“At every meal that we eat together, freedom is invited to sit down. The chair remains vacant, but the place is set,” wrote the French poet and Resistance fighter René Char. Char hadn’t wanted to publish his work during the war. It was a time to stay low. But he had carried on writing throughout, pressed up tight against terror and death. As the Fourth Republic took shape, he wanted to put his experiences on the record and so published Hypnos, from which this aphorism is taken, in 1946. Until quite recently, I’m told, it was a tradition in the French countryside to lay an extra place for an unexpected guest, or perhaps a returning friend or family member. In the darkest days of the Nazi occupation, the place was set for freedom. Char and his comrades could not know when or how freedom might turn up. While some, such as those who belonged to the communist FTP (Francs-Tireurs et Partisans), had definite ideas about the kind of freedom they were fighting for, many more experienced the presence of freedom simply in their determination not to yield to domination.
The American historian Timothy Snyder is no poet, still less an active combatant, but almost 80 years on he too has written a book about freedom at a moment when its future is both in doubt and, for that reason, wide open. Co-opted by political cynics and their rich friends, on the one hand, “freedom” has been squeezed of meaning, becoming a tatty banner in an apparently worldwide battle with no purpose other than to keep on generating fear, outrage and terror in pursuit of power. Yet precisely because of the horrors perpetuated under this banner, there is a new awareness of freedom, even if it is perceived simply, and for many starkly, as an empty seat.
Just ask them in Kyiv, Snyder would say; and he does (one of the people he asks is Volodymyr Zelensky). Ask them in America’s prisons where the population of black men has increased nine-fold in the past 50 years; he does this too, teaching the philosophy of freedom to incarcerated students. Ask them, many would add, in Gaza, Haifa and Beirut.
Snyder is a historian of modern Europe, particularly of eastern Europe. After Vladimir Putin’s invasion in February 2022, I was not alone in reaching for his history of 20th-century Ukraine, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (2010); thousands more tuned into his Yale lectures that autumn. Very much a public historian, he has never been shy of making broad sweeps, to the irritation of some colleagues. History’s lessons are not incidental; for Snyder, they are the whole point of paying close attention to the past. In 2017, in the wake of the election of Donald Trump and as the rug of liberty, already threadbare, began to pull away from under America’s feet, he published On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. A slim book about a monstrous history, it became a bestseller.
On Freedom, perhaps fittingly, is a bigger, baggier and riskier book than its predecessor. Nor is it a history. It’s a hybrid. You could say that in some respects Snyder has written a kind of philosophical novel about freedom, a Bildungsroman in which the narrator comes of age and the historian loses his historical innocence. The book opens with the young Snyder queuing up to ring the “liberty bell” on his grandparents’ farm in Ohio in 1976, the year of the US bicentennial. It’s hard to think of a more pastoral introduction to a story that by its end – the present – will turn grimly gothic. “I will try to show, on the basis of five decades of my own mistakes, how some misunderstandings of [American] freedom arose, and how they might be corrected,” he begins; later adding: “My lifetime is a half-century of failure.”
The big mistake, Snyder contends, was believing in negative freedom; that all you had to do for freedom to flourish was to remove barriers – the state, government, market control. Freedom “from” was the American cry, and one of the gravest misunderstandings was believing that with the end of the Cold War, that cry would reverberate virtuously around the world. It did reverberate, but not virtuously, and very few felt freer as a result, not least in the Land of the Free itself.
In the US today, “freedom” turns to ashes on the lips of those denying access to abortion, books, social mobility and affordable healthcare to their fellow citizens, while giving free rein to the digital oligarchs whose machines, Snyder notes, are “predictifying” our lives. Freedom “from”, it turns out, produces its own kind of tyranny, as the 17th-century English political philosopher Thomas Hobbes, no stranger to the horrors of civil war, first pointed out.
Instead, Snyder wants us to think about freedom positively, as a virtue we all need to work at, collectively and with responsibility. In Europe we used to call this social democracy. His philosophical guides in this matter are five of the 20th century’s most courageous and imaginative freedom-thinkers: the playwright and former Czechoslovakian president Václav Havel; the Polish communist turned dissident philosopher Leszek Kołakowski (Snyder’s teacher at Oxford); Edith Stein, the Jewish convert to Catholicism and pioneering phenomenologist of empathy, who was murdered in Auschwitz; fellow convert and mystic Simone Weil; and the anticolonial freedom fighter Frantz Fanon. These writers got as close to political violence as you could possibly get and all pulled back – resisted – by being very clear that to be free was the essence of what it means to be human in a world of other humans. Freedom is, Snyder says, “the value of values,” and he is absolutely right.
None of these thinkers belong to American traditions of political thought, except for Fanon whose place in the Black Power movement was assured when his book The Wretched of the Earth was translated from French into English in 1963, two years after his death, and whose significance has since been rediscovered by Black Lives Matter and, over the past year, by the growing pro-Palestine movement in the US.
“Prodding from another tradition can shake us free of misapprehensions,” Snyder explains. It can, and there is something engaging, indeed compelling, about an American historian who has spent a lifetime understanding totalitarian and Cold War Europe applying insights from the history of those struggles to explain to America why it was so wrong to imagine it had got freedom right. Freedom boomerangs between continents, histories and traditions in this book, which is partly what makes it exhilarating, if, at times, a little confusing.
There are five essential “forms” of freedom, according to Snyder, who dedicates a chapter to each. The first three are part of individual life stories: sovereignty, which is the capacity to begin, to know, judge, and to be agent in the world; unpredictability, the freedom not be nudged or predicted, to change our minds unexpectedly according to circumstance; and mobility, both social and physical. A further two collective forms guard those first three: factuality, having a common truth from which to act; and solidarity, because “freedom for you means freedom for me”.
Philosophers will be as picky about these forms as historians have been about some of Snyder’s uses of the past in his previous books. They are overworked and possibly a bit random, but this doesn’t really matter: any serious writing about freedom is going to struggle with categories; it is the nature of freedom to challenge our forms of thought and expression. “Freedom is positive,” Snyder writes; “getting words around it, like living it, is an act of creation.” He’s right about that too.
Still, Snyder’s own words can result in some pretty wild tonal shifts. At some moments he writes from on high, as though, indeed, a European philosopher has somehow found herself commentating on a baseball game. (“Pitching is a bit like declaring freedom. You are alone, elevated on a mound, in your little chalk circle of honour, labour, and despair.”) Sport is a significant feature in this book, as is the rock music of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Where would Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution have been without the Plastic People of the Universe, Frank Zappa, and the Velvet Underground, he ponders at one point? And where would his own book be had he not seen REM live in 1986? “The unpredictability of biography flows into the unpredictability of history,” he intones.
There is a goofiness and warmth about this book, which is part of Snyder’s earnestness. You sense that he has never been anything less. When he was an undergraduate, an essay on the nuclear arms race got him an invite to Moscow; in the 1990s he was advising on Soviet monopolies. Snyder has always been serious about freedom. Be sure to write a physical letter to someone at least once a month, he advises cosily in his final chapter, which includes other good advice about reading not scrolling, banning all private prisons, and seizing back freedom for democracy.
This earnestness is not naivety. It is a pitch at virtue, and for that his book is to be welcomed. “Freedom needs human thinkers, sovereign and unpredictable,” Snyder writes. It really does. “The virtue of the common man is marvellous,” René Char wrote at the height of his war. Now, as in the 1940s, is a time for virtuous people. The evenings are getting darker, and the table needs laying – with that extra place set for freedom.
Lyndsey Stonebridge is the author of “We Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love and Disobedience” (Jonathan Cape)
On Freedom
Timothy Snyder
Bodley Head, 368pp, £25
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[See also: How India made the ancient world]
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This article appears in the 09 Oct 2024 issue of the New Statesman, 100 days that shook Labour