A Tolerable Anarchy: Rebels, Reactionaries, and the Making of American Freedom [Hardcover]

Jedediah Purdy (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 3, 2009

From the author of For Common Things: a provocative look at the meaning of American freedom.

Freedom is at the heart of the American identity, shaping both personal lives and political values. The ideal of authoring one’s own life has inspired the country’s best and worst moments—courage and emancipation, but also fear, delusion, and pointless war.

This duality is America’s story, from slavery to the progressive reforms of the early twentieth century, from the New Deal to the social movements of the 1960s and today’s battles over climate change. The arc has been toward expanding freedom as new generations press against inherited boundaries. But economic forces beyond our control undercut our ideas of self-mastery. Realizing our ideals of freedom today requires the political vision to reform the institutions we share.

Jedidiah Purdy works from the stories of individuals: Frederick Douglass urging Americans to extend freedom to slaves; Ralph Waldo Emerson arguing for self-fulfillment as an essential part of liberty; reformers and presidents struggling to redefine citizenship in a fast-changing world. He asks crucial questions: Does capitalism perfect or destroy freedom? Does freedom mean following tradition, God’s word, or one’s own heart? Can a nation of individualists also be a community of citizens? A Tolerable Anarchy is a book of history that speaks plainly to our lives today, urging us to explore our understanding of our country and ourselves, and to make real our own ideals of freedom.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. No term in American political discourse elicits such uncomplicated reverence as the word freedom—and no concept is more complex and conflicted, argues this brilliant study. Drawing on everything from the writings of Frederick Douglass and Emerson to presidential inaugurals and Supreme Court opinions, Purdy (For Common Things), who teaches law at Duke, surveys the ways in which the ideals of individual liberty, dignity and fulfillment have made and remade America. It's a vexed and protean legacy in his wide-ranging account, one that's given us both stirring liberation movements and misbegotten wars; a doctrine of laissez-faire economics and a welfare state that shields workers from the industrial economy; an unbridled thirst for personal self-actualization amid private utopias and a dread that our lives are incoherent, isolated and socially meaningless. In scintillating prose that's erudite but straightforward and packed with insights, Purdy offers both a searching critique of America's ideology of freedom and an affirmation of the millions of small declarations of independence from hierarchy, constraint, and fear it has inspired. The result is a tour de force of engaged political philosophy from one of America's most perceptive public intellectuals. (Mar. 5)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Bookmarks Magazine

What all critics appreciated about A Tolerable Anarchy was the rich intellectual history Purdy has constructed; more than one reviewer compared the book to a college course with a very engaging professor. But they were less certain about whether Purdy had reliably proved his particular thesis. In the New York Times Book Review, Gary Hart, the former senator and presidential candidate, compared Purdy’s book to Alan Wolfe’s recent title The Future of Liberalism and found the former the equivalent of a course for sophomores and the latter the equivalent of a course for seniors. Hart wrote that he did not intend this to be a criticism, but it was not quite praise, either. Nevertheless, Hart and others strongly endorsed the book, particularly the sections that try to reconcile American individualism with environmentalism.
Copyright 2009 Bookmarks Publishing LLC

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 294 pages
• Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf; 1ST edition (March 3, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1400044472
• ISBN-13: 978-1400044474
• Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 1.1 x 7.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,003,305 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Freedom explained, July 25, 2009

By 

Jorge Madrazo (Nutley, NJ United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: A Tolerable Anarchy: Rebels, Reactionaries, and the Making of American Freedom (Hardcover)

This is a beautifully written book that includes interesting history, abstract ideas, and real applications of the ideas.
The author describes the contradictions and complexities of the concept of freedom -- which for me had become a meaningless word that is too freely thrown out by politicians.
He uses Ralph Waldo Emerson and Frederick Douglass as compasses for what freedom means.
He provides context and insights to the controversial headlines that is as far as most people hear, such as -- The courts rule that the constitution guarantees the the right to sodomy or abortion.
He provides a great summary of the subconscious acceptance of our market economy. How we implicitly accept its arbitrary, inhuman and merciless aspects. And he provides reasons why we should be the driver of such negative aspects to make them more human friendly.
He also sees the market economy as going hand-in-hand with promoting the best aspects of freedom.
Finally, he takes the lessons from the US's experiments with freedom and sees aspects that we can apply as we try to solve the survival-challenging problems of this century.

4.0 out of 5 stars great book, June 11, 2010

By 

Stephen Maxwell (El Dorado Hills, CA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: A Tolerable Anarchy (Kindle Edition)

I haven't finished this book yet, but I'm already very impressed with Mr Purdy's eloquence and balanced view of politics. I have heard that some of his historical facts may be off, but I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt because he doesn't seem to be pushing a particular opinion - except perhaps that there's nothing really new under the sun. The book is well-written and enjoyable to read.

0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars riding the chocolate mudslide to grease on her knees, July 15, 2011

By 

Bruce P. Barten (Saint Paul, MN United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: A Tolerable Anarchy: Rebels, Reactionaries, and the Making of American Freedom (Vintage) (Paperback)

Political economy and law have been stumbling blocks for Americans because they have not been as curious as gay thinkers attempting to comprehend the nature of sexual relationships. A Tolerable Anarchy (2009) by Jedediah Purdy begins with an analysis of great thinkers in England in the winter ending in 1775, Samuel Johnson and Edmund Burke, producing intellectual reactions to the desire of Americans to govern themselves as free thinkers owning slaves with a past strongly influenced by individualist religious ideas. The success of American economic potential as a supplier of armaments for confrontations like the world wars was based on how strong an economy could come after the rich had blown everything in a Woody Wilson wet dream and gambling addictions in free markets like the stock market had sucked up whatever money could be squeezed from people who wanted to buy chocolate.

When Europeans discovering America found out that chocolate was such a rare treat that only Montezuma was allowed to drink it (anyone else would be put to death for diverting a divine substance from its intended use), they had stumbled upon the kind of product that a technological society could produce and distribute easily to those who were allowed to spend enough money to cover the associated costs. The anarchy that Americans desired, as expressed by the Boston Tea Party, was that government stop trying to control such transactions for the benefit of merchants who would run America to maximize the number of fur trades by keeping Americans along the Atlantic coast from spreading westward.

Oil and natural gas became far more important than chocolate, but coffee and tea were major products in world markets furnishing the civilized world with habits to enjoy or condone as a way of getting more work done. Work and wealth appear in the index of A Tolerable Anarchy, but instead of writing about chocolate, Jedediah Purdy provides entries for:

change
character
children
China
Christianity
citizenship
civil rights
civil slavery
Civil War
climate change
common good
common sense
community
competition
Congregationalists
connectedness
conscience
consent
Constitution
constraint, economics and
consumer culture
creative destruction
crime
culture
custom

For a clear picture of how economic rights is strangling cultural interaction, I found:

That means the owners can stop the remixers
and impose heavy fines to discourage others
from picking up where they left off.
They can do so because they don't like the message
the remixer is sounding
or just because they don't want anyone
no matter how benign,
messing with their stuff
and encouraging others to do the same. (p. 213).

Nietzsche thought philosophers would suffer if a little bird flew past, tweeting:

What do you matter?

A small number of people who made a lot of money tends to act one way, and a government that can borrow tremendous amounts of money would love to follow in their footsteps as it pretends to provide prosperity for its people and their partners in trade. When money has become electronic, the speed at which institutions control the time and space of financial transactions can replace the world as the location of the absolute chocolate mudslide hopping on a financial bobsled that goes down clear though to China while the little nation in Europe that claims to be the source of rational thinking gets grease on its knees.