ABSTRACT
It is particularly appropriate, if not ironic, to address The Dialectic of Freedom (Greene, 1988) on the eve of Independence Day in the United States. The ritual of an Independence Day celebration enacts Maxine Greene’s critique of how most people conceptualize freedom in contemporary society. Greene points out that ‘freedom is still taken to be a given in this country: to be an American is to be endowed with freedom, whether or not one acts on it or fights for it or does anything with it’ (1988, p. 26). In this vein, each year in early July civic cultural images of freedom saturate the national landscape and pervade the media.
