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Liberty and Freedom: A Visual History of America's Founding Ideas. By David Hackett Fischer. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. 851 pages. $50.00
In periods of national crisis, liberty and freedom-two of America's foremost values-become of particular concern, this book reminds us, because reactions make clear that people have different views about their meaning and their relationship to other values such as security, order, justice, and equality.
David Hackett Fischer, a Brandeis University professor and a leading historian, seeks in this sprawling volume to explain the history of these two values from the era of the American Revolution to the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001. He explores the way in which their meanings and relationships have varied in different places and times and among diverse groups in American society.
Beginning with etymology, he notes that the word liberty originated from Latin and indicated one having independence, unlike a slave. Freedom derived from Indo-European words for endearment and connoted connection through kinship or affection to other free peoples. Over time, he argues, Americans paired these different concepts-privileges of independence and rights of belonging-in various, new, and dynamic ways.
This book's innovative approach combines history and cultural anthropology to trace the meanings of these core values through customs, traditions, and folk beliefs. Fischer's primary concern is what the common people, not just intellectuals, thought about them. Most Americans did not think of liberty and freedom as a series of texts or abstractions, he concludes. Rather, they understood them as inherited values they learned early in life and in which they deeply believed. De Tocqueville explained this as "habits of the heart."
Like an ethnographer, Fischer studies folk beliefs by examining empirical evidence primarily in the form of words, images,...