On Freedom, page 42
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to create a mystical harmony: The notion that one’s own “rational” pursuit of interests corresponds with a higher divine “reason” was characteristic of a number of eighteenth-century thinkers. It is one of the ironies of twenty-first-century discourse that people who call themselves “enlightened,” and who believe themselves beyond religion, rest their account of reason on two articles of faith characteristic of discussions that are now a quarter millennium old: that people are naturally “rational” and that their unreflective collective “rationality” somehow corresponds to some greater good.
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blurs into gray: This point is nicely made from observation of the early Soviet Union by George Shevelov, “Youth of the Fourth Kharkiv,” written in Ukrainian in 1948, published in Polish in Kultura in 1951, and available in abridged form in English at Kultura, https://kulturaparyska.com/en/topic-article/mlodziez-czwartego-charkowa.
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the most dangerous people: Adam Michnik, W cieniu totalitaryzmu (Warsaw: Agotra, 2019).
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If we accept a single value: Consider Learned Hand’s 1944 speech: “The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the mind of other men and women; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which weighs their interests alongside its own without bias; the spirit of liberty remembers that not even a sparrow falls to earth unheeded; the spirit of liberty is the spirit of Him who, near two thousand years ago, taught mankind that lesson it has never learned but never quite forgotten; that there may be a kingdom where the least shall be heard and considered side by side with the greatest.”
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dismissed as fools: In his novel The Schirmer Inheritance (New York: Knopf, 1953), Eric Ambler writes that “the sadness of evil men is that they can believe no truth that does not paint the world in their colours.”
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members of the politburo: The most sophisticated defense of Leninism was György Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1968); originally published in German in 1923.
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or ever new values: “The ethical world is never given; it is always in the making.” Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1944), 85.
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false tragic choice: “If you play freedom against society, you lose both in the end.” Ralf Fücks, Freiheit verteidigen: Wie wir den Kampf um die offene Gesellschaft gewinnen (Berlin: Carl Hanser Verlag, 2017).
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“There is no incompatibility”: Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (1944; reprint New York: Routledge, 2001), 148.
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“contradictory virtues in the souls of saints”: Weil, La pesanteur et la grâce, 170. Graham Greene has his narrator Bendrix describe saints as “outside the plot, unconditioned by it.” The End of the Affair (London: Penguin, 1951), 186.
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Conclusion: Government
Achilles fighting Amazons: Adrienne Mayor, The Amazons: Lives and Legends of Warrior Women Across the Ancient World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016).
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Scythians of the Black Sea coast: Alfonso Moreno, Feeding the Democracy: The Athenian Grain Supply in the Fifth and Fourth Centuries BC (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
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merged the two cultures: For elegant reflections on the ancient history, see Charles King, The Black Sea: A History (New York, Oxford University Press, 2012); Neal Ascherson, Black Sea (New York: Hill & Wang, 1996).
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cult of Artemis: Edith Hall, The Adventures of Iphigenia in Tauris (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
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hottest summer in history: “NASA Announces Hottest Summer on Record,” NASA press release, September 14, 2023.
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“rashysty,” a Ukrainian neologism: On the sources and meanings of the word, see Timothy Snyder, “The War in Ukraine Has Unleashed a New Word,” New York Times Magazine, April 22, 2022.
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all have their origin: David W. Anthony, The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010); David Reich, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018).
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“We rely not upon management or trickery”: Funeral oration as recorded by Thucydides in his History of the Peloponnesian War.
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good for various reasons: “The ethical is not a homogeneous domain, with a single kind of good, based on a single kind of reason.” Charles Taylor, “Diversity of Goods,” in Stanley G. Clarke and Evan Simpson, eds., Anti-Theory in Ethics and Moral Conservatism (Albany: SUNY Press, 1989), 237.
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jagged colors of a broken stained-glass window: I was inspired in this argument by Isaiah Berlin’s characterization of Romanticism. For example, in The Roots of Romanticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 26, he offers similar images. (The essay in question was originally a lecture delivered in 1965.) See also Berlin, The Crooked Timber of Humanity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 236–237, which reproduces an essay from 1975. Joseph Raz nicely invokes an “ultimate imprecision” in his The Morality of Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 409.
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A fascist philosopher: On Ilyin, see Snyder, Road to Unfreedom, chap. 1. See also Philip T. Grier, “The Complex Legacy of Ivan Il’in,” in James P. Scanlan, ed., Russian Thought After Communism (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1994), 165–86; Daniel Tsygankov, “Beruf, Verbannung, Schicksal: Iwan Iljin und Deutschland,” Archiv für Rechts- und Sozialphilosophie 87, no. 1 (2001): 44–60. Articles by Ilyin on fascism: “Pis’ma o fashizm’: Mussolini sotsialist’,” Vozrozhdenie, March 16, 1926, 2; “Pis’ma o fashizm’: Biografiia Mussolini,” Vozrozhdenie, January 10, 1926, 3; “Natsional-sotsializm,” in Vozrozhdenie (Paris: 1933), 477–84; “O russkom’ fashizm’,” Russki Kolokol, no. 3 (1927) 60: “fascism is a salvationary excess of patriotic arbitrariness.”
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repeatedly cited by Vladimir Putin: Putin cited Ilyin on September 30, 2022, regarding the invasion of Ukraine, but he has a long record: address to Federal Assembly, April 25, 2005; address to Federal Assembly, May 10, 2006; transcript of radio program Russkaia Gazeta, December 15, 2011; “Rossiia: natstional’nyi vopros,” Nezavisimaia Gazeta, January 23, 2012; address to Federal Assembly, December 12, 2012; meeting with representatives of different Orthodox patriarchies and churches, July 25, 2013; remarks to Orthodox-Slavic Values: The Foundation of Ukraine’s Civilizational Choice conference, July 27, 2013; transcript of the meeting of the Valdai International Discussion Club, September 19, 2013; interview with journalists in Novo-Ogariovo, March 4, 2014; meeting with young scientists and history teachers, Moscow 2014.
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“The Priest and the Jester”: Leszek Kołakowski, “Kapłan i błazen. Rozważania o teologicznym dziedzictwie współczesnego myślenia,” Twórczość, no. 10 (1959): 65–85, reprinted in Zbigniew Mentzel, ed., Pochwała niekonsekwencji: Pisma rozproszone z lat 1955–1968 (London: Puls, 1989), 2:161–80.
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our task was to see the clash: Weil, La pesanteur et la grâce, 246.
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The forms of freedom: “While not denying that governments can and do, pose a threat to liberty, there is also another conception that regards them as a possible source of liberty.” Raz, Morality of Freedom, 18.
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You were not born free: I am perhaps being unfair to Rousseau, who makes this claim at the beginning of his Social Contract (1762). He meant that we are born free in the sense that something is lost when we are enslaved. My critique here is of the straightforward sense of the expression: we are free as ourselves; there is a clear distinction between each individual and society and each individual and the world; society and the world must be the problem.
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the choice of no government: Hannah Arendt said that “the abstract nakedness of being nothing but human” was the “greatest danger.” Simone Weil made the point that it is absurd to speak of rights that cannot be claimed. The ability to claim rights is part of what I am calling sovereignty.
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all-too-predictable coup attempt: The prediction: Timothy Snyder, “Not a Normal Election: The Ethical Meaning of a Vote for Donald Trump,” Commonweal, November 2, 2020.
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Silicon Valley supermen: I use Nietzsche’s “superman” here ironically. The people I have in mind actually resemble Nietzsche’s last man. On these categories, see Krzysztof Michalski, The Flame of Eternity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011).
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conservative-liberal-socialists: Leszek Kołakowski, “How to Be a Conservative-Liberal-Socialist: A Credo,” Encounter, October 1978, reprinted in Modernity on Endless Trial (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).
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differences in value commitments: There is more to be said about this than I can manage in this general guide to basic institutions. See Thomas Nagel, “Moral Conflict and Political Legitimacy,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 16, no. 215 (1987): 239.
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“responsive to all of its citizens”: Robert A. Dahl, On Democracy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).
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The closure of voting booths: For examples from the 2016 election, see Carol Anderson, White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide (New York: Bloomsbury, 2017), 151, 163.
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allow the very richest: Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page, “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens,” Perspectives on Politics 12, no. 3 (2014): 564–81; Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson, Winner-Take-All Politics (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011).
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Memory laws are passed: Timothy Snyder, “The War on History Is a War on Democracy,” New York Times Magazine, June 29, 2021. For background, see Nikolai Koposov, Memory Laws, Memory Wars: The Politics of the Past in Europe and Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).
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“veil of ignorance”: See John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (1971; reprint Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999).
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we must know some basic facts: Charles W. Mills, Black Rights/White Wrongs: The Critique of Racial Liberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).
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the “avowed object” of democracy: Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, December 28, 1794.
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a republic rather than a democracy: James Madison, Federalist no. 10, November 23, 1787.
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The Supreme Court has ruled: For example, Arizona Free Enterprise Club’s Freedom PAC v. Bennett, 131 S. Ct. 2806 (2011).
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the least protected: I tend to think that even supporters of campaign finance reform are too respectful of an incoherent view of freedom of speech. So long as freedom of speech is regarded as “negative,” as a matter of barriers, we will again and again see the wealthy platformed to complain about this or that rule being applied to them. Compare Robert C. Post, Citizens Divided: Campaign Finance Reform and the Constitution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2014); Lawrence H. Tribe, “Dividing Citizens United: The Case v. the Controversy,” Constitutional Commentary 30 (March 2015): 463.
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The American Founders were amateur historians: A helpful introduction to references that would have been more available to the Founders than to us: Simon Goldhill, Love, Sex, Tragedy: How the Ancient World Shapes Our Lives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 193–214.
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The toughness needed to face the past: For my further thoughts on memory laws, see “War on History.” For a positive proposal, see Meira Levinsohn, No Citizen Left Behind (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012).
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I finished this book in 2023: Alert readers will notice citations and references to subsequent events. I submitted this manuscript after returning from Ukraine in September 2023. During subsequent rounds of edits I was able to insert material.
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pay every American adult: For the evidence that basic income for adults helps children, see Rutger Bregman, Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World (New York: Little, Brown, 2014).
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clean air, food, and shelter: Again, even the strictest devotées of market economics agree that this is a good idea: “There can be no doubt that some minimum of food, shelter, and clothes, sufficient to preserve health and the capacity to work, can be assured to everybody.” Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (1944; reprint New York: Routledge, 2001), 148.
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Potable and available tap water: The availability of potable water is an element of freedom some of us take for granted. Steven Solomon, Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth, Power, and Civilization (New York: HarperCollins, 2010).
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only by sound policy: See Heather Boushey, Finding Time: The Economics of Work-Life Conflict (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2016).
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Four out of five Americans: World Urbanization Prospects: The 2018 Revision (New York: United Nations, 2019).
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the Clayton and Sherman acts: I have in mind the laws themselves rather than the Bork interpretation, which is convenient for bad actors, contrary to the intentions of the legislators, and inimical to functioning markets.
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This hinders good choices: See Paul Mason, PostCapitalism (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2015).
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roughly the same percentage: Data for Czechoslovakia are drawn from the entry for the Czech Republic in Institute for Crime and Justice Policy Research, World Prison Brief, PrisonStudies.org, and from “Prisoners in 1989,” Bureau of Justice Statistics Bulletin, May 1990.
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peaked in 1991: Gary Lafree, “Social Institutions and the Crime ‘Bust’ of the 1990s,” Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 88, no. 4 (1998): 1325–68. See also Randolph Roth, American Homicide (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009).
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no freedom dividend: Matthew Friedman, Ames C. Grawert, and James Cullen, “Crime Trends, 1990–2016,” Brennan Center for Justice, 2017.
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About 1.7 million Americans: See estimates from the Sentencing Project, Prison Policy Initiative, and World Prison Brief.
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theater, and art: On prison art, see Nicole R. Fleetwood, Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2020); Winfred Rembert (as told to Erin I. Kelly), Chasing Me to My Grave: An Artist’s Memoir of the Jim Crow South (New York: Bloomsbury, 2022).
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such hypertrophic responsibility: Compare Lisa Guenther, Solitary Confinement: Social Death and Its Afterlives (Duluth: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 222.
