On freedom: essays from the Frankfurt Conference.

OF HIS EXPERIENCE in the Polish underground during World War II Leopold Tyrmand writes:

there were some among us, certainly, who pondered the Constitution and the American promise, or dream, but for most of us the collective improvisation of a Dixieland combo came to mean, if only subliminally, the perfect emblem of freedom and all the necessary energy to defend it. It was an image of liberty whose dynamics, at that time, seemed invincible, the ultimate representation of free utterance, the typification of a situation where anyone plays his own tune, providing he submits to a wise and superior arrangement.

Perhaps so; but maybe Tyrmand would admit in retrospect that the energy which one asociates with jazz is essentially hedonistic, carrying none of the heroism and stamina of an earlier --and equally popular--tradition of patriots and freedom-lovers of which Beethoven's Eroica, Wagner's Rienzi, and almost all of Verdi's early operas are representative. And jazz itself prepared the way for rock--that clangorous orgy of robotic copulations which, so far from giving rise to a passion for civic freedom, conduces to bestiality in its fans and hermitism in sane people. Unfortunately, freedom today, while it continues to be represented by a variety of emblems (such as blue jeans), appears to have been divested of any that can be said to profess either resonance or staying power: this being in fact the thesis of the book in which Tyrmand's remarks appear.

On Freedom: Essays from the Frankfurt Conference (Devin-Adair, 6 North Water Street, Greenwich, Conn. 06830; $12.95), edited by John A. Howard and with a foreword by Robert A. Nisbet, is an anthology of addresses--all of them interesting, some of them much more than that--delivered at a conference entitled "For Your Freedom and Ours," held in Frankfurt in November 1982 under the auspices of the Rockford Institute. Of the nine contributors four are American (Ronald Berman, John A. Howard, Richard John Neuhaus, and Leopold Tyrmand); while the remaining five include Paul Johnson, Leszek Kolakowski of All Souls, Oxford, Melvin J. Lasky (a Britisher, I believe, by choice), Nicholas Lobkowicz of the University of Munich, and Arthur Shenfield, an English economist, barrister, and author.

Among these more than competent panelists, the common concern of paramountcy is the precipitous decline of the ideal of political freedom that has occurred in the democratic West since the end of World War II and which Lasky traces to about 1960: when the "European renaissance" that was a product of the cataclysm and the ensuing Cold War ran out of gas, to be replaced by the rampant neo-Marxism that has plagued civilization during the past quarter-century and according to which "political freedom" is irrelevant and "personal freedom," or "social freedom," of the essence of democratic existence. Considering the adherents of the contemporary ethos, Ronald Berman writes in "Feeling Unfree" that

They naturally want government either to get on with the main job of life as perceived by so much of the demi-philosophy of our time, which is to change the human condition, or else admit that it has no claim on them. It is tempting to use a term which has been invoked--the failure of nerve--to explain much that has transpired ... but I think it might be better to presume some assertion of ideas. ... Even a non-idea may have a time that is come.

As Robert Nisbet observes, "Freedom takes on its importance only in the company of the values of morality we cherish"; and there is an underlying assumption common to these essays that the chief threat to political freedom today is posed less by the geo-political context than by the moral and itellectual one. John Howard, in "Reopening the Books on Ethics: The Role of education in a Free Society," makes a strong bid for returning education, at the earliest possible moment, to its original role as chief inculcator of a common moral denominator; while Arthur Shenfield reminds us of the importance of business to a free society, and Paul Johnson, in a splendid piece, defends the free-market system as "an infinite natural computer, which in the long run has the infallibility of nature itself." Ultimately, however, what is required is a "new philosophy of freedom," based upon a renewal of moral purpose both individual and collective (cf. Pastor Neuhaus, "New Hymns for the Republic"); and informed, as Mr. Kolakowski puts it, by the regained knowledge of the "essentia of being human ... [which] may never be deduced from gathering data about human behavior."