Timothy Snyder’s new book is a strange beast. It is a mixture of academic work, autobiography and political pamphlet. I find the academic part fascinating, the autobiographic part emotionally touching, and the pamphlet part tiresome. In this review I will focus on the academic part.
Snyder is a Professor at Yale University. He is specialized in the history of Central and Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and the Holocaust. He is an expert on Ukraine, where he has spent much time, also during the current war. In 2017 he published the bestseller On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, see https://www.europeanleadershipplatform.com/news-item/stand-up-and-stand-out/
Freedom, in Snyder’s view, is not just an absence of evil but a presence of good. If we want to be free, we will have to affirm, not just deny. Freedom is neither the lack nor the acceptance of constraints, but rather the use of them. Negative freedom is naive, he writes; its about removing a barrier (the government, Jews, migrants, private property) and then expecting miracles. “Negative freedom is the fantasy that the problem is entirely beyond us, and that we can become free simply by removing an obstacle.”
Snyder stresses that individual freedom is a social project. He writes that “the creation of individuality must be a social act”. We aren’t born free. “Whether we become free depends upon the actions of others, upon the structures that enable those actions, upon the values that enliven those structures.” Children can only develop themselves into free individuals with the help of parents, schools and other institutions, and a society that cares about how children are raised. “Individual freedom is a social project and a generational one. For people to grow up in freedom, the right structures must already be in place when they are born.”
Snyder defines five forms of freedom. The first is sovereignty, which is the learned capacity to make choices. A sovereign person knows themselves and the world sufficiently to make judgments about values and to realize those judgments. To be sovereign means to have a sense of what ought to be and how to get there.
The second form of freedom is unpredictability: the power to adapt physical regularities to personal purposes. It is about which values we deem important. We can combine values, accept contradictions, compromise with others. “The possible combinations of values are infinite, and so our actions as free people are not predictable.” Freedom needs the future to be open.
The third is mobility: the capacity to move through space and time following values, to go our own way. Snyder writes that mobility requires basic collective facilities, such as healthcare and retirement pensions. Because of the inequality in the US, mobility is reduced. A small group of Americans is very rich, but many ordinary people cannot come up with $1,000 in an emergency or pay for their own funeral. The life expectancy of Americans is five years shorter than that of Canadians and a shorter life means less mobility.
“The first three forms of freedom should be present throughout our lives. There is nevertheless an order of development. In childhood, we attain sovereignty with the help of others; in youth, we sustain unpredictability as we realize our own combinations of values. As we become adults, we need somewhere to go and the ability to get there.”
The fourth form of freedom is factuality: the grip on the world that allows us to change it. “Facts are not what we expect or want. They do not fit our prejudices but knock holes in them.” We need science, journalism and education to ground ourselves. “If we have different facts, concord is impossible. (..) If we lose track of the difference between “it is true” and “it feels right”, we are not free.”
The fifth form is solidarity: the recognition that freedom is for everyone. Freedom for you means freedom for me. Young people can become free thanks to the care of others. None of the things that we need to become free can we produce ourselves. If I claim the forms of freedom for myself, then I must also do so for others.
I like Snyder’s thorough thinking about the naivity of negative freedom, which is at the core of the Trump-Musk universe, and the precisely defined benevolent presence of positive freedom. I also liked to read about his personal experiences in Ukraine, in post-Communist Central and Eastern Europe, and about how he has been teaching prisoners about freedom, and what he learned from them in the exchange. His loathing of Trump and social media – the pamphlet part – is sometimes well written and well-researched, but in my view too long and too repetitive. Nevertheless, this is an important and timely book.
Timothy Snyder. On Freedom. Crown, 2024