Reviews

A Tolerable Anarchy: Rebels, Reactionaries, and the Making of American Freedom by Jedediah Purdy

unionmack's review against another edition

2.0

I wanted to like this book more than I ultimately did. It looks, right down to the dust jacket design, like a book I'd really love. Nothing about it is really bad or even totally uninteresting but there's just something about this one that's, bare minimum, less than enthralling. The basic idea is that America's freedom experiment is riddled with inconsistencies but these inconsistencies can lead to progress? At least, that's what I think the main point was. All well and good. I appreciated Purdy's depth of citation here, his use of historical examples and his grasp of political nuance. But his analysis never struck me as particularly enlightening or cohesive. It just seemed like a Jackson Pollack collection of facts smeared together to make SOME point about America. After finishing the book, I'm still not sure what that point was.