On Freedom by Timothy Snyder; Crown, 368 pp., $32
Intellectuals, like baseball players, don’t handle every position well. The philosopher tries to write an Umberto Eco novel, but drops the ball. The psychologist decides she’s also a poet, but strikes out. Add the historian who transitions into a philosopher-memoirist. If one admires and appreciates Yale historian Timothy Snyder, as I do, it’s difficult to know what to make of the hodgepodge that is On Freedom. As a scholar and public intellectual, he’s on the side of the angels: skilled as a researcher, indefatigable as an author, antifascist to the core, a fount of worthy policy goals, and the historian who brought Eastern European history to nonspecialist readers. Alas, it may be his very success that explains this departure from the previous high quality of his work.
Snyder first drew significant attention as a historian of Eastern Europe in 2003 with The Reconstruction of Nations, which scholars welcomed as a magisterial account of how the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth evolved over centuries of ethnic strife into Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, and Belarus. Later came Bloodlands (2010), in which Snyder controversially contended that Stalin’s mass killings and the better-known Nazi horrors amounted to interrelated genocides that together claimed 14 million lives. Admirers celebrated (and some critics complained) that the book de-emphasized German Holocaust history, championed Poland’s heroism amid European atrocities, and focused intently on the Soviet Union as an under-recognized villain. Anne Applebaum, who like Snyder often favors Polish narratives of the 20th century, praised Bloodlands as “a brave and original history of mass killing in the twentieth century.” The majority of reviewers also applauded 2015’s Black Earth, a paradigm-shifting work that moved past German- and Auschwitz-centric interpretations of the Holocaust. In it, Snyder asserted that fear of environmental crisis had triggered Hitler’s imperialism and cautioned that modern-day climate change could prompt fascism to rise again—a warning that signaled his drift from pure historian to prognosticator and activist.
Those books, although not universally well received (some reviewers strenuously objected to the author’s interpretations), raised Snyder’s profile. After Russia’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine and Donald Trump’s presidential win two years later, his academic expertise and his willingness to apply it to current events helped vault him to the peak of celebrity as a public intellectual. Yale launched a 23-hour series of Snyder’s lectures about Ukraine on YouTube, and he became a regular commentator on cable news networks and a contributor to prestige outlets such as The New York Review of Books. Snyder became even better known in 2017 with the release of his breakout bestseller, a slim, by-the-cash-register book called On Tyranny. Written in an imperative voice that exhorted Americans to resist Trumpian autocracy, it mixed predictable political admonitions (“Do not obey in advance”) with more surprising ones (“Read books”). Two more works followed: The Road to Unfreedom (2018), in which Snyder doubled down on his growing status as a political theorist and policy activist, and last year’s Our Malady, about his near death from a postappendicitis infection that developed into sepsis. Just as history offers lessons for the future, he seemed to have decided, so too does autobiography. In Our Malady, Snyder upped his inclination to comment on everything from American health care to the decline of local journalism.
Now we have On Freedom, and here, unfortunately, Snyder’s interweaving of vignettes from his life as a small-town Ohio kid, a Cincinnati Reds fan, and a gradual pal of Eastern European intellectuals like Adam Michnik and Leszek Kołakowski comes across as disjointed and distracting. Also odd is Snyder’s potted “Intro to Atomic Theory,” offered in advance of his pitch for fusion energy, and his occasional riffs on mass incarceration as purely racist rather than connected to criminality. It’s as if Snyder decided that On Freedom should give him the freedom to shoehorn his every political thought into the manuscript.
One can best characterize the book as a work of secular existentialism, though Snyder writes as if his readers have never heard of Sartre or Camus. His central position is that freedom divides into “negative freedom” (elimination of constraints) and “positive freedom” (achieving goals as an autonomous individual). But whereas “negative freedom is our common sense,” he writes, only positive freedom is coherent. He thinks we get the word freedom wrong. He then hammers home his hostility to negative freedom with numbing redundancy, going so far as to assert that thinking of it as removing hindrances prevents positive freedom.
Positive freedom, he continues, requires five social conditions: sovereignty (the creation of free human beings), unpredictability (the capacity of humans to do the unexpected), mobility (the capacity to move to new places in society), factuality (respect for truth), and solidarity (wanting the same for others as for oneself). All make social sense. The chief merit of Snyder’s existentialism is that, unlike his French precursors, he always homes in on the concrete, practical, worldly underpinnings of freedom. It leads him to enthusiastic advocacy of policies, such as early childhood education.
Philosophically and stylistically, however, On Freedom’s weaknesses include exaggeration, repetition, excessive recycling of thoughts from Snyder’s earlier works, and an insistence that concepts like freedom and reason are misunderstood—and that only a slice of their meaning stands as a legitimate part of their definition. It doesn’t help that in contrast to his method as a historian, Snyder fails to adequately acknowledge the substantial literature in the field, from John Stuart Mill to Isaiah Berlin. Even as recent a book as Cass Sunstein’s On Freedom (2019), which Snyder’s somewhat mirrors in its approach, goes unmentioned.
Many political philosophers would agree that freedom divides into negative and positive aspects. They would likewise point out, however, that negative and positive freedom are separate from each other and that Snyder is mistaken to contend that only positive freedom is legitimate. He might have listened more closely to Wittgenstein: the way we use a word is the meaning of that word. In a rare inclusion of contrary thinking, Snyder acknowledges that one of his incarcerated students didn’t quite buy the idea that negative freedom—getting out of jail—wasn’t freedom.
Snyder takes for granted that freedom is the value that makes all other values possible. But Aristotle pointed to courage, just as other thinkers have advocated for wisdom. Snyder never considers another possibility. He believes that one must understand history in order to understand the future. I hope that in his own future, Snyder applies the same scholarly rigor he has brought to Eastern European history to his philosophical and political observations.
