This week at Progressive Book Club, we're honored to host a discussion between Jedediah Purdy and Eric Foner. Purdy is the author of For Common Things and A Tolerable Anarchy: Rebels, Reactionaries, and the Making of American Freedom, a PBC selection for March. Foner, one of America's most distinguished historians, is the author of Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, and The Story of American Freedom, among many other books. In the coming days they'll be discussing A Tolerable Anarchy and, more broadly, the idea of American freedom in history and today.


Friday, March 13

Eric,

I have greatly enjoyed this exchange, too.  Thank you for ending our pass at an inexhaustible topic with the question of its (let us hope inexhaustible) future.

When I first began thinking about the book, it seemed to me that it might be a bleak account of how a charismatic idea ended its days in the arid delta of Bush's America.  I no longer feel that pessimism, but I do share your observation that, in trying to renew a language of political community and citizenship, Obama has not used 'freedom' much.  Instead he seems to be recasting certain Bush words that were also in some measure Clinton words - responsibility, service.  For fifteen years, these have been apolitical terms of personal and social virtue, strangely central to political language.  Obama, I think, is working to link these up to citizenship and polity again, taking familiar terms and inflecting back in the direction of national aims. 

Where is 'freedom' in this?  One thing I note in Obama's language is that 'imagination' and 'curiosity' are on his list of perennial political virtues.  I think this is new in presidential language, though I have not looked back specifically for these terms, and FDR and LBJ invoked similar humanist qualities.  They are in any case unimaginable in Bush's voice.  They strike me as the necessary conditions of a dimension of democratic freedom - conceiving of a different and possible future in service of pursuing it.  His language about loyalty to political tradition, too, ties the value of that tradition to the possibility of such change.  This is a kind of freedom that I think intensely interests him, and which his engagement with 'cynicism' and 'fear' is in defense of - that is, this is the. Freedom he sees those as attacking with their all-is-tactics world without end (lack of) imagination.

Participating in this seems to me a real part of a person's freedom, though mediated by collective identity and action.  In talking about the economy, I would love to hear himbtie security and opportunity to an enriched idea of freedom, as both FDR and LBJ did.  I think the time is ripe to say what a real 'free market' or 'free economy' would be: an order in which Americans could be free in more dimensions of their lives, and enjoy more and more kinds of choices, not just the chance to swim or drown (or, as recently, be swept away by a flood).  I think there are ears for this, and I hope he can find the music.

Again, thanks very much for all. - I hope in ways it is only the beginning of a conversation.

 My best,


 Jed



Friday, March 13

Jed,

I have enjoyed exchanging ideas about freedom with you.  I guess this in
an inexhaustible subject.  However, since our conversation is now
nearing its end, let me pose one more question.

I am struck by the fact that President Obama rarely if ever uses the
word "freedom," either during the campaign or now that he is in office. 
Do you thyink that George W. Bush has, in effect, discredited it by his
overuse and cynical misuse of the word (Operation Iraqi Freedom, for
example).  If Bush did discredit the idea of freedom, that would be one
more crime to add to his long list.

But on a more positive note, I hope Obama does not abandon the idea or
cede it to the extreme right.  So my question is, in the world of the
21st century, what do you think freedom should mean?  What elements of
the long, complex tradition of freedom you explore in your book are
still relevant today?  Are there new elements that ought to be added to
meet modern exigencies?  Of course, this is not a question about
history, really, but as you have thought so creatively about American
freedom, I was wondering what you think about its future.

Best wishes,

Eric

Wednesday, March 11

Eric,

It does seem connected with Winthrop's contrast, doesn't it?  I think the connection must be the image of consumption as an unbounded, appetitive pursuit of things and the (fleeting? false?) satisfactions they promise.  It's the kind of image Winthrop denounced as "natural," that is, animal-like.

So, here are a few thoughts, in no particular order. One is that there's a tradition of freedom focused on inner liberty from false necessity, which is often associated with luxury or showy bases of status.  Its first canonical secular expression is probably in Thoreau's wish to achieve a kind of inner freedom by distinguishing false from real needs, desires, attachments - where the real is fundamental, essential, the false somehow mistaken or dispensable.  This note is often struck among high-minded reformers of the latter part of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth.  I have been reading a lot of early Sierra Club and other parks/wilderness advocates' arguments recently, and they were uniformly ranged against "materialism" as blunting higher forms of (aesthetic and spiritual) consciousness, which they would probably have called freedom.  Teddy Roosevelt and others made the same complaint against "materialism" as enervating civic energies and the heroic or adventure-seeking spirit. 

It would be culturally attractive, I think, if we drew on this now (it would have been attractive in the last decade, too) to try to distinguish more clearly between essential and trivial, real and illusory, satisfactions, and pursue less of the latter types.  And to my mind, it would make sense of think of ourselves as being freer by virtue of doing that.  This is all "one man's meat" kind of stuff - de gustibus - but as a matter of experience, most of feel there is a difference, and it would be good to do more of the kinds of experiments Thoreau urged.

A second thought, though, is that a lot of our seeming materialism is not that we're just lost in Sex-and-the-City World, but rather that you need a lot of wealth to feel secure in a society with few secure baselines of membership, such as that you get health care and a decent education for your kids just for showing up (and obeying the law, maybe), instead of having to scramble to get those and then scramble to keep them.  So a social order that made people more secure in their basic interests and opportunities - consistent with FDR's New Deal conception of freedom as updated to security and opportunity - might help us feel freer to undertake experiments in freedom, in Thoreau's sense.

A third thought (a bit in tension with the other two) is that I mistrust any description of consumerism as merely mistaken or crass.  I think this may be partly generational.  I find many progressives a little older than I have this mistrust, while I take assume that people pursue Thoreau-style experiments in living in what they buy, and how, and that paying more for less stuff, though from an ecologically or ethically better supply chain (as with a certain or certain aspects of what Whole Foods does) is not (just) a symptom of capitalism's power to absorb every dissenting impulse (as people like Thomas Frank contend), but also an expression of the enormous variety of goods we can pursue under the sweeping headings of "consumption" or "exchange." 

 Hope these thoughts are responsive.  I am enjoying this exchange and want to note that whenever I write anything about the past, I immediately flash on the fact that somewhere along the way I have read you on the theme and benefited greatly from that.

Best,

Jed


Wednesday, March 11

Jed,

Moving on to another major theme of your book, which seems somehow related to Winthrop's contrast, I wonder if we are now seeing a decline in the pervasiveness of what be called the consumer definition of freedom that seems to have dominated our thought lately, or perhaps since World War II. Freedom being the ability to choose from the cornucopia of goods available in the great American marketplace.  Remember the famous Kitchen Debate of 1959, where then vice-president Nixon and Soviet premier Khrushchev discussed consumerism at the American exposition in Moscow?  To Nixon, freedom seemed to mean living in a suburban home with a large number of labor-saving devices.  It fell to K., leading a supposedly materialist society, to suggest that there were also moral and political elements of freedom.

My point is that the issue of economic freedom, a key theme in your book, discussed very insightfully, may be undergoing a transformation right now, due to the economic crisis and the sense that we have all -- individuals, banks, government -- mortgaged our futures and incurred unsustainable debts in the pursuit of consumption.  I wonder what definitions of economic freedom in the American tradition you think we can draw on today to "think anew" (as Lincoln asked us to in a different context) about how we understand economic freedom.

Eric


Tuesday, March 10

Dear Eric,

This terrific point brings us to one of the main themes of the book.  As you know, Winthrop's contrast (though not his language) has been used ever and again in contests over the question of which demands for change can usher in new forms of community and which are "charters of anarchy" (as some the American revolutionaries' critics charged of the colonists' announced, if not practiced, theory of political equality and innate liberty).  It's only the most recent example that gay rights has inspired the charge that this form of desire, if set loose, will undercut the shaping confines of family, fidelity, and intergenerational continuity and make us animals to one another.

Of course, Winthrop's argument is not quite this: his is not functional, but purely moral, so in theory he would have been unmoved to know that in the twenty-first century his own Massachusetts could live in natural liberty, that is, sin, and be no worse for it in worldly terms.  But in the social practice of argument, I suspect the two ideas - expressing some kind of disapproved desire is wrong and is socially destructive - travel together.

The source of the book's title is Edmund Burke's 1775 observation that restive Massachusetts (again) seemed to be making self-organizing self-government work, a fact in contradiction to conventional political ideas (at least as Burke characterized them).  The result of the experiment should have been anarchy, he told his fellow members of the House of Commons, but it was not, or if it was, "anarchy has proved tolerable." 

In ways, the book is a (highly incomplete) history of such experiments in what is forecast to be anarchy but turns out to be tolerable, that is, to be a new form of community with a greater range of possible self-government, self-expression, or mutual recognition.  We now debate things that would have been unimaginable as serious questions in Winthrop's time, and if the arguments are still in the form of natural versus moral freedom, a good deal of nature has proved tolerable than it seemed to Winthrop.  So if there is not an end to the argument, it is clear that its center has moved dramatically in what Winthrop would have seen as a libertine direction, while those who now occupy his role in the argument embrace vastly more personal liberty as "godly" than their theological predecessors did.  Compare Rick Warren, who tells his readers that God wants them to be "authentic" with Him and to be their "best friend" to the Puritans who assured their parishioners of their depravity. 

I said the arguments about what works socially travel together with those about what it is right to choose; but of course, to repeat, they are different arguments in principle, and I have seized on the first here.

Best wishes,

Jed 


Tuesday, March 10

Dear Jed,

Thanks for your very illuminating response.  Since, as you say, your book is, in large part, about the tension between the highly individualistic strands of American ideas of freedom and the desire for community, let me introduce another element worth exploring (although this is not a criticism for its omission as one can never cover everything).

Back in 1645, I believe, John Winthrop, the governor of colonial Massachusetts, spoke to the legislature (General Court) about freedom.  He identified two kinds.  The first was "natural freedom."  This is what so many of us think of freedom today -- basically the right to do what one wishes without restraint.  But to Winthrop, this was the opposite of real freedom.  Indeed "natural" was far from a compliment.  Natural freedom was the freedom of animals, not human beings -- it meant being a slave to ones passions, immediate needs and desires.

The other kind of freedom, according to Winthrop, was moral or Christian freedom.  This required subordinating one's self to a moral code; ie, submitting one's passions, needs, etc to self-restraint.  It meant *not* doing everything one wished.  The free person was restrained, not libertine.

Clearly, this tension, akin to but not identical with, individualism vs community, has existed throughout our history.  One sees it in modern conservatism, in the conflicts between libertarians and Christian conservatives.  One might say that the issue can be stated thus:  is freedom the right to choose, or is it choosing the right?

And connected is the question of how a moral code is to be established:  by individual decision or public coercion?  In debates over abortion rights, gay rights and many many other issues, this dichotomy within our traditions of freedom sill roils our society.

Anyway, I wonder if you see any exit from this long debate?

Eric


Monday, March 9

Dear Eric,

Thanks for these helpful questions; It's a real pleasure to be able to have this exchange with you.

I think that different figures are in the book for somewhat different kinds of reasons.  Frederick Douglass and Ralph Waldo Emerson both embody something outside the intentions of most who used the language of Revolutionary American freedom - Douglass slave revolt, Emerson the antinomian conscience that the Americans' critics warned against; but each also demonstrates how the same language, in the hands of a later generation, can support wider and deeper kinds of emancipation than its first users envisaged.  They personify aspects of the paradox I want to praise.

 The presidents are there because their language strikes me as expressing, and sometimes shaping, the broader struggle to find an account of civic dignity and the role of government at various points in the country's history.  They are both exemplary instances and primary agents of this central drama in the story.

Sanger and Debs are, of course, very telling picks.  Debs represents a major strand that I do not pick up in the book: strong economic egalitarianism of the producerist/socialist variety.  A major argument of the book is that commonsensical and indisputably mainstream American attitudes have radical and thoroughly "unrealistic" pasts.  The reasons for the success of some kinds of radicalism and failure of others are beyond what I felt able to do in the book.  The radical heroes of this story are the successful prophets for that reason.

Sanger is (like Debs, like nearly anyone interesting) such a wonderfully complicated figure, but if we take her as importantly emblematic of early demands for for women's emancipation and sexual autonomy, I just have to plead to having omitted this important strand from a not-too-long meditation.  A better book would have included both and done a lot with them.

On economic freedom: partly influenced by your wonderful books, I've been interested all along in the relationship between democratic community and various versions of the market.  Economic life so thoroughly structures our relations and prospects that a project on national community seems hollow without it.  (Of course, some might say the same o a history of American freedom without Debs and Sanger.)  And I think many of the confusions that emerge in the effort to integrate a strong idea of personal freedom into a vision of national community are particularly acute in, even grounded in, ideas of economic life that celebrate the power of free self-authorship as if it were a natural fact rather than a social achievement.  The role of economic community in the language of the major twentieth-century presidents reinforces this impression. 

On Obama: it's such a complicated question.  The book is really about freedom AND national community, and the difficulties the one can pose for the other.  It took early shape in good part in response to Obama's 2004 DNC address, which I downloaded compulsively until I understood that he was talking about fairness and solidarity in ways that sounded fresh, genuine, and American - something I had never heard a president do.  I started the research that grounds the discussion of presidential language to try to understand the course public language had traveled to reach this point of difficulty.  As you know, I concluded that ideas about personal freedom were connected with the difficulty of talking about fairness in the national community; but that personal freedom is also so close to the heart of the national political imagination that ideas of fairness, solidarity, or security have to take them very seriously to have a prospect of success.

I thought Obama might have the potential to bridge this gap.  And I think he does have the goal of developing a language of solidarity that works for today's Americans.  So far, as you say, he doesn't seem to think freedom is a key to that project.  This separates him, notably, from FDR and Wilson.  I don't think it's enough that Bush used the word so much - he also made a fetish of words like responsibilty and community, which Obama is much more willing to take up.

Maybe we could think over the next few days about why this is so.  I would welcome that.

Best wishes,

Jed


Monday, March 9

Dear Jedediah,

To launch this conversation let me propose a few comments or questions about the book.  I found A Tolerable Anarchy a remarkably well-researched and well-thought-out meditation on the history of the idea of freedom in this country (remarkable only because we historians think no one from outside our little corner of the academic firmament can discuss these questions as well as we do).

I would be interested in your responding to some of the following questions as the basis of further discussion:

How did you choose the cast of characters for discussing the idea of freedom?   A wide range of individuals are introduced here, but the basis of selection is not always apparent.  It would be interesting to know why some are included and others connected with the history of freedom -- say, Margaret Sanger, or Eugene V. Debs, do not make an appearance.

The book offers a wide-ranging investigation of various elements of freedom -- individual, social, political, economic, religious.  In the second half it seems to focus most extensively on various concepts of economic freedom.  You seem like a prophet, in that the book presumably was conceptualized before the current crisis.  I wonder how you decided to privilege economic freedom.

Finally, for the moment, it would be interesting to speculate on why Barack Obama so infrequently appeals to the idea of freedom.  I don't think the word occurs very often in his speeches.  Did President Bush tarnish, or even discredit "freedom" by his promiscuous misuse of the word (Operation Iraqi Freedom, etc).  Are we in a post-freedom moment in American political ideology?  Or, if not, what do we think the elements of freedom under the Obama administration will look like?

I look forward to discussing these and other questions this week.

Best wishes,
Eric Foner