On Civil Liberties and the Redefinition of Freedom

An appreciation of the polite liberties and basic granting immunitys enjoyed by the American individual, according to Eric Foner, would be impossible without a knowlight-emitting diodege of how the American peoplegeneration by and by generationstruggled to lay out and demarcate the boundaries of immunity and liberty.In The Story of American Freedom, Foner (2002) successfully applies a mlange of analytical framework ranging from structural analysis, marxist dialectical and historical materialism to feminist and postmodern criticism to prove that independence has always been a terrain of conflict, subject to multiple and competing interpretations. By analyzing exemption from a historical narrative, he aims to show how at different periods of American history different heads of freedom have been conceived and implemented, and how the clash between dominating and dissenting views has constantly reshaped the ideas pith. And because of this, the discourse of American civil libert iesborne from the American peoples love affair with the idea of freedomwill nonwithstanding net income relevance by directing the the meanings of freedom the friendly conditions that make it possible and the boundaries of freedom the definition, that is, of who is entitled to enjoy it (Foner, 2002).The Birth of Civil LibertiesIndeed, the notions of civil liberties in a given society are necessarily intertwined with its cherished concept of freedom. In the books eight chapter, entitled The Birth of Civil Liberties, Foner shows that the extraction of the idea of civil liberties was the outcome of the tumultuous blushts and crisis prior and after the dry land War I the United States participation in the warfare, the paranoia produced by the payoff of Socialist Russia, and the Great Depression following shortly after the war ended. It was at this period, with the widespread poverty amidst the growth of the United States as a major Capitalist economy and Progressivists disencha ntment with the illusions of state benevolence after the whole scale arrest of left-wing intellectuals, that the paradigm shift from the dominant freedom from into freedom to occurred. The ideas of social scientists as Herbert Croly, keister Dewey, and William Willoughby, formed the bottom of the new definition of freedom as one that does not only protect the individual from aggression, but one that actually permitted him to do things. Foner (2002) narrates the turn out contradiction between the dominant appearivism and the emerging modern liberalismEffective freedom, wrote John Dewey, who pondered the question from the 1890s until his death in 1952, was far different from the passing formal and limited concept of liberty as a be possession of autonomous individuals that needed to be protected from outside restraint.For utile freedom to crystallize, it was realized, certain conditions first had to be met. Human beings (at this stage meaning White Men), for instance, though by nature imbued with the freedom to live comfortably, could not do so if they were impoverished. Freedom therefore required that a military man being be economically secure, which meant that unemployment and starvation were seen as infringements to freedom.The new-fangled get by and the Redefinition of FreedomBy the 1930s, the belief that economic security was a little condition for exercising individual freedoms had gained significant acceptance. This is reflected in the way that the state, led by then Pres. Roosevelt, implemented the New pickle from 1933-37, the pre-cursor of the establishment of benefit in the United States which implemented relief, reform, and recovery by intervening in the market and granting the demands of groups from a variety of the political spectrum. Seeking to cushion the refer of the Great Depression on the starving and unemployed majority of the American people, as well as pacify the restless from succumbing to left ideology, the New Deal showed the transformation of progressivism into modern liberalism, which espoused Keynesian economic models and personal freedom based on the four Rs freedom of speech, freedom to worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear.Fighting for FreedomAnd so it is with the rhetoric of freedom that the United States would camouflage its interests in overtaking to the Second World War and in declaring the cold war against the socialist bloc of the USSR. Noting the irony when Pres. Roosevelt promises the world a Global New Deal based on the four freedoms while declaring its participation in the war, Foner echoes Deweys lament when he wrote in The Meaning of Freedom in the era of Emancipation thatin our own time, we have witnessed the putative division of the orbiter into free and non-free worlds (with the former including many nations that might be seen as lacking in freedom) invoked to justify violations of individual liberties at home and interference with the business to self determinat ion (Foner, 1994)This startling realization, that American freedom has been both a reality and a mythical ideal a living trueness for millions of Americans a cruel mockery for others,influenced the formation of racial, gender, ethnicity, and class-based reform and radical emancipationist movements whose basic slogan was that of equality and the recognition of marginalized groups, such as those for the citizenship of the Blacks, womens suffrage in the 1960s, and the peoples right to state-sponsored provision of social services in the 1930s. Foner describes the development of emergent concepts of freedom in the twentieth century which tested and challenged the status quofeminists sought to recast gender transaction in order to afford women the same freedom as men, and Americans change integrity over whether poverty and lack of economic security should be seen as deprivations of freedom that the government had an obligation to alleviate.The womens vocal demands for their right to take and the Black and immigrant movement for civil recognition, were therefore significant efforts to redefine the comprehensive and exclusive meanings of freedom since categories of freedom defines the categories of unfreedom. Foner affirms the relevance of such movements by stating that,those who get a purely negative view of freedom as the absence of out-of-door coercion, rather than, for example, economic autonomy or political empowerment, must identify what constitutes illegitimate coercion.It is with this contention, that freedom has not simply been a linear progress toward a pre-ordained goal, but rather a complex and conflictedand sometimes even violent struggle between the contradicting interests of groups tainted by class, race, ethnicity, gender, and even religion, that Foner challenges and dares his subscriber to attempt to redefine the confined, claustrophobic spaces of Americas state-sponsored concepts of freedom.ReferencesFoner, Eric. The Story of American Freedo m. New York Norton, 1998. pp. 163-236Foner, Eric, The Meaning of Freedom in the Age of Emancipation. The Journal of American History 81, no. 2 (Sept. 1994) p. 4.