The book presents a powerful critique of freedom as negative liberty, calls for a more inclusive and collective understanding of liberty’s moral and practical dimensions.
‘On Freedom’, by Timothy Snyder, is a highly perspicacious exploration of liberty, hinged on its philosophical, historical, and practical strands. The author has craftily critiqued the encapsulation of ‘freedom’ as being merely the absence of constraints, calling it negative freedom. He has put forth a richly layered argument for a more constructive and inclusive understanding of the concept of freedom. Freedom, as he has rightly called it, isn’t a vacuum but a living and dynamic ecosystem (Edith Stein’s Leib: a living body, built on collective conscience, empathy, and shared values of understanding and accommodation).
The book’s philosophical grounding is both rigorous and relatable. It draws on thinkers like Edith Stein, Václav Havel, Tony Judt, and Simone Weil, combining their arguments into a very forceful narrative about freedom’s moral and inclusive dimensions. For the major part of the book, Snyder delves into long, allegorical paragraphs about the evolution of the political and philosophical landscape of the world. He argues that freedom begins with sovereignty—our ability to know ourselves and the world within limited coordinates—before expanding into the ever-expanding realms of unpredictability, mobility, factuality, and solidarity. Each of these “forms of freedom” illustrates how liberty requires not only the removal of barriers but also the creation of supportive structures to ‘achieve’ and ‘to be.’
The true erudition of the author becomes apparent through the book’s historical lens. As in his previous works, Snyder has made a case for freedom as all-embracing through the use of contemporary realities, from the USA to Europe to Russia to South Asia. He has used myriad examples, particularly from Eastern Europe and wartime Ukraine, to underscore the fragility, elasticity, and resilience of freedom. He has presented harrowing stories of towns from wartime Ukraine, where liberation from Russian occupation is only the beginning toward the ultimate goal of true freedom. Throughout, he emphasizes that freedom is contingent on reconstruction and collective efforts to build spaces where individuals can explore, expound, and live with dignity and purpose.
The book has elaborately called out the hypocrisy of the American conception of freedom, derived from its misplaced priority on American exceptionalism. It has challenged the idea of “negative freedom,” which dominates U.S. culture and equates liberty with the absence of government interference. This, the book argues, is a shallow understanding of freedom that ignores the necessity of individual social responsibility and the conditions required for social mobility. The book dismantles any semblance of pure, crass, and crude racism against African Americans in the context of what freedom entails. It also illustrates the dangers of confusing unregulated capitalism, the development of monopolies, and environmental degradation with freedom to attain mobility.
One of the most important examples criminally missing in the book is that of Israel and Palestine. If there is such an in-depth analysis of the Holocaust, why is there no mention of the violence in Palestine? While the author hasn’t pulled his punches in dispassionately laying bare the complicity and hypocrisy of world regimes, he has simply failed to push his argument forward on Israel.
That being said, the book is undoubtedly one of the best of 2024. It consistently makes freedom the leitmotif of his arguments, utilizing everyone from Plato to John Locke, Simone Weil, and Arundhati Roy. The book’s prose is engaging and accessible, enriched by Snyder’s personal anecdotes, life experiences, travels, understanding of ethics, erudition, and reflections. He has tried to connect philosophical insights with moments from his life—whether it’s his childhood in the USA, his studies in Eastern Europe, or his experiences in Ukraine during the war. This personal touch has rendered highly complex ideas tangible, legible, and urgent, inviting readers to see themselves in the struggle for freedom.
Perhaps the most innovative aspect of the book is its insistence on the collective conscience that liberty entails. Snyder has rightly dismantled the myth of the self-made individual, showing how freedom is always a product of relationships and shared effort. His discussion of solidarity—the recognition that freedom for one depends on freedom for all—is especially powerful in an era of rising inequality, inequities, poverty, and division.
The message of the book is a compound of celebration and challenge. It celebrates the resilience and creativity of people striving for liberty despite being fettered, while challenging readers to rethink what freedom truly means. Snyder’s vision of freedom as an active, generative process—rooted in empathy, factuality, and shared purpose—is a timely antidote to the cynicism, compartmentalization, and polarization of our age. This book is, rather, a call to action, urging us all to proactively lay down the conditions where freedom can thrive.
Indeed, it is a very powerful read. Highly recommended.
The writer is a teacher
By Uzair Qadri
mo*************@***il.com