Customer Reviews

A Tolerable Anarchy: Rebels, Reactionaries, and the Making of American Freedom (Vintage)

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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.

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.

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.