{"id":66737,"date":"2024-10-23T16:11:37","date_gmt":"2024-10-23T14:11:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/libmod.de\/a-shift-to-the-right-in-the-eu-a-differentiated-view-of-the-election-results-copy\/"},"modified":"2024-10-23T17:02:08","modified_gmt":"2024-10-23T15:02:08","slug":"on-freedom-interview-wit-timothy-snyder","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/libmod.de\/en\/on-freedom-interview-wit-timothy-snyder\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201dOn freedom\u201d \u2013 Interview with Timothy Snyder"},"content":{"rendered":"

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In the face of multiple crises and a depressing world situation, it is not surprising that many non-fiction books from this fall are deeply pessimistic. Unlike \u201cOn Freedom\u201d by US historian Timothy Snyder. Our author Till Schmidt spoke with him about his latest book.<\/h3>\n

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In the face of multiple crises and a depressing world situation, it is not surprising that many non-fiction books from this fall are deeply pessimistic. Unlike \u201cOn Freedom\u201d by US historian Timothy Snyder. Our author Till Schmidt spoke with him about his latest book.<\/p>\n

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The world situation is bleak. In contrast to that, your new book explores a subject associated with hope, trust, and optimism. What made you write \u201cOn Freedom, Timothy Snyder?\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

There are certainly terrible things going on, but we cannot really address them without concepts. We can\u2019t simply react to one crisis or another. A big part of our problem of the last 35 years has been conceptlessness\u2014the lack of ideas or, worse, the idea that we can get by without ideas. With the word \u201dfreedom\u201d we have the begin\u00adnings of a big idea, and I believe of the right idea. I believe that if you define freedom correctly, it opens the way towards a better form of politics, and it opens the imagi\u00adnation towards the future.<\/p>\n

\u201cOn Freedom\u201d is also a very personal book. What genre is it?<\/em><\/p>\n

Freedom is not a subject that we can handle ex cathedra or through an abstract solely logical chain of conclu\u00adsions. Freedom is the value of values, which means that it is the condition in which we can choose other values. But those other values are diverse and sometimes contra\u00addictory. If we are free, we are unpre\u00addictable. The book is about making mistakes and learning. \u201cOn Freedom\u201d mixes memoir, history, and philosophy. It also treats music and literature.<\/p>\n

The book is also in some sense an answer to questions that people have been asking me for fifteen years. So, if in \u201cBlood\u00adlands\u201d or in \u201cBlack Earth\u201d I showed how things went wrong, shouldn\u2019t I then also be able to say something about good politics? People who read \u201cOn Tyranny\u201d quite reasonably asked: If we\u2019re defending something, what is the thing that we\u2019re defending? That intuition is correct because you can\u2019t just stave off problems indef\u00adi\u00adnitely. At some point, you have to be creating.<\/p>\n

\u2026 which leads us to the main argument in your book: The distinction of negative and positive freedom. Why do you make such a strong case for the latter?<\/em><\/p>\n

Negative freedom is not freedom. It is at best a wrong\u00adheaded tradition of talking about freedom, or a precon\u00addition of freedom. In the tradition of negative freedom, we\u2019re concerned with freedom from<\/em>. But the only reason to be concerned with \u2018freedom from\u2019 is because we\u2019re concerned with \u2018freedom to<\/em>\u2019. So, to give you an example: It may be bad to put you in prison, but it\u2019s only bad because you\u2019re a person. So, then the question is: What besides the absence of prison do we need to be free?<\/p>\n

The answer is clearly: not nothing.<\/em><\/p>\n

Absolutely. So, the absence of prison is not enough. The absence of bad government is not enough. The absence of oppression is not enough. Removing the barriers is necessary, but only because we are creatures who are capable of imagining a world that is different to the existing one. One of the problems of negative freedom is that it focuses on the barrier rather than the person. We end up thinking of ourselves as physical objects, just as we think of the barriers as physical objects. We end up with a theory of freedom in which we bounce around following our interests and occasionally run into things. But the point is that without the barriers we cannot grow and change and become.<\/p>\n

There are many good things in the world, and what\u2019s special about us humans is our ability to combine them. Freedom is the condition in which we can do that. We are creatures who are capable of believing in values and realizing them in the world. But values don\u2019t follow physical laws. They\u2019re not predictable. Mathe\u00admatical and logical propo\u00adsi\u00adtions don\u2019t apply to them in the same way. So, you can\u2019t take an average between loyalty and honesty. You can\u2019t say that loyalty is better than honesty. When you\u2019re loyal and when you\u2019re honest is ultimately going to be a human decision. So, freedom is the condition in which we can affirm the things we believe are in our own ways.<\/p>\n

Could you give me examples for when positive freedom has made a striking political impact?<\/em><\/p>\n

I cannot claim that it was perfectly under\u00adstood at any moment in the past. But consider John Maynard Keynes. His basic idea was that people became their worst selves when faced with economic insta\u00adbility. Accord\u00adingly, they are more free, when the government creates condi\u00adtions for stability. And consider Franklin D. Roosevelt: The Americans joined the Second World War on the idea that freedom meant the creation of a different kind of society. The entirety of Roosevelt\u2019s rhetoric was about what we would now call positive freedom. The same could be said of many of the resis\u00adtance movements in Europe during the war.<\/p>\n

In the book, you are using European thinkers like Simone Weil and Edith Stein to develop ideas for Americans. What is the political impact of the idea of negative freedom in the US?<\/em><\/p>\n

It has instructed the Americans that the only barrier to freedom were their own govern\u00adments. This believe disabled govern\u00adments to the point that they were unable to provide some of the basic condi\u00adtions of freedom. At that point Americans start to see each other as a barrier, and politics therefore become a matter of \u2018us-and-them.\u2019 The weakened government was also unable to restrain monop\u00adolies, especially in media and social media, which has also pushed American politics towards fascism.<\/p>\n

The fact that Americans treat freedom as negative has discredited the idea of freedom for Europeans. Therefore, the welfare state is almost never being discussed in terms of freedom. It is solely defined in terms of justice, equality, or common sense. But in fact, the welfare state is best justified as a way to create the condi\u00adtions in which we can become free people.<\/p>\n

In other words: Your under\u00adstanding of freedom can be seen as a correction of the flaws of predom\u00adinant concepts of liber\u00adalism promoting an idea of freedom without taking into account, among others, solidarity and inter\u00adsub\u00adjective encounters?<\/em><\/p>\n

You can\u2019t be free without other people. So, the entire liberal tradition in which we begin with an abstract human being can\u2019t work. A useful starting point is birth. The baby should be free, but freedom will depend on capac\u00adities the baby cannot generate alone. The people who raise and educate the child also need support. In other words: To become an individual, you need collective action. The word \u201cinter\u00adsub\u00adjective\u201d is very appro\u00adpriate here because you can\u2019t become a subject without inter\u00adsub\u00adjec\u00adtivity. You don\u2019t know who you are unless you can listen to other people. And if you are unaware of who you are, then you are definitely not going to be free, because you\u2019re going to be vulnerable to other people who see your weaknesses.<\/p>\n

In my reading of your broader work, both overt and more implicit notions of human agency seem to play quite a big role. In \u201cOn Tyranny\u201d for instance, you juxtapose the notion of agency to a \u201cpolitics of eternity\u201d and to a \u201cpolitics of inevitability.\u201d In what ways is the notion of agency embedded in the notion of freedom as you suggest it in your new book?<\/em><\/p>\n

It is very important, although I use the word \u201csover\u00adeignty\u201d instead. In the first chapter, I consider the struc\u00adtures necessary to educate sovereign people, in other words people who can be free. The newborn has the potential to become an agent, but only if we value and nurture that potential. We can have a notion of what is good, and we have the power, along with other people, to change the world. Denying that is to start down a different rule, a kind of political thought towards author\u00adi\u00adtar\u00adi\u00adanism or fascism.<\/p>\n

And then from there, the question is: How do we use agency? Not all the things that seem like barriers to us are real barriers. Within the concept of negative freedom, other people eventually become the barrier. But instead, only other people enable us to be free, which means that if we take freedom seriously, we must show solidarity. In the concept of negative freedom, the world is simply a limit. But some limits are tools, if we are agents. Dancing is not possible without gravity. We can also know about the world and other people in the past, which extends our own sense of the possible. The knowledge of history allows us to say: Some<\/em> things are possible. Not every\u00adthing, not nothing, but some things.<\/p>\n

In contem\u00adporary political culture, however, there is no utopia. Positive visions of a better future are scarce. But there is a lot nostalgic longing or \u2018retro\u00adtopia\u2019, to borrow from a term of Zygmunt Bauman, meaning the belief in a good future to be achieved by turning towards a roman\u00adti\u00adcized past. Why is that the case?<\/em><\/p>\n

When there is neither an imaginable future nor a historical past, politics becomes a loop back to myth, as with Putin and Trump. Negative freedom eventually extin\u00adguishes future.  If the problem is always on the outside, if the outside is always the barrier, then I never have to ask: Who am I, where should I be going? Practi\u00adcally, negative freedom favors wealth inequality, which itself stifles the future.<\/p>\n

A few people are monop\u00ado\u00adlizing our common future with dumb ideas like that we\u2019re all going to Mars or live forever. Negative freedom also favors global warming, because it presents obvious solutions that would allow billions of people to survive and live in freedom as infringe\u00adments on the rights of a handful of hydro\u00adcarbon oligarchs. Global warming creates the sense that the future is coming to us in a very bad way.<\/p>\n

So, in what concrete ways can that notion of positive freedom help us to develop and nourish positive visions for a better and democ\u00adratic future?<\/em><\/p>\n

If you see freedom as positive freedom, you\u2019re imagining a future in which all sorts of things are possible, and many of them are good. If we think as free people, then we start to get positive feedback loops where the future seems less pressurized and more open. If we can raise children to be sovereign, to be agents, then they reinforce freedom as adults. If we get social media under control, and allow humans to regain more of their unpre\u00addictability, we interact better with one another.<\/p>\n

If we can promise social mobility, then people will be enabled better to think of a personal future, and thus a national or a political one. Factu\u00adality means, among other things, knowing the little truths of local journalism as well as the big truths of science, meaning that we can solve problems together. Solidarity requires addressing differ\u00adences in wealth and income, which would have countless positive effects for freedom.<\/p>\n

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