Being America: Liberty, Commerce and Violence in an American World (review)

Jedediah Purdy, BeingAmerica: Liberty, Commerce and Violence in an American World. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003. 352 pages. Hardcover. $24.00. Jed Purdy's first book, For Common Things, was, at its best, an installment in a venerable tradition of American social criticism. The social and political costs of a sensibility founded on ironic detachment were made explicit, although the evidence had been right in front of us all along. Purdy simply and eloquently pointed out the obvious. Like Thorstein Veblen's early twentieth-century shaming of 'conspicuous consumption' or Christopher Lasch's late twentiethcentury diagnosis of cultural narcissism, Purdy's unflattering mirror to currently pervasive behavior and attitudes received a mixed but strong reaction. That so many reviewers would respond with hostile ridicule was reminiscent of the patient who protests that he is not in denial. However, a rather different Jed Purdy emerges in Being America, and although he is every bit as articulate as he was in the first book, he is possibly more conflicted. Here Purdy is taking on a rather big topic, namely, the future of America's place in the world in cultural as well as economic terms. Unfortunately, this time around, his critical insights take a back seat to his desire to celebrate a specific interpretation of what America stands for, or at least should stand for, an ultimately rather generous and benign account. While Purdy is here attentive to the reasons US foreign policy breeds animosity abroad, he does not seem to question the fundamental premise that our nation has a civilizing mission of remaking the rest of the world in our own image. 92 We are here reminded of what is distinctive about America: "We have experimented more with modernity than any other people." But, lest we fall prey to a complacent triumphalism, Purdy cautions "modernity is not the end of history." He is also wary of those supposed alternatives that are so often "themselves the children of modernity." The antimodernisms of militant nationalism or religious fundamentalism are in reality "battles for the future" which abandon the "best possibilities of liberal modernity." Herein lies the failure of Purdy's latest take on things: a failure not of intelligence but of imagination. He is quite aware of the ambivalent nature of modern society, that it harbors deep contradictions. Nevertheless, he can envision no genuine alternative to more of the same; there is no suggestion of a viable postmodernity. This is not to say that his defense of liberal modernity is a completely naïve or unhistorical pitch. Purdy is clearly aware that "liberalism" is not reducible to the narrowly defined partisan view referred to by media pundits. Rather he sees it as that broad tradition that began in the eighteenth century, which was and still is the social and political expression of capitalism and representative government. Thus, his principal model and reference is logically to the "conservative" icon, Edmund Burke. While he acknowledges the conflicts, disruptions and turmoil spawned by the modern triumph of liberalism and rejects the reactionary oppositions it generates, he gives scant notice to those currents of opposition that fall outside those parameters. This is nowhere more evident than in his choice of language: he finds the term "globalization" useless, and avoids completely any reference to "neoliberalism," despite its widespread, and critical, use in present-day protest movements. Being America ends up being rather a tepid endorsement of the globalizing trends of liberal modernity, a rather surprising second book from an author who made his debut lecturing the nation on its cynicism and artifice from the vantage point of an Appalachian value of authenticity. There is no longer the hint or suggestion that America is in need of some radical soul-searching of the kind exemplified in For Common Things. Instead we find occasional qualifying remarks punctuating an otherwise optimistic appraisal of our being the one great superpower left standing at the end of the twentieth century. In a recent exchange in The American Prospect magazine, one of Purdy's colleagues asserted that "Jed is an ideologue—a term I do not 93 intend as pejorative." Purdy responded that he did consider "the word an insult, maybe because I...