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Since the nineteenth century, ideas centered on the individual, on Emersonian self-reliance, and on the right of the individual to the pursuit of happiness have had a tremendous presence in the United States—and even more so after the Reagan era. But has this presence been for the good of all? In Negative Liberties Cyrus R. K. Patell revises important ideas in the debate about individualism and the political theory of liberalism. He does so by adding two new voices to the current discussion—Toni Morrison and Thomas Pynchon—to examine the different ways in which their writings embody, engage, and critique the official narrative generated by U.S. liberal ideology.
Pynchon and Morrison reveal the official narrative of individualism as encompassing a complex structure of contradiction held in abeyance. This narrative imagines that the goals of the individual are not at odds with the goals of the family or society and in fact obscures the existence of an unholy truce between individual liberty and forms of oppression. By bringing these two fiction writers into a discourse dominated by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Isaiah Berlin, John Rawls, George Kateb, Robert Bellah, and Michael Sandel, Patell unmasks the ways in which contemporary U.S. culture has not fully shed the oppressive patterns of reasoning handed down by the slaveholding culture from which American individualism emerged.
With its interdisciplinary approach, Negative Liberties will appeal to students and scholars of American literature, culture, sociology, and politics.

      From The Birth of Tragedy on, Nietzsche worked to comprehend the
        nature of the individual. Richard White shows how Nietzsche was inspired
        and guided by the question of personal "sovereignty" and how
        through his writings he sought to provoke the very sovereignty he described.
        White argues that Nietzsche is a philosopher our contemporary age must
        therefore come to understand if we are ever to secure a genuinely meaningful
        direction for the future. Profoundly relevant to our era, Nietzsche's
        philosophy addresses a version of individuality that allows us to move
        beyond the self-dispossession of mass society and the alternative of selfish
        individualism--to fully understand how one becomes what one is.
      A volume in the International Nietzsche Studies series, edited by
        Richard Schacht