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Freedom is at the heart of the American identity, shaping both personal lives and political values. The ideal of authoring one's own life has inspired the country's best and worst moments--courage and emancipation, but also fear, delusion, and pointless war.
This duality is America's story, from slavery to the progressive reforms of the early twentieth century, from the New Deal to the social movements of the 1960s and today's battles over climate change. The arc has been toward expanding freedom as new generations press against inherited boundaries. But economic forces beyond our control undercut our ideas of self-mastery. Realizing our ideals of freedom today requires the political vision to reform the institutions we share.
Jedediah Purdy works from the stories of individuals: Frederick Douglass urging Americans to extend freedom to slaves; Ralph Waldo Emerson arguing for self-fulfillment as an essential part of liberty; reformers and presidents struggling to redefine citizenship in a fast changing world. He asks crucial questions: Does capitalism perfect or destroy freedom? Does freedom mean following tradition, God's word, or one's own heart? Can a nation of individualists also be a community of citizens?
An excerpt of this book is available in The New York Times.
Book Launch Event
Please join us Wednesday, March 25th, at the New America Foundation for a discussion and book-signing with the author.
Click here to learn more and RSVP.
Publishers Weekly
March 5, 2009
No term in American political discourse elicits such uncomplicated reverence as the word "freedom"-and no concept is more complex and conflicted, argues this brilliant study. Drawing on everything from the writings of Frederick Douglass and Emerson to presidential inaugurals and Supreme Court opinions, Purdy (For Common Things), who teaches law at Duke, surveys the ways in which the ideals of individual liberty, dignity and fulfillment have made and remade America. It's a vexed and protean legacy in his wide-ranging account, one that's given us both stirring liberation movements and misbegotten wars; a doctrine of laissez-faire economics and a welfare state that shields workers from the industrial economy; an unbridled thirst for personal self-actualization amid private utopias and a dread that our lives are incoherent, isolated and socially meaningless. In scintillating prose that's erudite but straightforward and packed with insights, Purdy offers both a searching critique of America's ideology of freedom and an affirmation of the "millions of small declarations of independence from hierarchy, constraint, and fear" it has inspired. The result is a tour de force of engaged political philosophy from one of America's most perceptive public intellectuals.
The New York Times
March 19, 2009
Jedediah Purdy creates an idea-packed sandwich in “A Tolerable Anarchy”: first a slice of radical American autonomy, which frightened both Samuel Johnson and Edmund Burke (unnecessarily); then a slice of practical constraint on that autonomy, produced by Mother Nature herself in the form of a warming climate; and in between, a tour of American political history as it relates to the essence of freedom in different eras. This tour of freedom and its discontents passes through slavery and race, property and labor, conflict and war, utopias and morality.
Additional Praise for A Tolerable Anarchy
"Purdy has emerged as one of America's most promising young public intellectuals. This beautifully written book confirms his place. Rich in the history he tells, and brilliant in its insight, the book will change how you think about America and the challenge we face for its future"
-- Lawrence Lessig, founder of Creative Commons and author of Free Culture
"America has always struggled to define freedom–a struggle that has involved everything from slavery in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, to the cultural ferment of the 1960s, and the free-wheeling capitalism of the 1980s and 1990s. In this thoughtful and engaging history of ideas, Jedediah Purdy vividly recounts this multifaceted debate and illuminates how the idea of freedom is still evolving. Here is an essential book for understanding the idea of freedom in America and the role of government in our lives."
-- Robert B. Reich, author of Supercapitalism: The Transformation of Business, Democracy, and Everyday Life
