What is freedom and why is it important? Timothy Snyder’s answer is that “it is the absolute among absolutes, the value of values. This is not because it is the only good thing that everyone else should bow down to. It is because it is the condition in which good things can flow within us and between us.”
This sounds abstract, but it is not. Snyder knows how valuable and fragile freedom is because he has studied and even seen in Ukraine what happens to people when brutes take it away from them.
A Yale professor, Snyder is one of the most prominent historians of Central and Eastern Europe. Among his numerous books are Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin ―which explains how those monsters fed on each other― and On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, that tells us where we are going.
He is not an ivory tower academic. He seeks to make the world a better place through his books and his Substack, which is remarkably clear on the neo-fascism of Donald Trump’s Republican Party.
His knowledge of tyranny is invaluable for analyzing freedom, but Snyder’s book goes far beyond the story. Analyzes the thought of Edith Stein, a German Jewish philosopher who converted to Catholicism and died in Auschwitz. He cites French philosopher Simone Weil, dissidents Václav Havel and Adam Michnik, and Karl Marx’s leading critic Leszek Kolakowski. It includes his own experiences from his home in Ohio to his studies in Central and Eastern Europe, teaching in an American prison, and being in Ukraine during Russia’s genocidal war. All of this makes On Liberty intellectually rich, but at the same time personal.
Unpredictability is a form of freedom. Free people should be able to do and think what they want, not just what their rulers want.
your book On Freedom It starts from a passionate conviction that freedom is not negative—and therefore defined by the absence of external restrictions—but positive, and defined by what we are capable of doing. The latter, in turn, depends on what we get from others. For Snyder, the ability to recognize others as beings like us is the basis of freedom. Without that, we will treat others as objects, not subjects, and end up in tyranny.
Therefore, he argues, “we make freedom possible not by rejecting government, but by affirming freedom as a guide to good government.” Politically, freedom means democracy. A democracy of equal citizens is incompatible with an oligarchy protected by “negative freedom.” If, as in the US today, the law says that money is expression and corporations are people, creates a plutocracy, then “freedom” becomes synonymous with privilege.
What do these points mean in practice? The answer is that “the connection between freedom as a principle and as a practice are the five forms of freedom: sovereignty, or the learned ability to make decisions; unpredictability, the power to adapt physical regularities to personal purposes; mobility, the ability to move through space and time following values; facticity, the control of the world that allows us to change it, and solidarity, the recognition that freedom is for everyone.”
Together, these “forms” make those of us who are fortunate enough to live in liberal democracies free members of a free society.
As the son of Hitler refugees who grew up during the Cold War, I know what this means, and so does Snyder. It should be noted that all of these forms depend on the actions of others. They cannot be achieved by individuals alone.
As Snyder points out, “babies left alone don’t learn anything.” Children cannot acquire the personality and knowledge necessary to be free members of a free society on their own. Their achievement of individual sovereignty depends on what others do, but the ability of adults to act freely also depends on the honesty and competence of judges, police, civil servants, and all those who pay their taxes and do vital jobs.
Unpredictability is a form of freedom. Free people should be able to do and think what they want, not just what governments want. That is what tyrannies seek to avoid. They want to make people predictable. The digital screen, Snyder maintains, seeks to achieve the same result.
Mobility is the challenge for mature people, Snyder says. A free society must be mobile, but, he emphasizes, mobility includes social mobility. A hereditary oligarchy is the opposite.
This motivates Snyder’s hostility toward negative freedom, the idea that one is free once freed from the restrictions imposed by governments. This perspective is solipsistic and, therefore, “antisocial.” In the US, he argues, the “rise of negative liberty in the 1980s set a political tone that lasted well into the 21st century.” The government’s purpose was not to “create the conditions of freedom for all, but to remove barriers to help the rich consolidate their gains.”
Furthermore, “the more concentrated wealth became, the more limited the discussion became, until, in effect, the word liberty in American English came to mean little more than the privilege of wealthy Americans not to pay taxes, the power of a few oligarchs to shape the discourse and the unequal application of criminal law.”
Truthfulness is neither an archaism nor an eccentricity, but a necessity for life and a source of freedom.
Snyder condemns the populism that Trump proposes and describes it as “sadopopulism.” True populism, he maintains, “offers a certain redistribution, something that the State gives to the people; sadopopulism offers the spectacle that others are more disadvantaged.”
Being based on facts is essential: neither an individual nor a group can make decisions without information. “Truthfulness,” Snyder argues, “is neither an archaism nor an eccentricity, but a necessity for life and a source of freedom.” Deliberate lies, like those Trump and JD Vance have been telling about how Haitian immigrants in Ohio eat pets, are a mockery of democracy and therefore freedom. Vladimir Putin is today the master of these lies.
Values may differ, but for politics to work, there needs to be some agreement on the facts. The difficulty here, Snyder points out, is not only the manipulative politicians, but the digital media. The advertising revenues needed to sustain journalism, especially local journalism, were gobbled up by digital giants. Investigative journalism has largely disappeared, and politics is drowning in a wave of conspiracies and lies.
And, no less important, Snyder argues, there must be solidarity. This follows from his most fundamental proposition that I am free because others are free. This is what makes the bonds of citizenship work, on which freedom depends. If I am better off than others, I have the obligation to pay the taxes on which the freedom of others depends. At the limit, it means fighting in defense of your country’s freedoms, as Ukrainians do. As Snyder insists: “Morally, logically and politically, there is no freedom without solidarity.”
In On Freedom There is no recognition that competitive markets are both a form and a source of freedom. However, Snyder is not hostile to markets. On the contrary, he rightly insists that “they are indispensable and help us do many things well, but it is up to people to decide what those things are and under what parameters markets best serve freedom.”
Snyder is right about what’s most important. Understand that freedom means choosing between competing values and accepting disagreement, while respecting democratic rules on how to manage it, but freedom does not mean giving the rich the right to buy elections or the powerful the right to destroy votes. of people they don’t like. Freedom is a precious gift. We have to defend it.
