History as Prophecy and Politics as Salvation

In A Tolerable Anarchy, Jedediah Purdy chronicles an enduring American tradition. He also exemplifies it. Reaching back to familiar episodes and characters of the past, the book shows how the boundaries of freedom have periodically stretched to provide an expanding circle of Americans with a deeper sense of civic dignity. Purdy narrates the stories of reformers who redefined the aim, means, and meaning of freedom. Such redefinition is also the ultimate purpose of the book, making it another chapter in the very tale it tells. Purdy's explicit use of history to promote present-day change links him to the freedom-seeking figures that populate his story.

Thomas Jefferson cited British constitutional history as authority for his break from Britain. Ralph Waldo Emerson celebrated Jesus Christ as he walked away from Christianity. Frederick Douglass used the American Constitution in his attack on its slavery-protecting provisions. Jedediah Purdy summons Adam Smith while calling for political regulation of the free market. Purdy is the latest, but far from the first, American intellectual to use the venerated memories of reformers to justify new reformations, even reformations that trouble the institutional legacies of the heroes they invoke. In such uses of history, the past we celebrate grants us license to leave it behind. "Tradition," Purdy writes, "can make us rebels" (p. 117).

Yet, as Purdy demonstrates through his historical examples and his own suggestive conclusions, the strategy of using tradition to pursue change can moderate both the pace and depth of reform. One can hardly draw on historical rebellions without reverencing to some degree what one's predecessors accomplished and bequeathed. Purdy's treatment of Frederick Douglass illustrates this, showing how Douglass opted to employ the Founding as a model and justification for future reform rather than follow the likes of William Lloyd Garrison in completely disdaining the constitutional tradition and the union it created. (Typical of the book's quick tempo and broad strokes, Purdy does not pause to explain in any detail the complicated split between Garrison and Douglass.) Douglass' willingness to use the past rather than repudiate it entailed a somewhat less radical but more realistic—and, arguably, more effective—path to progress. Purdy shows even more restraint than Douglass. He writes approvingly of "incremental" change, advocates "some" experimentation with existing structures, and the handful of specific reforms he proposes tend to adjust American institutions in their details rather than rework them at their core (pp. 155-60, 216). He sees such institutions as the material artifacts of the United States' long fight for liberty—a fight in which Purdy believes we should take greater pride and greater part.

In developing this argument, Purdy's liberalizing vision ironically intersects with the thought of eighteenth-century England's most famous conservative. Edmund Burke did not find much use in the notion that freedom derived from natural law. For all practical purposes, it was the product of government and culture—not a self-fulfilling abstraction but the means to an identifiable end. "Liberty," he wrote, "inheres in some sensible object; and every nation has formed to itself some favorite point which . . . becomes the criterion of their happiness" (p. 8). Having cited Burke, Purdy proceeds to contend that freedom was the chance to feel something, a sensible object, a sensation essential to a person's and a nation's internal well-being. Throughout the book this sensation of American freedom is largely captured in one word: dignity. The freedom to find purpose, the freedom to control one's own fate, the freedom of personal exploration and expression all come back to a basic human demand for dignity.

One of the lessons Purdy draws from his history is that both our understanding of true human dignity and the shape of dignity's most dangerous threats change over time. As the aim and enemies of American freedom are in a constant state of flux, freedom must likewise evolve. Politics, the mechanism by...