On freedom

Timothy Snyder

Book - 2024

"A brilliant exploration of freedom-what it is, how it's been misunderstood, and why it's our only chance for survival-by the acclaimed Yale historian and author of the #1 New York Times bestseller On Tyranny"--

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Subjects
Published
New York, NY : Crown [2024]
Language
English
Main Author
Timothy Snyder (author)
Edition
First edition
Physical Description
xx, 345 pages ; 25 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN
9780593728727
9780593728741
  • Preface
  • Introduction: Freedom
  • Sovereignty
  • Unpredictability
  • Mobility
  • Factuality
  • Solidarity
  • Conclusion: Government
  • Appendix
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • Index
Review by Booklist Review

The latest from this esteemed Yale historian takes a contemplative turn, examining the concept of freedom through the events of his life, his travels in war-torn Ukraine, and his work teaching incarcerated persons. Freedom, writes Snyder (On Tyranny, 2017), is often believed to be the absence of constraints: we are free when barriers that might hinder us--occupiers, oppressors, the government--are out of the way. But true freedom, he argues, exists in conditions that support human empowerment: the ability to become and be ourselves, and to know what we value and bring it into existence. In light of philosophers Edith Stein, Frantz Fanon, and Carl Schmitt, among others, Snyder identifies five types of freedom (sovereignty, unpredictability, mobility, factuality, and solidarity), and describes how each is threatened by recent social, political, and technological developments. Prompted by a recent health scare (Our Malady, 2020), Snyder's discussion frequently returns to the concept of corporeality: the awareness that the bodies of others, understood with empathy, become the roots of perception and reason. Pensive yet urgent, this meditation is itself an exercise of intellectual freedom.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Yale historian Snyder follows up On Tyranny, his grim but heady look at the ways freedom can get chipped away, with a more soporific rumination on how freedom can be maintained. Snyder contends that in today's world freedom is wrongly conceived as a "freedom from" negative outcomes, rather than a "freedom to" make choices and flourish. The latter kind of "positive freedom," in Snyder's view, comprises an intriguing range of personal freedoms involving both political and bodily autonomy--from freedom of expression and freedom of speech to free healthcare and the right to eight hours of sleep per night. While this sounds lefty, Snyder sets himself up as arguing with the left, who he sees as having ill-advisedly abandoned the notion of freedom as too individualistic. Indeed, the purpose of the book's many forays into 20th-century history is partly to prove how important the idea of personal freedom has been to leftist triumphs like the defeat of Nazism and the American civil rights movement. Snyder makes many salient points, especially when he notes how fear-powered "negative freedom" leads to social atomization. But the all-encompassing scope of his argument ventures into too tidy territory (Martin Luther King Jr. believed in "positive freedom," the war on terror was motivated by "negative freedom," and so on). The many kernels of insight don't outweigh the cumbersomeness of some of the connections made here. (Sept.)

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review

An examination of how the U.S. can revitalize its commitment to freedom. In this ambitious study, Snyder, author ofOn Tyranny,The Road to Unfreedom, and other books, explores how American freedom might be reconceived not simply in negative terms--as freedom from coercion, especially by the state--but positive ones: the freedom to develop our human potential within sustaining communal structures. The author blends extensive personal reflections on his own evolving understanding of liberty with definitions of the concept by a range of philosophers, historians, politicians, and social activists. Americans, he explains, often wrongly assume that freedom simply means the removal of some barrier: "An individual is free, we think, when the government is out of the way. Negative freedom is our common sense." In his careful and impassioned description of the profound implications of this conceptual limitation, Snyder provides a compelling account of the circumstances necessary for the realization of positive freedom, along with a set of detailed recommendations for specific sociopolitical reforms and policy initiatives. "We have to see freedom as positive, as beginning from virtues, as shared among people, and as built into institutions," he writes. The author argues that it's absurd to think of government as the enemy of freedom; instead, we ought to reimagine how a strong government might focus on creating the appropriate conditions for human flourishing and genuine liberty. Another essential and overlooked element of freedom is the fostering of a culture of solidarity, in which an awareness of and concern for the disadvantaged becomes a guiding virtue. Particularly striking and persuasive are the sections devoted to eviscerating the false promises of libertarianism, exposing the brutal injustices of the nation's penitentiaries, and documenting the wide-ranging pathologies that flow from a tax system favoring the ultrawealthy. An incisive, urgently relevant analysis of--and call to action on--America's foundational ideal. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Sovereignty Leib The German philosopher Edith Stein put her own body forward during the First World War. A graduate student, she took leave to volunteer as a nurse. When she returned to her dissertation, her time with the wounded guided her argument about empathy. "Do we not," she asked, "need the mediation of the body to assure ourselves of the existence of another person?" The word she used for "body" was Leib. 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. For Stein, we gain knowledge of ourselves when we acknowledge others. Only when we recognize that other people are in the same predicament as we are, live as bodies as we do, can we take seriously how they see us. When we identify with them as they regard us, we understand ourselves as we otherwise might not. Our own objectivity, in other words, depends on the subjectivity of others. This is not how we are accustomed to seeing things. We imagine that we can just take in information ourselves, as isolated individuals. We believe that when we are alone, we are free. This mistake ensures that we are not. The word Leib gets us to a new standpoint. The German language has two terms for "body," Korper and Leib. The word Korper can denote a person's body but also a "foreign body" (Fremdkorper), a "heavenly body" (Himmelskorper), the "racial body" (Volkskorper), and other objects thought to be subject to physical laws. A Korper might be alive, but it need not be (compare corpse). Stein says, "There can be a Korper without me, but no Leib without me." The word Leib designates a living human body, or an animal body, or the body of an imaginary creature in a story. A Leib is a Korper, subject to physical laws, but that is not all it is. It has its own rules and so its own opportunities. A Leib can move, a Leib can feel, and a Leib has its own center, impossible to graph precisely in space, which Stein calls a "zero point." We can always see some of our Leib, but we can never see all of it. Our liveliness is shared. When we understand another person as Leib rather than Korper, we see the whole world differently. The other person has a zero point, just as we do; those zero points make connections, creating a new web of understanding. It is thanks to the Leib of another that we are liberated from thinking of ourselves as outside the world, or against the world. A little leap of empathy is at the beginning of the knowledge we need for freedom. If it is just me against the world, then all my grumpy late-night pronouncements are justified and true and deserving of attention. But let us imagine that my daughter (also) gets cranky when she is tired and says entirely unreasonable things. Seeing her, seeing that, I recognize a phenomenon in the world, and suddenly know more about myself. That example I owe to questioning of my son about the argument of this book. Knowing me and knowing his sister, he immediately knew what I meant, and then he could also see that this is objective knowledge, of the kind we cannot get alone. Thanks to the Leib, phenomena come into view, those that are essential for life and for freedom: birth, sleep, waking, health, breathing, eating, drinking, sheltering, lovemaking, illness, aging, death. None of us remembers being born, but all of us were born. None of us will remember dying, but we remember others dying. Empathy is not just some vague urging to be kind. Empathy is a precondition for certain knowledge of the world. The isolated individual, trying to contemplate the world alone, has no chance at understanding it. Because the Leib is at the source of knowledge, it is also at the source of a politics of freedom. When we see other people as subjects like ourselves, we begin to gain objective knowledge about the world. If we see others as objects, we will lack essential knowledge not only about them but also about the world and about ourselves. This makes us vulnerable to those who would abuse us and rule us. We will see ourselves as objects, and we will be manipulated by others who treat us as such. 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 Korper, 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. 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. Negative freedom is not a misunderstanding but a repressive idea. It is itself a barrier, a barrier of an intellectual and moral kind. It blocks us from seeing what we would need to be free. Those who want us unfree create barriers between us, or dissuade us from building the structures that would allow understanding. When we see ourselves as Leib, and understand the world, we see what we would have to build together in order to become free. Life Edith Stein only ever held one university job, for a single academic year. She lost it when Adolf Hitler came to power. In April 1933 she wrote a letter to the pope, in which she tried to explain, in language he would understand, the position of Germany's Jews: "We have seen deeds perpetrated in Germany which mock any sense of justice and humanity, not to mention love of neighbor." She called the Church's silence about Jewish oppression a "black mark" on its history. Hitler took a view of the human body utterly opposed to Stein's. In Mein Kampf, he wrote of Fremdkorper, "foreign bodies," infesting the Volkskorper, the German racial organism. Rather than seeing each person in Germany as a distinct human body, Nazis portrayed the German race as a single organism and the Jews as the foreign objects, bacteria or parasites. When my children were smaller, we lived in Vienna. When my daughter was in first grade and my son in third, we commuted to school on scooters across the Heldenplatz, where a huge crowd had welcomed Hitler just before Germany annexed Austria. That year I took my son to soccer practice in a stadium twice a week. One day, the coaches passed out violet jerseys, Leibchen, a word that sounds like "little body." The boys threw off what they were wearing, pushed their arms and heads into their new shirts, and suddenly looked like a team. Five years before that, when we waited for the bus for kindergarten, my then-three-year-old son was fascinated by the machines used to dig into the sidewalk and to spread tar on the exposed areas. The workers were preparing to lay Stolpersteine, "stumbling stones," palpable memorials to murdered Jews who had lived there. These inscribed metal plates, embedded in the pavement, remind us of where Jews once lived. The information they carry--names, addresses, sites of death--give us a chance to rehumanize, to restore, at least in imagination, what they lost. Before the Jews were killed, they were stripped of everything: first their property, then their clothes. Like the million or so other Jews murdered at Auschwitz, Edith Stein had to disrobe. This was theft, of course, but mainly humiliation, treating a Leib as a Korper, preparing everyone for murder. Before my son's birth in Vienna, German was for me a language of death: of Hitler's speech at the Heldenplatz, of the sign over the gates of Auschwitz, of all the thousands of sources I had read in order to write about the Holocaust and other atrocities. Korper in all its forms was familiar, Leib less so. With my son, German became a language of life. I heard the word Leib in a Vienna maternity ward, from a nurse trying to teach breastfeeding. Mothers remain in Austrian hospitals for ninety-six hours after giving birth, to learn to wash and feed the baby. In that space with those bodies for four days, I learned things I would not otherwise have known. The predicament of nurse, mother, and infant was different from mine, but I could understand something about it, then about myself and the world. I am freer as a father for having been there. Your Leib pushes back into the world, changing it. It translates physics into pain and pleasure, chemistry into desire and disappointment, biology into poetry and prose. It is the permeable membrane between necessity and freedom. It is a Leib that is capable of the kind of concentration that marks a free and sovereign person. Korper we concentrate in a camp. Excerpted from On Freedom by Timothy Snyder All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.