Alex Zakaras's "Freedom for All"

Alex Zakaras is professor of political science at the University of Vermont. He is the author of The Roots of American Individualism and Individuality and Mass Democracy and is coeditor of J. S. Mill’s Political Thought.

Zakaras applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Freedom for All: What a Liberal Society Could Be, and reported the following:

Page 99 of my book falls near the beginning of a chapter about the exploitation of American workers in today’s economy. On this page, I’m discussing the history of American attitudes about economic freedom. In the early nineteenth century, not long after the country was founded, Americans tended to believe that most people who worked for wages were unfree. At the time, the United States was a nation of farmers, and most white families owned (or were on a path to owning) their own farms. Americans celebrated the independence of landowning small farmers who were their own bosses and who controlled their livelihoods; by contrast, they saw wage- earners as dependent on others for their daily bread, lacking economic security, and subservient to bosses or managers.

The Page 99 Test does not work very well for my book, because this is one of the few sections that looks backward into the (distant) past. If you started reading on this page, you might conclude that this is a book about American history; it’s actually about America today and in the future. Still, the themes I explore on this page are important throughout the book. The question I’m considering here is what a truly free economy would look like. In the eyes of our founders and the generations who lived right after them—including many of the abolitionists who fought to end slavery in this country—free markets were not enough, nor was economic growth or overall prosperity. If people doing essential work are economically stressed, vulnerable to being fired at will, and working in hierarchical workplaces that demand subservience, the country itself is not free—or so these early Americans believed. They also wanted an economy that was fairly equal, without extremes of opulent wealth and grinding poverty, where people could look one another in the eye as social and civic equals. For all these reasons, they would have been deeply unsettled by the American economy today.

Freedom for All argues that deep inequalities in wealth, power, and opportunity have pulled this country apart and left us vulnerable to demagogues and authoritarians. The book also invites us to imagine what our country could be if we really committed ourselves to building a society in which everyone is equally entitled to live freely.

Learn more about Freedom for All at the Yale University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue