On Freedom, page 32
too much government
Totalitarianism
error of single value or truth
too much government
Acknowledgments
“It is time to cease dreaming of liberty,” wrote Simone Weil, “and to decide instead to conceive it.” I first conceived of this book as a sort of dense philosophical poem, with every claim tersely ordered. A brush with death attached me unduly to this rigid form.
Early readers such as Leora Tanenbaum (who was my very first editor in college) and Susan Ferber (who edited a revised version of my dissertation) told me that I had failed. So I started again. As I opened again to life, a somewhat different sort of life than before, my solitary reckoning became a book of encounters. The formulation of my medical experience as a rights argument (in chapters 1 and 5) was influenced by Sara Silverstein’s scholarship. The physician friend present during my illness was Njeri Thande.
Once I had a new text, I realized that I would feel dishonest if I did not present my arguments about freedom to incarcerated Americans. I thank Zelda Roland and her colleague Vanessa Estimé for their work with the Yale Prison Education Initiative. Under its auspices (and as adjunct faculty at the University of New Haven), I taught a seminar on the philosophy of freedom inside MacDougall-Walker Correctional Institution in Suffield, Connecticut, in spring 2022 and workshopped the manuscript there in spring 2023. I gained from my incarcerated students perspectives on the United States and an education in political thought. I mention a few of them in the text by first name; each of them made a contribution to this book. My incarcerated student Kyle made an important point about the conclusion.
Russia invaded Ukraine right before the prison teaching began. The atrocity of Russian occupation was met not only by the resistance of Ukrainian civil society but also by an elevated discussion of freedom. I brought the manuscript with me to wartime Ukraine three times and revised it there. Two of my journeys to de-occupied zones (the ones mentioned in the preface) were in the company of the journalist Nataliya Gumeniuk, to whom I also owe insights about positive freedom. In Kyiv I was able to discuss the main ideas at the PEN Club thanks to Volodymyr Yermolenko, who also commented on the manuscript. A draft of this book was workshopped at the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv, where Taras Dobko, Myroslav Marynovych, Iryna Sklokina, and Volodymyr Sklokin commented on some key passages and Yaroslav Hrytsak offered important words of support. The Recovery Project arranged for me to visit rehabilitating soldiers in Kyiv.
In summer 2023, colleagues and friends, many having made the difficult trip from wartime Ukraine, commented on a draft of this book at a seminar in Krasnogruda, Poland. My friends at the Borderland Foundation there facilitate encounters through music, art, and theater. Their persistence and creativity have lent this project a certain optimism. I thought about freedom during summers there, in the warmth of the hospitality of Krzysztof Czyżewski and Małgorzata Czyżewska. Writers I read regularly in Krasnogruda (Czesław Miłosz and Józef Czapski) led me to Simone Weil. I was earlier able to give a Tony Judt memorial lecture in Krasnogruda, recalling the late historian friend with whom I first worked out some of the ideas presented here.
During a chance conversation in New Haven, Daniel Judt made an important point about early American definitions of freedom that led me to restructure the introduction. Daniel also planned a public discussion about his father between myself and Ta-Nehisi Coates at the New York Public Library. That exchange, which took place two days after Russia invaded Ukraine, broached issues of race and colonialism that I address here. The occasion was a new edition of Ill Fares the Land, a book of Tony’s that arose while I was working with him on Thinking the Twentieth Century. Such conversations raised and smoothed my own subject, like a river pushing rocks.
The encounters that made this book possible include those with teachers who are no longer with us. In addition to Tony, I would like to mention Isaiah Berlin and Leszek Kołakowski. I recall Leszek for his wisdom and humor, even as I draw a different politics from a pluralism similar to his. I remember Sir Isaiah for his generosity and sense of intellectual adventure, even though I disagree with his famous text on freedom.
Those two thinkers and their books hovered over my graduate studies at Oxford. My doctoral supervisors were Timothy Garton Ash and the late Jerzy Jedlicki, the first of whom was a historian of the suppressed Solidarity movement, and the second of whom was interned when martial law was imposed in Poland in 1981. Both of them helped me think my way toward chapter 5. Jerzy’s story of childhood survival in the Holocaust was important for the particular case I make for “normality” in chapter 2.
Since 1996, Vienna has been one of my intellectual homes. The Institute for Human Sciences, founded by the late Krzysztof Michalski and later led by Shalini Randeria and by Misha Glenny, has provided a perfect setting for intellectual friendship. Ivan Krastev, my colleague there, has been an important interlocutor. I thank Katherina Hasewend and Katherine Younger for their work at the institute. As the Russo-Ukrainian war began, we extended the institute’s long-standing cooperation with Ukrainian scholars by establishing Documenting Ukraine, a program that has allowed us to support hundreds of colleagues. This engagement allowed me to keep thinking about freedom. If you would like to support Ukrainians documenting the war, please go to www.iwm.at/documenting-ukraine/donors.
I am grateful for Volodymyr Zelens’kyi’s willingness to speak to me about Václav Havel and Andrei Sakharov, about dissidence and resistance, and about the argument of this book. At the beginning of a long conversation, he asked me what I wanted to talk about. When I replied “the philosophy of freedom,” he spread his arms wide and exclaimed, “So let’s talk about that!” Valeryi Zaluznhnyi and about fifty Ukrainian soldiers kindly took the time to speak to me, as did a few hundred Ukrainians who had experienced Russian occupation or who work in civil society or government. Long ago, Volodymyr Dibrova, Oxana Shevel, and Roman Szporluk introduced me to Ukrainian studies. Halyna Hryn and Lidia Stefanowska taught me the language.
Encounters include people we know, people we once knew, people we do not know, and people we could not have known. The Institute for Human Sciences was founded in part as an archive for the papers of Jan Patočka, a Czech philosopher who figures on these pages. Klaus Nellen is the hero of that story. Václav Havel, whom I knew only slightly, owed much to Patočka, who died after police interrogation in 1977. Ludger Hagedorn discussed Patočka with me. Havel and Patočka figure here as students of unpredictability. My reading of them, and chapter 2 in general, owes a huge amount to Roger Penrose, a dominant thinker of my youth whom I have never met.
This book brought me back, somewhat unpredictably, to Czech thinkers and the Czech language. I owe my period of sustained contact with Czech culture to Milada Vachudová (fille et mère). Ivan Havel allowed me to attend his seminars in Prague. Paul Wilson kindly commented on the parts of the manuscript touching upon his experiences with the Plastic People of the Universe and Czechoslovak dissidence. Milan Babik hosted a beautiful conference on Václav Havel. Kieran Williams read the entire manuscript, and Pavel Barša commented on the first two chapters. Roger McNamee was kind enough to comment on my predictability argument in chapter 3 as well as on the rest of the manuscript.
I owe a debt to the librarians of Yale’s Sterling Memorial Library, who made it very easy to access whatever tradition I needed. Within Yale’s extraordinary library system, Stephen Naron directs the Fortunoff Video Archive of Holocaust Testimonies, where I serve as faculty adviser. His inclusive view of Holocaust studies has led to projects that have informed this work. My citation of the podcast version of testimony of Leon Bass in chapter 3 is a small example of his outreach.
Marci Shore, an authority on the history of philosophy, offered critical comments and steady good sense. Edith Stein is a major figure in Marci’s forthcoming history of phenomenology, and my approach to Stein’s life and work owes much to Marci’s seminars and lectures. Much the same is true for Leszek Kołakowski and Václav Havel, figures from whom I draw a few ideas here, but who emerge in all their biographical and intellectual richness in Marci’s book. Without Dan Shore’s opera Freedom Ride and my meeting with Raymond Arsenault on a stage in Boston, chapter 3 on mobility would have been incomplete. Ideas about social mobility I gathered long ago from Thomas W. Simons, Jr., were also important to that chapter, as was a conversation with Byron Auguste.
Amanda Cook, whom I happened to meet for the first time right after graduating from college, edited this book. Amanda applied herself to this manuscript with tact and daring, and changed it very much for the better. Tina Bennett, who was my friend in graduate school and is my agent now, generously commented on drafts. Tim Duggan, a champion of earlier books, was an early interlocutor on this one. Detlef Felken, a devoted editor for fifteen years, read drafts of this book with great insight. He has been an enthusiastic supporter of my work, and I send him every good wish upon his retirement from Beck.
Olivia Judson inspired me with the arguments of her ongoing work in natural history, which I had the privilege of reading in draft. Stuart Rachels read the entire manuscript with care and spurred an involuntary memory. Andrzej Waśkiewicz, like Olivia and Stuart a friend from graduate school, commented on the entire manuscript and supplied references to political theory. I also entrusted versions of the text to Laura Donna, Daniel Fedorowycz, Peter Loewen, Leah Mirakhor, and Angel Nwadibia. In addition to the lecture at LMU München that I describe in chapter 1 and the workshops mentioned here, I presented arguments from this book remotely to Stanford University, the College of William and Mary, and the Lviv Book Forum.
Jason Stanley of Yale’s philosophy department read this manuscript, twice co-taught a class with me on mass incarceration, and introduced me to thinkers I needed to know. At a Yale Law School gathering, I appreciated Daniel Markovits’s remark that I was replacing rationality with unpredictability as the central category of freedom. Patrick McCormick, a student at Yale Law School, offered me important references. Yale undergraduates Isabel Kalb and David Rosenbloom helped me with research. A two-year project by Yale graduate Daniel Edison kept me close to Leszek Kołakowski. Yale history department faculty and staff have kept my spirits up over the years. Brenda Torres assisted me during the writing and publication. I thank Jim Levinsohn, the dean of Yale’s Jackson School, for his support of my academic and public work.
Debts can be intellectual and personal at the same time. I hope that, even in the oblique form of acknowledgments, the importance of friendships emerges. My children and my parents are both subjects and inspirations here. I was not particularly good at being parented, nor am I now particularly good at parenting, but the double encounter informs this book. Though one of its theses is that the difficulty of child-rearing requires a reworking of our concept of freedom, I hope the moments of simple joy with families shine through. My brothers, Philip Snyder and Michael Snyder, and my mother and father, Christine Hadley Snyder and E. E. Snyder, commented on this book as I neared completion. In their cases, as in all others, generosity need not signify accord.
The happiness list in chapter 1 is borrowed with modifications from one by Władysław Tatarkiewicz, which I found by accident in a library. By his own account, Tatarkiewicz became a philosopher after a chance encounter in a train station. I have had some lucky breaks as well, too many to acknowledge here. My idea of freedom involves creating the conditions for good fortune for as many people as possible. And then, within the expansive frontiers of a shared borderland of the unpredictable, we thrill to the elevating grace of the individual.
Notes
Preface
But is that, even that, liberation?: I started thinking about this subject thanks to Dan Stone, The Liberation of the Camps: The End of the Holocaust and Its Aftermath (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015); review at AJS Review 40, no. 1 (2016): 206–9.
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT
Children need places to play: Rutger Bregman, Humankind: A Hopeful History, trans. Elizabeth Manton and Erica Moore (New York: Little, Brown, 2020), 279.
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT
what philosophers call “negative freedom”: The most famous treatment of positive and negative freedom is Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” a lecture delivered in 1958, reprinted in The Proper Study of Mankind (London: Chatto & Windus, 1997), 191–242. As the argument develops, I will specify what I mean by negative and positive liberty. Berlin skews the argument from the beginning by assuming that freedom is “freedom from” (193) and identifying positive freedom as authority (194). There might be two concepts of liberty, as Berlin says, but I think the clear distinction between them owes more to his essay than to the history of ideas. Philosophically speaking, as Charles Taylor and others have shown, the two collapse together. Any notion of negative liberty is empty without some idea of positive liberty. I believe that Berlin’s distinction, furthermore, was unproductive for his own arguments. In the essay (219), he identifies positive freedom with guidance toward a single human nature. I agree that the assumption of such a single human nature is mistaken and dangerous, but will disagree that this has anything to do with positive freedom. His own idea of pluralism, as I will try to show, must in fact lead to a notion of freedom as positive. Even if freedom is the absence of interference, as Berlin says when describing negative liberty, this is only undesirable because of the (multiple) positive aims and purposes of the individual. As Berlin rightly says, those aims must and will contradict each other; freedom then becomes the capacity or state in which we can consider and adjudge and affirm them in practice. From this it follows that we would strive to create such a state, also in politics. Freedom is positive in three senses: it is positive because it is a presence in a person and among people rather than an absence in the world; it is positive in that it depends upon the affirmation of virtues; and it is positive because it requires thoughtful political action.
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT
“Stone Walls do not”: Richard Lovelace, “To Althea, from Prison” (1642).
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT
became a torture facility: The memoir of one inmate is Stanislav Aseyev, The Torture Camp on Paradise Street (Cambridge, Mass.: Ukrainian Research Institute, 2022).
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT
Auschwitz had been: See Debórah Dwork and Robert Jan van Pelt, Auschwitz (New York: Norton, 1996); Sybille Steinbacher, Auschwitz (Munich: Beck, 2004).
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT
Kozelsk, a Soviet POW camp: For documentation of the Soviet mass executions remembered as the Katyn massacre, see Anna M. Cienciała, Nataliia S. Lebedeva, and Wojciech Materski, eds., Katyn: A Crime Without Punishment (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007). For the notebooks taken from the pockets of murdered men, see Pamiętniki znalezione w Katyniu (Paris: Éditions Spotkania, 1989). On the widows, see Andrzej Spanily, ed., Pisane miłością (Gdynia: Rymsza, 2003), vol. 3. On the memory cultures, see Alexander Etkind et al., Remembering Katyn (London: Polity, 2012).
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT
The Brothers Karamazov: The twentieth-century novel that for me most invokes Dostoevsky as student of character is Der Nister’s The Family Mashber, set in his hometown of Berdychev, Ukraine, in the 1870s. Der Nister was arrested in Stalin’s anti-Semitic purge in 1949 and died in a prison hospital in 1950. Vasily Grossman was also born in Berdychev, where his mother was murdered in the Holocaust. His novels Life and Fate and Everything Flows have shaped what I was able to do as a historian; their register of empathy has no doubt influenced my argument here.
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT
“they talk about the country”: Y. F. Mebrahtu, lecture at the Swedish Academy, March 22, 2023.
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT
bringing it to life: See Charles Taylor, “What’s Wrong with Negative Liberty,” in Philosophy and the Human Sciences: Philosophical Papers (1979; reprint Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 2:211–29, esp. 2:212, 216–17, 225, 227.
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT
Freedom justifies government: Compare Hannah Arendt: “Freedom is the sense (Sinn) of politics” and Charles Taylor: “The basic point of politics is freedom.” I mean that freedom provides an ethical justification for a certain kind of government, as well as guidance as to how such a government would be designed.
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT
Introduction: Freedom
George Washington’s birthday: Kenneth Morgan, “George Washington and the Problem of Slavery,” Journal of American Studies 34, no. 2 (2000): 279–301.
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT
He started work: Stuart W. Leslie, Boss Kettering (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983).
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT
the Soviet Union always seemed close: I cannot discuss Soviet history in any depth. Beautifully rich is Karl Schlögel, The Soviet Century, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2023); originally published in German in 2018.
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT
the people who suffered directly: See Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
Totalitarianism
error of single value or truth
too much government
Acknowledgments
“It is time to cease dreaming of liberty,” wrote Simone Weil, “and to decide instead to conceive it.” I first conceived of this book as a sort of dense philosophical poem, with every claim tersely ordered. A brush with death attached me unduly to this rigid form.
Early readers such as Leora Tanenbaum (who was my very first editor in college) and Susan Ferber (who edited a revised version of my dissertation) told me that I had failed. So I started again. As I opened again to life, a somewhat different sort of life than before, my solitary reckoning became a book of encounters. The formulation of my medical experience as a rights argument (in chapters 1 and 5) was influenced by Sara Silverstein’s scholarship. The physician friend present during my illness was Njeri Thande.
Once I had a new text, I realized that I would feel dishonest if I did not present my arguments about freedom to incarcerated Americans. I thank Zelda Roland and her colleague Vanessa Estimé for their work with the Yale Prison Education Initiative. Under its auspices (and as adjunct faculty at the University of New Haven), I taught a seminar on the philosophy of freedom inside MacDougall-Walker Correctional Institution in Suffield, Connecticut, in spring 2022 and workshopped the manuscript there in spring 2023. I gained from my incarcerated students perspectives on the United States and an education in political thought. I mention a few of them in the text by first name; each of them made a contribution to this book. My incarcerated student Kyle made an important point about the conclusion.
Russia invaded Ukraine right before the prison teaching began. The atrocity of Russian occupation was met not only by the resistance of Ukrainian civil society but also by an elevated discussion of freedom. I brought the manuscript with me to wartime Ukraine three times and revised it there. Two of my journeys to de-occupied zones (the ones mentioned in the preface) were in the company of the journalist Nataliya Gumeniuk, to whom I also owe insights about positive freedom. In Kyiv I was able to discuss the main ideas at the PEN Club thanks to Volodymyr Yermolenko, who also commented on the manuscript. A draft of this book was workshopped at the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv, where Taras Dobko, Myroslav Marynovych, Iryna Sklokina, and Volodymyr Sklokin commented on some key passages and Yaroslav Hrytsak offered important words of support. The Recovery Project arranged for me to visit rehabilitating soldiers in Kyiv.
In summer 2023, colleagues and friends, many having made the difficult trip from wartime Ukraine, commented on a draft of this book at a seminar in Krasnogruda, Poland. My friends at the Borderland Foundation there facilitate encounters through music, art, and theater. Their persistence and creativity have lent this project a certain optimism. I thought about freedom during summers there, in the warmth of the hospitality of Krzysztof Czyżewski and Małgorzata Czyżewska. Writers I read regularly in Krasnogruda (Czesław Miłosz and Józef Czapski) led me to Simone Weil. I was earlier able to give a Tony Judt memorial lecture in Krasnogruda, recalling the late historian friend with whom I first worked out some of the ideas presented here.
During a chance conversation in New Haven, Daniel Judt made an important point about early American definitions of freedom that led me to restructure the introduction. Daniel also planned a public discussion about his father between myself and Ta-Nehisi Coates at the New York Public Library. That exchange, which took place two days after Russia invaded Ukraine, broached issues of race and colonialism that I address here. The occasion was a new edition of Ill Fares the Land, a book of Tony’s that arose while I was working with him on Thinking the Twentieth Century. Such conversations raised and smoothed my own subject, like a river pushing rocks.
The encounters that made this book possible include those with teachers who are no longer with us. In addition to Tony, I would like to mention Isaiah Berlin and Leszek Kołakowski. I recall Leszek for his wisdom and humor, even as I draw a different politics from a pluralism similar to his. I remember Sir Isaiah for his generosity and sense of intellectual adventure, even though I disagree with his famous text on freedom.
Those two thinkers and their books hovered over my graduate studies at Oxford. My doctoral supervisors were Timothy Garton Ash and the late Jerzy Jedlicki, the first of whom was a historian of the suppressed Solidarity movement, and the second of whom was interned when martial law was imposed in Poland in 1981. Both of them helped me think my way toward chapter 5. Jerzy’s story of childhood survival in the Holocaust was important for the particular case I make for “normality” in chapter 2.
Since 1996, Vienna has been one of my intellectual homes. The Institute for Human Sciences, founded by the late Krzysztof Michalski and later led by Shalini Randeria and by Misha Glenny, has provided a perfect setting for intellectual friendship. Ivan Krastev, my colleague there, has been an important interlocutor. I thank Katherina Hasewend and Katherine Younger for their work at the institute. As the Russo-Ukrainian war began, we extended the institute’s long-standing cooperation with Ukrainian scholars by establishing Documenting Ukraine, a program that has allowed us to support hundreds of colleagues. This engagement allowed me to keep thinking about freedom. If you would like to support Ukrainians documenting the war, please go to www.iwm.at/documenting-ukraine/donors.
I am grateful for Volodymyr Zelens’kyi’s willingness to speak to me about Václav Havel and Andrei Sakharov, about dissidence and resistance, and about the argument of this book. At the beginning of a long conversation, he asked me what I wanted to talk about. When I replied “the philosophy of freedom,” he spread his arms wide and exclaimed, “So let’s talk about that!” Valeryi Zaluznhnyi and about fifty Ukrainian soldiers kindly took the time to speak to me, as did a few hundred Ukrainians who had experienced Russian occupation or who work in civil society or government. Long ago, Volodymyr Dibrova, Oxana Shevel, and Roman Szporluk introduced me to Ukrainian studies. Halyna Hryn and Lidia Stefanowska taught me the language.
Encounters include people we know, people we once knew, people we do not know, and people we could not have known. The Institute for Human Sciences was founded in part as an archive for the papers of Jan Patočka, a Czech philosopher who figures on these pages. Klaus Nellen is the hero of that story. Václav Havel, whom I knew only slightly, owed much to Patočka, who died after police interrogation in 1977. Ludger Hagedorn discussed Patočka with me. Havel and Patočka figure here as students of unpredictability. My reading of them, and chapter 2 in general, owes a huge amount to Roger Penrose, a dominant thinker of my youth whom I have never met.
This book brought me back, somewhat unpredictably, to Czech thinkers and the Czech language. I owe my period of sustained contact with Czech culture to Milada Vachudová (fille et mère). Ivan Havel allowed me to attend his seminars in Prague. Paul Wilson kindly commented on the parts of the manuscript touching upon his experiences with the Plastic People of the Universe and Czechoslovak dissidence. Milan Babik hosted a beautiful conference on Václav Havel. Kieran Williams read the entire manuscript, and Pavel Barša commented on the first two chapters. Roger McNamee was kind enough to comment on my predictability argument in chapter 3 as well as on the rest of the manuscript.
I owe a debt to the librarians of Yale’s Sterling Memorial Library, who made it very easy to access whatever tradition I needed. Within Yale’s extraordinary library system, Stephen Naron directs the Fortunoff Video Archive of Holocaust Testimonies, where I serve as faculty adviser. His inclusive view of Holocaust studies has led to projects that have informed this work. My citation of the podcast version of testimony of Leon Bass in chapter 3 is a small example of his outreach.
Marci Shore, an authority on the history of philosophy, offered critical comments and steady good sense. Edith Stein is a major figure in Marci’s forthcoming history of phenomenology, and my approach to Stein’s life and work owes much to Marci’s seminars and lectures. Much the same is true for Leszek Kołakowski and Václav Havel, figures from whom I draw a few ideas here, but who emerge in all their biographical and intellectual richness in Marci’s book. Without Dan Shore’s opera Freedom Ride and my meeting with Raymond Arsenault on a stage in Boston, chapter 3 on mobility would have been incomplete. Ideas about social mobility I gathered long ago from Thomas W. Simons, Jr., were also important to that chapter, as was a conversation with Byron Auguste.
Amanda Cook, whom I happened to meet for the first time right after graduating from college, edited this book. Amanda applied herself to this manuscript with tact and daring, and changed it very much for the better. Tina Bennett, who was my friend in graduate school and is my agent now, generously commented on drafts. Tim Duggan, a champion of earlier books, was an early interlocutor on this one. Detlef Felken, a devoted editor for fifteen years, read drafts of this book with great insight. He has been an enthusiastic supporter of my work, and I send him every good wish upon his retirement from Beck.
Olivia Judson inspired me with the arguments of her ongoing work in natural history, which I had the privilege of reading in draft. Stuart Rachels read the entire manuscript with care and spurred an involuntary memory. Andrzej Waśkiewicz, like Olivia and Stuart a friend from graduate school, commented on the entire manuscript and supplied references to political theory. I also entrusted versions of the text to Laura Donna, Daniel Fedorowycz, Peter Loewen, Leah Mirakhor, and Angel Nwadibia. In addition to the lecture at LMU München that I describe in chapter 1 and the workshops mentioned here, I presented arguments from this book remotely to Stanford University, the College of William and Mary, and the Lviv Book Forum.
Jason Stanley of Yale’s philosophy department read this manuscript, twice co-taught a class with me on mass incarceration, and introduced me to thinkers I needed to know. At a Yale Law School gathering, I appreciated Daniel Markovits’s remark that I was replacing rationality with unpredictability as the central category of freedom. Patrick McCormick, a student at Yale Law School, offered me important references. Yale undergraduates Isabel Kalb and David Rosenbloom helped me with research. A two-year project by Yale graduate Daniel Edison kept me close to Leszek Kołakowski. Yale history department faculty and staff have kept my spirits up over the years. Brenda Torres assisted me during the writing and publication. I thank Jim Levinsohn, the dean of Yale’s Jackson School, for his support of my academic and public work.
Debts can be intellectual and personal at the same time. I hope that, even in the oblique form of acknowledgments, the importance of friendships emerges. My children and my parents are both subjects and inspirations here. I was not particularly good at being parented, nor am I now particularly good at parenting, but the double encounter informs this book. Though one of its theses is that the difficulty of child-rearing requires a reworking of our concept of freedom, I hope the moments of simple joy with families shine through. My brothers, Philip Snyder and Michael Snyder, and my mother and father, Christine Hadley Snyder and E. E. Snyder, commented on this book as I neared completion. In their cases, as in all others, generosity need not signify accord.
The happiness list in chapter 1 is borrowed with modifications from one by Władysław Tatarkiewicz, which I found by accident in a library. By his own account, Tatarkiewicz became a philosopher after a chance encounter in a train station. I have had some lucky breaks as well, too many to acknowledge here. My idea of freedom involves creating the conditions for good fortune for as many people as possible. And then, within the expansive frontiers of a shared borderland of the unpredictable, we thrill to the elevating grace of the individual.
Notes
Preface
But is that, even that, liberation?: I started thinking about this subject thanks to Dan Stone, The Liberation of the Camps: The End of the Holocaust and Its Aftermath (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015); review at AJS Review 40, no. 1 (2016): 206–9.
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT
Children need places to play: Rutger Bregman, Humankind: A Hopeful History, trans. Elizabeth Manton and Erica Moore (New York: Little, Brown, 2020), 279.
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT
what philosophers call “negative freedom”: The most famous treatment of positive and negative freedom is Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” a lecture delivered in 1958, reprinted in The Proper Study of Mankind (London: Chatto & Windus, 1997), 191–242. As the argument develops, I will specify what I mean by negative and positive liberty. Berlin skews the argument from the beginning by assuming that freedom is “freedom from” (193) and identifying positive freedom as authority (194). There might be two concepts of liberty, as Berlin says, but I think the clear distinction between them owes more to his essay than to the history of ideas. Philosophically speaking, as Charles Taylor and others have shown, the two collapse together. Any notion of negative liberty is empty without some idea of positive liberty. I believe that Berlin’s distinction, furthermore, was unproductive for his own arguments. In the essay (219), he identifies positive freedom with guidance toward a single human nature. I agree that the assumption of such a single human nature is mistaken and dangerous, but will disagree that this has anything to do with positive freedom. His own idea of pluralism, as I will try to show, must in fact lead to a notion of freedom as positive. Even if freedom is the absence of interference, as Berlin says when describing negative liberty, this is only undesirable because of the (multiple) positive aims and purposes of the individual. As Berlin rightly says, those aims must and will contradict each other; freedom then becomes the capacity or state in which we can consider and adjudge and affirm them in practice. From this it follows that we would strive to create such a state, also in politics. Freedom is positive in three senses: it is positive because it is a presence in a person and among people rather than an absence in the world; it is positive in that it depends upon the affirmation of virtues; and it is positive because it requires thoughtful political action.
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT
“Stone Walls do not”: Richard Lovelace, “To Althea, from Prison” (1642).
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT
became a torture facility: The memoir of one inmate is Stanislav Aseyev, The Torture Camp on Paradise Street (Cambridge, Mass.: Ukrainian Research Institute, 2022).
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT
Auschwitz had been: See Debórah Dwork and Robert Jan van Pelt, Auschwitz (New York: Norton, 1996); Sybille Steinbacher, Auschwitz (Munich: Beck, 2004).
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT
Kozelsk, a Soviet POW camp: For documentation of the Soviet mass executions remembered as the Katyn massacre, see Anna M. Cienciała, Nataliia S. Lebedeva, and Wojciech Materski, eds., Katyn: A Crime Without Punishment (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007). For the notebooks taken from the pockets of murdered men, see Pamiętniki znalezione w Katyniu (Paris: Éditions Spotkania, 1989). On the widows, see Andrzej Spanily, ed., Pisane miłością (Gdynia: Rymsza, 2003), vol. 3. On the memory cultures, see Alexander Etkind et al., Remembering Katyn (London: Polity, 2012).
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT
The Brothers Karamazov: The twentieth-century novel that for me most invokes Dostoevsky as student of character is Der Nister’s The Family Mashber, set in his hometown of Berdychev, Ukraine, in the 1870s. Der Nister was arrested in Stalin’s anti-Semitic purge in 1949 and died in a prison hospital in 1950. Vasily Grossman was also born in Berdychev, where his mother was murdered in the Holocaust. His novels Life and Fate and Everything Flows have shaped what I was able to do as a historian; their register of empathy has no doubt influenced my argument here.
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT
“they talk about the country”: Y. F. Mebrahtu, lecture at the Swedish Academy, March 22, 2023.
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT
bringing it to life: See Charles Taylor, “What’s Wrong with Negative Liberty,” in Philosophy and the Human Sciences: Philosophical Papers (1979; reprint Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 2:211–29, esp. 2:212, 216–17, 225, 227.
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT
Freedom justifies government: Compare Hannah Arendt: “Freedom is the sense (Sinn) of politics” and Charles Taylor: “The basic point of politics is freedom.” I mean that freedom provides an ethical justification for a certain kind of government, as well as guidance as to how such a government would be designed.
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT
Introduction: Freedom
George Washington’s birthday: Kenneth Morgan, “George Washington and the Problem of Slavery,” Journal of American Studies 34, no. 2 (2000): 279–301.
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He started work: Stuart W. Leslie, Boss Kettering (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983).
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the Soviet Union always seemed close: I cannot discuss Soviet history in any depth. Beautifully rich is Karl Schlögel, The Soviet Century, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2023); originally published in German in 2018.
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the people who suffered directly: See Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
