On Freedom

by Timothy Snyder

The Ukrainian word de-occupation, which she and I are using in conversation, is more precise than the conventional liberation. It invites us to consider what, beyond the removal of oppression, we might need for liberty. It takes work, after all, to get one older woman into a position where she can greet guests and perform the normal interactions of a dignified person. I have trouble imagining Mariia being truly free without a proper house with a chair and without a clear path to the road for her walker. Freedom is not just an absence of evil but a presence of good.

It takes collective work to build structures of freedom, for the young as for the old.

I came to Ukraine during the war while writing this book about freedom. Here its subject is palpable, all around. A month after Russia invaded Ukraine, I spoke with some Ukrainian lawmakers: “We chose freedom when we did not run.” “We are fighting for freedom.” “Freedom itself is the choice.”

It was essential to remove repression, to gain what philosophers call “negative freedom.” But de-occupation, the removal of harm, was just a necessary condition for freedom, not the thing itself. A soldier in a rehabilitation center told me that freedom was about everyone having a chance to fulfill their own purposes after the war. A veteran awaiting a prosthesis said that freedom would be a smile on his son’s face. A young soldier on leave said that freedom was about the children he would like to have. Their commander in his hidden staff room, Valeriy Zaluzhnyi, told me that freedom meant a normal life with prospects. Freedom was a future when some things were the same and others were better. It was life expanding and growing.

If we want to be free, we will have to affirm, not just deny. Sometimes we will have to destroy, but more often we will need to create. Most often we will need to adapt both the world and ourselves, on the basis of what we know and value. We need structures, just the right ones, moral as well as political. Virtue is an inseparable part of freedom.

Liberty begins with de-occupying our minds from the wrong ideas. And there are right and wrong ideas. In a world of relativism and cowardice, freedom is the absolute among absolutes, the value of values. This is not because freedom is the one good thing to which all others must bow. It is because freedom is the condition in which all the good things can flow within us and among us. Nor is it because freedom is a vacuum left by a dead God or an empty world. Freedom is not an absence but a presence, a life in which we choose multiple commitments and realize combinations of them in the world.

If we believe something else makes us free, we never learn what we must do. The moment you believe that freedom is given, it is gone.

freedom. If we associate freedom with outside forces, and someone tells us that the outside world delivers a threat, we sacrifice liberty for safety. This makes sense to us, because in our hearts we were already unfree. We believe that we can trade freedom for security. This is a fatal mistake. Freedom and security work together. The preamble of the Constitution instructs that “the blessings of liberty” are to be pursued alongside “the general welfare” and “the common defense.” We must have liberty and safety. For people to be free, they must feel secure, especially as children. They must have a chance to know one another and the world. Then, as they become free people, they decide what risks to take, and for what reasons. When Russia invaded Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelens’kyi did not tell his people that they needed to trade liberty for safety. He told them that he was staying in the country. After my visit to Yahidne, I spoke to him in his office in Kyiv, behind the sandbags. He called de-occupation a chance to restore both security and freedom. He said that the “deprivation of freedom was insecurity,” and that “insecurity was the deprivation of freedom.”

We enable freedom not by rejecting government, but by affirming freedom as the guide to good government. Reasoning forward from the right definition of freedom, I believe, will get us to the right sort of government. And so this book begins with an introduction about freedom, and ends with a conclusion about government.

The five forms are: sovereignty, or the learned capacity to make choices; unpredictability, the power to adapt physical regularities to personal purposes; mobility, the capacity to move through space and time following values; factuality, the grip on the world that allows us to change it; and solidarity, the recognition that freedom is for everyone.

We should remove the causes of fear if we can; we should also take responsibility for our fears. Freedom cannot be just an absence; it must arise from us and grow into the world.

Arguments gave way to verities: capitalism would replace communism and bring democracy to the world. As negative freedom became common sense in the United States, one determinism replaced another. If the absence of private property had not brought freedom, then the presence of private property surely would. Since the iron laws of history would liberate everyone, there was no need to know the past—even the details of communism and fascism, the two great political alternatives of the twentieth century, could be forgotten. At the moment I chose history, it was deemed irrelevant. And yet freedom must be about possible futures, and any possible future exists on a line from an actual past. How were we to draw those lines without history?

On the Tuesday before Russia invaded, I was invited to join a class at Yale’s School of Management. The colleague leading the class had seen me on television the prior Sunday and knew that I held an unusual opinion about Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelens’kyi: that if Russia invaded, he would stay, and that Ukraine would fight. My colleague had invited security advisers to former presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump to participate remotely in the class, and he asked them to comment on my prediction. Talking down from the big screens, they all disagreed with me. For them, it was self-evident that Zelens’kyi would flee. Like the people inside the Kremlin, the people inside the Beltway believed that Ukraine would fall in three days. The Russian and American conventional wisdom was identical.

Americans had told themselves for decades that freedom was negative, that it represented a clearing-away of barriers by larger forces. If you believe in the primacy of the larger forces, then you have no choice when they seem to turn against you: you run. And you cannot imagine that others would behave any differently.

An unfree person can always try to run. But sometimes a free person has to stay. Free will is character.

In this light, negative freedom is the self-deception of people who do not really wish to be free. Those who present freedom as negative ignore what we are, ignore the Leib. If we are just Körper, physical bodies, then the idea of negative freedom would make a kind of sense. Objects can be restrained by other objects. Freedom could just be freedom from, without aspirations or individuality, without any sense of what life is or should be.