On Freedom

October 21, 2024
Yale historian Snyder follows up On Tyranny, his grim but heady look at the ways freedom can get chipped away, with a more soporific rumination on how freedom can be maintained. Snyder contends that in today’s world freedom is wrongly conceived as a “freedom from” negative outcomes, rather than a “freedom to” make choices and flourish. The latter kind of “positive freedom,” in Snyder’s view, comprises an intriguing range of personal freedoms involving both political and bodily autonomy—from freedom of expression and freedom of speech to free healthcare and the right to eight hours of sleep per night. While this sounds lefty, Snyder sets himself up as arguing with the left, who he sees as having ill-advisedly abandoned the notion of freedom as too individualistic. Indeed, the purpose of the book’s many forays into 20th-century history is partly to prove how important the idea of personal freedom has been to leftist triumphs like the defeat of Nazism and the American civil rights movement. Snyder makes many salient points, especially when he notes how fear-powered “negative freedom” leads to social atomization. But the all-encompassing scope of his argument ventures into too tidy territory (Martin Luther King Jr. believed in “positive freedom,” the war on terror was motivated by “negative freedom,” and so on). The many kernels of insight don’t outweigh the cumbersomeness of some of the connections made here.