Some Kinds of Freedom

Well before the idea of establishing a Center for the History of Freedom first gleamed in the eye of its founder, J. H. Hexter, there was a Center for the Study of the History of Liberty in America at Harvard University, directed by Oscar Handlin. Its legacy is pretty much confined to the sponsorship of perhaps a dozen and a half scholarly monographs, and one intriguing but now neglected work of what might be called prospective synthesis. In The Dimensions of Liberty, Oscar and Mary Handlin offered an exploratory overview of the questions, issues, and phenomena that a comprehensive history of liberty would respectively have to raise, consider, and describe. In their introduction, the Handlins identified nine “propositions or hypotheses” that this Center’s projected inquiry would explore and test. Crudely summarized, seven of these dealt with the ways in which power, both public and private, could be used not as the negation of liberty, its presumed antithesis, but rather as its fulfillment; the final two propositions addressed questions of social mobility. ¹ As this allocation suggests, the putative scholarly agenda of the Center owed more to Commonwealth, ² the Handlins’ seminal study in the history of American political economy, than to those two pathbreaking works of social history, Boston’s Immigrants and The Uprooted.

What made Dimensions of Liberty so intriguing and (I think) still rewarding a book is that it took seriously a question that most historians would be reluctant to ask or too timid to answer: If one were rash enough to set out to write a history of liberty, how indeed would you do it? In the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century heyday of whig history, Anglo-American scholars would have found that question less daunting and its answer less elusive. The history of liberty lay in the staple themes of the emergence and triumph of modern forms of constitutional government. Although still interested in the formal organization of power, the Handlins cast their net wider. By defining liberty not as an absence of restraint but as a capacity for action, they would have made it possible to apply this one concept to the many realms in which the modern individual acts, so that its history would embrace not only the meaning of citizenship but also the private and public uses to which liberties of all kind can be put.

Something of a similar agenda can be detected in the nine essays collected in Devising Liberty, the seventh volume so far published in The Making of Modern Freedom series under the general editorship of R. W. Davis. In some ways, these essays stand at some distance from both the Handlins’ conception and the companion volumes of this series. Where the other volumes of The Making of Modern Freedom largely conform to the expectation that a history of freedom should revolve around matters of constitutionalism, politics, and public law, Devising Liberty places its emphases elsewhere. The “new American republic” of the subtitle is a post-Revolutionary artifact, and save for discussions of political economy by Lance Banning and of federalism by Peter S. Onuf, these essays are situated in a chronological and conceptual space where the establishment of a new constitutional regime (or the creation of the American republic, to coin a phrase) is simply taken as a given. Instead, the underlying logic of this book revolves around the problem that the editor, David Konig, poses in his introduction. As Konig sets the table, the task is to examine the multiple and sometimes inconsistent ways in which different groups of Americans defined freedom and, perhaps more important, to trace the ways in which Revolutionary-era notions of liberty were “devised”—that is, transmitted and bequeathed, in the legal sense—to the succeeding generation(s). Konig thus rightly evokes the eighteenth-century metaphor of liberty as a precious “birthright” to be passed from one generation to another. ³

Given the inherently open-ended and amorphous nature of the subject...