(2005-01-17) Postrel Reviews Liberty And Freedom

Virginia Postrel reviews David Hackett Fischer's Liberty and Freedom. Before he gets to images, Fischer turns to etymology, establishing a contrast between liberty, whose Latin roots suggest release from bondage, and freedom, which shares Northern European origins with friend. ''The original meanings of freedom and liberty,'' he writes, ''were not merely different but opposed. Liberty meant separation. Freedom implied connection.'' He makes much of this distinction throughout the book, favoring ''freedom'' and often disparaging ''liberty'' (associating it, for instance, with Southern Racism). Yet he also declares that the creative tension between the two concepts has given English-speaking people ''a distinctive dynamism in their thought about liberty and freedom.''... (His earlier book noted) New England Puritans pursued ''ordered liberty,'' or community self-government, which could impose substantial restrictions on Individual Freedom of action or conscience. Southern cavaliers believed in ''hegemonic liberty,'' a status system in which liberty was a jealously guarded aristocratic privilege that entitled some men to rule the lives of others. By contrast, Delaware Valley Quakers subscribed to ''reciprocal liberty,'' in which every person was recognized as a fellow child of God, entitled to Self Determination and freedom of conscience. Finally, the largest group of immigrants, the borderlanders often called Scotch-Irish, adhered to ''natural liberty,'' a visceral, sometimes violent defense of self and clan. In foreign policy, Fischer's ''natural liberty'' maps directly to the ''Jacksonian America'' outlined by the political scientist Walter Russell Mead - isolationist by preference but relentlessly violent when attacked... Fischer's antipathy for Milton Friedman, whom he doesn't name but whose department at the University Of Chicago he refers to as ''dogmatic'' twice in as many sentences, may stem less from Friedman's Libertarian popular works than from his influential monetary scholarship, which contradicts Fischer's own eccentric - to put it mildly - theories of inflation... He seems to resent all these contentious people (except for consensus civil rights heroes) who insist on disturbing established institutions and ideas with their demands for liberty and freedom. Indeed, he implies that they're downright dangerous. ''If a free society is ever destroyed in America, it will be done in the name of one particular vision of liberty and freedom,'' he concludes. But not, of course, his own.