Fleurianism: A Working Theory of What it Takes to Achieve Flourishing

In the Welcome essay for this project, I made the observation that what seems to me to be missing is a convincing, comprehensive, and contemporary theory of what is required to create a social and economic system that maximises the potential for individuals to find happiness.

Having ranged over the questions of what happiness is, why it feels as though the world is in crisis, the root causes of the problems, and ideas for how the reform the system, the outlines of a suitable theory are starting to emerge.

My working hypothesis is that the following tenets provide a sufficient core framework for a philosophy of social organisation that systematically and structurally supports human flourishing.

1. Freedom is the pre-eminent right of the individual, but individuals should rationally forfeit some of their freedoms to gain the benefits of social cooperation.
2. Sovereignty is the right of the citizens of a country to self-determination free from external interference, and from subordination of their interests to those of the political elite, and national sovereignty is the collective expression of the sovereignty of its citizens.
3. The political system of the country should be determined by its citizens through a democratic process that maximises its independence from the influence of the ruling elite.
4. Sovereignty is the pre-eminent right of the nation, but nations should rationally forfeit some of their sovereignty to gain the benefits of geopolitical cooperation, and to protect their society from both external coercion, and internal subversion.
5. The overarching purpose of a national government should be to maximise the sustainable wellbeing of its citizens, subject to inviolable human rights, while protecting citizens both from each other and from outside forces, where what constitutes wellbeing is determined by each individual, and not presumed on their behalf.
6. The default assumption should be that individuals and nations will act in their own self-interest, and both national and trans-national political and legal systems should be designed to harness this self-interest and channel it to collective benefit, but with an explicit mechanism to resort to force to compel compliance if necessary.
7. The best interests of each nation, and its citizens, are served by maximising the global extent of this governance framework, and this should be actively pursued through persuasion and incentive. It is worth being clear about what these tenets represent. Tenets 1-4 are normative, while Tenets 5-6 are more operational, and Tenet 7 is strategic. The first three tenets align squarely with classical liberal thought on individual liberty and democratic consent, though the second tenet makes an explicit distinction around sovereignty that classical liberalism leaves ambiguous. The fourth tenet is novel, and is introduced specifically to address the structural gap that is evident from examining the current dysfunction in geopolitics. Classical liberalism is fundamentally procedural: it cares about rights, consent, rules, and process. It deliberately avoids prescribing outcomes, because doing so risks the overriding of individual preference. This framework makes three extensions that take it beyond being purely procedural: The first is that the purpose of government is stated as a substantive objective (sustainable wellbeing). This moves from process-liberalism toward something more consequentialist, but constrained by rights and an individual self-definition of wellbeing in a way that avoids crude utilitarianism. The second is to operationalise the philosophy by designing institutions (Tribunacy and Sovereigncy) to enforce the philosophy structurally, rather than assuming that principles and process will reliably lead to good outcomes. The third is the mechanism design layer — the explicit assumption that self-interest is the default and that institutions must be designed to channel it toward collective benefit, with enforcement mechanisms as a structural feature. Classical liberalism tends to assume compliance; this framework assumes the potential for non-compliance and adapts accordingly. In essence, the framework synthesizes liberal democracy with an explicit wellbeing objective, and adds institutional design for incentive alignment, and trans-national elements, as foundational constructs. The departure from classical liberal democratic theory is very deliberate: it is intended to confront the world as it actually functions, rather than assuming that actors will behave benignly. I have tentatively named this political philosophy Fleurianism. This derives from the French fleur (flower, blossom), itself descended from the Latin flos, floris, the root of the classical verb florere — to flower, to bloom, to thrive. It is from this same Latin root, via the Old French floriss-, that the English word “flourish” is also derived. The coinage is therefore etymologically deliberate: fleur and flourishing are cousins in the same word family, and the choice of root embeds the philosophy’s central purpose — the systematic pursuit of human flourishing — in the name itself. The suffix -ianism, combining the adjectival -ian with the Greek-derived -ism (denoting a doctrine or organised body of thought), places the term in the tradition of the major political philosophies — liberalism, utilitarianism, communitarianism. The double register of fleur — literal bloom and metaphorical flourishing — reflects the philosophy’s own dual ambition: to describe both what a good society looks like, and the institutional conditions required to bring it into being.

A Happy Ending

In the welcome essay I emphasised that this project is essentially one of optimism. There is much to despair about in the world as it currently exists. But humanity has repeatedly demonstrated an unquenchable need to progress, and an extraordinary capacity for reinvention and problem solving.

It is in this spirit that I offer my thoughts through this collection of essays. I don’t claim that my ideas are sufficient to address the bleak outlook of the moment. I do believe though that human creativity has the capacity to solve the problems that underlie the current recession in happiness and freedom, and I hope that the thoughts and suggestions that live in this project can go some way toward helping find the necessary solutions to allow humanity to flourish to its capacity.