The Story of American Freedom
Wolfe, Alan
ern poet, Wallace Stevens. And if Falstaff is all immanence, Hamlet, his only conceivable rival in acuity of intelligence, is all transcendence, aware to the point of pain of the world's...
...In recent decades scholars have stressed the role that previously invisible individuals---most of them women and people of color--have played in our nation's development...
...But just as international politics were morally problematic, so were domestic politics in ways Foner never acknowledges...
...But can we really know that for the present time...
...The cold war, Foner writes, "helped to legitimize a serious assault on civil liberties at home," noting that "the tiny Communist party hardly posed a threat to American security and many of the victims of the Red Scare had little or nothing to do with communism...
...Have any of our truly valuable critics been anything else...
...It is if one believes that the cold war was little more than an excuse for American imperialism...
...Was freedom best guaranteed by property or by government...
...Is Bloom autocratic and eccentric...
...If any writer in this century, in English, comes close to the moral stature of Samuel Johnson, we have to say now that it is Harold Bloom...
...By the same logic, those American leftists who Commonweal 2 2 November 6,1998 viewed the cold war as a sham were not serving the cause of freedom so much as they were exposing their narcissistic naivet6...
...Were wage workers in the nineteenth century free because they were not slaves, as Frederick Douglass once proudly proclaimed, or unfree because they could be considered wage slaves...
...It seems irrelevant to him that, in its internal structure, the Communist party denied dissent and organized itself in a highly authoritarian manner...
...But, for all our long friendship, Bloom and I have never had a conversation about the Bard...
...Unfortunately, The Story American of Freedom--for all its breadth, energy, and insight--does both...
...If you believe that literature is a crucial fact of being human, for God's sake read and use this book...
...However, Murphy's case is strongly endorsed by the structure and style, as well as the conCommonweal 2 4 November6,1998...
...But we might also discover that the bureaucratic state had overreached itself and that unleashing more entrepreneurial activity also unleashed unexpected cultural and personal freedom...
...Were white women free because they did not have owners who could sell them, or unfree, and thus comparable to slaves, because they were subject to the authority of their husbands...
...I rather doubt this myself: If there is indeed a true intellectual revolution afoot (or rather ahead, in both senses) it springs not from feminism's encounter with religion but from feminism itself...
...DEFINING FREEDOM ISN'T EASY Alan Wolfe 0 nce upon a time, surely before the advent of tenure, historians were disposed to write panoramic accounts of an important idea, synthesizing huge amounts of scholarship in a language accessible to nonspecialists...
...Freedom, as Foner points out, provided the language by which Southern whites defended slavery, Northern businessmen fought unions, and the national security establishment justified the cold war...
...And Iago is just too much fun to be true, while Prince Hal (later Henry V) is a Nixonian, cold-as-a-fish monster...
...Twelfth Night is the better play, but how can you not prefer As You Like It, since it has the infinitely lovable ("Falstaff's niece," according to himself) Rosalind...
...And invariably Foner identifies the cause of freedom with his own particular view of how the world ought to work...
...For them, a willingness to confront Soviet power advanced the cause of freedom...
...OPENING THE BIBLE Sara Maitland ~ epeatedly throughout this excellent book, Cullen Murphy argues that "feminism's encounter with religion" is profoundly radical and that the changes that it has wrought upon biblical studies constitute nothing less than "the next intellectual revolution...
...And if Falstaff is all immanence, Hamlet, his only conceivable rival in acuity of intelligence, is all transcendence, aware to the point of pain of the world's complexity, and wanting nothing so much as to evade it all for the absoluteness of one's own being...
...Alan Wolfe is University Professor and Professor of Political Science and Sociology at Boston University...
...I am no great fan of Ronald Reagan and I find myself persistently at odds with the conservative ideas on which he rode to power...
...The Story of American Freedom is at its best when demonstrating how contested a concept freedom really is...
...I've been teaching Shakespeare for almost as long as Bloom has...
...The religious intervention is simply a part of this larger phenomenon...
...No one can finish this book without appreciating the centrality of freedom for the American experience...
...One of the reasons Foner can be so clear and compelling when dealing with the nineteenth century is that we now have enough perspective to know which side advanced the cause of freedom and which did not...
...By organizing his historical survey around the same idea, Foner has produced an impressive challenge to the postmodern suspicion of master narratives...
...Sometimes it does make sense to insist that freedom has to mean something concretely, from which it follows that some people who use its language deny its meaning...
...Oddly, however, Foner's insightful elaborations of the complications of freedom in nineteenth-century America turn simplistic when he comes to the twentieth century...
...He discusses the influence of Herbert Marcuse on the New Left, but never mentions Marcuse's notorious essay "Repressive Tolerance," which argued against free speech--at least as that term is traditionally understood by civil libertarians...
...The story of freedom, in short, never ends and does not contain clear-cut political conclusions...
...Hamlet, after all, is the only major character in Shakespeare whose first words on stage are an aside--addressed not to anybody in the play, but to the audience, or just to himself...
...Foner is right that the Communist party was no threat to American security...
...But in doing so, Foner narrows the conception of freedom in ways which will prevent his book from becoming the definitive work it ought to have been...
...But that's just my personal delight at encountering this great book...
...My course is "Shakespeare for Non-English Majors," since I really believe the poet is too important to be left in the hands of the technologues of culture...
...But its principles were alien to American ideals of freedom, a point that at the very least ought to be mentioned in a book celebrating the story of freedom...
...His most recent book is One Nation, After All (Viking Penguin...
...Welcome at any time, his book is especially welcome now...
...But can I really be sure that the Reagan adrninistration--or, for that matter, the Thatcher administration--did not serve the cause of freedom...
...Frank McConnell, Commonweal's media critic, teaches English literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara...
...The closer we get to the present day, the more certain is Foner that freedom is not a contested concept at all...
...Foner never mentions the fact that the American Communist party avidly supported the Red Scare, defending the use of the Smith Act against Trotskyites...
...At one point he quotes the political philosopher Jean Cohen's important assertion that respect for privacy is the linchpin of freedom, but he fails to acknowledge the role that the New Left's slogan "The Personal is the Political" might have contributed to the abrogation of privacy...
...Compared with, say, feminism's encounter with classical Marxism or feminism's encounter with theories of representation, its influence on religion has not been that significant...
...And since Marcuse's essay was the intellectual inspiration for current university speech codes and stabs at political correctness, Foner also never mentions these exercises in unfreedom, even though he does carry his story up to the 1990s...
...Freedom is too important a term to be reduced to one side in political or ideological debate...
...Foner celebrates the contributions these critics made to American freedom as he speaks with disdain of the establishment...
...Eric Foner's The Story of American Freedom harkens back to that era...
...But is it just as obvious, as Foner suggests, that national-security managers abused the language of freedom in justifying the cold war...
...On the contrary, he insists, there is usually one party that speaks clearly and unambiguously for freedom and one that does not...
...In his discussion of contemporary events, Foner drops the rich appreciation of nuance that characterizes his treatment of earlier struggles over wages and family life...
...SO I'm delighted--and bemused-to find that we share so many healthy prejudices about him...
...Bloom manages to weave this grand opposition across the whole range of the plays, illuminating all the major characters--Rosalind, the Fool in Lear, Macbeth, Iago, etc.--and making wonderful if idiosyncratic sense out of why we find Shakespeare, somehow, simply indispensable...
...Some day we may discover that contemporary conservatives used the language of freedom to justify unequal distributions of income which left all too many Americans unable to control their lives...
...For them, freedom was the idea around which their political struggles were organized...
...Almost as much as its great original, it contains the Blessing: more life...
...Bloom has finally achieved what I think he wanted all along...
...Neither Soviet dissidents nor the leaders of the pro-democracy movements in Eastern Europe thought that way, however...
...Clearly slaveholders abused the language of freedom, just as segregationists distorted the language of rights by daiming them for states rather than people...
...Unwilling to stretch the reach of the concept that much, Foner rightly seeks to narrow the meaning of freedom to those actions---such as the abolition of slavery or the establishment of the New Deal--which enhanced the autonomy and dignity of large numbers of Americans...
...None of these questions had easy or automatic answers, and Foner offers his readers a fascinats guide through the appeals made by individuals on all sides of these issues...
Vol. 125 • November 1998 • No. 19
