TIMOTHY SNYDER On Freedom. Reviewed by Braham Dabscheck

Historian Timothy Snyder asserts that freedom is something we must work for – and collective action is imperative to maintaining it.

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Timothy Snyder was in Czechoslovakia, working as a graduate student in economics and studying history. He ‘liked history’s inexhaustibility – [its ability to] surprise’. What would happen now, when ‘the great Soviet enterprises came into private hands’?  Would laissez-faire capitalism do all that was hoped? Snyder feared the New Russia would succumb to oligarchy, rule by the very wealthy. ‘This odd confidence about the future was one reason I decided to study the past.’

For the next decade Snyder immersed himself in Eastern European history, mastering a number of languages and reading writers usually unavailable to western scholars. The Notes section of On Freedom runs to almost 50 pages, and reveals the depth of his reading, his scholarship, and his ability to clearly explain difficult concepts.

His object in this book is to define freedom. Snyder’s major focus is on the United States, but he also includes the experiences of Western Europe, Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and Nazi Germany. He draws on numerous philosophers, and explicitly cites five thinkers: Frantz Fanon, Václav Havel, Leszek Kolakowski, Edith Stein, and Simone Weil.

The task of obtaining and maintaining freedom is difficult; we have to work for it.

Freedom is hard, so we are tempted by simple algorithms that stand in for thinking and keep us from acting. The simplest is to defer any evaluation and to stay clear of the world of values. Let someone else make decisions for us. Let God tell us what is right. Let the members of the politburo or the prophets of the ‘free market’ tell us what is right. Let the Leader, the tribe, the television, the internet tell us what is right … Freedom is not a drama we watch. It is a play that we write on a stage that we build for an audience of everyone.

Snyder sees freedom as the ultimate value. It is:

the condition in which all other values may be exercised. A government is not legitimate just because it has power and uses the word sovereign to embellish decrepitude and deception.

His approach to freedom draws on two major principles. The first is that there is more to freedom than being free from an external force.

It might at first seem logical that freedom is an absence and seem fair that government should leave each of us equally alone. This intuition draws its plausibility from a history of exploitation. Traditionally, some people have regarded themselves as free because they exploit the labor of slaves and women. Those who believe themselves free because they dominate others define freedom negatively, as the absence of government, because only a government could emancipate the slaves or enfranchise the women … Freedom never just means government leaving us alone: nor does it mean our leaving government alone. The forms of freedom must be daily practice. The forms of freedom legitimate government and guide individuals.

For Snyder, freedom is something positive, something that we need to work towards and act upon. Freedom ‘needs the vivifying world of values. If we have no purpose, we serve someone else’s, or we serve a purposeless machine.’

His second principle is seeing freedom as a collective rather than an individual pursuit. At the most basic level, my freedom cannot be dependent on your unfreedom. How could America be regarded as a free society when it practised slavery? Freedom has to be a collective goal, something positive that we all seek.

Snyder identifies five forms of freedom: sovereignty, unpredictability, mobility, factuality and solidarity.

A sovereign person knows themselves and the world sufficiently to make judgments about values and to realize those judgments … To be sovereign means to have a sense of what ought to be and how to get there.

Our sovereignty is dependent on others. Snyder points to how a newborn is dependent on the support of their family for their survival, growth and attainment of sovereignty. It is not as if you can leave a baby at the foot of Mount Olympus and wait around to see what will happen.

Snyder is particularly critical of Ronald Reagan and his claim that government was the problem, not the solution, which led to the dismantling of the welfare state, the disadvantaging of those with less, and the redistribution of wealth to American oligarchs.

If we are predictable we are able to be controlled and exploited, and so for Snyder unpredictability is important to make sure this does not happen. He examines how the music of Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground helped to shake the foundations of the Communist leadership in Czechoslovakia. Hearing something different opened up a space for innovation. Unpredictability enhances our ability to be free; enables us to be inventive, creative, entrepreneurial, to be ourselves.

Working together, people bring human unpredictability into the world, and joyfully. This helps us to be free of all the people and forces who would rule us by predicting us or by making us more predictable.

Mobility is Snyder’s third form of freedom.

For all of us, mobility means access to food, water, hygiene, health care, parks and paths, roads and railways, to help us make what we can of our bodies. Access includes safety: we are not free to go where it is not safe to go, especially when we are responsible for children … None of us is capable of mobility without assistance … mobility for all can be only achieved together. Mobility for individuals requires collective political attention to the logic of life; the risk of injury and illness, the progression from infancy to old age.

The historic racism and discrimination experienced by African Americans has hindered their mobility and freedom, and the dismantling of the welfare state has lessened social mobility, reducing the freedom of all Americans. The collapse of roads and public transport in the US compared to Eastern Europe, is another aspect of the loss of freedom.

Factuality is the need to understand the facts of our existence; to ignore the fantasies that we are told by those who want to control us. Factuality champions the attainment of positive freedom, of being able

to deal with how the world actually works … the most essential knowledge: biology, chemistry, and physics; birth, death, aging; the earth we live on; our place in the universe; our power to consider that place.

It is only by knowing what is that we can hope to act to enhance our freedom and move to where we think we should be.

Facts help us to be unpredictable and free.

Facts are not what we expect or want. They do not fit our prejudices but knock holes in them. They challenge what people around us think … Facts enable sovereignty by allowing people to decide for themselves, without relying on authorities. Facts are needed both for court rulings and fair elections. Facts enable self-defense against the wealthy and the powerful … When facts are respected, each of us is entitled at least to a hearing and has a shield against the hail of static.

Snyder considers the big lies of communists (the party is always right), Nazi Germany (Jews are the problem) and Donald Trump (I won the 2020 election) and the need for investigative reporters to dig for facts (in addition to the work of historians and scholars more generally). The demise of local news reporting and anti-woke legislation that outlaws Critical Race Theory because it casts a negative light on America’s history of slavery and maltreatment of African Americans are impediments to freedom.

Solidarity, for Snyder, is imperative if we are to become free. Freedom is not something that we can acquire by ourselves, we need to act together.

Without solidarity, without protection of free speakers and without the support of institutions that enable listening, freedom of speech (like freedom itself) becomes an empty slogan. Without solidarity, freedom of speech becomes a parody of itself, used by its oligarchical enemies as a slogan to enforce their own dominance and to undermine freedom as such.

Timothy Snyder is one of the world’s leading intellectual commentators and regularly appears in podcasts and YouTube videos speaking on a wide range of historical and contemporary matters.

This is an important work of unparalleled scholarship and deep thought that unpicks the dimensions of that most cherished of goals, freedom.

Timothy Snyder On Freedom The Bodley Head 2024 PB 368pp $36.99

Braham Dabscheck is a Senior Fellow at the Melbourne Law School at the University of Melbourne who writes on industrial relations, sport and other things.

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Tags: factuality, freedom, mobiity, philosophy, solidarity, sovereignty, Timothy | Snyder, unpredictability