On Freedom

Timothy Snyder, “On Freedom, Crown, 2024, 276 pp.

I had a difficult time getting through this book.

NYT Book Review:

On Nov. 9, 2024, it will be 35 years since the Berlin Wall fell. The exhilaration of that moment was followed by high hopes for the spread of democracy throughout Eastern Europe, then in Russia itself when the Soviet Union imploded. Gradually hope gave way to frustration, disappointment, and then dismay. Russia did not become a liberal democracy, nor did many of its former satrapies.

Few people have had more opportunity and reason to ponder this than Timothy Snyder. Before he became a Yale professor and a prominent historian, he spent several years in Central and Eastern Europe, where he came to know one country after another, learn one language after another, and meet many people, among them those who had been brave dissidents against communist rule in its last decadent phase.

His scholarly work includes his formidable book “Bloodlands,” which describes the hideous period in the 1930s and ’40s when as many as 14 million people perished one way or another at the hands of Hitler and Stalin, with Ukraine a particularly awful mass grave. When he published that book 14 years ago, he must have hoped — didn’t we all? — that such large-scale bloodshed wouldn’t be seen there again. (I have read this book as well).

He has also written political and polemical journalism and books, notably “On Tyranny” (2017). (Another I have read)  Inspired by the numb horror he and so many Americans like him felt at the election of Donald Trump, the book looked back at the way fascism had so widely succeeded in 20th-century Europe, not least by using democratic means to destroy democracy. Snyder sought lessons which might help guard against any such American disaster, even if in my view the suggested historical comparison doesn’t really work. There may be an American people, but there is no American Volk, and the objective conditions for anything that could be called fascism don’t exist in the United States, although there might yet well be something very nasty.

Now, as another election approaches, Snyder has returned with “On Freedom.” A longer antithetical companion to the earlier book, it is part memoir, part meditation and part manifesto. Between descriptions of his time in Eastern Europe and reflections on the events there in recent decades, there are invocations of his personal heroes, from European thinkers who lived and died in the Bloodlands days such as the philosophers Simone Weil and Edith Stein, to more recent rebels against despotism such as the former Czech president Václav Havel and the Polish historian Adam Michnik. And there are plenty of sharp phrases: “Donald Trump proved to be a compelling sadopopulist”; “Oligarchs do not just have the biggest piece of the pie. They often have the pie cutter”; “Freedom justifies government.”

For a very long time now, from Aristotle and Kant to John Stuart Mill and Isaiah Berlin, philosophers have discussed the question of freedom and unfreedom. Snyder’s episodic and discursive book doesn’t really belong in that company or make a sustained argument, but he does follow Berlin’s “Two Concepts of Liberty.” Indeed, Snyder is more scathing than Berlin about “negative freedom.” This is merely the absence of restraint or coercion, but it can also mean the freedom to starve to death or die of untreated disease. It is, he writes, “a necessary condition for freedom, not the thing itself.” The positive or substantive freedom in which a good life can be led, Snyder argues, is the kind that might take collective action.

With all his deep absorption in Eastern Europe, Snyder has no illusions about the dilemma of freedom in his own country. Apart from his work as a professor, he teaches prisoners, which gives him a keener appreciation of the unique horrors of American mass incarceration. Likewise his own turn with catastrophic illness — in the winter of 2019, he suffered near-fatal complications from an appendectomy — has given an edge to his critique of American medical care. As he rightly observes, “Americans live shorter, sicker lives while spending far more money on health care than others in comparably rich countries.”

But the problem comes when he turns from diagnosis to remedy. “Universal access to health care is possible,” Snyder writes, “desirable in itself and necessary for a future in freedom.” And good luck with that. His fine words are all very well, but he must know there is no realistic prospect in any foreseeable future that the United States will create a system of universal health care such as is enjoyed in every Western European country. Nor is there much prospect, whether or not Prosecutor Harris wins, that the ferocious American penal regime will be reformed.

Again and again, his book returns — as Snyder has done himself — to Ukraine, where he sees the conflict between freedom and unfreedom in brutally vivid form. He begins in Posad Pokrovs’ke, a village in southern Ukraine, which was completely destroyed by the first Russian advance but whose inhabitants have now returned to live as best they can among the ruins. From here forward the book is haunted by Ukrainian suffering and Russian violence. Then what?

We can all agree that Vladimir Putin is a bloodthirsty brute, whose invasion of Ukraine was a shameful act of aggression. Having said that, I personally would wish this horrible war to end as soon as possible, which will almost certainly mean with some degree of compromise. When Snyder writes that, for America to remain “the land of the free” half a century from now, “Ukraine must win its war against Russia,” does he really believe that’s possible? Does “winning” mean a Russian capitulation comparable to the German generals’ unconditional surrender in May 1945? The only way anything of the kind could conceivably happen would be following a coup to overthrow Putin, a most desirable outcome but improbable at present.

And when Snyder writes that if Ukraine’s “allies fail it, tyrants will be encouraged around the world, and other such wars will follow,” some of us are old enough to feel that we’ve seen this movie before. It was called the domino theory, and it was invoked to justify the Vietnam War — fought in the name of freedom, but bringing much unfreedom in its wake.

This may seem a gloomy and unhelpful way to end a review of a stimulating and well-intentioned book. Of course Snyder is right, in the sense that his heart’s in the right place. I share his horror at crimes past and present. I only wish I could share his optimism about the future.