Customer Reviews

Freedom, Vol. 1: Freedom in the Making of Western Culture

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Who would have thought that a Marxist sociologist at Harvard could write a profoundly moving account of the history of freedom? Patterson delivers a highly readable account of the "three chords of freedom" as they evolved in the ancient world, were crushed during the Roman empire, and were reborn and spread worldwide by history's first freedom-centered religion, Christianity. The book has just two small flaws: the author's frequent references to rusty Marxist notions of class struggle, and the sketchy and incomplete character of the final chapters and conclusion. Still, it is a marvelous read. I for once can hardly wait for volume 2, expected in 1999.

This book literally changed my life. I stumbled on it at a [local bookstore] (sorry Amazon). Through this Marxist scholar I learned pride in the accomplishments of my culture i. e. Western Civilization.

While his Marxist training sometimes peeks through, in asides, it never interferes in his central theme which ultimately destroys the foundations of Marxist thought and propaganda.

His skill is in weaving facts about the West, we all know but have displaced because of left wing historical revision, into a compelling and coherent pagent about the "invention" of freedom.

This Marxist turned me into a proud conservative.

Mr. Patterson is a bourgeois who understands freedom from a typical husbandman's perspective. What he doesn't see is the perspective of nomads, gypsies, wandering artists, etc., i.e. the moving crowd. He did not look at them, and by this missed the chance to write about a commitment to freedom much deeper and older than the attempts of the people bound to their soil or community. Also, he neglects the Jewish heritage of Christianity and its fight for freedom. Obviously he has not read Michael Walzer's "Exodus and Revolution". If he had, he would have known that the first successful attempt to become free from slavery did not happen in Greece but in the desert between Egypt and Palestine. It was not Greek rhetoric about freedom but the Exodus story that gave spiritual power to the civil rights movement.

I was especially taken by Patterson's book on the sociology of Slavery. However, in this book he appears to contradict himself. Maybe. In his 1982 book Patterson tendered that Greek polis and Roman slavery ought not to be confused with modern, capitalistic notions of freedom. If freedom was yearned for by slaves and freedom indeed was a virtue aspired to particulary by women and slaves, then, what of the paranome and operae obligations, reciprocal obligatons that was part and parcel of first century Mediterranean societies. Indeed Peter Garnsey and Richard Saller have admitted that even while the Romans may have given their slaves citizenship along with their freedom, this act was always undergirded in the interests of the owner. The slave had to work out his obligations. Why does not Patterson talk about these obligations, a social-anthropological reality? Or, is Berlin right in stating that freedom as we know it is a modern phenomena, something that Patterson himself observed in 1982, Slavery and Social Death?