‘Conversation
with…Eric Foner’
Dr
Andrew Hammond (University of Warwick)
Eric
Foner is DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University.
Born in
New York City to a family that included union organisers, political
activists,
and historians – his father Jack was a scholar of military
history – Foner has gone
on to become one of the leading historians of his generation. His most
recent
book, for example, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American
Slavery
(2010), won the Pulitzer Prize, the Bancroft Prize, and the Lincoln
Prize,
while he has been one of only two figures to have been elected President
of the
American Historical Association, Society
of American Historians, and the Organisation of American Historians.
Previous
works have included Free Soil, Free Labour, Free Men: The Ideology of
the
Republican Party Before the Civil War (1970), Reconstruction:
America’s
Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (1988), and The Story of American
Freedom
(1998). While two strands run throughout his intellectual trajectory,
the first
being the abolition and legacy of slavery, it is the second theme that
I wish
to take up here.
Freedom.
This is a word like any other – or perhaps not. A
word that has instant visceral and cerebral appeal. A word that
resonates with
diverse and quite often incompatible and irreconcilable political
audiences. A
word that occasionally haunts and in many ways defines the causes and
struggles
and dynamics of the century from which we have just recently emerged:
from
imperial geopolitics to decolonisation; from recalcitrant conservatism
to the
expansion of civil and political rights to previously marginalized
groups; from
the struggle between fascism, communism, and liberalism, to
contemporary
debates about the proper relationship between states and markets. After
all
these days who, we might ask, can be against
freedom? Such is the power and potency of the word.
Just
as interestingly, who can be for
freedom? Who defines
who is for and who is against freedom? Very
often two sides in a political contest will claim to be fighting for
this word.
Yet, they find themselves fighting on opposite sides. Indeed, which
political
actors, social forces or national communities have been privileged in
ascribing
meaning to events - events defined as either for or against freedom?
How has
freedom come down to us historically, for surely it did not come to us
fully
formed in the way that Athena sprang from the head of Zeus. How has it
been
constructed, shaped and advanced and by whom and for whom and with what
effects? What are its secrets and silences, its omissions and
commissions? For
freedom has a history and a story. Like any endeavour that seeks to
place the
present in context and that seeks to understand antecedent events, we
find
uncomfortable specifics and inconsistent generalities, whether
ensconced in the
materiality of the archive, or dormant in the political (un-)
conscious;
embarrassing instances that have to be quickly forgotten, explained
away or
accounted for; things done wrongly
-
from a distinctly presentist vantage point – in the family
name
of ‘freedom’.
Like any history there are also interacting structures and agents,
processes
and forces sometimes within, and sometimes beyond our ken.
Like any story, meanwhile,
there is drama and
pathos, a narrative arc and unforeseen twists in the plot.
In
the modern age, one country has been inextricably
bound up in this story – if for no other reason than sheer
self-identification.
Indeed, ‘freedom’ has been alternatively called the
United
States’ ‘foundational
ethic’, ‘ultimate codeword’, and
‘most
resonant, deeply held value’. The notion
of ‘America’ fulfilling this role has been the case
since
at least the Pilgrim
Fathers, whose memorial in Boston, Lincolnshire mentions their search
for ‘religious
freedom across the seas’. A century and a half later,
meanwhile,
an erstwhile
corset-maker from Thetford in Norfolk trumpeted out to the thirteen
colonies in
Common Sense
(Thomas Paine, 1776): ‘Freedom hath been
hunted round the
globe…O America, receive the fugitive freedom, and prepare,
in
time, an asylum
for humankind’. In the late nineteenth century the symbolic
embodiment of this
idea, the Statue of Liberty, welcomed waves of immigrants from Italy to
Scandinavia, from Ireland to the Russian Pale of Settlement:
‘give me your
tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to break
free’. A
rather more
prosaic example from a recent popular cultural product brings the story
much
more up to date. In the hugely popular and critically acclaimed TV
series, The
Sopranos, we hear chef and
restaurant owner Artie Bucco – whose roots like his boyhood
friend, mob-boss
Tony Soprano, lie in Il
Mezzogiorno –
tell the young Albanian hostess of whom he is enamoured that he cannot
help
speed her through the green card process: ‘I guess
you’re
just gonna have to do
it yourself.
I’m
sorry…I wish
I could
help you, but it’s a small inconvenience compared to living
in
freedom, right?’.
In
what he has termed ‘the forever unfinished story of
American freedom’ the work of Eric Foner stands out. In the
course of his
career, Foner has examined the ways in which freedom has been shaped
and
reshaped across American history. My interest in Foner’s work
stems from my own
recently completed doctoral dissertation and forthcoming book Struggles for Freedom: Afghanistan and US
Foreign Policy Since 1979. In
this work, I essentially analyse the
role
that freedom has played in US foreign policy towards Afghanistan since
the
Soviet invasion of that country. While based on archival research and
oral
history interviews, comparing and contrasting narratives of
‘freedom’ employed
by the US during the Cold War and the Global War on Terror, The
Story of American Freedom was
indispensible in helping me place my own research within a much broader
historical context. While I work at the intersection of diplomatic
history and
international relations, rather than American history per
se, The Story of American
Freedom nevertheless became
merely a starting point for a broader
engagement
with Foner’s oeuvre
(which in turn
rekindled my interest in the US Civil War and gave me the excuse I
needed to
read the copy of Ulysses S. Grant’s memoirs which had been
sitting on my
bookshelf for several years!).
Building
upon Foner’s work, I have found ‘freedom’
to be
a powerful interpretive frame through which to understand the United
States.
Indeed, I would suggest that an understanding of the relationship
between the
United States and this key term is crucial for those who wish to
understand not
only this most powerful of countries, but America’s place in
the
modern
international environment and its own understanding of its role in
history (this
extends way beyond Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi
Freedom, the
names ascribed to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq respectively). It
was,
therefore, a real honour and a pleasure to be able to talk to Professor
Foner
about ‘American freedom’. I spoke with him over
coffee at
the Old Bank Hotel
opposite All Souls, Oxford, while he was in town for a board meeting of
the landmark
social history journal Past
and Present.
***
AH:
Central to your academic career has been the question of American
freedom. I
think the readers of this article would be quite interested to know how
you
came to be interested in this theme?
EF:
Well
let me start by saying, historians are not necessarily the good
autobiographers, we tend not to analyse ourselves as much as other
people. I
was an undergraduate and then a graduate student in the United States
during
the 1960’s at the height of the civil rights movement, and of
course the
Vietnam War, but particularly the civil rights revolution, which led
many, many
people, including myself to try to understand the history that had led
to this
crisis in American life. The study of slavery [also] exploded and the
study of
the period after slavery, and I became one of those people studying the
anti-slavery movement. My first book was called Free Soil,
Free Labour, Free Men and even
though I didn’t
conceptualise the concept of freedom in quite the same way as I later
would, it
really was all about the whole question of slavery and
freedom…That book began
a series of works which culminated in my work on the reconstruction era
after
the civil war which was published in the late 1980’s, a study
of
the time when
freedom was a concrete question of public policy, not just an ideology,
or a
set of values…So in a sense, I think the main inspiration
initially was simply
to understand the world I was living in which is the inspiration of
many, many
historians…America was riven by really deep divides and so
where
did they come
from in our past…that was my main motivation in the
beginning…along the way I
had a little detour where I write this book on Thomas Paine and the
American
Revolution, again a book in which the concept of freedom figured very
dramatically…I always seem to be attracted to studying
people or
moments of
crisis…where these issues get galvanised, and pushed to
beyond
in a sense where
previously we had conceptualised them…so that was the first
part
of my career
and the concept of freedom was quite important there, and then a little
later
on in the 1990’s I decided to write this book about the
history
of this idea of
freedom from the Revolution all the way up to the present.
AH:
So
from Thomas Paine up to the present era the meanings of American
society are
played out within this term…
EF:
That is exactly right, but that can also be somewhat misleading, or at
least
can obscure the fact that Americans tend to absorb all sorts of ideas
into the
notion of freedom, sometimes when we are talking about freedom we are
really
talking about equality or community or economic justice, or things like
that,
but
they always seem to be
expressed in
the language of freedom. So that this is part of the reasons why
American
political discourse doesn’t seem to always coincide with
that,
let’s say, in
Europe, where I think there is actually a much richer political
language, there
is a problem with everything being reduced to freedom, because it
really
flattens out what are really very different sorts of
concepts…in
the United
States…we are always talking about freedom or liberty, which
are
used pretty
interchangeably regardless of what the actual subject is.
AH:
One
of the things that I found interesting in my research was that in the
American Presidency Project, the online
repository of all the presidential speeches and pronouncements, in
keyword
searches ‘freedom’ comes up roughly 17,000 times,
‘liberty’ around 7000 times,
‘democracy’ 3000, in fact
‘exceptionalism’ only
comes up half a dozen times or
so, most of those past 10 years, I found that really
fascinating…
EF:
Well
that is true, of course…[but] there may be something a
little
misleading about
that…the problem is the more recent you get, the more
presidential papers there
are. So Reagan’s were gigantic and he used freedom all the
time,
so if you look
and see how many of those thousands of citations were just
Reagan…as time has
gone on presidents have said more and more things, and issued more and
more
papers, so just counting up the numbers doesn’t really tell
us,
we also need to
look at the distribution over American history. I think the slavery
issue did
galvanise a great deal of talk about freedom in 19th
century
America, even though presidents were not issuing as many,
…the
entire
collective works of Lincoln is seven volumes and two or three of those
are
before he is president, that is nothing, I mean the works of Roosevelt,
of
Reagan, are multiple, multiple volumes…but still your point
of
course is
correct, that this is
AH:
While
‘liberty’ is of course still used, it seems to me
that
‘liberty’ is more
prominent in the early days of the Republic, but then freedom seems to
gradually supplant it in terms of prominence…
EF:
Well,
I just had an email from a journalist in the USA…some of
these
Tea-Party, you
know [these] very conservative people, are trying to urge people to use
liberty
and not freedom, they say liberty is the individual without restraints,
and
freedom they think is more of a statist sort of idea, and in some ways
there
may be some merit to that, but I think most people use them
interchangeably. In
the Gettysburg Address, Lincoln talks about a nation conceived in
liberty and
then a little while later he says we are going through a new birth of
freedom,
he is using these words more or less the same way. English is a
wonderful
language, because it has more words than any other language, I am not a
linguist, but I read somewhere English, it absorbs words from
everywhere, this
is what makes it great to be a writer in English, but also daunting,
because
there are multiple ways to say almost anything…certainly
there
is a Latinate
way and a Germanic way of saying almost anything, and liberty goes back
to the
Latin and root of libertas
and
freedom goes back to the Germanic root of freiheit,
but that is just the English language, that we have these two roots
merging
into one language, so there is more than one way of saying almost
anything and
this is just one little example of that.
AH:
I
mean although both words are used interchangeably would you accord any
significance to the fact that freedom seems to increasingly supplant
liberty,
or would you share in that view that it does…
EF:
Well…
I think that has happened since the
Cold
War actually…since World War Two really, the notion of the
United States being
the leader of the free world, originated really in the fight against
Nazism,
and then was carried over into the Cold War… the United
States
being the
exemplar of freedom, the Soviets lacking freedom, of course liberty was
used
also, but it seems like freedom became the central rallying cry or the
central
short-hand for what the difference was between us and them, we had
freedom,
they don’t have freedom. Now of course, saying that opened
the
door to people
in the United States to claim that they lacked freedom, and as I said
the civil
rights revolution, they called themselves the freedom movement, right,
free at
last, free at last, freedom schools, freedom marches, freedom rides,
freedom
songs…
AH:
Let
freedom ring…
EF:
Let
freedom ring, now to some extent that is a reference to the
emancipation of the
slaves, but it is more than that, it is a very broad concept which
includes,
equality, and dignity, and rights, and recognition by the
society…so it seems
that in that context the word freedom was utilised both by the
government, but
by authorities and by the critics at this same time, so liberty seemed
to be
less, you know less prominent. I think it has become more prominent
again
lately, because the radical right in the US has really adopted liberty
not
freedom as their rallying cry and their critique of Obama and their
critique of
government and of taxation and of regulation, all sorts of things, all
that
seems to come under the rubric of liberty, for them.
AH:
This is of course an area in which you have thought about deeply and
published
extensively, but I would be interested to know whether you think that
liberty
was somehow tainted by its association with a slave-owning republic and
then
freedom becomes a way of transcending this? For example, in the
Gettysburg
Address which you mentioned above, Lincoln speaks about ‘a
new
nation,
conceived in liberty’ that shall have ‘a new birth
of
freedom’…
EF:
I
mean Jefferson did call it an empire of liberty, Paine as you said, an
asylum
for mankind, people seeking liberty from other countries who come to
the United
States, whether slavery tainted American liberty is an interesting
question, a
fellow called John McKivigan years ago wrote an article called
‘Monarchical Liberty
and Republican Slavery’. It was about how the abolitionist
movement contrasted
British devotion to liberty and the American republic’s
devotion
to slavery, in
other words turning around the normal association of a republic with
liberty
and a monarchy with despotism. They said in fact that it was the
monarchy that was
promoting liberty after emancipation in 1833,[1]
so liberty was used in conjuncture with the American form of
government. The emancipation
of the slaves I think did elevate freedom to a more central place, and
not just
in terms of issues related to race. One of the themes of my book [was
that]
long after the end of slavery, aggrieved groups would pick up the
example or
the mantle of abolitionism to promote their own causes, so labour
talked about
economic freedom, chattel slavery has been abolished, but industrial
slavery
still exists, we need industrial freedom or economic freedom, by
linking their
plight with that of the slaves, metaphorically, they sort of again
emphasise
again the word freedom.
AH:
Obviously
a lot of people from these islands in which we are sitting went to
America and
were therefore important in terms of the development of ideas about
‘American
freedom’. However, do you think that it could be argued that
in
terms of the
ways in which the subject has been studied and understood there has
been a degree
of Anglo-centrism? I am thinking, for example, of David Hackett
Fisher’s Albion’s Seed[2]
where he speaks about four British ‘folkways of
freedom’ in
America.
EF:
Yes.
Fisher is continuing to write that series, but even in colonial America
there
were a lot of people who were not English or British, the largest group
that
came to the colonies in the eighteenth century were Germans, what were
their
concepts of liberty…and then of course there were Africans
in
large numbers that
were brought in, they had their own understanding of what liberty was
or should
be, given that that they were slaves, so there is a certain
Anglo-centrism, but
to some extent that is understandable given that the people who created
the
American nation were very Anglo-centric in a sense.
They
were consciously
thinking of themselves within an Anglo-American tradition of discourse
going
back to Locke or Harrington or wherever you want to find it, or
eighteenth
century country party ideologies, but they tended to think very much in
British
terms. When they were thinking intellectually in terms of their own
political
formation, they were thinking in British terms, whether Scottish or
English. The
key founding documents, whether it’s the Declaration, the
Constitution, the
Federalist Papers, do use liberty in ways that would be very familiar
to
eighteenth century Britons.
I
mean it’s interesting,
maybe surprising, but maybe not, that a guy like Thomas Paine, who came
here, sorry
there, who went to the colonies
in 1774 at the age of 37, within a few months wrote this pamphlet which
galvanised everybody. I mean he was an outsider, he was not like
Jefferson or
Adams or any of these people, or Franklin who had grown up in that
world, he
was a total outsider, what he was writing as much reflected his British
experience, but none the less it was completely understandable to vast
numbers
of colonists. That suggests something about the dominance of the
British
tradition of liberty in the discourse of that time. I think as we move
through
American history though, we must move away from that, as immigration
fills the
country from all over the world, from Ireland, from Germany, from
Eastern
Europe, from China, from Mexico, all these people are bringing ideas
with them,
they may come for liberty but there idea of what liberty is shaped by
the world
they are leaving. So it needs to be a multi-cultural view of American
freedom.
AH:
I
remember reading an admiring poem by the poet Robert Burns entitled
‘An Ode to
General Washington’s Birthday’, and being a Scot I
also
think of figures like
James Wilson and John Witherspoon, so it has always been fascinating to
me that
this was almost a transatlantic debate, a transatlantic
discourse…
EF:
Very much so. But of course, very quickly thereafter the French
Revolution
introduces a whole new set of ideas about freedom and fears about
freedom, and
so very quickly one has to start thinking beyond the British Isles to
think
about American influences on American ideas about freedom, because the
French
Revolution really shakes things up enormously in the 1790’s,
and
then and
although not studied nearly as much, the Haitian Revolution also
affects a lot
of people, both in terms of fear and in terms of inspiration in the
United
States, particularly as the slavery issue becomes more central to
debates about
freedom.
AH:
One
of the frequent arguments that I come across is that all this talk of
freedom,
all this study of culture, concepts, values…
EF:
It’s just rhetoric…
AH:
That
is right, it doesn’t matter. It is just propaganda,
hypocrisy, or
epiphenomena.
This is not what really matters, it is a distraction…
EF:
The
answer to that is yes sure freedom is used for propagandistic purposes
all the
time. When…the 9/11 attacks took place President Bush went
before Congress and
brought the whole thing within the realm of freedom, that they hate our
freedom, we love freedom, they hate freedom, I think that there is a
combination there of genuine belief and propaganda. When President
Truman gave
a speech to Congress announcing the Truman Doctrine, and calling for
aid to
Greece after the British said in ‘47 we don’t have
the
money anymore, we can’t
support Greece against this internal rebellion…and that
there is
a danger of
communists taking over there and the US has to step
in…Vandenberg [a Republican
in Congress] said to Truman you better couch this as a worldwide battle
for
freedom, because if it is just aiding a bunch of Greeks no one is going
to want
to spend the money. So it is not that Truman didn’t believe
this,
but it became
a way of selling a policy, the Truman Doctrine was to promote the free
world, and
so forth.
I
think that the question I would ask to people who say it is just
propaganda,
‘why did they choose this
for their
propaganda, of all the values, of all the words, of all the concepts,
why is this
the one that keeps coming forward.
In other words, the very value of it as propaganda tells us something
about its
deep roots in the culture, because it wouldn’t be useful as
propaganda if that
weren’t the case…So basically…there can
be a number
of different things. I think
it displays an unsophisticated view of politics to think that some
things are
propaganda and some things are real belief and that these are two
separate
categories. Peoples motives are always
complicated, the use of language is always
complicated and serves many purposes at once, so […] there
are
partisan
political national interests, all sorts of interests at stake, but the
way
people choose language tells us something about what values they feel
are most
appealing to most people and that itself is a revealing thing. I would
say…[that] when the American people stop thinking of freedom
as
a central part
of their culture, politicians won’t talk about freedom any
more,
they will find
something else to talk about. It does not mean that one should not be
alert to
cynical uses.
AH:
That’s
my response. I
am trying to say, of
course, that it can be used instrumentally, hypocritical, whatever, but
that doesn’t
exhaust its uses…
EF:
I
wish Obama would talk about it, I wish he would try to incorporate, to
defend
his health care plan using some concept of what freedom is, can you be
a free
person if you lack various kinds of security, whether its economic or
medical
or others. Roosevelt talked about that, the free person cannot be
economically
impoverished, you can’t really enjoy freedom if you are in
that
condition, of
course the right rejects that completely…I say the left
should
battle for
possession of the idea of freedom, but they never listen to me. Obama
won twice
anyway, but I told that to a friend of mine who is writing speeches for
Hillary
Clinton so watch when she runs, let’s see if anything happens.
AH:
That is really interesting. You mentioned Reagan there and I was lucky
enough
to interview some of Reagan’s speechwriters and I was asking
them
about this
word freedom and how he was so successful as you point out, in
reappropriating
the term. Why were Reagan and Roosevelt so skilled at changing the
meaning of
this term, what qualities did they have…
EF:
Reagan was a great actor of course. I don’t say that to
denigrate
Reagan, I
respect great actors, it is a wonderful talent to have. Roosevelt
wasn’t a
professional actor you know, although he did seem to have this ability
to
communicate with people in a way that was very personal, very homespun
even
although Roosevelt was a rich aristocrat…I guess their
speechwriters must get a
lot of the credit too…Also, this goes back to the thing of
propaganda, if you
are selling something that people don’t want, I
don’t care
what language you
use, I don’t care how great an actor you are, I
don’t care
if you have the best
propagandistic language, it is not going to get very far. Look at Jimmy
Carter,
he used the term freedom a lot and it didn’t get very far,
because people
didn’t want what he was conveying through that. Ultimately,
Reagan and
Roosevelt were successful because people wanted what they were giving
them.
AH:
So,
skilfully and adroitly using this term freedom is only going to get you
so far?
EF:
It
is very valuable to do and it is certainly in a presidential campaign
in a
speech here and there but as you are governing you can talk about
freedom all
you want and if the economy is going down the drain,
people…are
going to find
that very appealing.
AH: In January
2001, you gave a presidential speech to the American Historical
Association
entitled, ‘American Freedom in the Global Age’. In
this
speech you say that: ‘in
the global age the forever unfinished story of American freedom has to
become a
conversation with the entire world, not a complacent monologue with
ourselves’.
Indeed, I guess in my own small way I am trying to take part in that
conversation. Later that year, however, the momentous events of
September 11
transpire. I’d be interested to know what went through your
mind
when you heard
the attacks framed in terms of a battle between freedom and its
enemies, and of
course the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were entitled Operation
Enduring
Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom respectively?
EF:
Historians
are often the killjoy in the party. Everyone is having a good time,
enjoying
themselves and then the historian comes and says no, no it is not like
that at
all, you misunderstand all this, it is much more complicated, sorry. It
is the
historian’s job to just not allow people to be swept up in
this
fervour of
Iraqi Freedom, without again reminding people that freedom is a
contested idea,
and that our history is not just a simple one of freedom forever and
for
everybody. That spreading freedom by the sword is usually not a very
effective
way of doing it.
I
wrote some essays which were widely reprinted at the time about civil
liberties
in wartime and then the danger of getting swept up into a war fervour
and that
how individual liberties…we must remind ourselves of WWII
Japanese internment,
WWI the suppression of freedom of speech, the Civil War Lincoln himself
suspension of Habeas Corpus, the danger of supressing liberty in the
name of
liberty, and the USA Patriot Act and things like that. To me the role
of the
historian is to say what a minute, let’s just think through
everything, let’s
remember the lessons of history which are not as simple as they
government is
conveying. But I also think that, as you now say, it put freedom right
back on
the agenda of discourse.
AH:
One
of the things I found very interesting recently, with the whole
Snowden/NSA
affair, is that the government will say that this is ultimately for a
greater
freedom. It is for the freedom of the state, it is for the freedom of
the
country, so we have to supress your individual freedoms, this back and
forth is
very interesting…
EF:
Well, it illustrates what we know, which is that freedom is not a
unitary thing
and some freedoms cut against other freedoms, and that is where a lot
of the
conflict comes from. The freedom of the slave-owner was premised on the
slavery
of the slave. Slave-owners said and believed it honestly, we, the
slave-owner,
is the freest person, free from manual labour, free for intellectual
pursuits,
whatever. Slavery is the basis of freedom, slavery for some is the
basis of
freedom for others, so what does that tell us about the concept of
freedom, who
are we talking about, who was entitled to freedom that is another big,
big
issue in American history…It pops up today in the question
of
illegal
immigrants…they are not really entitled to be here, they are
not
entitled to
the same rights as other people, there is always some kind of boundary
around
freedom, and who draws it and why is another major issue throughout
American history.
AH:
When you were speaking there about the way that freedom is not a
unitary thing,
it made me think of Lincoln’s speech at the Sanitary Fair in
Baltimore in 1864
where he talks about different conceptions of liberty and the
relationship
between the wolf and the sheep…
EF:
Lincoln had a somehow amazing way of taking commonly held ideas and
expressing them
in a way everyone could understand, succinctly: Gettysburg two minutes,
Second
Inaugural, another brilliant speech, seven or eight minutes, the
Sanitary Fair,
very brief remarks, but he had this way of encapsulating peoples ideas,
including their ideas about liberty and giving them back in a way that
made
people think about them in a different way…I wrote a book
about
Lincoln a few
years ago, I have taught nineteenth century American history for forty
years, I
have written about that period many times, but reading the works of
Lincoln,
really carefully for the first time, I mean really
carefully, was an amazing experience. It increased my admiration for
him, his
amazing command of language, brilliant, logic, rhetoric, clarity. You
can learn
a lot about writing from just reading Lincoln’s letters and
speeches.
AH: Another objection that I have come across, and the Sanitary Fair speech would be a case in point, is that if there are so many different understandings of freedom, does this not mean that freedom is meaningless?
EF:
Well, that is a interesting question. People asked me that after my
book, which
is somewhat based on the notion of freedom as a contested idea, an
evolving
idea. I would say, right in the sense in that there is no one abstract
definition of freedom that we should go about applying all of the time
in time
and place…freedom is very frequently contextual, that is why
it
requires
historical analysis, but when I lecture about this people say, just
tell us
what freedom is.
I
say, well I’ll give you my idea of what freedom is or what it
ought to be, but
it is mine, I am not saying this is what you or anyone else has to
believe. I
think there is a middle course between saying freedom is just an empty
vessel
into which you pour whatever you want, because over time there have
been
strands which have existed throughout American history. There is a
difference,
there is a middle ground between that and between saying, well
here’s what
freedom is folks, I am telling you what it is and that is it, we can
now, now
that I have my five points of freedom we can go around judging. Ok,
well the
progressive era had three of them and the new deal had two of them and
the
Reagan era had four, no I don’t think that is the way to do
it,
it is not an
abstract a
priori, it doesn’t
exist
outside of history. Freedom has a history, and therefore fifty years
from now
people’s concepts of freedom, they will still be talking
about
it, but they may
be rather different than what we think about, in ways we
can’t
even anticipate.
For example, to the founders, freedom was primarily a public set of
entitlements, you know they said the British were trying to reduce the
colonies
to slavery, why, were they putting George Washington in chains? No. By
taking
away our right to representation, having taxation and other policies
agreed to
by people you have chosen, is the essence of freedom, that’s
a
public
entitlement…Today more than two centuries later I think most
Americans think
about freedom in personal more privatised terms, freedom is living your
life in
the way you want to live it, whatever areas of life, certainly theses
guys back
then were not talking about sexual freedom, the intimate kinds of
freedom which
are very much on our agenda nowadays. That is something different and
new, so
should we go back and judge the founders and say well they
didn’t
believe in
gay marriage, so what kind of freedoms did they have…well
that
is absurd,
obviously, that was not a political question at the time. That is a
good
example of how concepts of freedom have evolved and will continue to
evolve, so
I would be very hesitant to give an a
priori definition of freedom
AH:
In
the
field of international relations, diplomatic history perhaps a little
less so,
it seems to me that there is a pronounced materialist bias. I guess
what I am
saying chimes with what you have just said, which is that freedom is
not
something outside of time, something outside of international politics,
it is
inside the world, it is here with us, it is actively involved in
shaping the
world around us in greater or lesser ways depending on the context...
EF:
Well exactly, I want to go back to one thing you were asking me when
coffee
arrived, when I said in that speech this has to become a dialogue with
the
world. To some extent that speech was a critique of an idea you
mentioned very
briefly that is so dominant in America and I think pernicious in many
ways, which
is American exceptionalism. Now of course American exceptionalism goes
back to
our revolution, if not before. Paine in Common
Sense puts it out there, the
birthday of a new world is at hand, we
have
escaped from history, the revolution cancels history and things start
anew. That
is a deeply held view in the United States, that the history of the
rest of the
world is irrelevant to us, we are so different…American
exceptionalism homogenizes
the rest of the world, there’s all those people out there and
then there is us,
and we are outside of history. Therefore, the trouble is that is a
recipe for
parochialism, we don’t have to know anything about them,
because
it is
irrelevant to us, we don’t have to engage in any kind of
dialogue
because we
have our own premises and our own ideas and history and there is
nothing to
learn from the rest of the world…freedom of course is at the
core of American
exceptionalism, we are exceptional in our devotion of freedom, our
understanding of freedom and that gives us the right to go around
telling other
people what freedom is and I mildly put forward the idea that we might
also ask
other people what they think freedom is, and we might learn something
from that.
That is a sub-theme in this freedom debate, but it is certainly deeply
rooted
in American culture.
AH:
I
remember reading, I think it may have been Felipe Fernandez Armesto,
who said that
the only thing exceptional about America…
EF:
Is
the intensity of their belief in their own exceptionalism, right.
Don’t run for
office saying that, you have to say America is exceptional if you run
for
office, I mean it is, I think even among historians, that it is inbred
so to
speak, we sort of accept that idea without even thinking of it, and one
of the
things that you could homogenize Europe, there is American history and
then
there is European history.
AH:
You
think that that being the case it is important, to go back to your
presidential
address, that people from other countries become involved in this
debate about
American freedom…
EF:
Well, in a sense they have
to be
involved, because we are the dominant power in the world. Maybe we
won’t be
forever, but we have been and are, and therefore what the people of the
rest of
the world need to know what the US is doing in a way that we
don’t need to know
what everyone else is doing, because it is not affecting us in nearly
the same
way…I think the American experience has highlighted the
importance of certain
ideas about liberty which are very important, individual liberty, a
sense of
personal entitlement against outside oppression, things like that. I
think
other people can learn from that and how it evolved in the United
States, so
yes, a dialogue goes both ways and it should.
AH:
I
know you have a meeting, if I could ask just one final question. After
we had
arranged our conversation I said to a friend who is also a fan of your
work,
what one question would you most like to ask Eric Foner? He said, why
is he so
successful? I realise that it a slightly uncomfortable question to be
asked, so
allow me to rephrase it. There will be a lot of early career scholars
who will
read this article who are embarking upon an academic career, ambitious,
who
want to get involved in these important debates that we have been
speaking
about. Is there any guidance or advice you would give them, any
strategies that
you have utilised over the course of your very successful career?
EF:
Yes, there is advice. This may sound odd, number one, do not be a
perfectionist. Try to do the very best work you can, obviously, but
then finish.
I am not a perfectionist, I
obviously try to make my writing very good, but I stop. I know, I have
friends
who will hold onto a manuscript literally for ten years, they are never
satisfied,
it is never perfect. Yes, it will never be perfect, nothing created by
a human
being is perfect, if you are looking for perfection, you will never
write
anything, so don’t just slap-dash anything off, but
don’t
have a closure
problem either. Especially when you are starting out, you are nervous
that you
have missed something, or you have made a mistake, or you want this to
be as
good as it possibly can be, but don’t be afraid to stop and
move
onto something
else…And you know, the other thing, I am just going back to
my
own career. I
learned to write here in Oxford, after I was an undergraduate in the
US, I was
lucky enough to get a fellowship to come here for two
years…I
learned to write
in the tutorial system, that is I learned to write fast, and not be
afraid of
writing, you’ve got to produce a paper every week and there
is no
excuse for
not doing it. I learned to write, to research and write quickly,
clearly, and
not be overwhelmed by the difficulty of the thing, so I never have a
problem
starting, just as I don’t have a problem
stopping…And then
the other thing, is
an adage from my mentor Richard Hofstadter who supervised my doctoral
thesis
and who was a brilliant writer, great, great writer, who said 90% of
writing is
rewriting. It is in the rewriting that you’ve kind of shaped
it
into something
that is literary as well as historical, again you are not worried about
your
first draft, the purpose of a first draft is to just sort of get your
ideas in
order, and then the real process of writing and shaping takes place.
So, that
is how I write, I am not afraid to start. I am not worried if I do not
think it
is all that great to begin with, I go back over it, and over it, and
over it,
till I am satisfied and then I stop and if you can manage to do it that
way you
will be able to produce a lot of scholarship over the course of your
career.
AH:
Thank
you very much for your time.
***
I
enjoy talking about
‘American freedom’. I have become semi-obsessed by
the
term. I take notes of
every instance that the term arises – whether in work-a-day
political debate or
abstract philosophical speculation; whether on television, in
people’s tattoos,
or on their t-shirts. If there is one person I would have wanted to
speak to
about American freedom, meanwhile, it would have been Eric Foner. I
learned a
lot through our conversation from someone who has spent much of his
working
life thinking hard about the term and how it relates to American
history. At
this stage, however, I would like to encourage the readers of this
article to
take part in this conversation. For the ways in which
‘freedom’ gets
conceptualised in the United States and the ways these understandings
play out
matter to us all – politically, economically, culturally, and
historically.