'Liberty and Freedom': The Eagle Has Landed
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/19/books/review/19POSTREL.html?pagewanted=all&position=
By VIRGINIA POSTREL
Published: December 19, 2004
When patriotic country music fans sing Lee Greenwood's lyric ''I'm
proud to be an American, where at least I know I'm free,'' what do they
mean? Is Greenwood's idea of freedom the same as Bruce Springsteen's or
Francis Scott Key's? And is this freedom the same as the liberty of the
Declaration of Independence, the Pledge of Allegiance or the statue in
New York Harbor? In ''Liberty and Freedom,'' David Hackett Fischer, a
historian at Brandeis University, argues that we cannot learn how most
Americans understand freedom by studying political theory or
intellectual debates. ''Most Americans do not think of liberty and
freedom as a set of texts, or a sequence of controversies or a system
of abstractions,'' he writes. ''They understand these ideas in another
way, as inherited values that they have learned early in life and
deeply believe.''
LIBERTY AND FREEDOM
By David Hackett Fischer.
Illustrated. 851 pp. Oxford University Press. $50.
David Hackett Fischer
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