Whose Freedom?: The Battle Over America's Most Important Idea (Hardcover)

by George Lakoff (Author) "We all have what cognitive scientists call "folk theories," implicit understandings of how things work..." (more)
Key Phrases: United States, Social Security, Iraq War (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Lakoff revisits the theme of his 2004 bestseller (Don't Think of an Elephant!), exploring the role of rhetorical metaphors in shaping political discourse. Specifically, he explores how the conservative and progressive definitions of "freedom" differ from one another, in order to demonstrate how liberals uphold a dominant American political tradition while "radical conservatives" seek to overturn that legacy for their own selfish ends. The historical evidence for this claim is never detailed to a persuasive degree, however, leaving a simplistic psychological model in which conservatives adhere to "strict father" thinking while progressives embrace a "nurturant parent" model. Though Lakoff's proposed solution calls upon progressives to reject the conservative framework with new language, it's highly questionable whether talking about "freedom judges" instead of "judicial activists" could really catch on. The author undermines his own warnings that the conservative movement is a threat to free will by suggesting that conservatives are trying to brainwash Americans to render them less capable of adopting progressive attitudes. Lakoff has been heralded for offering Democrats a new strategic vision, but the plan he articulates entails creating a populist movement that demonizes the right wing as a "dangerous elite"—hardly a new frame for political discourse. (July)
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From The Washington Post
If I had to guess at the virtues that future historians may attribute to George W. Bush, I think they'll say something like, "He tried to advance freedom." Even the president's critics (like, say, me) will admit that Bush has placed the concept of worldwide freedom before the people regularly and emphatically.

George Lakoff, unquestionably a presidential critic, would grant Bush that much. But for Lakoff, Bush's idea of freedom is deeply problematic -- antithetical, in fact, to the "progressive freedom" that Lakoff argues has defined America and made it great. This progressive definition of freedom -- the more or less continuous expansion of rights, opportunity and citizen enfranchisement -- stood unchallenged for many years. But now, that freedom is "up for grabs," and Lakoff is worried: "To lose freedom is a terrible thing; to lose the idea of freedom is even worse."

Lakoff is a cognitive scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, and well known among liberals as a sort of Democratic savant. He first captured attention with Moral Politics, a groundbreaking 1996 analysis of the different value systems that inform liberal and conservative political attitudes. Subsequent attention made him a star in progressive circles. By 2004, he was advising House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on "framing" language that would counter rather than buy into conservative attempts to frame issues (e.g., the "death tax"). His 2004 book, Don't Think of an Elephant!, became a whopping bestseller. In the meantime, in more elite liberal circles, something of an anti-Lakoff backlash set in; some critics began to suspect that he'd already said what he had to say, and that his new work was getting to be less than met the eye.

Certainly, Whose Freedom? is made to a considerable extent out of recycled material. The progressive and conservative definitions of freedom that Lakoff lays out here are rooted directly in the categories he first discussed at length in Moral Politics. Conservatives, he argues, believe in a "strict father" morality in which the male parent has unquestioned authority over dependent children, while liberals believe in the "nurturant parent" model, in which a less hierarchical parental authority allows for more empathy, more caring, fewer orders.

With regard to freedom, these two thought-habits lead their adherents toward very different conclusions. To progressives, freedom means the expansion of rights and opportunities; it includes not just freedom to do positive things but freedom from certain negative aspects of life (want and fear, as Franklin D. Roosevelt famously said in 1941).

Conservative freedom, in contrast, is dispensed by the father figure, and it cannot survive without morality and order -- that is, immorality and disorder threaten society so profoundly that freedom cannot be maintained in the face of them. From the conservative point of view, writes Lakoff, abortion and gay marriage "represent threats to the very idea of a strict father family -- and threats to their idea of freedom."

In a series of chapters on economics, religion, foreign policy and personal freedom, Lakoff compares the implications of the liberal and conservative definitions of freedom. The book's best chapter is devoted solely to a close parsing of Bush's second inaugural address. Calling the speech "a work of rhetorical art," Lakoff notes that more than half of the president's uses of the words "freedom," "free" and "liberty" could appeal to liberals as well as conservatives. But he then goes on to show the hidden ways in which the speech advocated the conservative conception of freedom: how a line such as "history also has a visible direction, set by liberty and the Author of Liberty" defines freedom as impossible without God and democracy as unworkable without religion.

This shrewd dissection comes before Lakoff's concluding, prescriptive chapter, which is a little disappointing. His suggestions about how liberals can reclaim freedom are more personal than political or policy-oriented: He wants individual progressives to achieve a "higher rationality" in which they let go of the idea that they can fight conservative rhetoric with facts (because no one cares about such trifles). He urges progressives to "see the ideology behind the language" of the right, understand how it asserts a strict father morality and try to counter it with more nurturant language. That's very good advice for the parish hall but rather less so for cable television.

Lakoff is right to identify freedom as a concept that liberals need to think about more. It's to liberals' shame that the words "freedom" and "liberty" are more closely associated with today's American right than with today's American left, so I admired the polemical intent of Whose Freedom? If you're a liberal who has never read Lakoff, you might find this book as revelatory as I and many others found Moral Politics years ago. But if you're familiar with his work, Whose Freedom? won't provide many eye-opening moments. And in either case, despite its many moments of insight, it won't quite tell liberals how to take back the idea of freedom.

Reviewed by Michael Tomasky
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (June 27, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374158282
• ISBN-13: 978-0374158286
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.5 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (30 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #501,585 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

34 of 37 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars It's not about the words, July 9, 2006

By	Michael P. Maslanka (dallas, texas United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

Lakoff has been taking a lot of unfair pops lately as the guy who thinks a simple word fix will cure what ails progressives. Unfair and he defends himself in his latest. As he explains, it is not about words but about pre-exiting belief frames that all of us are wired with. People have already made up their minds about certain things---they have a frame---and the key is to find the words that activiate it. it's about finding the right frames,which are already out there, not the right words.He also pounds away on those who insist that more facts will carry the day, and firmly lets the reader know that a good frame will beat an oustanding, fly me to the moon fact any day. The last chapter disects president bush's last inagural address and show how it skillfully uses frames to advance the conservative idea of freedom. A must read for anyone interested in how public debate is framed or even for those interested in persuasion. The book is a little denser and more academic than his previous one, Don't Think of Elephants.

49 of 56 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The War Over the Idea of Freedom, June 27, 2006

By	Glenn W. Smith (Austin, Texas USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

George Lakoff's work on language and politics has already transformed the progressive movement. Simply by creating a new awareness of how language works -- from the perspective of a politically savvy cognitive scientist -- Lakoff has demystified the power of words and political media. At the grassroots, activists are much more aware that the manner in which we structure our arguments, the frames we use, make a difference, an ultimate difference. Lakoff's "Moral Politics" and "Don't Think of an Elephant" -- and his ongoing work at the Rockridge Institute -- do much more than create awareness. A new political language is getting written.

Lakoff is now pulling the cognitive curtain back on the nation's most important idea: the idea of freedom. "Whose Freedom" describes in clear detail how the nation's radical conservatives are redefining political freedom as something much smaller and meaner than the freedom embodied in our American tradition. To many of us, it seems paradoxical that greatly increased domestic surveillance by the government, loss of voting rights, and government intrusion into private life are seen by the radical right as paving stones to freedom.

How can this be? Lakoff tells us how. And he tells us how to redeploy a language of freedom that is open and dynamic, that speaks of opportunity to achieve, of freedom from want, and of freedom from fear.

The progressive concept of freedom is creative and forward looking. The form of the U.S. Constitution describes freedom even better than that great document's words. The Constituion is written so that it's real meaning must be continually discovered. It is written so that our commitment to justice will evolve.

We don't obey the Constitution. We live through it. When it was written, its authors did not know how we would be living more than 200 years later. They hoped we would live freely. This book will help us rededicate ourselves to that cause.

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A must read for any thinking progressive person., August 24, 2006

By	T. Parobeck - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I listened to this on CD and was very impressed with the insights that Greorge Lakoff has about the way propaganda and today's media works for the Republician Party. The conservs are winning the battle of getting their ideas accepted, and unless enough progressives wake up to what the hell is going on, we won't have any individual freedom. The only free people in our society will be the upper 10% income earners. The rest of us will be serving them for crumbs or starving.

Read this book or listed to the CD's.