Jedediah Purdy—who debunked irony in his attention-getting first book—now explores the conundrums of freedom in A Tolerable Anarchy.
Have Americans ever agreed on the meaning of freedom?
Different eras make very different political meaning from inchoate attitudes about freedom, which swung in an interventionist, government-friendly direction during the New Deal, and in a libertarian, antigovernment direction under Reagan. There's a question whether Obama can create new attitudes that will be friendlier toward government. The challenge in writing this book was to bring out the continuity and coherence beneath that cacophony.
You cite the 19th-century French socialist Charles Fourier, who wanted courts to assign people lovers, as a prophet of modern freedom.
We've excised the Gallic imagination—his crazy, hyperbureaucratic idea of having administrators tell you who would satisfy you as friend and bed-partner. Nonetheless, what Fourier envisioned as a radical, wild-eyed utopia now seems ordinary and commonsensical. He imagined a world in which work and play would be integrated, and friendships and sexual couplings would be driven more by affinity and desire than by customs and necessity. In everything from careers to relationships, we follow his notion of building a social order out of desire, through millions of individual experiments in doing things a little differently, demanding a little more from ordinary life. Where Fourier's utopianism was institutional and political, ours is “personal utopianism”—making a different world through the shape of your own life.
Does the current economic chaos stem from an excess of freedom?
Not from an excess, but from a distorted view of freedom that exaggerated the virtues of unregulated markets. There's a deep affinity between the idea that we can make our lives match our dreams in an uncomplicated way, and a social vision of markets that build an order out of millions of free choices. It's a charismatic idea, but it's too simple; it encouraged faith in the self-regulating power of complex financial instruments and speculation. That we end up as flotsam and jetsam on financial hurricanes that we can't control is the classic comeuppance to the idea that each of us should be the author of our own lives.
Will freedom have to be sacrificed to save the environment?
The question is, will we see [ecological limitations] as constraints forced on us by circumstances, proof that freedom was never compatible with reality? Or would we understand a carbon-neutral economy as a way of becoming more free by deliberately accepting constraints that acknowledge something true and important? There is a tradition of seeing self-awareness and awareness of the world as part of being free—a richer and more mature version of American freedom.
