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The Two Faces of American Freedom
The Two Faces of American Freedom boldly reinterprets the American political tradition from the colonial period to modern times, placing issues of race relations, immigration, and presidentialism in the context of shifting notions of empire and citizenship. Today, while the U.S. enjoys tremendous military and economic power, citizens are increasingly insulated from everyday decision-making. This was not always the case. America, Aziz Rana argues, began as a settler society grounded in an ideal of freedom as the exercise of continuous self-rule―one that joined direct political participation with economic independence. However, this vision of freedom was politically bound to the subordination of marginalized groups, especially slaves, Native Americans, and women. These practices of liberty and exclusion were not separate currents, but rather two sides of the same coin. However, at crucial moments, social movements sought to imagine freedom without either subordination or empire. By the mid-twentieth century, these efforts failed, resulting in the rise of hierarchical state and corporate institutions. This new framework presented national and economic security as society’s guiding commitments and nurtured a continual extension of America’s global reach. Rana envisions a democratic society that revives settler ideals, but combines them with meaningful inclusion for those currently at the margins of American life.
432 pages, Hardcover
First published September 15, 2010
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
October 3, 2020
If I were to have reviewed this book earlier in the reading process, I would have been much more excited about it than I am at the end of my experience. In many ways, this is a very worthwhile read; my main complaints are:
1. The writing style, while readable and clear, became tiresome over the course of 400 pages. It is by no means poorly written, but by so closely analyzing the guiding ideologies of various periods (which is very well done), these ideologies can at times feel like they exist in a vacuum divorced from their historical context or leading figures. The historical moments we looked at did not breathe in the way that really successful historical reinterpretations let them.
2. Rana largely excludes Black and Indigenous groups from this history. I do not believe this is malicious; indeed, it is a byproduct of his general thesis that American freedom, while often liberatory for "in" groups (at least early in the settler project), was and is predicated upon the existence of subordinate "out" groups, which again he makes a compelling case for. I do think it hurts the book, though, since, in a way, legitimates the colonial and then settler state as determiners of people's humanity and capacity to attain republican freedom. The irony of naming the book "The Two Faces of American Freedom," while largely ignoring the tragedies of the lived realities and material conditions of oppressed nations, does not go unnoticed.
As for positive points, Rana generally does a good job explaining the shifting ideological trends among the general public and some key thinkers, especially dissident ones. While this is by no means a Marxist analysis, Rana highlights the interesting tendency of settlers throughout the American experiment to draw connections between relations of production and individual liberties.
As Rana puts it, republicanism in the American context was predicated on the absence of external/higher forces restricting the decision-making capacity of the individual. As the mode of production in the national core shifted away from settler individualism to large-scale production, and as even homesteaders on the frontier saw their relationship with the federal government evolve over time, the interests of the American capitalist class necessitated an ever-widening divide between the people-qua-masses and the people-qua-abstract concept, upon which a government could be built that actually blunted the traditions of local autonomy, direct democracy, and (among certain groups of European immigrants) high levels of integration and participation in the democratic process. Throughout this process, the federal government met with plenty of resistance from a people for whom wage labor, especially when it was not simply a transitionary phase leading to republican individual liberty, was anathema to their very conception of freedom. As the settler social stratum saw itself pulled ever closer to the nations upon whose oppression their own liberty was founded (vis-a-vis their relations to the means of production), the more social unrest grew as a result.
All in all, if this book strikes you as interesting, I recommend it, given you read it with a critical eye. However, it fell short of what I had hoped for in a book with aspirations of offering a massive reinterpretation of the ideological history of the United States.
1. The writing style, while readable and clear, became tiresome over the course of 400 pages. It is by no means poorly written, but by so closely analyzing the guiding ideologies of various periods (which is very well done), these ideologies can at times feel like they exist in a vacuum divorced from their historical context or leading figures. The historical moments we looked at did not breathe in the way that really successful historical reinterpretations let them.
2. Rana largely excludes Black and Indigenous groups from this history. I do not believe this is malicious; indeed, it is a byproduct of his general thesis that American freedom, while often liberatory for "in" groups (at least early in the settler project), was and is predicated upon the existence of subordinate "out" groups, which again he makes a compelling case for. I do think it hurts the book, though, since, in a way, legitimates the colonial and then settler state as determiners of people's humanity and capacity to attain republican freedom. The irony of naming the book "The Two Faces of American Freedom," while largely ignoring the tragedies of the lived realities and material conditions of oppressed nations, does not go unnoticed.
As for positive points, Rana generally does a good job explaining the shifting ideological trends among the general public and some key thinkers, especially dissident ones. While this is by no means a Marxist analysis, Rana highlights the interesting tendency of settlers throughout the American experiment to draw connections between relations of production and individual liberties.
As Rana puts it, republicanism in the American context was predicated on the absence of external/higher forces restricting the decision-making capacity of the individual. As the mode of production in the national core shifted away from settler individualism to large-scale production, and as even homesteaders on the frontier saw their relationship with the federal government evolve over time, the interests of the American capitalist class necessitated an ever-widening divide between the people-qua-masses and the people-qua-abstract concept, upon which a government could be built that actually blunted the traditions of local autonomy, direct democracy, and (among certain groups of European immigrants) high levels of integration and participation in the democratic process. Throughout this process, the federal government met with plenty of resistance from a people for whom wage labor, especially when it was not simply a transitionary phase leading to republican individual liberty, was anathema to their very conception of freedom. As the settler social stratum saw itself pulled ever closer to the nations upon whose oppression their own liberty was founded (vis-a-vis their relations to the means of production), the more social unrest grew as a result.
All in all, if this book strikes you as interesting, I recommend it, given you read it with a critical eye. However, it fell short of what I had hoped for in a book with aspirations of offering a massive reinterpretation of the ideological history of the United States.
June 4, 2021
Utterly fascinating and brilliant when it covers early British legal ideology for the American colonies and expansion, and how the colonists took the resulting aims and backfilled a different justification to make themselves the settlers/protagonists and not subjects of the crown. The later sections are more stilted, but this is mainly frustrating because it stems from the book’s origin as a dissertation. Rana’s an excellent writer (as seen in N+1), and the newer sections like the intro and conclusion have a lightness on their feet that’s energizing.
Good stuff even if it’s probably not the first book you should tackle on the subject. Excited to read his upcoming next book on constitutional veneration, a subject he touches on briefly in the intro.
Good stuff even if it’s probably not the first book you should tackle on the subject. Excited to read his upcoming next book on constitutional veneration, a subject he touches on briefly in the intro.
Want to read
November 17, 2010Reviewed by Washington Post
January 30, 2019
Rana's long interviews on The Dig, drawn in part from this book, offer a profound reading of American migration history as shaped in tandem by settler colonialism and White supremacy. (First one here.) The book itself makes many of the same arguments, a bit more diffusely, but grounded more clearly in the traditions of constitutional and statutory law (Rana is after all a law professor). The interviews are five-star material. The book is also very strong, but not *as* strong, nor quite as accessible.
Still a tremendously informative read. I hadn't realized, for example, that Northern Ireland's Catholics had actually been moved onto reservations under the Tudors. No wonder "Protestant" ended up an ethnicity there. In that political economy, it functions as one. Dear God.
Still a tremendously informative read. I hadn't realized, for example, that Northern Ireland's Catholics had actually been moved onto reservations under the Tudors. No wonder "Protestant" ended up an ethnicity there. In that political economy, it functions as one. Dear God.
July 1, 2019
The settler theory of economic and political independence in expanding wide west has given way to plebisicitary politics where freedom is limited and decision making has been centralized. The equality of freedom of early immigrants from white nations has been converted to late 20th century non white immigrants whose freedom has been curtailed with industrial hierarchy. These themes of freedom and independence has been analyzed in the life of US.
December 8, 2025
A great account of how the idea of American settler freedom—self-rule, market independence—has required from the beginning the exclusion and domination of others: people of color, women, etc. Even though the book came out in early 2010s, I found myself thinking about today’s crypto and sports gambling schemes that similarly promise freedom, all while putting most of its users in debt.
The book is dense and a bit tedious at times. Reading it sometimes felt like a slog. But overall worth it
The book is dense and a bit tedious at times. Reading it sometimes felt like a slog. But overall worth it
Read
May 13, 2025Really interesting read on how republican liberty has been constructed by exclusion in American history. Not a Marxist work, but I think it digs into much of the history in a more interesting way than many strictly Marxist texts.
February 11, 2019
curiosity
December 8, 2025
In The Two Faces of American Freedom, Aziz Rana tries to reconcile the central contradiction at the heart of the American experiment—how its radically liberatory ideals of universal equality, freedom, and democratic self-rule coincided with vicious enslavement, expropriation, and oppression. Rana’s thesis is that this insider–outsider dynamic is not incidental but central to the American project—democratic self-rule for insiders, subjugation and exclusion for outsiders.
Over four chapters, he reinterprets American history through this lens, some with more success than others. The most eye-opening chapter is the first one, in which he argues that the best way to understand the framers is not solely as rejecting colonialism but as wanting to exercise it themselves. For example, settlers opposed Britain agreeing to the Proclamation of 1763–which resolved the French-Indian war by banning settlement west of the Appalachians—because it impeded their ability to continue plundering native land. For these and other reasons, Rana calls the American independence movement a “settler revolt” rather than an anticolonial one. Settlers wanted autonomy from the British Crown to govern themselves and expand their territory for the benefit of settlers only, while at the same time excluding those deemed unworthy of inclusion.
Rana’s thesis especially illuminates immigration policy over the centuries. For instance, in the mid 18th to early 19th centuries, when Anglo settlers lacked the population necessary to settle the frontier, many states allowed European immigrant non-citizens to own land and have the right to vote specifically so that the frontier could be settled by and for whites.
During the Spanish American war, when the US gained classic colonial possessions of its own—Puerto Rico and the Phillipines—Rana cites American thinkers (including McKinley and Teddy Roosevelt) who rationalized this new, civilizing role as an extension of how the US should govern minority groups at home, exemplifying how settler empire abroad mirrored insider empire domestically.
Importantly, Rana writes that settler self-rule depended on the economic autonomy enabled by a producerist economy in the agricultural era with an abundant frontier available to settle. The shift to an industrial economy, elite enclosure of the means of production, and the rise of a large wage-earning working class meant that the working class lost both the economic and political capacity for self-rule. Rana makes the brilliant point that by losing the ability to manage the workplace, ordinary people also lost the practical political skills needed to animate a vigorous democracy that fully answered their social needs. Rana writes that this was the shadow side of the New Deal as well, which by empowering the executive and the bureaucracy to deliver economic security, deprived workers of the opportunity to become a “government behind the government” capable of organizing to pursue more liberatory ends.
Rana ends the book by urging ordinary Americans to organize their economic lives to regain this agency, but he does not adequately explain how to do so, especially in light of current economic and technological conditions. He does, though, note the rich potential of linking a domestic movement for justice to broader anticolonial movements.
This book is brilliant because it deeply engages with the central problem of American history while providing a rigorous, insightful, and intellectually honest answer. Reading this history after being taught by pollyanish voices like Akhil Amar is a breath of fresh air. At the same time, the book is overly abstract and full of jargon. Rana also skips the Civil War which is surprising. And his solution on regaining economic and political agency is underdeveloped. But all in all, this is a tremendous work that recontextualizes America as both a colony and a colonizer in a way that must be reckoned with if we are ever to honestly realize its potential of justice for both insiders and outsiders alike.
Over four chapters, he reinterprets American history through this lens, some with more success than others. The most eye-opening chapter is the first one, in which he argues that the best way to understand the framers is not solely as rejecting colonialism but as wanting to exercise it themselves. For example, settlers opposed Britain agreeing to the Proclamation of 1763–which resolved the French-Indian war by banning settlement west of the Appalachians—because it impeded their ability to continue plundering native land. For these and other reasons, Rana calls the American independence movement a “settler revolt” rather than an anticolonial one. Settlers wanted autonomy from the British Crown to govern themselves and expand their territory for the benefit of settlers only, while at the same time excluding those deemed unworthy of inclusion.
Rana’s thesis especially illuminates immigration policy over the centuries. For instance, in the mid 18th to early 19th centuries, when Anglo settlers lacked the population necessary to settle the frontier, many states allowed European immigrant non-citizens to own land and have the right to vote specifically so that the frontier could be settled by and for whites.
During the Spanish American war, when the US gained classic colonial possessions of its own—Puerto Rico and the Phillipines—Rana cites American thinkers (including McKinley and Teddy Roosevelt) who rationalized this new, civilizing role as an extension of how the US should govern minority groups at home, exemplifying how settler empire abroad mirrored insider empire domestically.
Importantly, Rana writes that settler self-rule depended on the economic autonomy enabled by a producerist economy in the agricultural era with an abundant frontier available to settle. The shift to an industrial economy, elite enclosure of the means of production, and the rise of a large wage-earning working class meant that the working class lost both the economic and political capacity for self-rule. Rana makes the brilliant point that by losing the ability to manage the workplace, ordinary people also lost the practical political skills needed to animate a vigorous democracy that fully answered their social needs. Rana writes that this was the shadow side of the New Deal as well, which by empowering the executive and the bureaucracy to deliver economic security, deprived workers of the opportunity to become a “government behind the government” capable of organizing to pursue more liberatory ends.
Rana ends the book by urging ordinary Americans to organize their economic lives to regain this agency, but he does not adequately explain how to do so, especially in light of current economic and technological conditions. He does, though, note the rich potential of linking a domestic movement for justice to broader anticolonial movements.
This book is brilliant because it deeply engages with the central problem of American history while providing a rigorous, insightful, and intellectually honest answer. Reading this history after being taught by pollyanish voices like Akhil Amar is a breath of fresh air. At the same time, the book is overly abstract and full of jargon. Rana also skips the Civil War which is surprising. And his solution on regaining economic and political agency is underdeveloped. But all in all, this is a tremendous work that recontextualizes America as both a colony and a colonizer in a way that must be reckoned with if we are ever to honestly realize its potential of justice for both insiders and outsiders alike.
January 29, 2014
Finally! The field of political science & history is so well trodden that one can almost feel like original thought is reserved for when the recession is over. Far too often, what decorates the shelves at B&N will be many writers pandering with little creativity and even less insight. Yet bucking the trend comes Rana's 'Two Faces of American Freedom', an absolute challenge to the popular view of American history and the supposed 'natural' evolution of its civil society.
Rana writes with a confidence and a sureness of scholarship that permeates the text. This skill provides the provision of trust, permitting the only requirements of reading to be concentration and consideration. Whether a professional in the field or a casual observer, the access to the text is there. And for questioning what comes up, footnotes are provided regularly, with a full Index (a courtesy not as extensively employed as the writings of CNN's Fareed Zakaria or Noam Chomsky). Most of all, Rana's background in law gives the reader a unique look at the history, providing a frame for the picture being painted - that the American story is not as 'exceptional' as advertised..
For prospective purchasers concerned with readability, the book on the whole is fluid and without much concern. The intro provides anyone passing through their local store with enough of a guide to get acquainted with the topic without feeling like a chapter in its own right. The single criticism would be the oversight of a self-conscious first chapter. Either due to the book being an adaptation from Rana's award-winning dissertation from Harvard's Kennedy School, or because this is his first swing, the concern for cogency is almost as present as the awkwardness of the beginning of a blind-date. Fortunately for all, the writer hits stride immediately thereafter and only stands out in memory when planning this review.
The chapters are divided as below:
Introduction: Liberty and Empire in the American Experience
1. Settler Revolt & the Foundations of American Freedom
2. Citizens & Subjects in Post-Colonial America
3. The Populist Challenge and the Unraveling of Settler Society
4. Plebiscitary Politics and the New Constituional Order
Conclusion: Democracy and Inclusion in the Age of American Hegemony
(Rana also has some 'book talks' available online from his tour; search for yourself for the fastest for your connection).
What compelled this reader to reach into their pocket was how applicable this book is to anyone who has ever been confronted by difference. With multiculturalism a regular facet of Western life and the question of pluralism imminent in the Middle East, getting abreast with one's own history seemed the best way to relate and debate. And while the topic is American History, the writer regularly references other societies to provide the reader with both context and comparison. This provides ample room for approach for readers with other backgrounds. With passages that can be easily adapted to teaching a lesson or talking points, this is a great read worth keeping and later, revisiting.
Rana writes with a confidence and a sureness of scholarship that permeates the text. This skill provides the provision of trust, permitting the only requirements of reading to be concentration and consideration. Whether a professional in the field or a casual observer, the access to the text is there. And for questioning what comes up, footnotes are provided regularly, with a full Index (a courtesy not as extensively employed as the writings of CNN's Fareed Zakaria or Noam Chomsky). Most of all, Rana's background in law gives the reader a unique look at the history, providing a frame for the picture being painted - that the American story is not as 'exceptional' as advertised..
For prospective purchasers concerned with readability, the book on the whole is fluid and without much concern. The intro provides anyone passing through their local store with enough of a guide to get acquainted with the topic without feeling like a chapter in its own right. The single criticism would be the oversight of a self-conscious first chapter. Either due to the book being an adaptation from Rana's award-winning dissertation from Harvard's Kennedy School, or because this is his first swing, the concern for cogency is almost as present as the awkwardness of the beginning of a blind-date. Fortunately for all, the writer hits stride immediately thereafter and only stands out in memory when planning this review.
The chapters are divided as below:
Introduction: Liberty and Empire in the American Experience
1. Settler Revolt & the Foundations of American Freedom
2. Citizens & Subjects in Post-Colonial America
3. The Populist Challenge and the Unraveling of Settler Society
4. Plebiscitary Politics and the New Constituional Order
Conclusion: Democracy and Inclusion in the Age of American Hegemony
(Rana also has some 'book talks' available online from his tour; search for yourself for the fastest for your connection).
What compelled this reader to reach into their pocket was how applicable this book is to anyone who has ever been confronted by difference. With multiculturalism a regular facet of Western life and the question of pluralism imminent in the Middle East, getting abreast with one's own history seemed the best way to relate and debate. And while the topic is American History, the writer regularly references other societies to provide the reader with both context and comparison. This provides ample room for approach for readers with other backgrounds. With passages that can be easily adapted to teaching a lesson or talking points, this is a great read worth keeping and later, revisiting.
December 14, 2018
Still Incredible
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