Fairness and Freedom

In this comparative history of the USA and New Zealand David Hackett Fischer weaves narratives of similarity and contrast around the thesis that, while the history of the USA is characterised by the predominant influence of ideas of ‘freedom’ and ‘liberty’, that of New Zealand demonstrates the importance of concepts such as ‘fairness’, ‘equity’, ‘natural justice’ and the like. The pattern was set by the English culture from which the first settlers of each country successively came. The two centuries until 1800 were years when ‘liberty’ was much talked of in England, especially during periods of crisis; ideals of ‘fairness’ were as much in vogue as ‘liberty’ by 1850, and have increasingly predominated over it since then. The original pattern has remained imprinted on successive generations of the two settler societies: ‘founding visions’, a chapter heading tells the reader, are ‘enduring dreams’. According to the author, though, neither people has pursued one set of those ‘broad’ and ‘vernacular’ ideals to the total exclusion of the other. This he considers fortunate. Though both liberty and fairness can breed vices as well as virtues, both are necessary to the existence and beneficent operation of ‘open’ societies such as New Zealand and the USA, and both ideals promote the vigour and limit the excesses of the other. This relationship of interdependence is not so much presented as a conceptual truth; rather, the histories of the great continental federal republic and the small island unitary democracy demonstrate them to be practical and historical facts; and so Fischer’s history of the two nations is at once a comparative history of public morals and a moral tract in defence of open societies

Democracy · Economic Justice · Environmental ethics · Equity (law · Mythology · Political science · Politics · Sociology · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Classics · History · Law · Philosophy