Take the question of free will. There is a curious passage in Jean-Paul Sartre’s “Being and Nothingness” in which Sartre discusses human freedom by likening it to skiing. Sartre’s was a radical conception of freedom, according to which human beings, in an almost godlike way, could fashion themselves ex nihilo, unencumbered by the constraints of the world. In searching for a metaphor for this, Sartre considered but rejected ice-skating (the skater’s path was too dependent on the hard resistance of the ice) and eventually hit upon skiing (snow was soft, so the skier imposed his will more easily and left behind a less defined trace). Sartre conceded that a better metaphor would be some form of “sliding on water” — the vanishing trace of the rider’s path would suggest an even greater degree of autonomy from the world — but evidently he was not familiar with surfing.

James regrets that Sartre did not get to think about surfing. If he had, he might have been led to a different and, as James sees it, more convincing theory of freedom. Sartre was an “incompatibilist” about free will: He considered freedom to be at odds with the deterministic universe implied by our best physics. (In what sense are you free if you could not have acted otherwise?) But James is a compatibilist: He thinks there is a meaningful sense of “freedom” consistent with being trapped by the laws of nature — indeed, he thinks the surfer-derived notion of adaptive attunement captures that sense.

As the surfer knows, freedom is not a matter of imposing your will, Sartre-like, on the world. That’s a surefire way to wipe out. Freedom, rather, is a matter of transcending your will, and accepting the “exchange,” or two-way relationship, between what you intend to do and what you are constrained to do by the forces around you. You take what the wave gives you. In a deterministic universe, freedom is the sensation, known to the adaptively attuned, of “efficacy without control.” The surfer is right; Sartre is wrong.

The rhetorical conceit of James’s book is a debate between him and Sartre. This is not wholly successful as a framing device, in part because many of the discussions have little to do with Sartre. For example, James provides a marvelous analysis of the surfing lineup (the assemblage of surfers jockeying for waves) as a mode of political organization, one that is “akin less to the domestic state than to the ‘anarchical society’ that is international relations.” By showing how a few simple principles for wave sharing can give rise, through a process of adaptive attunement, to the fair and egalitarian allocation of a limited resource, he offers surfing as a model for global cooperation in an age of ecological scarcity. A mention of Sartre’s play “No Exit” gets included in this chapter to debatable effect.

Given that James’s principal area of academic expertise is political philosophy, it is not surprising his chapters on “society” and “work” are particularly strong. Surfers may want to flip straight to his argument for the necessity of a “more leisurely, surfer-friendly style of capitalism,” in which some people work less and surf more — in the interest of offsetting carbon emissions, of course.

But why stop at reforming capitalism? To those of us who spend our workdays sitting at desks in front of computers, furtively checking webcam footage of our local breaks, I say: Surfers of the world, unite! We have nothing to lose but our jobs.