The Two Faces of American Freedom (review)

The American Revolution was a transformative event in world history, when the idea of self-rule was first articulated and put into practice. But, Aziz Rana reminds us, the idea of self rule was often compromised by older ideas of empire. While Americans struggled to make good their democratic promise, they continued to impose rule over nonwhites, women, and foreigners in ways that limited the Revolution's radical promise. Liberty for those inside, Rana concludes, was premised on ruling others. These are the two faces of American freedom.

This is a work of synthesis, and most of the claims Rana makes will be unsurprising to scholars of American history. But Rana's interpretation of the American past helps make sense of the Revolution's democratic potential, and also the problems facing American democracy today.

The Two Faces of American Freedom opens with the story of Anglo colonization. To Rana, the colonial experience taught Americans the benefits of self-rule, and thus made them especially sensitive to England's efforts to impose its authority over settlers during the Imperial Crisis. The Revolution was a "settler revolt" that raised the possibility of "republican self-rule." (14-15) Rather than be subject to authority, citizens would govern themselves. But this promise was limited to those granted full citizenship. For others, the Revolution did not alter their subject status. Instead, the new republic was a "settler empire" that relied on expansion to maintain settler equality, and thus required imperial rule over Native Americans.

Despite its limitations, republican ideology was radical for those included in the republic. Small farmers and artisans shared a vision of active government committed to enacting the popular will. National elites feared the egalitarianism of these citizens, however, and instead established a federal government to limit popular aspirations. As a result, citizens turned to the free market and westward expansion to maintain equality and self-rule, rejecting the state as a source of freedom. The Constitution symbolized the "institutional defeat of populism" and thus "constrained democratic possibilities." (142) It did, however, enable the federal government to impose imperial rule over Native Americans.

The free market soon betrayed its liberating potential as wage labor increasingly replaced economic independence. The result was a populist critique of the emerging capitalist order by such writers as Orestes Brownson and Thomas Skidmore. To these critics, the promise of free markets, like republicanism more generally, was self-rule, but the new economy seemed to recreate arbitrary dependence, fostering subjecthood in the heart of a republican polity.

By the end of the nineteenth century, the ideal of free labor had been rendered a fiction. The result was Populism, which Rana sees as the high point of American history, an effort to universalize the republican promise and repudiate the settler empire. To Populists, the new industrial order threatened the ability—and right—of citizens to achieve economic independence. Westward expansion seemed to serve capital interests rather than those of settlers; racism divided the working class rather than enabling them to exercise their collective will. Populists thus sought to mobilize Americans in order to once again turn the state into a source of collective sovereignty and freedom. Unfortunately, Populism could not overcome inherited prejudices. Race, ethnicity, class, and gender continued to divide efforts to unite the people against capital, especially in debates over Chinese immigration. As a result, imperial rule was continued over outsiders, while citizens fell into de facto subjecthood to capital.

Despite its failure, Populism scared American economic and political elites, who sought ways to maintain social order and peace now that the frontier was closed. As elites responded to the Populist program, Rana argues, the Revolutionary promise of republican self-rule finally caved in to empire at home and abroad, reducing Americans to subjects

The demise of republicanism came from both the Left and Right. By reinforcing the legal fiction of free labor in the Lochner Supreme Court decision, Americans were legally free even as their actual working experience increasingly was one of dependence. At the same time, Progressives and New Dealers expanded...