On Freedom, page 35
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“Beginning, before it becomes”: Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1951), 477.
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As children, they themselves: From the age of about eighteen months, children from richer families are using language differently. Noted in David Denby, Lit Up (New York: Picador, 2018), 116.
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negative childhood experiences: For an introduction to this research, see Center on the Developing Child, “InBrief: The Impact of Early Adversity on Children’s Development,” Harvard University, 2007; also Christina Bethell et al., “Positive Childhood Experiences and Adult Mental and Relational Health in a Statewide Sample,” JAMA Pediatrics 173, no. 11 (November 2019); V. J. Felitti et al., “Relationship of Childhood Abuse and Household Dysfunction to Many of the Leading Causes of Death in Adults,” American Journal of Preventive Medicine 14, no. 4 (May 1998): 245–58.
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“the one thing that man possesses”: Weil, Réflexions sur les causes de la liberté, 71.
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Our knowledge of early childhood development: For a helpful set of articles, see “Advancing Early Childhood Development: From Science to Scale” (series), Lancet 389 (October 2016).
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good at recognizing faces: Faraz Farzin, Chuan Hou, and Anthony M. Norcia, “Piecing It Together: Infants’ Neural Responses to Face and Object Structure,” Journal of Vision 12, no. 13 (December 2012): 6.
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someone else’s speech: Elizabeth Bates, Luigia Camaioni, and Virginia Volterra, “The Acquisition of Performatives Prior to Speech,” Merrill-Palmer Quarterly of Behavior and Development 21, no. 3 (July 1975): 205–26.
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It takes caring people: The point is not to make parents individually confront the neurology of child-rearing. It is to account for this knowledge in creating general conditions that make parenting more fruitful. See Joyve Leyson, “Upbringing and Neuroscience,” in Malte Brinkmann, Johannes Türstig, and Martin Weber-Spanknebel, eds., Leib–Leiblichkeit–Embodiment (Berlin: Springer, 2019), 259–62.
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Positive emotions broaden the range: Barbara Fredrickson, “The Broaden-and-Build Theory of Positive Emotions,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Biological Sciences 359, no. 1449 (September 29, 2004).
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We can learn to govern ourselves: See Clyde Hertzman, “The Lifelong Impact of Childhood Experiences: A Population Health Perspective,” Daedalus 123, no. 4 (1994): 167–80.
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Abundant research indicates: See the consensus recommendations in World Health Organization, “Improving Early Childhood Development: WHO Guideline,” WHO.int, March 5, 2020, 11 and passim.
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unstructured play; and choices about things: Rutger Bregman, Humankind: A Hopeful History, trans. Elizabeth Manton and Erica Moore (New York: Little, Brown, 2020), 279–96.
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Motherhood belongs to freedom: I was brought to this conclusion by Heather Boushey, Finding Time: The Economics of Work-Life Conflict (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2016).
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Adults lend to children: Luce Irigaray made a similar argument, using the conceit of breath: we live in the womb thanks to a mother’s breathing, but we can never breathe for her or pay her back in kind. L’oubli de l’air chez Martin Heidegger (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1983), 10, 31–35, 42–43.
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“a loan that must be constantly renewed”: Weil, La pesanteur et la grâce, 80.
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make it impossible: This can be bad faith rather than a misapprehension, as the novels and essays of Margaret Atwood remind us.
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each maternity ward: True, Plato did not write of maternity wards. But the problem that new things might arise is one of his philosophy, not of my account of it.
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and expand it: For Leszek Kołakowski, it was important that new virtues could be created, for if all good things had already been done, we could not be free. He developed this thought in a speech of December 3, 1965, first published in Życie Literackie, no. 50 (1965): 34–35, then reprinted in Marzec 1968 w dokumentach MSW 1 (Warsaw: IPN, 2008), 266–68.
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describe the cave: Plato, Republic, bk. 7.
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a “release,” a liberation: At the end of The Apology.
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Socrates says that “such captives”: Plato, Republic, bk. 7.
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between certain shadows: Let us accept Plato’s demanding construction of the cave experiment, in which people would sit for years looking at a wall and see only the shadows of “carved objects,” and never notice the bodies of the people who are actually carrying those objects back and forth. Plato does away with the problem of the bodies of the puppeteers by putting them behind a low wall. They are holding the objects above the wall and somehow never exposing their hands and arms.
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presence of other bodies: I perform a similar but far more extended analysis upon the Turing Test, with attention to gender, in “And We Dream as Electric Sheep,” Eurozine, May 6, 2019. I write in this book less on gender than I wish I had done, but would like to refer readers to that essay, which extends and complements On Freedom in some areas.
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Plato tells us: In the Theaetetus.
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Unpredictability
texts that captivated me: I will be drawing on Havel’s 1975 play Audience; his 1975 open letter to Czechoslovak communist party leader Gustav Husák; and his 1978 essay “The Power of the Powerless.” I am not seeking to provide an overall account of Havel’s thought: for that, see David Donaher and Kieran Williams, eds., Václav Havel’s Meanings (Prague: Karolinum, 2024); David Danaher, Reading Václav Havel (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015); James Pontuso, Václav Havel: Civic Responsibility in the Modern Age (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004); Delia Popescu, Political Action in Václav Havel’s Thought (New York: Lexington Books, 2011); Daniel Brennan, The Political Thought of Václav Havel (Leiden: Brill, 2017). For critique, see Pavel Barša, Cesty k emancipaci (Prague: Academia, 2015). As in the case of Isaiah Berlin, I will be arguing that Havel’s ideas, taken seriously, point in a different political direction than the one generally accepted.
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a two-character play: An English version of Audience can be found in Václav Havel, Three Vanĕk Plays, trans. Jan Novák (London: Faber & Faber, 1990).
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period known as “normalization”: The locus classicus on the early years is Kieran Williams, The Prague Spring and Its Aftermath (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
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“Everything is shit”: Václav Havel, Hry (Prague: Lidové Noviny, 1991), 230.
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“the gradual erosion”: Václav Havel, “Dear Dr. Husák,” in Jan Vladislav, ed., Václav Havel or Living in Truth (London: Faber & Faber, 1987). This text is an open letter, sent in April 1975.
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a Bohemian in every sense: Mary Gluck’s emphasis on awareness of commercial life and public charisma is consistent with what I mean here. See her Popular Bohemia: Modernism and Urban Culture in Nineteenth-Century Paris (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008).
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moment of contact: See Václav Havel and Adam Michnik, An Uncanny Era: Conversations Between Václav Havel and Adam Michnik, ed. Ełżbieta Matynia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014). See also Robert Pirro, “Václav Havel and the Political Uses of Tragedy,” Political Theory 30, no. 2 (2002): 228–58.
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“the most probable states”: Václav Havel, “Power of the Powerless,” in The Power of the Powerless (1985; reprint London: Vintage Classics, 2018), 17. This essay was written and published in samizdat in 1978.
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Second Law of Thermodynamics: In 1969 Jaroslav Putik had already used the phrase “some kind of thermodynamic law” to describe normalization. See Jonathan Bolton, Worlds of Dissent: Charter 77, the Plastic People of the Universe, and Czech Culture Under Communism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012), 72.
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“Life rebels against all uniformity”: Havel, “Dear Dr. Husák.”
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“illuminates its surroundings”: Havel, “Power of the Powerless,” 36.
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phrase of Havel’s: Evgeny Zamiatyn’s novel We, completed in 1921, the paradigmatic digital dystopia, provides the formulation “the new, the improbable, the unpredictable” (128).
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Communists on television dramas: I learned this from Paulina Bren, The Greengrocer and His TV (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2010). See also Martin Štoll, Television and Totalitarianism in Czechoslovakia (New York: Bloomsbury, 2018); Ellen Mickiewicz, Split Signals: Television and Politics in the Soviet Union (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).
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less on “hitting” than on “sitting”: “Government’s an affair of sitting, not hitting.” Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (1932; reprint New York: HarperCollins, 2006), 46.
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“our machines are disturbingly lively”: Donna Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s,” Australian Feminist Studies 2, no. 4 (1985): 5.
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least interesting features: See Nicholas Carr, The Shallows (New York: Norton, 2011).
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Havel anticipated just such a digital future: A very precise forecast of digital addiction is to be found in David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest (New York: Little, Brown, 1996).
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an example of the “death principle”: Havel, “Dear Dr. Husák.”
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then invited us: An uncanny fictional unification of late communism with digital manipulation of the body is Jerzy Sosnowski, Apogryf Agłai (Warsaw: W.A.B., 2001).
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living in a computer simulation ourselves: There is more to be said. At some point I hope to have the opportunity to comment on David J. Chalmers, Reality+: Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy (New York: Norton, 2022), a book that is brilliantly of its moment.
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“hidden life of society”: Havel, “Dear Dr. Husák.”
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“The freedom to play rock music”: Havel, “Power of the Powerless,” 54.
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Jan Patočka, a noted philosopher: In what follows, I don’t even scratch the surface of Patočka’s life and work. Marci Shore’s forthcoming history of phenomenology in central and eastern Europe delivers the connections.
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he called young musicians “our cosmonauts”: Jan Patočka, “On the Matters of the Plastic People of the Universe and DG 307,” Labyrinth 19, no. 1 (September 2017): 25.
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wished to export predictability: For personal histories of the late Soviet Union, see Katja Petrowskaja, Vielleicht Esther (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2014).
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The dream of a communist future: On the general setting, see Alec Nove, “Marxism and ‘Really Existing Socialism,’ ” in Studies in Economics and Russia (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1990), 171–221; Alfred B. Evans, “Developed Socialism in Soviet Ideology,” Soviet Studies 29, no. 23 (1977): 409–28. For a case study, see Amir Weiner, Making Sense of War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), and for background, David Brandenberger, National Bolshevism: Stalinist Mass Culture and the Formation of Modern Russian National Identity, 1931–1956 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002).
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Helsinki Final Act, signed in 1975: Michael Cotey Morgan, The Final Act: The Helsinki Accords and the Transformation of the Cold War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018).
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to report on conditions: Abraham Brumberg, “Dissent in Russia,” Foreign Affairs 52, no. 4 (1974): 781–98; Emma Gilligan, Defending Human Rights in Russia (New York: Routledge, 2004).
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It arose from the “race music”: Paul Linden, “Race, Hegemony, and the Birth of Rock & Roll,” Journal of the Music & Entertainment Industry Educators Association 12, no. 1 (2012).
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postwar American music: Russian fascists and Soviet Stalinists held the same view of jazz. See Ivan Ilyin, “Iskusstvo,” in D. K. Burlaka, ed., I.A. Il'in–pro et contra (St. Petersburg: Izd-vo Russkogo khristianskogo gumanitarnogo in-ta, 2004), 485–86; Maxim Gorkii, “O muzyke tol’stikh,” Pravda, April 18, 1928. On jazz as anti-communist, see Leopold Tyrmand, Dziennik 1954 (London: Polonia Book Fund, 1980).
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One of these bands: For the simplicity of the argument I am developing about the unfolding of chance and agency, I focus on the Plastics as exemplary of a larger scene of rock, folk, and later jazz music. See Bolton, Worlds of Dissent, chap. 4.
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The Plastics started covering: See Tony Mitchell, “Mixing Pop and Politics: Rock Music in Czechoslovakia Before and After the Velvet Revolution,” Popular Music 11, no. 2 (1992): 187–203.
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of a Jewish family: Jon Stratton, “Jews, Punk and the Holocaust: From the Velvet Underground to the Ramones: The Jewish-American Story,” Popular Music 24, no. 1 (2005): 79–105.
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pop artist Andy Warhol: Joan Acocella, “Untangling Andy Warhol,” New Yorker, June 1, 2020.
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the old Habsburg monarchy: The contemporary locus classicus is Pieter M. Judson, The Habsburg Monarchy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2016). In the vast literature on Habsburg nationality, some points of orientation are István Deák, Beyond Nationalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); Jeremy King, Budweisers into Czechs and Germans (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002); Keely Stauter-Halsted, The Nation in the Village (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2001); Iryna Vushko, Lost Fatherland: Europeans Between Empire and Nation-States, 1867–1939 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2024).
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performed by his band: “Plastic People” is track 1 of Absolutely Free, Verve Records, 1967. It is discussed in Bolton, Worlds of Dissent. See also Lily E. Hirsch, Insulting Music (London: Palgrave, 2022), 75–85.
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by the Kingsmen: Richard Williams, “A Rock ’n’ Roll Classic,” Independent, June 26, 1993.
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by Richard Berry: Jon Pareles, “Richard Berry, Songwriter of ‘Louie Louie,’ Dies at 61,” NYT, January 25, 1997.
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lifted directly from Touzet’s composition: On this genealogy, see Christopher Doll, “A Tale of Two Louies: Interpreting an ‘Archetypal American Musical Icon,’ ” Indiana Theory Review 29, no. 2 (2011): 71–103; Roberto Avant-Mier, Rock the Nation: Latin/o Identities and the Latin Rock Diaspora (London: Bloomsbury, 2010).
