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James Bovard
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Freedom in Chains : The Rise of the State and the Demise of the Citizen Hardcover – January 1, 1999

by James Bovard (Author)
4.6 4.6 out of 5 stars 20 ratings
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A provocative exploration of the steady growth of government power and its consequent dangers to personal freedom traces the development of the State, providing a historical perspective on how its power has gone out of control. 25,000 first printing.
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  1. Print length
    326 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    Palgrave Macmillan
  4. Publication date
    January 1, 1999
  5. Dimensions
    6 x 0.75 x 9.75 inches
  6. ISBN-10
    0312214413
  7. ISBN-13
    978-0312214418
  8. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Bovard (Lost Rights) throws more red meat to angry libertarians in this antigovernment jeremiad. While he provides some frightening examples of how governments?mostly the U.S. federal?do more harm than good, his passion leads him to some hyperbolic conclusions. There are many passages that will make readers?not only welfare-state liberals but also moderate Democrats and Republicans?wonder whether they live in the same country as Bovard. One of his biggest targets is the notion of state sovereignty: "The doctrine of 'sovereignty' often does nothing more than provide a respectable gloss for some people's lust to control other people's behaviors, or to seize the fruits of other people's labor." That last clause is telling, for it could just as well be turned against Bovard. It is precisely to stop nongovernmental entities (e.g., factory owners) from seizing the fruit of other people's labor (e.g., factory workers) that so many of the regulations and laws Bovard decries (e.g., a minimum wage or corporate taxes) were instituted. But Bovard is well-read and makes entertaining use of Rousseau, Hegel, Hobbes (he's very fond of Leviathan) and other thinkers. He's also consistent and intellectually honest enough to follow his own ideology to its logical conclusion about, for instance, marijuana (legalize it, he says). Few readers will agree with Bovard that the dominant spirit in America today is one that idolizes the state, but most will find that he makes a rousing theoretical case against statism.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

This author comes highly touted by the mainstream conservative press, and with good reason. Bovard, a journalist best known for his influential Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty (St. Martin's, 1994), sets forth a passionate indictment of the state's coercive powers over the people. He is especially critical of the "Peter Pan" theory of good government and other political illusions fostered by the state. Bovard reviews 200 years of political philosophy and makes effective use of extreme examples of government programs and regulations to drive home his essential message. Although his argument is bipartisan in its critique of the state's excesses and excuses, the overall effect is one of polemical overkill. Still, this is a well-researched book that can serve as a sampling of libertarian thought for many libraries.?Thomas A. Karel, Franklin & Marshall Coll. Lib., Lancaster, PA
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Palgrave Macmillan; First Edition (January 1, 1999)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 326 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0312214413
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0312214418
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.45 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 0.75 x 9.75 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.6 4.6 out of 5 stars 20 ratings

About the author

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James Bovard

James Bovard

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James Bovard is the author of Last Rights: The Death of American Liberty (2023) Public Policy Hooligan (2012), Attention Deficit Democracy (2006), and eight other books. He is a member of the USA Today Board of Contributors, a frequent contributor to the New York Post, and has written for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Playboy, and the Washington Post, and is a fellow with the Libertarian Institute. His books have been translated into Spanish, Arabic, Japanese, and Korean.

The Wall Street Journal called Bovard 'the roving inspector general of the modern state,' and Washington Post columnist George Will called him a 'one-man truth squad.' His 1994 book Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty received the Free Press Association's Mencken Award as Book of the Year. His book Terrorism and Tyranny won the Lysander Spooner Award for the Best Book on Liberty in 2003. He received the Thomas Szasz Award for Civil Liberties work, awarded by the Center for Independent Thought, and the Freedom Fund Award from the National Rifle Association.

His writings have been been publicly denounced by the chief of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Secretary of Agriculture, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, the Postmaster General, and the chiefs of the Transportation Security Administration, U.S. International Trade Commission, the Drug Enforcement Administration, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency. In 2015, the Justice Department sought to suppress his articles in USA Today.

Customer reviews

4.6 out of 5 stars
20 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Waldemar V. Vega
5.0 out of 5 stars Interesting read! Worth reading!
Reviewed in the United States on November 17, 2013
Verified Purchase
Great book! It provided me with the information that I was looking for and is an easy read. Not every book has all of the information that you may need, but it is definitely a good start.
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Theodorus Rex
5.0 out of 5 stars Scary and at times prophetic
Reviewed in the United States on September 16, 2003
Verified Purchase
The size of Government is Scary... Under George W. Bush the Government has grown at an alarming rate... Read this book!
6 people found this helpful
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Efrem Sepulveda
5.0 out of 5 stars Does government REALLY care for you?
Reviewed in the United States on March 21, 2015
James Bovard's book on the lost of freedoms and liberties reads like a stunning indictment on the government that we have today. Bovard's main theses is that limited government is essential to the safeguarding of our freedoms and that its expansion has caused great harm to the public at large. In the introduction, Bovard goes to work right away to discuss the peril of which we face. The nature of the battle, in his opinion, is not liberalism versus conservatism or capitalism versus socialism but rather statism--the belief that government is inherently superior to the citizenry and that progress consist of spreading compulsion. Throughout the book, there are many things that are readily quotable such as the comment that "democracy" serves mainly as a sheepskin for Leviathan and that it deludes people into thinking that the government's big teeth will not bite them.

The book is divided into nine chapters and covers the range of thought of the author. Chapter two for instance covers the ideas of Rousseau and Hegel and how their fallacies have given the state legitimacy despite its sordid record over the past 200 years. Chapter Four covers the illusion of freedom in the Welfare State. Bovard contends that Welfare State freedom is freedom to do what politicians and bureaucrats want you to do. Associated with the Welfare State is the idea of "positive freedom" where people have the freedom to achieve authenticity, autonomy, and freedom from want. This freedom, however, presumes that only government knows what is good for the people and that it knows what people want subconsciously. In turn, the government subjugates the people for its own good. Bovard comments that this freedom is based on forcing citzens to carry a government swollen by endless false political promises, swollen by taking tasks for which it has no competence, swollen by its own arrogance and eternal meddling.

Bovard takes a dim view on democracy, but he does not discount the system altogether. He believes that it can be a proper safeguard against tyranny, but cautions that the people need to be on guard constantly lest they lower their guard at the precise moment that the government has the most desire for expansion. Bovard also states that in order to have a genuine democracy, government must be limited to the size that the average voter can understand and that the voter must understand that it must distrust the pretensions and false claims of any government, regardless of its purported sanction. Bovard concludes his book with a warning that whenever a government tries to become "glorious" and tries to pursue national greatness, it is a sure recipe for national ruin.

This is an excellent, well researched book with much quotable material. Since this was written in the late 1990s, some of the material might be dated. Nonetheless, it is an excellent book that needs to be read by lovers of liberty. Five stars.
4 people found this helpful
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Barron Laycock
5.0 out of 5 stars Disturbing Examination Of State Usurpation Of Civil Rights!
Reviewed in the United States on January 9, 2004
According to perpetual social and political critic James Bovard, the power inherent in government is alive and well; unfortunately, as he reminds us, they are not always necessarily accomplishing the people's will. Thus we find ourselves in circumstances in which governments are both larger and more powerful than ever before, while the individual citizen's ability to control and influence the course of his or her own life and liberty is becoming more and more problematic. In this stirring expose, the author explores how the federal government increasingly poses a threat to destroy individual rights and liberties in an attempt to preserve the fiction of government as superceding the citizen. Bovard wonders along with us how this state of affairs has managed to occur, and takes a thoughtful and impressive tour of the history of government control over individual liberties in an attempt to better understand it, and the future it presents for our cogitation.
Long before it was either fashionable or popular, conservative author Bovard was railing against the accumulating power and privilege of the crony-based capitalists who now seem to control the country. Here he draws blood from a dissection of the notion of state sovereignty, which he contends amounts to nothing so much as a glossy justification for the power elite's lust for ever-increasing power and privilege. Especially egregious in the author's view is the way the doctrine is being used to justify the behavior of others, to limit their rights to protect themselves, or to keep the fruit of their own labor. Indeed, all of this is food for thought. Moreover, Bovard is an interesting and quite eclectic scholar, someone who accomplishes both meticulous research and establishes the substantiation for his claims as he proceeds, and does so quite convincingly. He also seems to be profoundly well read, based on his wide use of quotations from such luminaries as Marx, Hegel, Rousseau, and Thomas Hobbes.
Thus, he manages to raise some thought provoking issues regarding our seeming need to regulate many aspects of private behavior (such as the use of pot) that we can neither effective enforce nor usefully demonstrate to be evil for the individual. Bovard argues quite convincingly regarding the potential dangers of allowing others to regulate our Constitutionally guaranteed civil liberties according to their own moral prerogatives. Bovard reserves special scorn for the so-called "Peter Pan" theory of government as the benevolent and paternalistic defender of the commonweal, and actively guides the reader through a critical review of the two hundred year history on the subject, a history he finds rife with examples through which government has repeatedly used its power to thwart rather than support the will and civil liberties of the majority. This is a splendidly researched book that reads well and which has some disturbing thoughts regarding the state of our polity. It is also one I highly recommend. Enjoy!
19 people found this helpful
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J. Davis
2.0 out of 5 stars Just reread "Lost Rights" and skip this.
Reviewed in the United States on April 21, 1999
Repeat after me: THE IRS IS BAD. That basically sums up this book, which contains little new information from his previous ones. It's disappointing that Bovard could not find new subjects to discuss. Basically, the reader can save himself time and money by reading Lost Rights and The Fair Trade Fraud again. I don't mean to be harsh: He makes some excellent points, but they are ones we've already heard from him. Another problem I have with this book and his previous ones is that he never examines the dangers of the absolute free market he preaches. For example, OSHA and the EPA may overstep their boundaries, but what are the dangers to workers and the environment if they are rendered powerless? This is the "vice versa" pure libertarians never discuss. Nor is corporate abuse, such as random drug testing for $7/hr jobs examined. It's fine to say government is abusive (and it often is) but private enterprise is not quite as flawless as Bovard and company would have us believe.
12 people found this helpful
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