Review

John Dunn: The Idea of Freedom in Asia and Africa

Robert H. Taylor (ed.): The Idea of Freedom in Asia and Africa, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2002, xv + 329 pp., hardback, £46.95, ISBN 0-8047-4514-5.

All human societies, like all individual human beings, have always had tothink and feel for themselves. Every individual human being is enabled tothink and feel as they do largely by drawing on resources of interpretationand explanation built up long before their own conception within the soci-eties in which they grow up. Most human societies encourage their youngermembers to view their lives on terms, and through categories, which carrydeep seated convictions about what is good or bad, valuable or worthless,within an individual life, and what sorts of action are, either in themselvesor because of their impact upon others, seldom or never permissible. Everyhuman society, accordingly, distinguishes as emphatically as it can betweenways in which it is good or bad for its members to be constrained. All soci-eties with a protracted experience of literacy develop an elaborate con-ception of their own about why it is desirable for their members to beconstrained in certain ways, and undesirable for them to be constrained inmany others. Every society thus offers its denizens a view of itself as a stageon which to act out one or more of a range of suitable parts with greater orless fluency and felicity.

The history of modern economics and politics has made freedom thepivotal ideological category of modern history; and its outcome, at least forthe present, has strongly privileged interpretations of what freedom meansand requires, which derive from the history of Europe. The Center for theHistory of Freedom at Washington University, St Louis has been exploringthe sources and modalities of these interpretations for some time, initiallyunder the aegis of a distinguished American historian of the English CivilWar (and much else), Jack Hexter. In The Idea of Freedom in Africa and Asia,many volumes after it first set out, it turns its attention to the fate of freedomin two continents that these interpretations have been last to reach, andwhere their impact as yet has in many ways been shallowest. The two conti-nents have had very different histories, in the long term as well as more

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recently. For all the drastic differences in power and wealth within each,those histories now give them very different levels of cultural self-assurance.One, Africa, has never had, over a large area, a shared conception of its ownof how it is good or bad for its inhabitants to be constrained or left to theirown devices, let alone of what makes this good or bad. The other, Asia, stillplainly very much retains several different such conceptions unmistakably ofits own, stemming from great world religions which it founded and launchedon their career very long ago.

Historians, understandably, disagree with one another professionally overhow to write the history of ideas at every level from the most self-conscioustheoretical thinking to the deepest imaginative mechanisms for reproduc-ing or transforming social, political and economic relations over time. Theyalso disagree, like other political agents, over how far and in what ways it isappropriate to press or answer historical questions through and on behalfof their own personal evaluations and convictions. The intellectual challengeof the odyssey on which the Center for the History of Freedom first set outwas bound to prove at its fiercest once it reached Africa and Asia.

Only someone wholly uninterested in understanding either modern pol-itics or economics, and quite indifferent to the still conspicuous and oftenawesomely disquieting impact of the West on both of these continents, couldfail to respond to the issues with which Robert Taylor and his contributorsseek to grapple. By the end of the book some of the central ideological chal-lenges of the new millennium have come into unfamiliar and intriguingfocus. Individual chapters naturally vary in insight and ambition. All reflectsome degree of recognition that the pragmatic framework of political andeconomic life across the globe has been transformed over the last centuryby the relative efficacy of some ways of institutionalizing political power andagency and some approaches to organizing economic activity, in marked con-trast with others. Both the main victors of an increasingly global struggle forwealth and power over this period, the representative democratic state andthe market economy, conceive and celebrate themselves through an idea offreedom. Both, a little more abstractly and with rather less plausibility, havesought to persuade themselves and one another that the idea in question isessentially the same. Out of this remarkable mobilization of power, andthrough the unmistakable historical momentum that it has built up, it hasbecome quite natural to believe that the practical character of collectivehuman life today requires that we accept, utilize and then perhaps improveupon, these freedom-friendly expedients, and do our best by whatever meansseem appropriate at the time to eliminate the increasingly impractical andconsequentially undesirable alternatives which continue to disfigure largeareas of the map. In part as a consequence of this momentum, it has alsobecome increasingly plausible to the peoples of the West to see their swellingtriumph as a vindication not just of their own preferred political and eco-

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nomic practices, but also of the imaginative history which lies behind theseand the sense of ongoing purpose and commitment embodied in their ownway of life. While that commitment may often falter and lose conviction,moment by moment, in the everyday domestic and political life of their ownsocieties, it can, by a trick of perspective, readily look more secure and com-manding when projected out onto the unfathomable texture of the lives of huge populations of which they know virtually nothing. If the lesson ofmodern history proves to be that it is rationally mandatory to adopt someof the political and economic practices of the west, why should it not alsoturn out to be rationally mandatory to adopt the conceptions of apt andinappropriate constraint that lay behind those practices and have since beenreshaped so dynamically by and through them?

All Taylor’s contributors provide thoughtful and informative analyses ofthe competitive pressure of western economic and political practices on theareas which they consider, for the most part with considerable qualms aboutthe results. Least enthusiastic, understandably, are the chroniclers of Africa– Crawford Young and William Foltz – and of the Middle East, James Gelvin.The most ambitious set themselves, too, to try to capture just how these insis-tent intrusions have altered the political, economic, and even moral, imagi-nations of the societies into which they have made their way. They varyconsiderably in tone, from Robert Taylor’s disabused and illuminating com-parison of Myanmar with Thailand to Ben Kerkvliet’s more engaged studyof the vicissitudes of coercion, struggle, suffering and disappointment in thePhilippines and Vietnam. Deepest and most striking are the three studies ofthe transformation in conceptions of freedom in the three most historicallyimposing of all Asia’s civilizations: India, Japan and China. The most pene-trating of the three is Sudipta Kaviraj’s remarkable analysis of the Indianexperience, a work of extraordinary historical finesse and depth, whichshows with exemplary force just why the history of the most refined of ideas and the broadest movements of economic, social and political trans-formation can be separated from one another only at the price of self-stultification. For the moment, his case is also the most ideologically disconcerting, with two-thirds of a century of democracy in action and ameasure of recent economic liberalization having summoned up the mili-tant accents of an already intermittently murderous Hindu Reconquista, andthreatened to place at its disposal the full power of the Indian state and recastin eschatological terms and in the most dramatic of settings its enduringrivalry with its Islamic neighbour and fellow nuclear power, Pakistan.

The challenge of Japan and China is rather different, but perhaps evenmore fundamental. Besides the question of what they are free from, allhumans also face the question of what they are free for. China and Japan (as Andrew Nathan and Sheldon Garon show) have both accommodatedthemselves to some degree over the last two centuries to western recipes for

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diminishing the constraints from which it would be better to escape. Theyhave done so, plainly, in very different ways, and often as much by luck asby good judgement. (Consider the role of General MacArthur.) Where theyhave on the whole kept their distance with some obstinacy has been in theirconceptions of what it is good to be free for. More particularly, they havekept it in their continuing sense of the priority of this question over all theissues of freedom from.

You could organize an entire higher education around the issues raisedin these three chapters. Is the history of the modern world as a whole oneof spreading practical expedients for economic and political freedom whichsimply open up the space for individual human beings to recognize forthemselves how best to constrain themselves and set about the living of theirown lives? Is freedom an endlessly additive good in itself, and all constraintinherently regrettable except as a means for diminishing other constraint?Or is it wiser to see the economic and political practices of the modern Westnot as neutral heuristics for a good quite independent of themselves, whichrests indefeasibly within each individual soul, but as an opaque and evermore insistent tipping of the balance between the social and the personal,and one which corrodes all sense of the merit of constraint and so corruptsany individual’s grasp of what it is or is not good to be free for?

However confusedly, the societies of the West have placed their wagerdecisively on the first view. As yet, at any rate, none of the great civilizationsof Asia has quite seen fit to join them. There is a serviceable English idiomfor circumstances in which you simply do not know the answer to a question:‘Your guess is as good as mine’. The most urgent issue at stake in RobertTaylor’s volume, and perhaps the most fundamental human question for thenext millennium (if we prove to last that long), is: is it, or is it not, now rea-sonable to believe – looking at the matter from Europe or North America –that over the question of how to distinguish good constraint from bad: ‘Theirguess is as good as ours’?

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