On Freedom

by Timothy Snyder

American defenders of negative freedom are in the habit of arguing that Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were results of positive freedom. Any attempt to “intervene in the economy,” goes the argument, must lead to totalitarianism. This view has been repeated incessantly since the 1940s, and it is familiar to the point of being common sense. But it is the purest propaganda, entirely contrary to history. Hitler and Stalin, leaders of revolutionary parties bent on violence, would have been baffled to learn that they came to power as a result of kindergarten or pensions. They did not. Positive freedom saves not only freedom but also the market from the free marketeers. Stalinism and Nazism had a chance precisely because defenders of negative freedom had no challengers in the 1920s, and capitalism collapsed into the Great Depression as a result. Negative freedom in our American sense—the demolition of government services—generates fear and anxiety, making extreme politics more likely. The welfare state reduces the human anxiety and political risks inherent in the boom-and-bust cycle of markets. It thereby makes extreme politics of the Nazi and Soviet variety less likely, by depriving them of their undergirding of loneliness and anxiety.