On Freedom

by Timothy Snyder

Freedom is not just an absence of evil but a presence of good.

Another defined victory as being “for something, not against something.”

A soldier in a rehabilitation center told me that freedom was about everyone having a chance to fulfill their own purposes after the war.

It was life expanding and growing.

Americans often have in mind the absence of something: occupation, oppression, or even government.

Negative freedom is our common sense.

But is the removal of something in the world really enough to liberate us?

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.

ones, moral as well as political. Virtue is an inseparable part of freedom.

The Brothers Karamazov, set the dialogue with the famous question: If God is dead, is everything permitted?

Nature gives us a chance to be free, nothing less, nothing more.

We are told that we are “born free”: untrue. We are born squalling, attached to an umbilical cord, covered in a woman’s blood. Whether we become free depends upon the actions of others, upon the structures that enable those actions, upon the values that enliven those structures—and only then upon a flicker of spontaneity and the courage of our own choices.

Freedom is not an absence but a presence, a life in which we choose multiple commitments and realize combinations of them in the world.

When we assume that freedom is negative, the absence of this or that, we presume that removing a barrier is all that we have to do to be free.

We call America a “free country,” but no country is free. Noting a difference between the rhetoric of the oppressors and the oppressed, the dissident Eritrean poet Y. F. Mebrahtu reports that “they talk about the country, we talk about the people.” Only people can be free. 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.

When the Ukrainian army de-occupies cities, it raises the flag and shares the photos. But Ukrainians tend to regard cities as liberated when rail service has been restored.

We enable freedom not by rejecting government, but by affirming freedom as the guide to good 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.

Freedom justifies government. The forms of freedom show us how.

I do cite explicitly five thinkers: Frantz Fanon, Václav Havel, Leszek Kołakowski, Edith Stein, and Simone Weil.

“ye shall return every man unto his possession, and ye shall return every man unto his family” (Leviticus 25:10). In the nineteenth century, abolitionists read those words as a call to end American slavery.

Those who believe themselves free because they dominate others define freedom negatively, as the absence of government,

because only a government could emancipate the slaves or enfranchise the women.

I did have the idea, as a teenager, that fear was making the country less free.

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.

Monopolists would seek to prevent competition, own media, and corner political power. Once the Soviet Union began to come apart (I was arguing), its industrial concentration would accelerate the process of disintegration, because locals who seized control of valuable assets would seek to protect their new holdings by trying to control new states.

From the starting point of the Soviet reality around me in November 1990, laissez-faire was not going to lead to the right result.

Anti-communism led to the denunciatory excesses of McCarthyism. It also became a justification for supporting right-wing dictators, invading Caribbean and Latin American countries, and overthrowing democratically elected rulers.

If freedom is negative, then politics becomes the practical work of clearing away the junk of the past: in the jargon of the 1980s and 1990s: deregulation, privatization, welfare reform.

After 9/11, Americans were told that the attackers “hate freedom,” but our response suggested that we misunderstood it.

The ostensible exchange of freedom for security meant less of each. Surveillance became normal.

The 2003 invasion of Iraq killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and left the United States poorer, l...

In 2016 the

oligarchical American presidential candidate won, with Russian assistance.

We protect free speakers because truth threatens the power of tyrants.

The first form of freedom, as I hope to show, is sovereignty. A sovereign person knows themselves and the world sufficiently to make judgments about values and to realize those judgments.

But when we correctly apprehend ourselves as a body in a human sense, as a Leib, we understand that freedom must suit that special state. It must be positive, not negative. Barriers are bad not because they block us as objects, but because they hinder us from understanding one another and becoming subjects.

“had compassion on him” (Luke 10:30–33), tended his wounds, and found him shelter. Who is thy neighbor? He that showed mercy. Go and do likewise. In the story, it is the Samaritan who is free. He is sovereign, in that he is acting according to his own values and is able to realize them in the world.

I do remember wondering what it meant for the players who were not American to stand for the anthem of another country.

Does the American flag wave today? Most assuredly it does. This is the easy part. But does it fly over “the land of the free”?

Is it not more courageous to ask what Americans have done, could have done, should do?

By no meaningful index are Americans today among the freest peoples of the world. An American organization, Freedom House, measures freedom by the criteria Americans prefer: civil and political liberties. Year after year about fifty countries do better than us on these measures.

Freedom to, positive freedom, involves thinking about who we want to become. What do we value? How do we realize our values in the world? If we don’t think of freedom as positive, we won’t even get freedom in the negative sense,

Freedom from is a conceptual trap.

From regarding the body as an object, it is a short step to regarding it as a commodity. It seems normal in the United States to see the body as a source of profit. And that was my next problem.

The absence of freedom threatens life,

In Jefferson’s list, the pursuit of happiness comes third. Contemplating happiness teaches us important things. It is different for each of us. This can be irritating. But the implacable diversity of ideas of the good demonstrates the possibility of freedom.

Leopold Staff says that we are happy when we give the most, Irène Némirovsky when we give the least.

Happiness has to do with what we value. The things we hold dear are real, but none of us values the same things in the same way as anyone else, nor is there a single correct way to order all the virtues.

health as an element of good government.