One of the more interesting developments in recent work in the history of political thought has been the attempt to tell the global history of liberal and republican ideals. A crucial part of that history involves the exploration of the complex interplay among republicanism, liberalism, and empire. In doing so, it is tempting to pluck for one of two extremes: that liberalism, for example, is deeply tainted by its association with various justifications of empire, or that properly understood, liberalism is a fundamentally anti-imperial ideology. The dichotomy can be extended to particular concepts as well. Rights can be seen as empowering individuals and protecting them from the exercise of arbitrary power. Or they can be seen as conduits through which various forms of power are enabled and exercised over individuals and groups.

One thing the new histories of liberalism and republicanism have done is complicate our understanding of these historical and conceptual relations. Within both traditions there are rich, complex, and often conflicting sources of justification both for and against empire—sometimes within the corpus of the same author. Our concepts thus become more multifaceted and multivalent. The relation between the concepts of power and freedom is perhaps one of the most striking examples to think about in the context of these genealogies and histories of empire.

Aziz Rana's ambitious and thoughtful book fits very much within this revisionist trajectory. As he writes in his Introduction, the book is an attempt to make sense of the “transformations in the relationship between American liberty and American power” (p. 2). Echoing but also attempting to push beyond the seminal work of Rogers Smith, for example, Rana emphasizes that the exclusionist and hierarchical dimensions of American democracy run deep both historically and philosophically. America's democratic ideals—including a powerful conception of republican liberty—gained their strength and meaning through “frameworks of exclusion” (p. 7). The extraordinary breadth of the author's argument represents both the strength and weakness of the book.

At the heart of Rana's argument is an elaboration of what he calls “settler freedom,” linked to a distinctive settler ideology. This ideology fused “ethnic nationalism, Protestant theology and republicanism to combine freedom as self-rule with a commitment to territorial empire” (p. 12). One of the most important aspects of this conception of settler freedom is self-rule: “the elimination of all modes of arbitrary power [requiring] individuals to assert actual decision making control and democratic participation” (ibid.). American settlerism, according to Rana, is based on four key components (pp. 12–13, 175): i) economic independence as the ethical basis of free citizenship (at least for insiders); ii) conquest as the “basic engine of republican freedom,” providing new territory for settlers to develop; iii) noninclusive republican principles (i.e., economic independence for some requires the subservience of others); and iv) the need for new migrants to help settle new territories and provide labor for an expanding economy.

Uniquely, it seems, America combined openness to mass migration with internal colonization. Increased migration entailed an expanding circle of ethnic and religious categories for semi- and full inclusion into citizenship, but at the same time required the domination of internal subject populations against which these new freedoms could be defined (hence, justifying the expropriation of indigenous peoples' lands, slavery, and the subjugation of women and migrant groups). The two faces of American freedom are represented by the continuity between settlerism and colonization—between internal liberty and external subordination.

Rana uses the conception of “settler freedom” to interrogate key moments in the history of the development of American democracy, from colonial to modern times. And he does so very much in the spirit of Michael Walzer's image of the “connected critic”—providing arguments garnered from within the practices of a given society, aimed at reshaping its collective life by drawing on, but also contesting, some of its shared traditions, histories, and values. One of Rana's central aims is, thus, to recover “a robust account of human freedom embedded in our past” (p. 18). Failing to grasp the deep connections between republican freedom and empire risks missing the extent to which American power continues to be exercised in ways that entail subjection for many at home and abroad. But it also risks underestimating the great promise of republican freedom—as true today as it was 300 years ago—embodied in those democratic social and political movements that fought back against imperial power in domestic and international contexts. One of the author's most significant achievements is to demonstrate the close link between concerns about the exercise of arbitrary and unchecked power abroad (e.g., in Mexico or Puerto Rico) and its leakage back into the domestic sphere (see especially pp. 277–80). Many of the heroes of his story are acutely alert to this particular danger.

So alongside a rich historical reconstruction of settler freedom we have a normative claim about the value of republican freedom. One interesting aspect of Rana's argument is his emphasis on a particularly strong conception of self-rule. This brings it into sharp relief with the influential conception of republican freedom developed by Quentin Skinner and Philip Pettit. For Skinner and Pettit, the central insight of the republican tradition was to link freedom to a state of nondomination, wherein an individual or group was protected from subjection to the actual or even potential exercise of arbitrary power. However, for Pettit at least, nondomination is not linked to a particularly robust conception of participatory self-rule. In fact, he is skeptical of overly politicizing the process of identifying those common interests meant to track the exercise of power required to secure nondomination. For Rana, on the other hand, republican freedom involves not simply the lack of an arbitrary external will but the “active assertion” of control over economic, political, and religious life (pp. 54–55).

An obvious question, though, is just what “active assertion” of control means in the twenty-first century in relation to a political community as large and complex as the United States (or any other modern state, for that matter). Rana writes passionately about the “unabated growth” of what he calls “plebiscitary rule” and “corporate governance” that undercuts this republican ideal of self-rule, but is somewhat vague about the countervailing alternatives. He looks to the agrarian and urban protests of the nineteenth century and to Civil Rights activism of the late twentieth for immanent models of a genuinely democratic public, but these moves raise as many questions as the examples are inspiring. Here his text links up with other radical democratic theorists who look to migrant and indigenous communities as harbingers of a more democratic future, and yet struggle to articulate just how such hope can be translated into political reality.

Nevertheless, The Two Faces of American Freedom remains a challenging and often compelling book. It is well written, full of fresh interpretations of familiar debates, and unafraid to pose big questions and draw striking conclusions where others often fear to tread. There is a slightly odd moment where Rana claims that the “real exceptionalism” of the American democratic project (taking its lead from radical critics) might be its effort to strip republican ideals of their oppressive roots and “make free citizenship broadly accessible to all” (p. 14). I couldnt disagree more—and in some ways it is a conclusion at odds with much of the story he has to tell—but the panache and energy with which he prosecutes his argument make it well worth contesting.