Becoming Free: An Historical and Very Human Experience

BOOK REVIEW: On Freedom

By: Timothy Snyder / Crown

Reviewed by: Jean-Thomas Nicole

The Reviewer — Jean-Thomas Nicole is a Policy Advisor with Public Safety Canada. The opinions expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official policies or positions of Public Safety Canada or the Canadian government.

REVIEW — Timothy Snyder is an American contemporary historian with an impressive resumé. Dr. Snyder is the Richard C. Levin Professor of History and Global Affairs at Yale University and a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. A scholar of history of Central and Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and the Holocaust, Snyder speaks five and reads ten European languages, has written 16 books, including six on Ukraine, and co-edited two.

His work, published in forty languages, has inspired political demonstrations, sculpture, posters, punk rock, rap, film, theater, opera, and earned him six state orders and decorations from Austria, Estonia, Lithuania, and Poland, as well as four honorary doctorates.

For his latest book, On Freedom, Dr. Snyder first conceived this highly personal reflection on freedom and democracy within the United States as a sort of dense philosophical poem, with every claim tersely ordered. Originally, a brush with death due to a medical misdiagnosis attached him rather unduly to this rigid form.

It follows thematically and chronologically his earlier books On Tyranny and The Road to Unfreedom. The first book of this series was an invitation to the American people, in a form of a manifesto, to understand the US past more clearly and take action, in small and large ways, as individuals and collectively to defend democratic values.

The second book looked at Putin’s favorite Russian political philosopher, Ivan Ilyin, and the template the Russian president set for fake news, disinformation and polarization, therefore deliberately sowing division, confusion among his perceived adversaries within the West.

His third book of this series brought him back, “somewhat unpredictably” he writes, to Czech thinkers, the Czech language, and the Czechoslovak dissi­dence. In the process, this intellectual journey allowed him to develop and explain his idea of freedom.

The war in Ukraine always looming in the background in its most interesting parts, since “here its subject is palpable, all around”, this book aims at defining freedom, not only negatively, but even more positively, in an affirmative and creative way: “Oppression is not just obstruction but the human intention behind it”.

Dr. Snyder writes “freedom is about knowing what we value and bringing it to life. So it depends on what we can do—and that, in turn, depends on others, people we know and people we don’t”.

Based on these solid foundations, Dr. Snyder then exposes his central thesis on freedom and the proposed plan to demonstrate it effectively:

“Reasoning forward from the right definition of freedom, I believe, will get us to the right sort of government. And so this book begins with an introduction about freedom, and ends with a conclusion about government. The five chapters in between show the way from philosophy to policy”.

This book follows the logic of an argument and the logic of a life. The chapters are furthermore divided into vignettes. Some of them include memories that sprang to mind as Dr. Snyder was trying to address a philosophical issue. The flashes of recollection enable some reflection. The point is to elicit truths about this country and about freedom that were not evident to him in the moment—and that would not be evident to him now had he not passed through those earlier experiences.

Along with this philosophical method fitting for a historian, On Freedom also relies on historical examples; this is thus a book about the United States, but it draws comparisons with western Europe, eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and Nazi Germany

Accordingly, from this point of view, the connections between freedom as a principle and freedom as a practice are the five forms of freedom. The forms create a world where people act on the basis of values. They are not rules or orders. They are the logical, moral, and political links between common action and the formation of free individuals.

The forms resolve two apparent conundrums: a free person is an individual, but no one becomes an individual alone; freedom is felt in one lifetime, but it must be the work of generations.

The five forms are: sovereignty, or the learned capacity to make choices; unpredictability, the power to adapt physical regularities to personal purposes; mobility, the capacity to move through space and time following values; factuality, the grip on the world that allows us to change it; and solidarity, the recognition that freedom is for everyone.

Ultimately, Dr. Snyder notes that: “Freedom and security work together. The preamble of the Consti­tution instructs that “the blessings of liberty” are to be pursued along­side “the general welfare” and “the common defense.” We must have liberty and safety”.

Along the same lines, he comments further on the solution to the problem of freedom is not, “as some on the Right think, to mock or abandon government. The solution is also not, as some on the Left think, to ignore or cast away the rhetoric of freedom. Freedom justifies government”.

Perhaps more interestingly to a Canadian reviewer philosophically inclined, in his book Dr. Snyder is in discussion with philosophers ancient, modern, and contemporary. He does cite explicitly five thinkers: Frantz Fanon, Václav Havel, Leszek Kołakowski, Edith Stein, and Simone Weil.

 These figures are not American and are not well known in the United States; with minor exceptions, they neither resided in the country nor wrote about it. A prodding from another tradition (or a term from another language) can shake us free of misapprehensions. He adapted from each thinker a concept that advances the argument

This book is conservative, in that it draws from tradition; but radi­cal, in that it proposes something new. It is philosophy, but it cleaves to historical and very human experience.

On Freedom earns a solid 3 out of 4 trench coats

3

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