The Story of American Freedom.

Eric Foner W. W. Norton, $27.95, 422 pp.

Alan Wolfe 

Once upon a time, surely before the advent of tenure, historians were disposed to write panoramic accounts of an important idea, synthesizing huge amounts of scholarship in a language accessible to nonspecialists. Eric Foner's The Story of American Freedom harkens back to that era. Welcome at any time, his book is especially welcome now. In recent decades scholars have stressed the role that previously invisible individuals - most of them women and people of color - have played in our nation's development. For them, freedom was the idea around which their political struggles were organized. By organizing his historical survey around the same idea, Foner has produced an impressive challenge to the postmodern suspicion of master narratives. No one can finish this book without appreciating the centrality of freedom for the American experience.

The Story of American Freedom is at its best when demonstrating how contested a concept freedom really is. Were wage workers in the nineteenth century free because they were not slaves, as Frederick Douglass once proudly proclaimed, or unfree because they could be considered wage slaves? Were white women free because they did not have owners who could sell them, or unfree, and thus comparable to slaves, because they were subject to the authority of their husbands? Was freedom best guaranteed by property or by government? None of these questions had easy or automatic answers, and Foner offers his readers a fascinating guide through the appeals made by individuals on all sides of these issues.

Oddly, however, Foner's insightful elaborations of the complications of freedom in nineteenth-century America turn simplistic when he comes to the twentieth century. The closer we get to the present day, the more certain is Foner that freedom is not a contested concept at all. On the contrary, he insists, there is usually one party that speaks clearly and unambiguously for freedom and one that does not. And invariably Foner identifies the cause of freedom with his own particular view of how the world ought to work.

Sometimes it does make sense to insist that freedom has to mean something concretely, from which it follows that some people who use its language deny its meaning. Freedom, as Foner points out, provided the language by which Southern whites defended slavery, Northern businessmen fought unions, and the national security establishment justified the cold war. Unwilling to stretch the reach of the concept that much, Foner rightly seeks to narrow the meaning of freedom to those actions - such as the abolition of slavery or the establishment of the New Deal - which enhanced the autonomy and dignity of large numbers of Americans. But in doing so, Foner narrows the conception of freedom in ways which will prevent his book from becoming the definitive work it ought to have been.

Clearly slaveholders abused the language of freedom, just as segregationists distorted the language of rights by claiming them for states rather than people. But is it just as obvious, as Foner suggests, that national-security managers abused the language of freedom in justifying the cold war?

It is if one believes that the cold war was little more than an excuse for American imperialism. Neither Soviet dissidents nor the leaders of the pro-democracy movements in Eastern Europe thought that way, however. For them, a willingness to confront Soviet power advanced the cause of freedom. By the same logic, those American leftists who viewed the cold war as a sham were not serving the cause of freedom so much as they were exposing their narcissistic naivete.

Foner celebrates the contributions these critics made to American freedom as he speaks with disdain of the establishment. But just as international politics were morally problematic, so were domestic politics in ways Foner never acknowledges. The cold war, Foner writes, "helped to legitimize a serious assault on civil liberties at home," noting that "the tiny Communist party hardly posed a threat to American security and many of the victims of the Red Scare had little or nothing to do with communism."

Foner never mentions the fact that the American Communist party avidly supported the Red Scare, defending the use of the Smith Act against Trotskyites. It seems irrelevant to him that, in its internal structure, the Communist party denied dissent and organized itself in a highly authoritarian manner. Foner is right that the Communist party was no threat to American security. But its principles were alien to American ideals of freedom, a point that at the very least ought to be mentioned in a book celebrating the story of freedom.

In his discussion of contemporary events, Foner drops the rich appreciation of nuance that characterizes his treatment of earlier struggles over wages and family life. At one point he quotes the political philosopher Jean Cohen's important assertion that respect for privacy is the linchpin of freedom, but he fails to acknowledge the role that the New Left's slogan "The Personal is the Political" might have contributed to the abrogation of privacy. He discusses the influence of Herbert Marcuse on the New Left, but never mentions Marcuse's notorious essay "Repressive Tolerance," which argued against free speech - at least as that term is traditionally understood by civil libertarians. And since Marcuse's essay was the intellectual inspiration for current university speech codes and stabs at political correctness, Foner also never mentions these exercises in unfreedom, even though he does carry his story up to the 1990s.

Freedom is too important a term to be reduced to one side in political or ideological debate. One of the reasons Foner can be so clear and compelling when dealing with the nineteenth century is that we now have enough perspective to know which side advanced the cause of freedom and which did not. But can we really know that for the present time? I am no great fan of Ronald Reagan and I find myself persistently at odds with the conservative ideas on which he rode to power. But can I really be sure that the Reagan administration - or, for that matter, the Thatcher administration - did not serve the cause of freedom? Some day we may discover that contemporary conservatives used the language of freedom to justify unequal distributions of income which left all too many Americans unable to control their lives. But we might also discover that the bureaucratic state had overreached itself and that unleashing more entrepreneurial activity also unleashed unexpected cultural and personal freedom.

The story of freedom, in short, never ends and does not contain clear-cut political conclusions. Unfortunately, The Story American of Freedom - for all its breadth, energy, and insight - does both.

Alan Wolfe is University Professor and Professor of Political Science and Sociology at Boston University. His most recent book is One Nation, After All (Viking Penguin).