On Freedom

by Timothy Snyder

The labor of freedom begins after the labor of a mother. A baby has the potential to evaluate the world and change it, and it develops the requisite capabilities with the support of and in the company of others. This is sovereignty. Coming of age, a young human being learns to see the world as it is and to imagine how it might be. A sovereign person mixes chosen virtues with the world outside to make something new. Thus unpredictability is the second form of freedom. Our bodies need places to go. We cannot as young people create for ourselves the conditions that will allow us to be sovereign and unpredictable. But once those conditions have been created, we rebel against the very institutions that made them possible and go our own way. And this mobility, the third form of freedom, is to be encouraged. We are free to do only the things we know how to do, and free to go only to places where we can go. What we don’t know can hurt us, and what we do know empowers us. Freedom’s fourth form is factuality. No individual achieves freedom alone. Practically and ethically, freedom for you means freedom for me. This recognition is solidarity, the final form of freedom.

Examples of the five forms of freedom.