On Freedom
Key Data
- Author: Timothy Snyder
- Published: 2024
- Purchase link
- Finished reading on: 7.2.2026
Content
The book argues for a vision of Freedom as divided into 5 sub-components, utilizing contemporary social and political issues and rebuts some common misuses of the word.
Why Did I Read It?
As a liberal and a fan of Timothy Snyder, I was interested to see how he would navigate the classical liberal problem of just advocating for a value-less, process-driven vision of the world, which fails to inspire.
Thoughts After Finishing
I have very mixed feelings about the book. On the one hand, I think it delivers some very powerful philosophical arguments about freedom, and provides a great positive vision to look forward to. On the other hand, it is structurally weak and thus leaves itself open to a wide range of preventable criticisms. Some of the micro-arguments are also weak (both in terms of substance and phrasing), and as such this book fails its ambition to "forge a new consensus" as advertised, and is basically only accessible to leftists.
Main Takeaways
- Freedom is a positive virtue, something to be enacted by humans. It describes our ability to operate in the "fifth dimension", the gap between what is and what should be. Virtues play an important role in that gap, and us combining them, as well as finding new ones is essential. It is divided into five sub-components:
- Sovereignty: The knowledge of oneself and the external world sufficient to make judgments about values and realize them.
- Unpredictability: Acting in "the world of values", affirming and combining them, together with others reducing susceptibility to people or structures that want to control us.
- Mobility: Capable movement in space and time and among values and the capacity to choose and alter our path as we go.
- Factuality: An understanding of reality that allows us to change it for the better.
- Solidarity: Self conscious labor to make the other forms possible for others, just as they had been made possible for us by our priors.
- Conceiving freedom as negative, and to be achieved by removing barriers just empowers those who already profit off the system. Instead, one should strive to continuous improvements to improve everyone's lives.
Criticisms
- The book's structure is just not appealing to me. Essentially, it divides "Freedom" into 5 subcategories, which it then explores in sub-chapters tied to contemporary issues. While there is value in giving such an examples-heavy, concrete overview of the discussed values, it also makes it hard to track the main argument of the book. Oftentimes, I found myself asking what Mr. Snyder was even arguing for in a section, or how that section was relevant to the overall point.
- Mr. Snyder uses this book as a way of commenting on a multitude of political topics. Personally, I don't think this has a place in a book ostensibly concerned with moral philosophy, axioms and defining terms. The quality of the commentary also varies significantly, ranging from a precise dismantling of Russian political messaging about the war in Ukraine, to weird dismissals of US economists competence, to a ludicrous explanation of how racism is the reason for the USA not having universal healthcare.
- The reason for this varying quality is quite simple: Timothy Snyder is a historian, he isn't an economist, nor a political scientist. He is very competent in matters of his own field, but he shouldn't assume that that competence carries over to other fields (funnily enough, that is the same criticism, verbatim that I give Jordan Peterson).
- Alternatively, he could rigorously defend these positions in that field while disclosing that he is not fully qualified, but he doesn't even do that. In one section, he implicitly states that politicians and economists are hoodwinking everyone about income inequality without providing any supporting evidence (page 156).
- Mr. Snyder also fails to see the chances in the digital revolution and social media, uniformly dismissing it in favor of personal activity and manual research. While I see the merits in that argument, I think that it misses that the world has moved on, and limits our ambitions to constructively deal with it.