A Tolerable Anarchy

by Purdy, Jedediah

• ISBN13: 9781400095841
• ISBN10: 1400095840
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Trade Paper
• Copyright: 2010-03-09
• Publisher: Vintage

Summary

InA Tolerable Anarchy, Jedediah Purdy traces the history of the American understanding of freedom, an ideal that has inspired the countryrs"s best-and worst-moments, from independence and emancipation to war and economic uncertainty. Working from portraits of famous American lives, like Frederick Douglas and Ralph Waldo Emerson, Purdy asks crucial questions about our relationship to liberty: Does capitalism perfect or destroy freedom? Does freedom mean following tradition, Godrs"s word, or oners"s own heart? Can a nation of individuals also be a community of citizens? This is history that speaks plainly to our lives today, urging readers to explore our understanding of our country and ourselves, and a provocative look at one of Americars"s cherished principles.

Author Biography

Jedediah Purdy teaches law at Duke University and has also taught at Yale and Harvard. Purdy is the author of For Common Things: Irony, Trust, and Commitment in America Today and Being America: Liberty, Commerce, and Violence in an American World, and has written for The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times, Democracy, and other publications.

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Sensations of Freedom	p. 3
Declarations of Independence	p. 24
The Search for Civic Dignity	p. 43
War and Its Equivalents	p. 74
Is Freedom Empty? Citizenship, Sodomy, and the Meaning of Life	p. 97
American Utopias	p. 121
The Economics of 1776, and Today	p. 161
The Value of Freedom	p. 189
Fragments of a Free Economy	p. 204
Afterword	p. 229
Acknowledgments	p. 233
Notes	p. 235
Bibliographic Essay	p. 263
Bibliography	p. 275
Index	p. 285
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

c h a p t e r 3

War and Its Equivalents

One of the best pieces ever inThe Onion,the satirical newspaper whose articles make up a parallel history of the last two decades, appeared just after September 11, 2001. It opened, “Feeling helpless in the wake of the horrible September 11 terrorist attacks that killed thousands, Christine Pearson baked a cake and decorated it like an American flag Monday.” True to form, the article is lightly ironic as it traces the fictional Topeka legal secretary's rummage through her kitchen cabinets in a frenzy of distress and media saturation. It concludes, though, with a middle- American version of the “Yes” at the end of James Joyce'sUlyssesas Pearson presents the confection to her neighbors:


“I baked a cake,” said Pearson, shrugging her shoulders and forcing a smile as she unveiled the dessert in the Overstreet household later that evening. “I made it into a flag.”

Pearson and the Overstreets stared at the cake in silence for nearly a minute, until Cassie hugged Pearson.

“It's beautiful,” Cassie said. “The cake is beautiful.”

ThatOnionpiece better captures the mood of those weeks than the soaring and belligerent speeches of politicians. It spoke to a basic and powerful wish to be connected to others, to help heal rather than injure, to be on the side of good rather than let isolation make you neutral. And it recognized that the ways we try to do these things are often stumbling, awkward, easy to make fun of-even though making fun of them is not just cruel but also shoddy and trite, much more jejune than the attempts to do something good. This scrap of satire acknowledged all of this and, in a paper that specializes in relentless fun making, gently refrained from attacking it.

The appetites for connection, membership, and righteousness (which is not the same as self-righteousness) that this sketch almost shyly honored are a reminder of Americans' persistent desire for a sense of national community and the common good. More vivid reminders include the nomination in 2008 of two presidential candidates who believe in citizenship and political service and, in particular, the enormous enthusiasm for Barack Obama's conviction-driven primary campaign. Self-concern, self-regard, even a certain amount of self-involvement, are all resting places for human feelings. Selfishness and isolation are not. That is why political language remains essentially engaged in trying to find a language of common good that feels alive, contemporary, genuine, and American. The search often feels as futile as the fictional Christine Pearson's search through her kitchen cabinets and, like hers, ends in the personal orbit of friends and neighbors.

What might such language sound like today? Part of the answer comes from the themes of the previous chapter. For one thing, it would have to take seriously what Ronald Reagan saw when he triumphantly dispatched Jimmy Carter: there is no American appetite for diminution and bad conscience in political life. We listen to be affirmed and celebrated. We are mostly not interested in being called to serve, let alone to sacrifice, for a promise of sterner limits. In this respect we are the spiritual descendants of Walt Whitman,
who announced that he celebrated himself and, in that act, celebrated every American and the country as a whole. Reagan's inaugurals were tableaux of American dreaming and striving, full of a heroic ordinariness that had more of Whitman in them than any previous president's.

For another thing, a renewed language of common good would have to accept some of the personal-virtue consensus that united Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. Americans do experience freedom, purpose, and satisfaction most strongly in family and individual life. These are, by and large, our archetypes for understanding what it means to be

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Excerpted from A Tolerable Anarchy: Rebels, Reactionaries, and the Making of American Freedom by Jedediah Purdy
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.