Washington Post Book Reviews
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Tuesday November 23, 2010
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THE TWO FACES OF AMERICAN FREEDOM
Aziz Rana
Harvard Univ
ISBN 978-0674048973
415 pages
$29.95
Reviewed by David Greenberg
People love to complain that academic history is too specialized. But there are good reasons why we don't see more first-rate works that tackle big subjects over large swaths of time. One is that they're very hard to write. Not many scholars are capable of freshly analyzing the whole of our nation's history, from settlement to the present, and conveying their interpretation with depth, persuasive power and lively prose. To cross that high bar, you need to possess either formidable historical knowledge or uncommon skills in developing and presenting original ideas and arguments. Ideally, you'd have both of these things. Unfortunately, few people do.
This fundamental challenge of writing groundbreaking historical syntheses, I think, explains why, despite its commendable ambition, Aziz Rana's "Two Faces of American Freedom" comes as something of a disappointment. An assistant professor of law at Cornell University, Rana has in his first book attempted a synthesis that follows in the footsteps of such scholarly heavyweights as Christopher Lasch ("The True and Only Heaven"), Michael Sandel ("Democracy's Discontent") and Robert Wiebe ("Self-Rule"), to name but a few -- all of whom bemoaned America's supposed slide from a Jeffersonian republic of self-sufficient farmers and workmen to a vast administrative state that allows citizens only token participation in national political decisions.
The scholars who have followed this thread through our history have often looked for alternatives to today's ostensibly jejune politics in the so-called classical republicanism of 19th-century America -- a political culture centered in local communities and rooted in civic virtue. Yet, as its analysts have usually grasped, the culture of republicanism, which empowered elite civic leaders trusted by the community, was exclusionary, denying women and racial and ethnic minorities full claims to American citizenship. Indeed, historians have perennially wrestled with the irony that social inclusion has increased alongside -- perhaps because of -- the growth of the federal power that Rana and other communitarians decry.
I've never been convinced that it's either desirable or possible to return to a world even remotely like the small r-republican culture of the Federalist era. Still, the historian-enthusiasts of republicanism, with their wide-ranging books, have contributed amply to the history of political ideas by demonstrating that liberalism has hardly been the sole intellectual tradition in America, as was once commonly supposed.
Rana now seeks to add to this discussion not so much by conducting original research as by melding his predecessors' well-developed ideas with a somewhat rarified but interesting new area of scholarship focusing on settler societies -- colonial outposts where newcomers mixed with indigenous peoples. America's relentless territorial expansion in the 19th century, Rana argues, made it nothing less than a "settler empire," in his phrase. He traces that idea and the contradictions it contains -- a generous provision of liberty, but tied to the exclusion of those defined as less than full American citizens -- through a series of wide-ranging episodes in American political and legal history; we revisit Shays' rebellion, the Dred Scott decision, the populist movement of the Gilded Age, the women's suffrage crusade, and more. But the outcome is, for Rana, always bleak and repressive. Viewing U.S. global leadership in the 20th century as a new form of imperialism, he links American intervention abroad to the demise of settlerism at home. The upshot: "empire has become the master rather than the servant of freedom."
All this strikes me as a bit of a reach. The conclusion itself is dubious since -- notwithstanding certain shameful presidential policies, such as the open-ended jailing of suspected terrorists without trial -- most of the world envies the unprecedented freedoms enjoyed by Americans, even those in Guam, Puerto Rico or other parts of the "empire."
But the larger problem lies not in Rana's arguments, which are provocative if sometimes a little flaccid. Rather it lies in the nature of this undertaking itself. Almost any rising academic is going to be pulled in one direction by the institutional demands of writing a first book aimed at gaining credibility within an academic discipline, while the aspirations of a book like this to offer "a large-scale act of historical reconstruction," as Rana puts it, tug in another.
Rana thus seems torn about whether to present himself as a confident master or an apt pupil. On the one hand, striving to establish his own authority, he makes grand promises about his book. "I reinterpret the lasting implications of our political origins and shed light on questions of how settler identity, economic independence and ethnic assimilation grounded popular contests regarding social inclusion," he writes; "I then reconceive the central causes and consequences of the American Revolution by reinterpreting the Revolution as a settler revolt."
In other ways, though, Rana lacks the quiet self-confidence needed for a study like this. The book suffers from academic jargon, a preference for the abstract over the concrete, and a tendency to brandish other scholars' insights as tokens of erudition.
("This book is an experiment in what Michael Walzer has called 'connected criticism.'") These stylistic habits may assure finicky academics that the requisite literature has been digested, but they can also signal a lack of comfort with one's own ideas. Successful syntheses convey their authority not through brash claims, mystifying jargon or literary name-dropping but through a fearsome command of detail, deftly deployed.
But if "Two Faces" doesn't offer a fully comprehensive (or fully comprehensible) account of liberty and empire, it is to be admired for trying to reconcile clashing impulses in the American past -- exclusion and tolerance, security and freedom, humanitarianism and imperialism. Scholars will be wrestling with these dilemmas and ironies for a long time, and Rana will surely have more to say on the subject.
David Greenberg, a professor of history at Rutgers University, is a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars for 2010-11. He writes frequently for The Washington Post Book World.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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DEALINGS: A Political and Financial Life
Felix Rohatyn
Simon & Schuster
ISBN 978-1439181966
292 pages
$27
Reviewed by Steven Pearlstein
In my next life, I want to come back as Felix Rohatyn. I'm envious of just about every aspect of the rewarding, challenging and glamorous life described by Rohatyn in his new autobiography except for, perhaps, writing those long, ponderous essays for the New York Review of Books. And what makes "Dealings" such a pleasure to read is that you can tell Rohatyn enjoyed writing it as well.
There was the dramatic, and lucky, escape from the Nazis as a young French Jew. And tutoring Edith Piaf in English. And working with the ad legend Bill Bernbach to turn around Avis Rent-a-Car with the "We Try Harder" campaign. And, of course, negotiating some of the biggest corporate acquisitions in history: ITT-Hartford Fire, GE-RCA, Matsushita-MCA and KKR's leveraged buyout of RJR-Nabisco.
Here's a man who, at various times, rescued Wall Street, Lockheed Corp. and New York City from financial collapse. He's known anyone who was anyone on Wall Street, in Hollywood and in Washington, and on any given day he could be found hobnobbing with Woody Allen at Elaine's; sharing a power breakfast with the governor at the Regency; chatting over the back fence with casino-hotel magnate Steve Wynn, one of his Sun Valley neighbors; talking in whispered tones with former Walt Disney Co. president Michael Ovitz at the Four Seasons; or getting the inside scoop from political heavyweights Bob Strauss and Vernon Jordan at the Hay Adams.
Then there's the apartment on Fifth Avenue with the park view, the cottage on Long Island and that house in Sun Valley, along with the ski trips to Zurs, Austria. And when he finally had done everything he wanted to do on Wall Street, Rohatyn managed to wangle the best job in government -- U.S. ambassador to France -- but only after turning down the offer to become president of the World Bank.
In the recounting of such a rich life, allowance must be made for a certain measure of name-dropping and boastfulness, particularly from an author who fesses up freely to numerous lapses in judgment. His attempts to dissuade the Justice Department from bringing an antitrust suit against the ITT-Hartford Fire merger earned him a grilling before a Senate committee, a minor role in Nixon's impeachment and the moniker of "Felix the Fixer." He admits now to giving Universal Studio's Lew Wasserman bad advice when he recommended that Wasserman turn down a takeover offer from Disney, then to have compounded the error by negotiating the sale of MCA/Universal to the Japanese, who never figured out what to do with it. And if you look closely at the pictures of executives fleeing from Lehman Brothers with boxes of personal items in hand just after the 2008 bankruptcy, you may find one of Rohatyn, who had only recently signed on as a consultant after returning from his ambassadorial duties in Paris.
Along with the mild self-criticism there is also some self-congratulation. Rohatyn revels in the release of Oval Office transcripts that prove it was President Nixon himself who ordered the head of the antitrust division to drop the Hartford Fire case even before Rohatyn first showed up at the Justice Department. ("You son of a bitch. Don't you understand the English language. Drop the goddamn thing. Is that clear?" Nixon tells Richard Kleindienst, the top antitrust official.) And he stresses too strongly that Gerald Ford's defeat in the 1976 presidential election was due to the president's refusal to bail out New York City.
Rohatyn understands that autobiographies are wonderful vehicles for evening up the score with those who have done you wrong.
He fingers former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin and Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan for blocking his nomination as the Fed's vice-chairman after they spread false rumors about his "soft money" predilections; Rohatyn goes on to note wryly that Greenspan came to embrace his view of the potential for high growth and low inflation. Rohatyn also exposes the treachery of socialite and diplomat Pamela Harriman, who was the first to bring up the idea of his succeeding her as ambassador to Paris before turning around and lobbying to give the plum job to veteran diplomat Frank Wisner. Those who shake their heads at the very mention of the corrupt financier Ivan Boesky will love Rohatyn's tale of their lunch at the Four Seasons.
Still, "Dealings" ends up as something of a letdown. Rohatyn leaves out too many of the behind-the-scenes details of his deal-making, along with candid assessments of most of the financiers and politicians who played a role in his life. He also skips over the painful episode of his break with his partners at Lazard Freres, the investment bank where he grew up professionally and had played such a prominent role for so many years.
Most disappointing, however, is Rohatyn's inability to draw the connections and the distinctions between his own deal-making and the greed and self-dealing that he now blames for having corrupted Wall Street. His chapter-ending reflections generally range from trite to banal, and even when he occasionally musters outrage over a financial services industry that has become an "electronic game" divorced from real-world value creation, he never quite explains why or how it came to be or who among his many friends, acquaintances and competitors was responsible.
Rohatyn has given us a memoir that is more kiss than tell, delightful in the reading but in the end less profound and incisive than one would have expected from someone who saw so much and lived so large.
Steven Pearlstein is a business and economics columnist for The Washington Post.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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