Free for All

In On Freedom, Yale historian Timothy Snyder describes going to Ukraine after the 2022 Russian invasion. Sitting in the back of a friend’s car, looking over the coast of the Black Sea from Ukraine’s Kherson region, he describes filling the trunk of the car with watermelons gifted by farmers who de-mined their own fields with improvised equipment.

Snyder and his friend would later give the watermelons away in Kyiv. “During this horrible war,” he writes, “when almost everyone in Ukraine seems to be grieving, people here seem all the more attached to small gestures of solidarity, all the more open to saying what actually matters, to enunciating the small virtues of everyday life, which are no less real than the mines in the fields.”

Snyder, whose 2010 book Bloodlands investigated the brutality inflicted on Ukraine and the surrounding region by Stalin and Hitler, emerged as one of the leading critics of Donald Trump’s tactics during his first presidential term. In 2017, Snyder published On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, a short but fierce guide to resisting totalitarian regimes bolstered by his studies of such powers in European history and applied to the current United States. His lessons were crisp, brief and appropriately urgent: “Do Not Obey in Advance,” “Defend Institutions,” “Beware the One-Party State,” “Be a Patriot,” and so on. It is a book to keep in your pocket “when the unthinkable arrives.”

Snyder followed On Tyranny in 2018 with his five-alarm-fire of a book, The Road to Unfreedom, about Vladimir Putin’s war on truth and how Silicon Valley tech oligarchs have promoted the growth of authoritarianism within the United States. With those two books, Snyder laid bare what we need to defend against and the tools with which to fight. With On Freedom, the most scholarly and philosophical of this triptych, he explains exactly what’s worth fighting for.

The answer — and we can probably all agree on this — is freedom. The issue, Snyder explains, is that we aren’t defining freedom using the same terms, and the purpose of On Freedom is to resolve that error so a truly free society can actually be attainable. “Americans often have in mind the absence of something: occupation, oppression, or even government,” Snyder writes. “Negative freedom is our common sense.” Talking to soldiers, journalists, widows, and farmers in wartime Ukraine, Snyder heard the word freedom over and over but discovered that none of his Ukrainian interviewees specified freedom from Russia. Positive freedom, he explains, is the freedom to do something, be something, imagine something.

On Freedom is structured according to Snyder’s five tenets of freedom, each one building on the next: sovereignty, which requires the development of an empathy-driven political environment where a person can feel safe to make their own choices; unpredictability, enabled by freedom from authoritarian or algorithmic control; mobility, in which young people can rebel from that foundational sovereignty; factuality (“What we don’t know can hurt us, and what we do know empowers us”); and solidarity, or recognizing that “freedom for you means freedom for me.”

Calling upon the works of such philosophers as Simone Weil and Hannah Arendt, historical events that he’s both witnessed and studied, biblical stories, and plenty of his own personal narratives, Snyder’s book is sweeping in its coverage, building a case that’s as challenging as it is transformative, well worth the density of his topics and the dryness of his language. His portrayal of the Constitution as being rooted in negative freedom draws a particularly interesting perspective: If a nation is built on the idea of freedom from (free from taxation, free from government oversight, free from worrying about the needs of others), then that same nation would reasonably begin to act as though it’s under constant threat, willing to sacrifice civil liberties for the promise of security.

It seems likely that, considering his engaging manner as a professor and his previous books’ robust voice, Snyder has kept On Freedom as journalistic as possible — a scholarly, logical argument without emotionality, without manipulation. The closest he gets to heroic language is when writing about Ukraine, but even then he stays measured, well-considered, and focused on the purpose of the book. It’s actually a relief to read something that isn’t working so hard to play on the reader’s emotions. “It is, I hope, reasonable, but also unpredictable. It is intended to be sober, but also experimental,” he writes in the book’s introduction. “It celebrates not who we are, but the freedom that could be ours.”