittz contends that the free spirit necessarily eschews traditional forms of politics and community. The practical demands of politics and the dogmas imposed by traditional communities threaten the free spirit's independence. She therefore seeks to live outside of society where she is able to pursue self-realization. However, this withdrawal from society does not preclude the free spirit from commenting on political life, a theme which Pittz takes up in chapter 3, “Free Spirits in Action.” Here, Pittz briefly examines the lives of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Herman Hesse, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau. These figures’ lives exemplify the free spirit's peculiar relation to the political sphere. Each practiced what Pittz calls a “politics of detachment,” a turning away from practical politics in order to develop their own inner nature and capacities. Pittz notes that the practice of political detachment raises the question of the free spirit's utility for the political community, an issue that he addresses in chapter 4, “Free Spirits in Liberal Political Society.” Here, he argues that the free spirit and liberal democracy are essential to one another. One the one hand, the spiritual and intellectual freedom achieved by free spirits allows them to serve as a check on the tyrannical authority of public opinion. On the other hand, the negative freedoms afforded by liberal democracies grant free spirits the space to pursue spiritual fullness.

In the book's final two chapters, Pittz directly responds to progressive and communitarian critiques of liberalism's core assumptions about individual autonomy. In chapter 5, “The Possibility of Autonomy,” Pittz draws on the notion of the “sovereign individual” from Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morality to argue that free spirits can liberate themselves from their social bonds through the practice of self-mastery. Pittz uses Nietzsche to define self-mastery as the capacity to hierarchically organize one's own instincts, drives, and desires, which therefore enables self-determination and self-governance. Chapter 6, “The Desirability of Autonomy,” argues that adherence to moral, religious, and political dogmas is not necessary for achieving spiritual fulfillment. Rather, the free spirit finds that satisfaction by assuming an “aesthetic perspective,” which she uses to imbue existence with her own self-created meanings and purposes.

Pittz's book takes up one of liberalism's greatest challenges: providing for the spiritual well-being of its citizens. Unlike political theorists such as William Connolly, Bonnie Honig, and David Owen, who use Nietzsche to critique liberalism, Pittz uses Nietzsche to defend liberalism. This unconventional approach requires Pittz's argument to navigate a narrow strait. He counters claims of liberalism's spiritual bankruptcy by appealing to a thinker who is vehement in his criticism of that bankruptcy. He tries to circumvent this problem by noting—but then dismissing—Nietzsche's critique of liberalism, a move that Nietzsche scholars will likely find dubious.

It is not clear, to this reader at least, that Pittz's Nietzsche-inspired free spirit actually addresses the core of the progressive and communitarian critique, namely, that liberalism erodes the social bonds that give most of our lives meaning. While he argues that traditional social bonds impede the free spirit, the elite character of the free spirit thus seems to restrict the possibility of spiritual fulfillment within liberalism to a choice few. But what about the unfree spirits, namely, most of us? Pittz's version of liberalism leaves the majority of its citizens without recourse either to meaningful community or spiritual freedom.

The tension between the many and the few is an unavoidable consequence of Pittz's appropriation of Nietzsche for liberal purposes. Aristocratic liberalism is a square that is hard to circle. Nietzsche, like Pittz, is concerned with the elite few—but this is a concern that is fully aligned with his illiberalism and derived from his view of nature. The natural order of rank justifies his disdain for and disregard of the many. As recent works by Hugo Drochon, Laurence Lampert, and Heinrich Meier have shown, it is difficult, if not impossible, to decouple Nietzsche's elitism from his conception of nature. Thus, any attempt to translate Nietzsche into a liberal idiom, particularly its language of universal rights, is arguably doomed from the start. To paraphrase Horace, you can drive nature out of Nietzsche's thought with a liberal pitchfork, but she always comes back.