Liberty and Freedom
In this week's New York Times Book Review, I review David Hackett Fischer's massive new book, Liberty and Freedom: A Visual History of America's Founding Ideas. Here's the beginning:
When patriotic country music fans sing Lee Greenwood's lyric "I'm proud to be an American, where at least I know I'm free," what do they mean? Is Greenwood's idea of freedom the same as Bruce Springsteen's or Francis Scott Key's? And is this freedom the same as the liberty of the Declaration of Independence, the Pledge of Allegiance or the statue in New York Harbor? In "Liberty and Freedom," David Hackett Fischer, a historian at Brandeis University, argues that we cannot learn how most Americans understand freedom by studying political theory or intellectual debates. "Most Americans do not think of liberty and freedom as a set of texts, or a sequence of controversies or a system of abstractions," he writes. "They understand these ideas in another way, as inherited values that they have learned early in life and deeply believe."
To probe those unspoken meanings and examine how they've evolved through the nation's history, "Liberty and Freedom" seeks to combine the "new history" with the "old," using the habits and customs of ordinary people to illuminate the actions and ideas of political leaders. The book, Fischer says, is "iconographic. It uses images, artifacts, and material culture as empirical evidence." Before he gets to images, Fischer turns to etymology, establishing a contrast between liberty, whose Latin roots suggest release from bondage, and freedom, which shares Northern European origins with friend. "The original meanings of freedom and liberty," he writes, "were not merely different but opposed. Liberty meant separation. Freedom implied connection." He makes much of this distinction throughout the book, favoring "freedom" and often disparaging "liberty" (associating it, for instance, with Southern racism). Yet he also declares that the creative tension between the two concepts has given English-speaking people "a distinctive dynamism in their thought about liberty and freedom."