A Tolerable Anarchy: Rebels, Reactionaries, And The Making Of American Freedom, by Jedidiah Purdy

This book is a classic example of the tendency of human beings to want to justify what they are. This book is a self-justification of a corrupt author’s vision for America–a vision that includes the celebration of moral decay as well as corrupt, activist government to enforce the author’s standards on recalcitrant Americans, and it takes advantage of the paradoxical and complex connections between radical and reactionary currents that have always swirled around the American political experiment. Throughout the book the author celebrates or bemoans (depending on whether they agree with his own worldview) various tendencies about how the American political experience from 1776 onward has been understood and applied by Americans and viewed by Europeans. The author demonstrates his overt political bias by celebrating Wilson, FDR, and LBJ, and showing contempt for Reagan and George W. Bush in particular, and when he states that a case for a political discourse that places honor in political service, he argues that all one needs is competent politicians who are able to harness the desire for the moral equivalent of war to support his romantic view of politics, not recognizing that the last 14 years or so since this book was published in 2009 have demonstrated the absolute moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the sorts of politicians that the author endorses, demonstrating that there is no competence or integrity to be found in our contemporary bureaucratic and political class, and hence no real alternative to a view that sees the efforts to increase the size and power of activist government as a total failure.

This book is made up of eight chapters that, along with an introduction and afterword, are a bit more than 200 short pages. The author begins with an introduction that discusses the sensations of freedom, and it is this vague and suitably protean subjective view of freedom that the author uses to undergird his own solipsistic and subjectivist view of freedom. This is followed by a discussion of the Declarations of Independence and the irony and complexity that has always been involved, from the beginning, in our nation’s political culture and founding (1). After this, the author discusses the search for civic dignity (alas, not by giving dignity to his own political opponents) (2). This is followed by a discussion of war and its equivalents, and the vain search that Progressives have had in making service the center of a leftist political culture (3). The author then gets to the crux of the emptiness of contemporary identity and sexual politics, without recognizing the truth of the matter, in his discussion of citizenship, sodomy, and the meaning of life (4). The author then tries to bring back utopianism as something other than an insult for hopelessly unrealistic views of the world that deny fundamental moral and structural realities (5), while attempting the untrue canard that contemporary economics are too complicated to be served by old-fashioned views of negative liberty (6). The author then discusses the supposed value of freedom–focusing on the “freedoms” that are provided by government on their politically supportive dependent classes (7), while also superficially addressing supposed “fragments” of freedom (8), without recognizing the importance of key freedoms enshrined in the Bill of Rights, for example. The book then ends with an afterword, acknowledgements, notes, bibliographic essay, bibliography, and an index.

This book is a classic example of what goes wrong when an author divorces his attempts to recognize historical and political reality as well as to influence that reality through his own efforts at self-justification and partisan politicking from a sense of absolute standards. The author tries to take advantage of the complexity and paradoxical nature of American political thought to argue for the plausibility of his own worldview and perspective, and then seeks to encourage the political side to win that would best support his worldview, thus demonstrating why it is that people view politics in the contemporary world as being so corrupt and so unworthy of honor and praise to begin with. The author’s goal is so obvious and self-serving as to be self-defeating, in that he transparently wants to clothe government with honor and legitimacy in the hope that he and people like him will direct the power of government and have its behavior at least supported or accepted by even those who disagree with it, but the obviousness of his partisanship makes it impossible for those who are opposed to his views to see his efforts at political philosophy to be anything but a mortal threat to freedom and liberty in the face of an increasingly corrupt society and an increasingly tyrannical government that does not deserve our support but rather our contempt, and perhaps even our rebellion.