In Culture and Liberty in the Age of the American Revolution, Michal Jan Rozbicki offers a sweeping interpretation of the coming and consequences of the American Revolution. Rozbicki's chief aim is to show how liberty, a concept deeply engrained in American culture, operated as a cultural practice and belief during the Revolutionary era. Instead of treating liberty as a universal and timeless concept, as he claims most historians have done, he wants to historicize the term to show how the American Revolution changed its meaning within the broader culture.

Rozbicki's argument essentially goes like this. Liberty in the eighteenth-century British Atlantic world meant something very different from modern conceptions of it. People in the eighteenth century understood liberty as a “privilege” that they inherited or earned, and its existence was based on inequality. Those who possessed it knew that they had it because others did not have it. Liberty so understood conferred on those who did have it the power to rule over those without it. By being able to rule others, possessors of liberty were the only people who could truly experience liberty. Liberty, for Rozbicki and his eighteenth-century actors, was essentially an elitist and exclusionary category of being. Those who were a part of this culture, including those without liberty, shared a common belief in its elitist presumptions and these beliefs shaped their behavior.

During the American Revolution, the colonial elite believed that they possessed liberty until they felt it being challenged by imperial overlords. In Rozbicki's telling, the Revolution was very much about liberty, but not as we imagine it. For the colonial elite, imperial policies seemed to demonstrate that they did not after all possess liberty. The imperial crisis thus began as the colonial elite waged a battle over their status with their elite counterparts in Great Britain. To combat the challenge to their liberty and preserve their status within their local societies, the colonial elite deployed a more expansive and inclusive notion of liberty that rallied a larger populace to their cause. Colonial elites did not anticipate that their rhetoric would become a reality, but those empowered by the promise of liberty fought to realize it in the years that followed. In the process and over time, the modern conception of liberty came into being.

Rozbicki's attempt to historicize liberty's meaning as a way to better understand the coming of the American Revolution and its consequences is novel, but his primary definition of liberty proves problematic. Rozbicki defines liberty as “a metaphor for a cluster of specific immunities and entitlements existing along a continuum, with different portions of this spectrum available to different social ranks, and with their fullest enjoyment exclusive to members of the uppermost elites” (11). Such a definition makes the meaning of liberty so expansive as to have little real analytical meaning in his text. His definition essentially means that liberty is personified in and embodied by elite culture. He does not try to historicize his concept by rooting its definitions in close readings from the era.

Even as Rozbicki offers what he believes to be liberty's primary meaning, he acknowledges, and the OED confirms, that liberty held other meanings in this era. The OED reveals something else, though. The concept of liberty that Rozbicki proposes, one primarily of political rights and privileges conferred on some but not all, was often equated with the plural “liberties” that were held communally, such as “British liberties.” On the other hand, liberty in the singular tended to focus on the individual, notably the right to be free from coercion. There are “political liberties,” which is what Rozbicki privileges in his book, and there is “individual liberty,” which is a related but nonetheless different concept. Moreover, some people may take issue with Rozbicki's definition of what liberty means in the present. He believes that liberty today means equality. Some, especially staunch libertarians, may argue that liberty and equality are not synonymous in American culture. Indeed, they may contend that these concepts are unrelated, if not diametrically opposed. Had Rozbicki tried to tease out the complexities and connections between these different uses of the term and its meanings, then he might have produced a fuller understanding of liberty and the way it operated in the Revolutionary era.

Rozbicki's occasional linguistic slippage and the general lack of clarity in his definitions leads him into contradictions and confusions, perhaps nowhere more evident than in his concluding paragraph. He begins by writing, “The historical ontology of liberty is too entangled in the complex web of culture to be reduced solely to power relations, legal formulations, or symbolic means of expression.” After rejecting the notion that his treatment of liberty is primarily about power relations, he asserts five sentences later,

The first sentence is what Rozbicki wanted the book to be about; the second sentence is what the book really is about. It is not about the historical meaning of liberty. It is about political power and status in the Revolutionary era. It is about how elites tried to maintain their position in a world they changed by bringing about the American Revolution.

Rozbicki tells us in his introduction that he hopes this book will energize studies on the American Revolution, a field that he says has grown staid and is in want of new ideas. One hopes his provocative book does spur much-needed discussion. It has the potential to spark an interesting debate about liberty in the age of the American Revolution. But it should be just that, the start of a conversation and not the last word.