Free at Last - Lynne Cohen

Full disclosure: Here is a review of my second book by friend and fellow author Brian Hanington. As you will read, though he loves my work, he has issues with some (maybe  most) of my strongly held opinions.

Reviewed by Brian Hanington

I’ve just finished Lynne Cohen’s autobiographic sketch Free At Last, and as a liberal with a quiet communist streak myself am happy to describe her work to others of my ilk.
    Unlike her more—shall we say—ardent counterparts in the right wing press, Cohen successfully maintains her forceful opinions on the usual range of flashpoint topics without sounding either arrogant or misinformed. Even better, she quietly makes the point that what we now view as arch-Republican conservatism was once thought decidedly liberal. So we begin to read Free At Last a bit back on our heels, thinking that just maybe the author isn’t nuts after all.
Perhaps that’s in part because her underlying political philosophy sprang reasonably from her own experiences and their subsequent epiphanies. Indeed, the book’s title may be the most contentious statement in the whole work, in that Free At Last implies (but does not actually mean, she later clarifies) that any generalized liberal philosophy is itself a form of captivity.
    There is substantial support for her views in the works of the great political philosophers of history, Rousseau, Descartes, Plato, Locke, Smith and even our own John Kenneth Galbraith among them, and Cohen’s positions therefore are not particularly new or surprising. It is the fervour of her convictions, artfully expressed in blunt prose with a deliberately challenging tone here and there—that make her unique, and that make Free At Last worth the read.
    Also, and perhaps more important, it is Cohen’s gutsy willingness to tell us about her private life in enough detail to make her leanings not-just-understandable-but-also-appreciable that give this book its energy.
    As always, left-wing readers (I am certainly one) will dispute the logic of some of Cohen’s conclusions. How one arrives at a publicly accepted truth is a process protected, some say, by the conventions of western logic and not achieved merely by strength of conviction. To reach a conclusion, any author must prove a minor premise (a position that is supportable through argument) that is connected to a major premise (something the audience already believes to be true). The trouble with right-wing lit is that what its authors assume an audience will accept as given is not in fact a given. We on the left do not accept these premises, and not because we’re imbeciles or captives but rather that in our experience (the same kind of life lessons that shaped Cohen’s ethos) those major premises simply do not appear to be true.
    So, for instance, when Cohen advances her thoughts about a culture that supports family values, she assumes that her readers believe a) that there is actually a set of something out there that could be called family values and b) that it matters. I could happily write a book arguing that in fact there are individual values and that there are group values, but that these vary widely depending on the individual and the group.
    One family may value pluralism, another NASCAR racing, another charity, another cool gadgets. But there is no set of values to which it may be said that ‘all decent families subscribe' other than those to which all decent individuals subscribe. Family values are not a known set of values and, as such, they are immaterial to any reasoned debate. Of course, as I pen this I can see Cohen’s eyes rolling in disbelief tainted by pity for my myopic vision. My major premise is not her truth either.
    The charming feature of Free At Last is that none of that matters. Cohen couldn’t care less that I disagree with her (as I have done may times in her own living room), and I couldn’t care less what she thinks about government interference (bad), religion (good), welfare states (bad), patriotism (good), divorce (bad) or any number of other hot topics. But she clearly cares that her own story be better known, which thanks to her generosity of revelation, crisp prose, ruthless editing and high humour it now can be. And she cares that all of us who read her work be entertained, and by God we are. Every life well lived is an adventure, and Cohen’s particular adventure—marked as it is by the travails of family distress, substance abuse, mental illness, misinterpretation and rejection—have formed a character that is noisy, opinionated, brash and deeply lovable.
    So while I may have scratched my head form time to time, I did so while laughing, or worrying, or wondering what was coming next, but I never felt any wont of intelligence, conviction, humility or empathy. In fact, Adam Smith and John Locke are no doubt looking down and smiling in approval.
    I loved it!

To purchase a copy, email the author at lynne@lynnecohen.net. She will happily arrange everything.