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."
Posted by Virginia Postrel on December 17, 2004 • Comments
For an upcoming article, I was able to arrange a preview of The Aviator, which opens this weekend in LA and New York and everywhere on Christmas Day. The movie portrays 20 years of Howard Hughes's life, from the making of his movie Hell's Angels to his fight to protect TWA's right to fly internationally from PanAm's man in Congress. It's not a documentary, of course, but a psychologically compelling tragedy that should become a classic. Leonardo DiCaprio, Cate Blanchett, and Martin Scorsese all deserve Oscars, but they couldn't have done it without the brilliant script by John Logan. (Interestingly, it was DiCaprio's idea to make a movie about Hughes.)
As further research, I also got the newly released DVD of Hell's Angels. The dogfight and Zeppelin sequences are wonderful, justifying Hughes's insane perfectionism, but the movie is much more interesting as a historical artifact than as entertainment. Watching Hell's Angels is a little like reading pre-Marlovian Elizabethan dramas. They have their moments, and the potential is there, but the writing is too episodic, the characters too flat, the language too stilted. Hell's Angels has some great visuals, but the acting is so broad and melodramatic that it makes the annoying characters more so. I didn't care if they died; in fact, it was something of a relief. (Plus Germany looks remarkably like the Southern California desert.) It's amazing how much the movies improved after 1930.
UPDATE: Jesse Walkers writes to let me know that Hell's Angels is playing tonight on Turner Classic Movies, midnight ET. It's part of TCM's 13-film (and one-documentary) tribute to Howard Hughes.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on December 15, 2004 • Comments
Inspired by the post below, Daniel Drezner posts on "an old parlor game among academics -- confessing the most important book in your field that you have never read." It's not clear what "my field" is. Since my formal training is in English literature, I might say Frankenstein (I intentionally avoided Ulysses, which means I'm not embarrassed). Given my current work, however, it's some combination of The Wealth of Nations and The Theory of Moral Sentiments. I've read parts of each but all of neither. Dan's reader comments suggest that Smith is vastly underread.
Responding to the original post, readers have been hard on Mark Edmundson, but I've got to give him credit for admitting that he'd never heard of The Road to Serfdom. It would have been easy to fake it with something like, "It's certainly been an influential book, but I have to admit that I haven't read it." As Dan's post implies, much of education is knowing what books you should have read, even if there are too many to master.
Reader John Brennan writes, "What I thought was particularly delicious was that it was THE VERY LAST question on the VERY LAST SHOW of Booknotes."
Posted by Virginia Postrel on December 15, 2004 • Comments
Sorry for the light blogging, which will continue to be sparse until at least Wednesday. I'm back in Dallas to sleep before I go to the Baltimore/Washington area for a day. I'll be taping Wall Street Week with Fortune on PBS, which this week features a discussion of design in busines, tied to Fortune's special feature on the subject.
Oh, yeah, and I have two articles due by Tuesday afternoon. (I confess that I enjoy real writing more than blogging, at least at the moment.) But at least I'm not getting my wisdom teeth out, the original plan for tomorrow.
UPDATE: A transcript of the Wall Street Week segment is here.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on December 08, 2004 • Comments
Sunday's Booknotes interview with Mark Edmundson, author of Why Read? ended with this exchange, which is even more striking in the context of the long, erudite interview and Edmundson's thesis that students need (in the publisher's words) a "challenging, life-altering liberal arts education."
LAMB: Here's an older book spoken about by Milton Friedman, on the other side.
EDMUNDSON: OK.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
MILTON FRIEDMAN, AUTHOR AND ECONOMIST: It's a book well worth reading by anybody, because it's a very subtle analysis of why, how it is that well-meaning people who intend only to improve the lot of their fellows, tend to favor courses of action which have exactly the opposite effect.
I think in my, from my point of view, the most interesting chapter in that book is one labeled, why the worst rise to the top.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
LAMB: He's talking about "Road to Serfdom" - Hayek - a bible for people on the conservative political side.
EDMUNDSON: I'm glad to know about it. Until this moment, I've heard nothing about it. But I will write it down and give it a look.
For an introduction to Hayek's work, and the increased recognition of its importance, see my Boston Globe article here. The new issue of Reason has an interview with Hayek biographer Bruce Caldwell, which is not yet online.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on December 07, 2004 • Comments
The WaPost's Cynthia Webb's blog-like "Filter" column has a great roundup of articles covering trends in online shopping. It's big this year--no surprise, there--but the details of how, where, and what people are buying are interesting. If you don't want to follow the links, Webb offers excellent summaries.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on December 07, 2004 • Comments
I'm in L.A., reading and writing up a storm and furthering my TV career (such as it is). I'll be on the Dennis Miller Show on Wednesday (9 p.m. and midnight ET, 6 p.m. and 9 p.m. PT). I also taped a slew of comments on pop-culture topics for this Bravo special, which first airs on December 16. (Follow the link for all dates and times.) I have no idea whether they'll use anything I said and, if so, whether it will be anything intelligent.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on December 06, 2004 • Comments
Once, social critics decried markets for reducing everyone to the lowest common denominator, eroding personal expression for the sake of mass production. Now they damn markets for giving us so many choices we're overwhelmed. The psychological research today's critics cite is legitimate, but their static view of the marketplace isn't. Less variety isn't the answer. Rather, we need better ways to narrow down that variety to the choices most likely to suit our personal preferences. That's not a problem. It's an entrepreneurial opportunity.
For a special retailing section of the NYT, I look at the rise of "mediated shopping." Related pieces are here (on the "variety revolution") and here (on "shopping magazines").
Posted by Virginia Postrel on December 06, 2004 • Comments
My latest NYT column was inspired by personal events (recounted in the lead) but turned out to be extremely newsy:
When I asked my editor whether I could be reimbursed for my travel to the American Economic Association meetings this year in Philadelphia, he agreed, with a caveat.
"Please try to get the cheapest air fare you can," he wrote in an e-mail message. "Southwest flies Dallas-Philly doesn't it?"
Well, no. It doesn't, even though both the company and its passengers wish it did.
Southwest is based at Love Field, not far from downtown Dallas. But it cannot fly from Dallas to Philadelphia - or Chicago or Las Vegas or Los Angeles or Baltimore-Washington or a host of other popular destinations - without violating federal law.
Like my editor, most people outside Dallas have no idea of this peculiar restriction. The so-called Wright Amendment, named for the longtime congressman from Fort Worth, Jim Wright, was intended to protect the newly built Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport. What it did was limit not the amount of traffic at Love Field (local rules take care of that) but where the airplanes could fly. It is a costly example of protectionist legislation.
In mid-November, Southwest called for the repeal of the law, reversing its longtime "passionately neutral" stance and igniting a heated local debate.
Read the rest here and lots of Dallas Morning News reports here.
The Wright Amendment offers an excellent test of Texas politicians, including the Bushies: Are they just crony capitalists? Or are they pro-market, pro-growth, and pro-consumer? For the past 25 years, the consistent answer has been "crony capitalists," more interested in protecting DFW Airport and American Airlines than in letting market competition serve the public (including a lot of Dallas businesses). A few politicians, including Rep. Pete Sessions, have come out for repeal. But, astoundingly, Dallas Mayor Laura Miller is defending the federal law that puts her own city at a competitive disadvantage. Or maybe it's not so astounding. It's Texas politics as usual.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on December 01, 2004 • Comments
This long American Journalism Review article on troubles at the LA Times made me think about the question media critics consistently dodge: What strategies are realistically available when you're caught in a declining industry, which the metropolitan daily newspaper most assuredly is? How do you sell localism--local news, local advertising, locally produced articles on national subjects--in a market saturated with cheap substitutes whose quality has been tested in national competition? What niche can you fill?
These are not questions that can be answered by referring to "good" journalism or "bad" journalism. The local newspaper faces the same essential problem as the independent bookstore, the local theater group (competing with the movies and TV), the local music scene, and so forth. What once was good--or good enough--no longer is. Newspapers, journalists, and their critics have to start by recognizing that circumstances have changed and strategies must change as well. Unfortunately, well-trained daily journalists tend to believe that the old ways were "ethical" and anything else (including the strong voices found in most magazines) is not.
Far be it from me to defend the decisions of newspaper managers, many of which (and whom) seem idiotic, but this sort of mindless "oh poor us" coverage doesn't add to readers' understanding. Morale is going to be bad in a declining business, but that doesn't mean ignoring the decline will reverse it.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on November 30, 2004 • Comments