Discussing Frederick Jackson Turner in The Progressive Historians (1968), Richard Hofstadter notes that “plasticity” is “an intriguing quality of the frontier thesis, and also one of the reasons for using it with care” (84). The same could be said of Aziz Rana's laudably ambitious yet ultimately flawed new book, which posits the quasi-Turnerian concept of “settler empire” (3) as a key to understanding American political thought from the 1670s to the 1930s. For much of its history, Rana argues, America offered its citizens access to a form of “republican self-rule” (15) based on economic independence. But significantly this autonomy was predicated upon the ongoing assimilation of new territory in order to provide individuals with the property deemed necessary to freedom. Thus the alter ego of liberty is racial domination, and it is this dialectic which is seen to be played out across a range of intellectual and social domains. Rana repeatedly suggests, for example, that America's open-door immigration policy for Europeans was designed to fuel expansion and in the process helped to flatten internal inequalities at the same time as creating dependent external communities of slaves and Indians. Such contradictions are alleged to have been central to the American experience until the early twentieth century, when the “old imperial narrative” (272) finally broke down. But throughout the book Rana also seeks to establish a tradition of thinkers, from Thomas Paine through Orestes Brownson to Randolph Bourne, who tried “to expand the meaning of liberty and to imagine this American ideal without either subordination or empire” (3). The problem with this counternarrative, however, lies in the assumption that these temporally and socially disparate writers are part of a coherent whole. And, similarly, the settlers whose values Rana describes in such confident terms remain homogeneous too – as with Turner's vision of the frontier there is not enough personal, regional or ideological differentiation between them. In short, then, although The Two Faces of American Freedom ably fulfills its remit as a “large-scale act of historical reconstruction” (2), the detail needed to substantiate its thesis tends to be obscured by the the broad sweep of its synthesis.

Rana's first chapter, the most original, begins by exploring the intellectual debt of “settler identity” (2) to Lockean notions of property and Cokean theories of conquest, before proceeding to dispute scholarly claims about the radicalism of the American Revolution. Having seized on republican notions of liberty in order to distinguish themselves from other colonial subjects, while simultaneously reinterpreting the necessity of conquest as the right to settlement, eighteenth-century Americans presumed that their political and social values would be extended across the continent, Rana argues. But a series of legislative decisions following the Seven Years War, including the Royal Proclamation, the Quebec Act, and the Somerset case, signaled the increasing desire of the British to place white Americans on a par with the Indians, Catholics and slaves who also inhabited its imperial dominions. When seen as a rebellion against this policy of equalization the Revolution thus emerges as a conservative attempt to recover a “lost imperial status quo” (22). Notwithstanding this reactionary intent, however, the Revolution also initiated a “a populist account of self-rule” (102), as Rana suggests in his less tightly focussed second chapter. Notwithstanding those historians who emphasize the rugged individualism of settler life, many colonists actually saw energetic government as promoting republican freedom, he asserts, and in the wake of the Revolution groups like the Whiskey Rebels and the Anti-Federalists began to envisage “local producerist democracies” which would function through “legislatures actively promoting economic liberty” (102). These articulations of the laborer's interest were destined to clash, though, with the elitist republicanism of the Federalists, who saw a strong executive as the only way to stave off economic dependence on Britain and social disorder in the West. It was, in Rana's view, this highly centralized form of government which the settler tradition then turned against. With the state no longer providing a place for “collective actualization,” and with their faith in a “self-regulating commercial society” destroyed by the rise of wage labor, ordinary Americans instead reaffirmed the “emancipatory potential” of empire and its attendant racial distinctions (148).

This “truncated populism” (130) persisted even under Andrew Jackson's more activist government, Rana concludes, and it would not be until various workers' movements came together under the banner of Populist Party in the 1880s that there was another “sustained effort … to imagine how social conditions could be made compatible with freedom as self-rule” (177). Chapter 3 then delineates the early Populists' quest to reclaim the government from corporate influence, and their criticism of expansionism for bolstering inequalities in the metropole. But it also traces the decline of Populist radicalism, as the movement's efforts to create a “permanently mobilized citizenry” (195) through a “plethora of informal and extralegal institutions” (206) were undone by the very looseness of this organizational model. Coopted by the mainstream parties, Populism effectively reverted to the rhetoric of settler jingoism, and was unable to prevent the state from using its imperial prerogative of external pacification to “subdue political and economic disorder at home” (221). Nor, Rana adds, did the Progressives fare any better at the turn of the century, since their social reforms failed to connect with a “clear community engaged in actual activities of protest” (254). Instead, Herbert Croly's identification of nationalism as a source of collective identity, like Walter Weyl's similar emphasis on consumerism, only led to the further centralization of American political life. Characteristically, Rana observes, with the domestic avenues of producerism and self-governance thus closed off, Americans turned again to “the other premise of … settlerism – the project of empire – for a solution” (263).

Crucially, though, by the time Teddy Roosevelt became President the internal frontier had closed, and so in his final, and most contentious, chapter Rana considers how settler imperialism was transformed by its extension abroad. Contrary to the earlier model of American expansion, for example, in which new territories could be taken in on an equal footing because their indigenous populations had been removed, the US's foreign acquisitions brought with them dependent communities whose constitutional status was unclear. One solution to this dilemma was to revive the pre-Revolutionary distinction between “a protected realm of free citizenship and a colonial one of stratified subjectship” (279), but this did not abate settler anxiety, since places like Cuba and the Philippines were not intended as sites for mass emigration, but were managed in the vein of European colonies like India or South Africa. When combined with the waning of the commitment to “de facto open borders” (237) at home, then, this ostensible attempt to export “democratic governance and respect for private property” (286) actually suggests how American imperialism was now being cultivated for the sake of power rather than liberty. Indeed, Rana maintains that North Americans as well as Latin Americans came under imperial rule in the 1930s, as the massive bureacracy of the New Deal marked a final shift to “liberal administration rather than popular control” (240). Dismissing those legal scholars who see the accumulation of legislative powers by FDR as leaving constitutional checks and balances intact, Rana instead portrays him as the founder of an unprecedentedly powerful form of “plebiscitary presidency” (301) in which the executive stands in for the public will. By the end of World War II, Rana writes, “economic independence had been resituated as economic security, political self-rule had become electoral choice, and settler colonization increasingly seemed reconfigured as global primacy” (296).

Here Rana's main historical narrative ends, but it is clear from his lengthy conclusion that he considers the “framework of imperial subjectship” (325) to pertain today and that he intends his book to serve as a critique of modern social relations. Unfortunately, though, it is less clear how the story we have been told serves the project of “reclaiming the settler vision of freedom” (343). The contours of an ideal polity – rooted in small-scale, labor-oriented associations – are certainly visible in Rana's pages. The concrete historical reference points for this polity, on the other hand, remain frustratingly vague. The populist tradition that Rana sketches is so often hedged in by caveats, and so often fueled by “voices in the wilderness” (105), that it is hard to see how a reader could find within it the “normative tools for grappling with the current moment” (17). Instead, ironically, the book is much stronger and more persuasive when tracing the institutional opposition to popular self-rule. Indeed, Two Faces perhaps works best as a series of legal case studies, from Johnson v. M'Intosh and Dred Scott to a score of others. It is for this compelling juridical narrative, and for its far-reaching exploration of “the constitutive role of external power in shaping internal notions of membership and collective freedom” (7), that this sharply written, engagingly provocative book deserves to be widely read.