Dan Schubert is a professor of Sociology at Dickinson College.

Elizabeth Lewis is a professor of Educational Studies at Dickinson College.

Schubert, Dan, and Elizabeth C. Lewis. The Obsolescence of Freedom? Inequality, Symbolic Violence, and the Ongoing Dilemma of American Education. In On Inequality and Freedom, edited by Lawrence M. Eppard and Henry Giroux, 387-401. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2022.

For more information on the published version, visit Oxford University Press's Website. https://global.oup.com/academic/product/on-inequality-and-freedom-9780197583029?cc=us&lang=en&

Freedom has for a long time served as the ideology of inequality in the United States. Even in an era of increasing economic inequality and a heightened awareness that class, racial, and gender inequalities persist, Americans at least know that they are free. They have the freedom to get a high school diploma, the freedom to work and to work hard even as wealth and income inequalities continue to rise, the freedom to get and to change jobs, and the freedom to grow increasingly politically polarized. That inequalities persist amid all this freedom is a consequence of individual actions rather than structural barriers --or so it seems in the land of freedom. Our point of departure in this chapter is that freedom is an ideology that has protected and perpetuated unequal social relations and served as the basis of symbolic violence that results from practices informed by this ideology. In fact, symbolic violence is a consequence of these practices that ends up making the ideology of freedom all but unnecessary. And, given the increasing encroachment on individual rights that we currently see in the United States, as well as the fact that this encroachment is stratified by issues of class, race, gender, and ability, this is an increasingly important point. Once people realize that their world is natural and that their place in it is normal and a result of their own inherent abilities, they don't even entertain the thought that it should or even could be changed. The violence is thus done and the ideology of freedom has become obsolete. We are not claiming that freedom as an ideology has disappeared or that it will. Instead, we are suggesting that its importance as a legitimizing force that protects the interests of dominant groups is waning. It is an increasingly contentless and vapid signifier, but that doesn't matter because symbolic violence is alive and well and working at least as well.