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A lifelong New Yorker, I studied philosophy in the early 1970s at New York University (under Sidney Hook, while working for Herbert Aptheker and studying jazz guitar under Pat Martino) and in the late 1970s at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (under Milton K. Munitz and J. B. Schneewind).
I doubt that anyone else’s influence on me, personal and scholarly, will match that of the impossibly prolific Murray N. Rothbard (1926-1995) for the last dozen years of his life. I standby my self-description as “roadkill” on the way to the definitive life of Rothbard, on which I began haplessly began to work in 1997 (and had to stop a year later) with the blessings JoAnn Rothbard and Lew Rockwell, who told me that Rothbard “needs his Skidelsky.” I’m no Skidelsky (a gross understatement), yet Gerard Casey thought my published notes worth citing in his 2010 monograph on Rothbard.
My latest book, Christian Individualism: The Maverick Biblical Workmanship of Otis Q. Sellers (Atmosphere Press, 2026), whom I knew personally. It traces Sellers’s journey from Baptist pastor to independent Bible teacher, a man whose pursuit of the truth cost him his pulpit, his home, and his standing among the so-called “orthodox.”
In Philosophy after Christ: Thinking God’s Thoughts after Him, I return to my first intellectual love, philosophy. In fewer than 200 pages, I vindicate the Christian worldview along lines inspired by Cornelius Van Til and his student Greg L. Bahnsen. For me, philosophizing is the unfolding of implications of that worldview which, along with our linguistic capability, we as created image-bearers inherit at birth. Only that “birthright worldview” can serve as the presupposition of intelligible predication, that is, of making sense of things, even our sense-making.
Two things especially struck me . . . . One is the sincerity and passion of [Flood’s] efforts over fifty years to explore various ways of understanding Christian faith. He has at various times looked to Bernard Lonergan and Gordon Clark for guidance, but he has now found a resting place in the presuppositionalism of Cornelius Van Til and Greg Bahnsen. . . . The other . . . is the exceptional learning displayed in it. Tony knows the Bible very well, and he discourses learnedly on the meaning of various Hebrew and Greek words in it. He brings to bear in his discussion a great many of the major Western philosophers, showing a detailed knowledge of their thought. If I am not convinced by Tony’s main thesis . . . I nevertheless commend this acute and erudite book highly.” From the Foreword by David Gordon, PhD, Senior Fellow, Ludwig von Mises Institute
“This is a fascinating book! Written with admirable clarity, erudition, and not a little panache, it addresses itself to the question “What must the world be like for there to be intersubjective communication and reasoning among intelligent (pattern-grasping) and rationally exigent beings with reliable, but fallible, memories, with a grasp of numbers as well as beauty, for there to be mutual criticism according to shared rational norms? . . . Reading Anthony Flood’s book gave me a headache, but the right kind of headache.” Gerard N. Casey MA, LLM, PhD, DLitt., Professor Emeritus, University College Dublin. Amazon.co.uk review, August 3, 2022
“Flood is a punchy, witty writer, and the material in these chapters is illuminating and a delight to read. . . . Flood succeeds in what I take to be his principal aims: to press for a philosophy that honors the lordship of Jesus Christ, and to draw out some of its major implications for engagement with non-Christian systems of thought. . . . I hope that Tony will . . . continue to direct his considerable intellectual and rhetorical gifts toward these important issues.” James N. Anderson, PhD, Carl W. McMurray Professor of Theology and Philosophy, Reformed Theological Seminary. Analogical Thoughts [blog], March 7, 2023
In my first book, Herbert Aptheker: Studies in Willful Blindness, I tell how, just out of high school, I became a research assistant to, friend, and comrade of Communist theoretician Aptheker (1915-2003). Decades after I repudiated the comradeship, it dawned on me that Aptheker’s politics had blocked his research in his area of specialization: he failed to recognize The Black Jacobins, the work of C. L. R. James (1901-1989) that chronicled the only successful slave revolt in modern times. The only explanation, I contend, is that Aptheker, the Stalinist, could not bring himself to acknowledge the work of James, the Trotskyist. There are other problems with Aptheker’s legacy, of course, such as his uncovering the truth about slavery in the Americas while covering it up in the Soviet Union and its satellites. The “dissing” of James, however, undermines his “anti-racism” reputation as well as his argument that “partisanship with the oppressed” makes objectivity in history writing possible. He was a partisan of too many oppressors. He eventually admitted his own “willful blindness” (his words), yet that didn’t stop him from defending, as late as 2000, The Truth about Hungary, his book-length apologia for the Soviet Union’s crushing of the 1956 Hungarian revolution. I’m working on a revised and expanded edition.
. . . a welcome addition to works on post-Stalin Stalinism, still a malevolent force long after the end of the Cold War.—Lloyd Billingsley, FrontPage Magazine
Flood has documented a striking example of the way Aptheker’s rigid adherence to the Stalinist line corrupted his historical writing. . . . His careful account of the “invisible man” in Aptheker’s historiography is a valuable contribution.—David Gordon, Mises.org Power & Market Blog
The target of Christ, Capital, and Liberty: A Polemic, my second book, is Catholic polemicist Christopher A. Ferrara’s ignorant attack on the Austrian School of Economics (ASE) as expressed in his The Church and the Libertarian. Championing Distributism and the social democracy vended as “Catholic Social Teaching,” Ferrara claims that the ASE is at variance with Catholicism. Flood argues for the compatibility, even harmony, that Ferrara denied.
“. . . Christ, Capital and Liberty: A Polemic is a spirited and detailed defence of the fundamental compatibility of Catholicism and Austro-Libertarianism. . . .
[T]he multiple, mostly short, chapters . . . provide so many insights, engage the perspectives of so many thinkers and attack the central topic of the compatibility of Catholicism and Austro-Libertarianism from so many angles that no reader can fail to achieve a greater insight into the matter after reading it than he had before he began.”
— From the Foreword by Gerard N. Casey MA, LLM, PhD, DLitt., Professor Emeritus, University College Dublin, Associated Scholar, The Mises Institute, Auburn, Alabama, Fellow, Mises UK
From 2003 to 2010, as a member of the International Society of Philosophers (since 2003), I mentored a dozen adults through Pathways in Philosophy, a long-distance learning program based in Sheffield, England.
Since 2018 I’ve been helping people with their writing. If you’ve written something (personal, academic, or business) that’s not quite ready for prime time, let me help you take it the rest of the way.
My passion is to share what I’ve learned over the past almost sixty years about the philosophical primacy of worldview in general, the unique adequacy of the Christian worldview in particular, and the Christian worldview as Otis Q. Sellers (1901-1992), maverick Bible expositor, expressed it in his ecclesiology and eschatology.
I’ve published in American Communist History, Journal of American History, C. L. R. James Journal, FrontPage Magazine, LewRockwell.com, Crisis: Politics, Culture & the Church, The Philosopher’s Magazine, New Oxford Review, New International Review, and Science & Society.
The hundreds of mini-essays posted on this site provide only glimpses of what I’m excited about. The best is yet to come.
