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Powell's Staff: New Literature in Translation: December 2022 and January 2023 (0 comment)
It may be a new year, this may be a list of new books, but our love for literature in translation hasn’t changed at all, and we are so pleased to be enthusiastically recommending these recent releases. On this list, you’ll find a Spanish novel where controversy swirls around a Coca-Cola billboard...
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  • Kelsey Ford: From the Stacks: J. M. Ledgard's Submergence (0 comment)
  • Kelsey Ford: Five Book Friday: Year of the Rabbit (1 comment)

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Whose Freedom The Battle Over Americas Most Important Idea

by George Lakoff
Whose Freedom The Battle Over Americas Most Important Idea

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ISBN13: 9780374158286
ISBN10: 0374158282
Condition: Standard
DustJacket: Standard

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Synopses & Reviews

Publisher Comments

Since September 11, 2001, the Bush administration has relentlessly invoked the word freedom. The United States can strike preemptively because freedom is on the march. Social security should be privatized in order to protect individual freedoms. In the 2005 presidential inaugural speech, the words freedom, free, and liberty were used forty-nine times. Freedom is one of the most contested words in American political discourse, the keystone to the domestic and foreign policy battles that are racking this polarized nation. For many Democrats, it seems that President Bush's use of the word is meaningless and contradictory — deployed opportunistically to justify American military action abroad and the curtailing of civil liberties at home. But in Whose Freedom?, George Lakoff, an adviser to the Democratic party, shows that in fact the right has effected a devastatingly coherent and ideological redefinition of freedom. The conservative revolution has remade freedom in its own image and deployed it as a central weapon on the front lines of everything from the war on terror to the battles over religion in the classroom and abortion. In a deep and alarming analysis, Lakoff explains the mechanisms behind this hijacking of our most cherished political idea — and shows how progressives have not only failed to counter the right-wing attack on freedom but have failed to recognize its nature. Whose Freedom? argues forcefully what progressives must do to take back ground in this high-stakes war over the most central idea in American life.

Review

"The strength of Whose Freedom? is that it attributes the left's current foundering not just to a failure of strategy but to a failure of self-knowledge...this makes a lot of sense, and it's easy to start imagining ways that pressing issues could be recast according to Lakoff's formula." Laura Miller, Salon.com

Review

"One of the most influential political thinkers of the progressive movement." Howard Dean

Review

"Because freedom has always been a progressive concept, it is time for progressives to reclaim the word and its meaning in today's context. Mr. Lakoff shows us how." Former Senator Tom Daschle

Review

"There is much to admire in Lakoff's work in linguistics, but Whose Freedom?, and more generally his thinking about politics, is a train wreck. Though it contains messianic claims about everything from epistemology to political tactics, the book has no footnotes or references (just a generic reading list), and cites no studies from political science or economics, and barely mentions linguistics....And Lakoff's cartoonish depiction of progressives as saintly sophisticates and conservatives as evil morons fails on both intellectual and tactical grounds." Steven Pinker, The New Republic (read the entire New Republic review)

(Read George Lakoff's reponse to Steven Pinker's review, reprinted here with the kind permission of the New Republic Online)

Synopsis

Since September 11, 2001, the Bush administration has relentlessly invoked the word "freedom." Al-Qaeda attacked us because "they hate our freedom." The U.S. can strike preemptively because "freedom is on the march." Social security should be privatized in order to protect individual freedoms. The 2005 presidential inaugural speech was a kind of crescendo: the words "freedom," "free," and "liberty," were used forty-nine times in President Bush's twenty-minute speech.

 

In Whose Freedom?, Lakoff surveys the political landscape and offers an essential map of the Republican battle plan that has captured the hearts and minds of Americans--and shows how progressives can fight to reinvigorate this most beloved of American political ideas.


About the Author

George Lakoff, recently featured in The New York Times Magazine, is Richard and Rhoda Goldman Professor of Cognitive Science and Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, and a founding senior fellow of the Rockridge Institute, a center for research devoted to promoting progressive ideas. He is the author of the influential Don’t Think of an Elephant! and Moral Politics, as well as seminal books on linguistics, including Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things and Metaphors We Live By (with Mark Johnson). He lives in Berkeley, California.

Reading Group Guide

1. How did you define freedom before reading Whose Freedom? Did you consider your definition to be progressive? Were you surprised to discover that the progressive definition is also the more traditional one, as George Lakoff maintains in the books opening pages?

2. What “frames” or cultural influences have shaped your political opinions throughout your life? In an enlightened society marked by considerable scientific discovery, why do frames still trump facts in shaping opinions?

3. In what way can the contested nature of language be an advantage for progressives?

4. Using Chapter 2 as a reference point, identify the folk theories that prevail in your community. Which folk theories have been the most difficult for you to reject?

5. Applying the authors logic of simple freedom, which cornerstones of freedom seem to be most in jeopardy today? How would you counter an argument that said equality and fairness are not inextricably linked to the definition of freedom?

6. Which aspects of freedom are currently not being contested in America?

7. Lakoff argues that the nation is understood metaphorically as a family, and that there are two very different models of parenting that reflect two opposing worldviews. Which model shapes your political views? Why has the authoritarian, paternalistic strict father model been allowed to flourish in so many cultures throughout history?

8. Which of the subgroups described in Chapters 5 and 6 (socioeconomic progressives, identity-politics progressives, environmental progressives, civil liberties progressives, spiritual progressives, antiauthoritarian progressives, idealists, pragmatists, militants, financial conservatives, libertarians, social conservatives, fundamentalists, and neoconservatives) do you predict will prevail in future American political structures?

9. In Chapter 7, “Causation and Freedom,” Lakoff begins with the observation that “the progressives argue on the basis of systemic causation (within a social, ecological, or economic system) and the conservatives argue on the basis of direct causation (by a single individual).” He goes on to explain the ways in which our understanding of causation can have profound effects on public policy. In what way does it empower us to be aware of the two models of causation?

10. How should “free” be defined in the notion of free markets? Do free markets undermine democratic freedom? Were the premises of the economic liberty myth, outlined in Chapter 9, readily believed by the American public?

11. In your opinion, is it right that American corporations in many ways act like governments, as discussed in Chapter 9? Should corporations be entitled to the same freedoms and liberties as an individual citizen?

12. How has religious rhetoric shaped American perceptions of freedom in recent years? How does the rhetoric of progressive Christianity differ from that of fundamentalist Christianity? What would the American political landscape look like without the influence of religion?

13. Based on what you read in Chapter 11, what seems to be the ultimate goal of George W. Bushs foreign policy? How did framing help him persuade Congress (and a substantial number of voters) to back many of these policies? Who has been liberated by his initiatives? Have Bushs policies been effective at spreading freedom abroad? What kind of freedom?

14. What fallacies can you identify in the radical conservative definition of freedom and liberty? To whom are those arguments appealing? How are these groups able to downplay FDRs goals of freedom from want and fear?

15. What would it take to enact the calls to action that form the closing paragraphs of Chapter 11?

16. How was 9/11 framed in terms of freedom? What were the consequences, in domestic and foreign policy, of this framing?

17. Is it possible to create a truly inclusive freedom—one in which the answer to “Whose freedom?” is “Everyones”?

18. What does the authors closing anecdote (regarding the use of MRIs in examining partisan thinking) say about the future of political rhetoric? Where does the greatest hope for reframing freedom lie? In the media? Universities? Popular culture?


3.8 8

What Our Readers Are Saying

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Average customer rating 3.8 (8 comments)

`
mikemykel , October 20, 2006
If I were to be sentenced to life in solitary confinement Philosophy in the Flesh would be the book I would most like to take with me. I have been carrying it around and rereading it for several years. The last book of Pinker's I read was Blank Slate and in fact it will probably be the last book of Pinker's that I read. I haven't read Whose Freedom yet but I am saving my nickles and dimes.

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judgeschreber , October 20, 2006
I think this debate is incredibly petty and embarrassing--it really shows academics at their worst. Lakoff, in my opinion, should never have tried to move into writing about politics, since, as Pinker rightly points out, any former intellectual rigor he observed previously is thrown out the window in order to make ideological points about a field he is no expert in. In this respect he could have taken a lesson from Chomsky--these are two different worlds with different standards of what passes for rigor, and if you're going to step into this other world, make sure you engage with it on its own terms with plenty of concrete examples and an abundance of footnotes. On the other hand, as Lakoff points out, Pinker's attack results from a poor, caricatured understanding of Lakoff's cognitive linguistics. I much admire Lakoff's early work that effectively demonstrates the mistake in thinking (ala Chomsky) that syntax is independent of semantics (even staunch supporters of Chomsky such as Ray Jackendoff have come around to the position that meaning does in fact matter for language). I like Lakoff's work on metaphor, but my support has somewhat softened, and I now feel, with Pinker, that although metaphor is important, Lakoff does take it a bit overboard. On the other hand, I find Pinker's evolutionary psychology utterly irresponsible. I agree with Lakoff that it is in many ways a throwback to social darwinism. It is meant to "shock" by confronting many admittedly irrational positions deriving from the attractive power of "the blank slate," yet it refutes these positions by making equally irrational appeals to the attractive power of darwinism. Not that evolutionary theory and linguistics/psychology cannot mix well, when applied responsibly and rigorously. Many people are doing great things with an evolutionary approach to mind, including some of my personal favorites: philosopher Daniel Dennett at Tufts; the AI people at MIT who were influenced by Marvin MInsky's "Society of Mind" (in case you've seen it, one of those MIT guys is profiled in Errol Morris' film "Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control," and he provides a good, rough account of this evolutionary model of cognition); and my new favorite thinker about linguistics and cognition, Michael Tomasello, a researcher on chimpanzee and human infant intelligence who, in his book "The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition," has a very intriguing argument about the attribution of intention to other beings as a crucial step in the evolution of the human mind. Anyways, that's my take on the whole thing.

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MuddyMo , October 19, 2006
I am commenting on TrollHaven's comments on Pinker's attack on Lakoff. TrollHaven wrote: "Republicans really do stand for something--something despicable, but they do stand for it" That's one for the ages.

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mplsvala , October 19, 2006
Lakoff does a good job of defending his point of view and will likely be proved correct eventually.

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Trollhaven , October 19, 2006
I am commenting on Steven Pinker's attack and Lakoff's defense. Clearly these two have a history and like to talk past one another: Lakoff certainly demonstrates that Pinker's caricature of him was invidious and untrue, but Lakoff did not respond well to Pinker's taunt that it won't work simply to make up catchy new phrases for paying taxes. On substance, however, Lakoff is way ahead, because cognitive linguistics is a real field, whereas evolutionary psychology is this century's Freudianism--a pseudoscience that is very nearly worthless and veers toward religion when adopted by Darwinian fundamentalists. Pinker's biggest mistake is connecting the modern Republican Party to any respectable thought from past centuries. This isn't a "conservative" administration, whatever definition you adopt. We are living under quasi-fascism, disguised in plain view because we elected Bush twice. Lakoff has much the clearer view of what the Democratic Party is up against. But Lakoff's smooth dichotomy into "strong father" and "nurturant parent" is too facile--one of Pinker's few barbs with any real sting is his noticing that Lakoff doesn't say "nurturant mother," which would be more symmetrical but open up several cans of worms. One of those cans is this: while no Republican wants to be more nurturing, almost every liberal succumbs from time to time to wanting to be "tough enough." Another way of putting this is to acknowledge that, right now, the Republicans occupy the dead center of the American ethos. The Republicans do not have to spin the metaphors--they are truly closer to the morality of a majority of the voters. With everything of late breaking the Democrats' way, they are still unlikely to emerge with more than a razor-thin majority in Congress, and I suspect money can still be made betting they don't even achieve that. If they do, you can count on a few defectors joining with the lockstep Republicans more than you can expect to see the Democrats putting up a united front. This is because the Republicans really do stand for something--something despicable, but they do stand for it--and Democrats stand for almost nothing. And you can't make something out of nothing by giving it a different label. Lakoff is proud of nurturant parent morality, but hardly anyone else is, politically at least. So before he can work his metaphorical magic on behalf of the Democratic Party, the Democrats will have to acquire some principles and then some integrity, and as Lady Bracknell would say, it is rather late in the season for that. Paraphrasing Gandhi, if asked what I think of the Democratic Party, I say I think it would be a good idea.

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arthur sanford , October 19, 2006 (view all comments by arthur sanford)
asocher is wrong. Pinker commonly misrepresents Lakoff's views because he believes (as said in The Blank Slate) in the tragic vision of Godwin and, recently, Sowell. To say that free and unfettered markets is one thing, but to defend a Leviathan and say that poverty has nothing to do with crime, and then say the opposite, and then blame everything on Marx is quite silly. The rational actor theory is dead and one would think that this would lead Pinker to give it up, considering his views on evo-psych. In short, Pinker has legitimate gripes against other scientists and theories, but he slights them in order to argue against them. Just look at his silly views on Chomsky! He actually says that saying that humans have a "species character" not to be attached to a machine is against evo-psych, when in fact evo-psych shows that humans have all sorts of species wide characteristics! one of which is sentient freedom!

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pabelmont , October 19, 2006
I cannot judge from Lakoff's defense or from Pinker's review (offense?) what is happening here. If the problem addressed is how Democrats can be more effective, why don't these gentlemen lead off with specific examples and analyze them? Did Lakoff recommend anything specific? Did Pinker think it was a bad idea? I cannot tell, so I guess I've got to read the (Lakoff) book.

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asocher , October 19, 2006
George Lakoff's reply to Pinker's review exemplifies just the kind of oblivious condescension which Pinker attributes to him. One of the most irritating aspects of his reply is the relentless name-dropping: Feldman's book is published by MIT, Kahneman won a Nobel Prize, Boroditsky works at Stanford and got a Prize from the NSF. So it's the NEW THINKING PRESTIGIOUS PRIZEWINNING REALISTS vs. the GRUMPY OLD MALICIOUS SEXIST NEO-DARWINIAN MEANIES. Gee, now that you frame it that way ... By the way, Leibniz is really a better example of a 17th cen. thinker who thinks reason is about formal logic, even if Antonio Damasio didn't put his name in a book-title.

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Product Details

ISBN:
9780374158286
Binding:
Hardcover
Publication date:
06/01/2006
Publisher:
FARRAR STRAUS & GIROUX
Copyright Year:
2006
UPC Code:
2800374158288
Author:
George Lakoff
Subject:
Conservatism
Subject:
Liberty

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