Timothy Snyder’s On Freedom
Freedom is about more than tearing down barriers.
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The American historian, Timothy Snyder, has written a personal book about freedom. His overarching goal is to emphasize that negative freedom is not enough; rather, it can be harmful if it is the only prevailing understanding of freedom:
Freedom is not just the absence of something evil, but the presence of something good.
The title On Freedom is a typical title for a philosophy book, and that’s what Snyder initially intended to write. But in a BBC interview, Snyder says that he eventually decided to take his notes and travel to various places where freedom was being discussed. For Snyder, who has written several books about Eastern Europe, Russia, and Ukraine, and who knows these countries well, it was obvious that Ukraine was the place to go. The foreword was written on a train journey he took in September 2023 from Kyiv to Dorohusk. The country is at war, and everyone in Ukraine is talking about freedom. The question Snyder asks is: What does this freedom consist of? How is it experienced, and what does it mean to be unfree?
Freedom in Ukraine is not just about removing the Russians, which Snyder calls the negative understanding of freedom, but about building a society. It's not enough to just remove barriers or expel the Russians; it’s about ensuring that society is built on positive freedom. Isaiah Berlin, who was also Snyder's professor, distinguished between positive freedom, the freedom to, and negative freedom, the freedom from. Snyder includes a list at the back of the book where he outlines the differences, but his point is that this distinction is ultimately meaningless. Freedom is both. In an interview with the BBC, Snyder says:
Loyalty and honesty and grace and beauty, commitment, friendship, these things are real. And freedom is the state of things in which you or I or all of us are able to choose among these values as we go through life and thereby create character, create personality. I think free will at the end of the day is character.
The book is based on five different forms of freedom that together explain all aspects of freedom. Each of these forms gets its own chapter, illustrated with numerous examples from Snyder’s own life and childhood, from his experiences, travels to Ukraine, conversations with Ukrainians, including Zelenskyy, past research, a teaching assignment in a prison in Connecticut, and from political and social debates, particularly in the United States.
The first form of freedom is sovereignty, or autonomy, meaning the ability to make choices, a classically-recognizable understanding of freedom.
The second is unpredictability. This might seem a bit different, as unpredictability is often associated with insecurity, not with reason and rational actions. Snyder’s concern is to explain that we humans have different values, and we combine them in various ways, making us unpredictable. Today, we are becoming more predictable, and with predictability comes greater ease of control, meaning we become less free. Algorithms, social media, phone tracking, and so on, make us easier to manipulate. This is worrying and has happened very quickly. The more predictable we are, the easier it is to control us, and, with today’s technological possibilities, Orwell’s 1984 is just a preview of what is possible. But unpredictable leaders or states create fear. Trump can be as unpredictable as he wants in his private life, but not as President of the United States. The framework around our lives must be predictable for us to be unpredictable.
The third form of freedom is mobility. If you are prevented from moving, you are less free. This is obvious, but both Europe and the United States struggle with border control; free movement is not for everyone. For Ukrainians, mobility was crucial when Putin had his troops crossing the borders into Ukraine. In today’s politics I think freedom of mobility is the hardest principle to live by.
The fourth form is factuality. This refers to the basis of how we perceive the world and how we communicate. This is connected to the second freedom of unpredictability. To communicate, we need a common ground, which is hard when fake news clips are being produced and spread through social media in just a few seconds.
The last form of freedom is solidarity, which is often used as a shorthand by those who set negative and positive freedom against each other. Solidarity includes the idea that freedom is for everyone and that no one is free alone, but within a community. As I read, I find myself thinking that the freedom Snyder describes aligns more with a European understanding of freedom than an Anglo-American one. Snyder himself points out that the latter often thinks of freedom as negative, that is, freedom from, and thus also often freedom from the state.
Snyder’s book is somewhat unpredictable, precisely because he chooses to illustrate freedom in a different way, using examples often with references to philosophers and thinkers, or statesmen like Zelenskyy, Václav Havel, Franz Fanon, Edith Stein, Leszek Kołakowski, and Simone Weil—none of whom are Americans.
The German philosopher Edith Stein has inspired Snyder to draw a distinction, which runs through many of the examples in the book, between Leib and Körper. This distinction exists in German but not in English. The living body, Leib, Stein says, is not possible without me as a human, while Körper is the body or physical form, an object. Leib is subjective, and Snyder uses Leib to illustrate that we have physical bodies that contain ourselves, our emotions, psyche, and physical possibilities. It is this understanding of the body, of ourselves as human beings, that builds freedom together with others. We must see others' bodies as subjects, not as objects.
Snyder takes Plato to task, a philosopher who has had great influence in Western philosophy, critiquing the allegory of the cave from The Republic. Snyder claims that Plato wrote the human body out of reality. It is our bodies, Leib, that are our real and immediate center for experiences and understanding of the world. The people Plato describes, chained facing the shadows on the cave wall, do not only experience mere shadows of reality. They experience the chains, the pain, the shadows they see of themselves and their fellow prisoners, the cold stone, and the warmth of the fire behind them. In the same passage, Snyder talks about his son’s birth, a birth with complications, and he writes:
If you watch a childbirth, it is hard to think: This is a shallow, partial replica of something else, only a reflection of some ideal birth.
On Freedom is a critique of an American, reductionist understanding of freedom—much of which Snyder derives from his many long stays in Europe. I read the book as a wholehearted attempt to present a broader, deeper, and more fundamental understanding of freedom. Snyder ends with a quote from the French philosopher Simone Weil: “We live in a world where people can expect miracles only from themselves.” For me as a Norwegian and for all my fellow Europeans, freedom is now about Ukraine—not as a theoretical concept, but as something we must fight for. The two ideas have become very close. It is fitting that Snyder’s previous books bear the titles The Road to Unfreedom and On Tyranny, and the last one was simply called On Ukraine.
Mathilde Fasting is an economist and historian at Civita, a Norwegian liberal think tank. She also hosts “Liberal halvtime,” Civita’s weekly podcast.
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