A slave to easy liberalism

Eric Foner is a left-wing historian. His subject - how the idea of freedom has been variously and uneasily interpreted in American political culture - is a worthy one. He pushes almost all the right liberal buttons, but his account of that story is dull.

The liberal button he doesn't push is the story of the American Indians, who get only the most passing reference. But how can the story of freedom in America be told without telling how the early colonists and their descendants treated the indigenous people so badly that the American Indian population was reduced from between three to seven million to 300,000 through disease, slaughter and poverty. Several treaties with the native Americans were disregarded, their lands were confiscated and their culture was virtually wiped out - mostly in the name of freedom.

And yet liberal historians and liberal history departments can almost ignore the history of the Native Americans and what was done to them. At Harvard in 1991 there was not a single course on offer in any department on Native Americans, not their history, their cultures, their economies, their religions or their societies (it may be different now). Martha Graham, the doyenne of American modern dance, categorised the dispossession and near-annihilation of the American Indians as "things we are ashamed of".

Foner is far better on what was done to the black population of America, and at describing the tension that arose during and immediately after the American Revolution, which proclaimed the "right" to freedom on the part of "all people". He notes: "At the time of the Revolution, slavery was already an old institution in America; it existed in every state and formed the basis of the economy and social structure from Maryland southwards." Many of those who gathered in Philadelphia in 1787 to draft the constitution were themselves slave-holders, including Thomas Jefferson. Another of the "founding fathers", James Madison, gave the assurance that the new constitution offered slavery a "better security than any that now exists".

That new constitution prohibited Congress from abolishing the African slave trade for two decades, it required all States of the new Union to return fugitives from bondage to their owners, and it provided that three-fifths of the slave population be counted in determining each state's representation in the House of Representatives and its electoral votes for president.

The latter provision ensured that the southern slave States had disproportionate political clout and, as a consequence, all but four of the first 16 presidents of the United States were southern slave-holders. As the new constitution provided, the slave trade continued after Independence, and between then and 1808 a quarter of all slaves brought to America - some 90,000 of them - were imported.

Foner is excellent in dealing with the subjugation of women and with the virulent racism that pervaded American political culture until the 1960s, not just against blacks but against Mexicans, Chinese and Japanese - the only whites targeted were prostitutes, convicted felons, lunatics, polygamists and persons likely to become a "public charge", plus anarchists, communists, homosexuals and illiterates.

Foner writes on how the Supreme Court (which, until 1954, played a thoroughly dishonourable role in "the pursuit of liberty" in relation to Blacks, Native Americans, Asians, women and workers) affirmed the right of Congress to set racial restrictions on immigration and to expel without due process immigrants who had not been naturalised - Chinese immigrants could not be naturalised. He also recalls how in the second World War 120,000 Japanese-Americans were interned without trial, solely because of their origins, although two-thirds of them were American citizens.

HE is good on how the idea of liberty or freedom was rendered meaningless by economic and social inequality, through reliance on the primitive legal notion of freedom of contract - the Supreme Court in a series of judgments asserted, for instance, that the freedom of contract between "free" individuals could not be interfered with by government in the regulation of employment conditions. He also records how Isaiah Berlin's notion of "negative liberty" was distorted by right-wing economists and ideologues. The belief was that the role of the state was solely to prevent the infringement of liberties, not to give them substance. Berlin himself later explained: "Legal (negative) liberties are compatible with extremes of exploitation, brutality and injustice. The case for intervention by the state or other effective agencies to secure conditions for both positive and at least a minimum degree of negative liberty for individuals is overwhelmingly strong" (Introduction to Four Essays on Liberty).

But it is disappointing that Foner ignores the chief ideologue of the American right, Robert Nozick, the author of Anarchy, State and Utopia, which, perhaps more than any other work, has influenced contemporary attitudes to the role of the state, not just in America but throughout the world. Nozick has argued from a strong presumption of "self-ownership" that we are all entitled to the produce of our labour and to the free exchange of resources in the marketplace, and that any intervention on the part of the state represents an infringement on one's autonomy. This has given rise to the idea that "taxation is theft", an attitude much reflected by the Progressive Democrats here.

The challenge to that idea has come from another seminal contemporary American political philosopher, John Rawls, whose book, A Theory of Justice, published in 1971, has also had a profound impact (actually, the Nozick book was published in response to the Rawls book, not the other way around). A Theory of Justice is also ignored by Foner.

Rawls argues that the distribution of income, resources, wealth, power and respect are the product of entirely arbitrary processes that contain no moral absolutes, and that it is indeed the function of the state to even out the inequities and injustices that an unfettered market-place produces.

Vincent Browne is a broadcaster, barrister and Irish Times columnist