remove going forward and you just for the best. and with that a few housekeeping notes. but i think we can wrap things up. this has been a fantastic conversation. thank you. great q&a. great questions from, the audience. the book is power and the money the epic clashes between commanders in chief and titans of industry. it's on sale at amazon and. all other booksellers, those of you in the audience, use this little card here that you should have to get your own copy. the few notes on september 19. cii is hosting our annual julian simon memorial award dinner that will be at the national cathedral. you can sign up for that at cia dot org and are always doing events like this both here at our headquarters in d.c., also on capitol hill and around town. so keep an eye on c.i. dawgs events. and with that, thank you very

much for a wonderful event. have a good day day. professor snyder, i'm delighted to talk with you today. you're a well-known historian and you've written books on the history mass killings in eastern europe and in the trump era. you became an important public voice warning about the dangers of tyranny. and when democracies slip into tyranny. and so after writing many books

on violence and tyranny, why did you decide to to a book on freedom and a book on advocating for freedom? yeah that's a nice first question, because it contains the in itself. so if you think about the trajectory that you're suggesting i spent and years trying to figure out the politic of atrocity, i wrote a book called bloodlands, which was about mass killing in the thirties and forties in europe and then a book called black earth, which was about the causes of the holocaust of the --. and in in responding to questions about those books, there was always the implicit thought. if i can explain things go wrong, then i ought to at least have some advantage in explaining why things could go right, or how they could go right. it's not as translation, but it's in there. and likewise with on tyranny. when i went on tour with on

tyranny, which out as a really simple tour like me and and a backpack and sandals and carrying the book around the gateway for free. the question asked, which was wise, was fine we should defend this republic, but what exactly are we defending? what what the good version of this republic be? or to put it a different way. like if you can write resisting tyranny again, you be able to say something about what freedom is. and it's actually it's a much harder challenge. it's much harder to prescribe than to describe. and it's much harder to define freedom than it is to define the absence of it. so i understood this as a challenge, as a necessary challenge for me, but also was something which was perhaps important for the discussions that i felt like i was taking part in. great. yet this is a book on freedom that is pitched to a certain degree to americans. but you also include stories from about freedom from all over the world and you open the book with the voices of ukrainians in

current war torn ukraine. and i'm. what is it about ukrainians? visions of freedom in the midst of war that led you to open the book with their comments. well, let me start with a method, a logical test. so, i mean, you write about freedom to and and you've done it from you've done it from unorthodox perspectives. i think it was very important for me to different perspectives in the book. and that's an easy thing to say, right? and it's also pretty easy to popular your book with people who are not yourself. but i wanted to do something a little bit stricter with myself. i want i really want to avoid the situation where i was just making arguments and being right because it's my intuition that that's not what freedom can be about. that freedom is not about being all by yourself behind a desk making arguments and being right. that freedom is essentially about understanding yourself by

way of identifying with others that have free freedom is ultimately an individual achievement. you can't really get there without knowing yourself and you can only really know yourself if you're if you're able to listen to others, which is harder than it sounds. and so at the level of creating the book, i wanted to take the thing that i'd written into spaces where i would be in a way required to listen to other people. one of those spaces was a prison and another space was occupied. ukraine, where i took the book three times while i was writing it. so, i mean, it begins with a kind methodological check on myself that. i need to go to places where people are thinking about or talking about freedom and hear them. and so then just getting to your question, what does one learn from ukraine? i think when you learn some not things, right. so if you're far away from a war and you're from a country where people talk about freedom, you're naturally going to be thinking, well, the ukrainians are going to want a free themselves from the russians. and interestingly, that's not what their discussion was about

at all. in its essence if if you what they do and this is where i start the book i start the book as you can remember a conversation with an older woman village had been totally destroyed and, then occupied by the ukrainian army. if you start from that position from that ukrainian concept, the occupation. it helps a lot because it reminds you that getting of the bad thing no matter. how horrible it was. i mean, the russian occupation involves executions it involves torture, it involves deportation of children for forced assimilation. it's just it's close to as bad as things can get. but getting rid that thing is just the no matter how bad it is, you still have to rebuild the houses from, the rubble. you know, in the case of maria, the woman i was talking to at the beginning, the book, there has to be a path cleared from her, the little corrugated metal she's living in from there to the road there has to be a path because she uses a walker she's not going to be free without that. the have to start running to get

on that road if she's going to be free. in other words freedom has to be not just negative but positive. and that's always true. i think it's true for everybody. but in these in these words, drastic situations, the picture comes into focus more sharply. and then another thing, which i got from you, from ukrainians has to do with the future. so we like in our conversations, freedom. we very often get lassoed into talking about the founders or talking about the declaration of independence or talking about holder country and these things. i mean, my people have been for a really long time and i have my own attachments to things that are very old, but freedom has to be about taking, like finding the paths that lead from the past into the future it can't be about cycling back into the past. you can't really go back into the past. and so and i think a lot of what's wrong in our present political discussion in the us, in the west, which is the world, is the absence of the future.

and ukrainians made that very clear because the way they're talking about, about freedom is all about the future and the problem with the russians is that the russians are getting in the way of possible which ukrainians think are were there and need to and need to be grasped again. and then the final thing is what i think about is this the lenski. so a few a few months into the war, i talked to president zelensky for the first time about the war, and he was really helpful with me on a number of these points. but the one thing which i wanted to talk to you about was why he had stayed, why he had, why he had chosen to stay at a time. we remember in february 2022 when basically everybody assumed everybody assumed that he was going to flee, that the ukrainians were going to flee, the ukrainian army, wasn't going to fight on the ukrainian state was going to collapse. why does why do you stay? and this helps me with defining freedom as positive in a different way, in a moral way, which for me is the fundamental thing. i mean, the in the conversation we had, what he made clear was he he didn't really feel like he had a decision to make.

he going to stay and he was going to stay because of all the prior because of the person was he wouldn't be the person he was if he decided to go if he went and the reason that's true is because of all of the other choices that he had made before that which made him the person who was and i think that's really helpful. we think of freedom. we often think, well, freedom is just doing what i feel like right now. it's just an impulse. but what you feel like right now are your impulses very often guided by forces that you're not thinking about, that you don't understand? i think freedom has much more to do with being able to choose among moral commitments over time and becoming a person and then sometimes that person you become in a certain predicament can only really do one thing. and that's precisely because you're free, right? so i think there's are moments where an unfree will try to run, but a free person will stay or a free person will think you know, this is the only thing that i believe that can do right now, precisely because they are free. so those are some of the things that ukrainians help me with

great that. that's really beautiful. and i think, you know, part what you're doing is showing us versions of that. you are asking us to think about grapple with and strive for. and you're also really criticizing some of the ways in which we have come to use the language of freedom recent years, you write in the book recently, quote, the word freedom in the english language came to mean little more than the privilege of a few wealthy americans not to pay taxes the power of a few oligarchs to shape the discussion and the unequal application of criminal law and quote, you know, in my own work, i call these ugly freedoms, where we see freedom the language of freedom being to justify violence, cruelty and oppression. and so i'm wondering, you can tell us a little bit more about the kinds freedoms that you are writing against, the ways in which people are using freedom that you don't think really measure up to what the word and the practice of freedom should be. mm hmm.

i think, first of all, i would i want to thank you for setting up what i think is a very important defense of philosophy or political, which is that we really have to pay attention to the words we can't have the concepts without the words. and when we lose the words, it's very hard to get the concepts and we don't have the concepts. it's very hard to get to the practices. and so one way of thinking about this whole book is that i'm trying to i'm trying to claim the word freedom, not even because i have not for a particular cause, by the way, end up arguing for certain causes by the end, because really do believe that the word means something that they were better, not just better and worse ways of talking about it. i think they're right ways and wrong ways of talking about it. and i think the wrong ways are the ones that that fill up our minds, fill up our fill up our computer screens. they're the ones that fill up the public discussion. and it starts i believe, from the idea that freedom is negative. the idea that freedom is just a

barrier rather than an opportunity. i think that's that's the that's the deep problem. and historically as i think, you know, you know, nobody's much better than me. but historically, the problem is that if if i'm a slave or if i'm one of a small group of people who has the vote, then freedom for me can easily be defined as the government leaving alone for me. right. and most of the people writing about freedom for the last 500 years have been in some position like that owning slaves, owning, owning a lot of land, being served by women. and so in that situation, you, you define freedom as negative. it's a government not taking my stuff away because only a government is going to be able to enfranchise the slaves or give the vote to the women. that's a very basic historical trajectory. and then we have to be aware of that because it's very powerful in our own country. but but then there's also this

the philosophical issue. and the linguistic habit. if we think of freedom as just being against things, then we really have a chance. then we're being taught not to think about what we're for. and that, i think, is the beautiful aspect of freedom. right. so, i mean, my my book is about regions beautiful. that for me is the beautiful aspect of freedom. that's about our quirks. it's our commitments. it's about like the things we actually care about actually value truly value and where they might overlap with other people's commitments and values and quirks and and that in order to be a to be free people, we have to have some kind setup which allows us to become those individuals. right. but if freedom's just negative, it's just against things. then we're never asked to think about what we're for. and all that space of what we're supposed to be for. or put it more broadly, the thinking about what the future is supposed to be ends up getting taken up by.

the people who have the money, who have the platforms and they give us really weird ideas like we're all going to live forever, or we go to mars. or in the case of ukraine or you know, putin's very weird idea, we're going to invade ukraine because it exist. and so ends up getting warped because it's the concept is the concept is negative and. when it's negative, it when it's when it's empty, when it's without the values that it ends up being de facto taken over by a few voices. great. you implicit in your answer just now is that we also need to ask for kind of different relationship between government and freedom than the one that is popular right now, right in our own era, there's a really deep anti statist streak, right? the claim that state services are only ever and that we're only free when government is shrunk to like a little shriveled raisin right. and you're explicitly arguing

against claim and you suggest that government services can make us free. and this is another quote from you. you write, it takes collective work to bring structure of freedom. so tell us a little bit more about that. yeah. yeah. i mean, i'm just let me just say it. i mean, the idea that that freedom is against government is is childish and wrong. and we really need to drop it. the you can't you can't get yourself to freedom from that idea because there is intrinsic connection, individuality and co-op. i mean, i mentioned the very i think is the most basic example of this is that if you if you want to be free, you have to know yourself and you just can't yourself by yourself. you need other people for that. that's the very beginning and that's true it anymore have legs but if we then think seriously about life reproductively

biologically we we realize that it's just blatantly obvious that there have to be collective structures already in place whenever there a birth if that child wouldn't have a chance to be free. i mean, it's it's just it's just idiotic to think that if you have a child and then you leave that child by the side of the road, it's going to grow up to survive, let alone grow up to be free. and once one makes that basic admission, then you have to go on to the next step, which is, well, what would be the structures for that child to survive and grow up to be free? and that's that's kind of the way i formed the argument in the book. i have five steps or five forms of freedom in the book, which are sovereign unpredictability, mobility, sexuality, solidarity. and they're meant to be a logical chain of argument from, freedom to government, but they're also meant to describe a way, the path of a life that where sovereignty means all the

things that we would want to have in place, knowing what we know, early childhood development, we know a fair amount knowing those things, what are what would we need to have in place for a child to have a chance to grow up free? because to be free, you have to know yourself. you have to understand, you have to be able to regulate your emotions. you have to have of working out your sensibility out into the world and all that stuff. and it doesn't come from nowhere. it comes from other people and their time and their commitments, and that requires structures. and so if we want to have a land of the free, we want to have a country where people grow up become free. the work has to be cooperative. and it also has to be generational. we can't make it up again every time a child is born and the name for co-operative in generation no work is government. that's what government can do. so it's it's view that freedom as as as the value of values is how i see it freedom justifies government not all government, but it justifies government which designed to create the conditions of freedom and, i

think. so that's mainly an argument as you're implying, against the right or a form of right wing ideology, which would say let's just make the government small. that's just dumb, right? that's childish, simple. like it's no better than a stalinist saying, let's make government big. it's just a very easy binary. it gives you an answer to every question, but it's stupid, especially as a way to think about freedom. but it's also a critique of the left right, because on the left or these structures are argued for, but they're a bit people tend to hesitate, argue for them in the name of freedom. and i think it's quite important to argue parental leave, health care, frickin the garden, those sorts of things in terms freedom because they are necessary, the freedom of the child and they're also necessary for the freedom of the parents and the adults in question. so a lot of the things which so to put it a different way, like if do take freedom seriously, then you have care about these structures. and if you already care about these structures, as a lot of

people do, it might make sense to think about them. terms of freedom. great. thank you this connects to another place where you, i think intervening our current ways of describing freedom. an aligned one is the free market. right. so there's a discourse about government always being a source of freedom and. then at the same time that the free market is the real of freedom. right? you write, however, right in the vision that you're offering in the book that markets can't be free, only people can be free. the moment we delegate freedom to the market or anything else, it becomes submission. so why? what is it about the free market that you see a contradiction in terms, or perhaps that freedom is not the right language? perhaps, you know, an ugly freedom or a misuse of freedom? yeah. i mean, so let me let me just start with the very banal point. i markets are useful tools. i mean, among other social

institutions that we imagine and create and and allow to function and then revise. i think markets are very useful. i'm not i'm not against markets. what i am against is the essentially religious idea that markets are there to save, which they're not. markets are they're social institutions which we create and which we guide and if some of us say the market must be free, we're really just saying that other people get to control the markets and those are going to be the people who control market. those are going to be who have who have to have huge amounts of money, who can control. when we talk about markets. so if some of us say markets are free, we're basically saying, well, we're going to let other people control the markets, which is a very weak position to be in. and of course, the deeper problem, which you've already suggested, is that describing a market is free has to be a mis description at one and more superficial and at deeper level. superficial level is there is

not a free market. if you try to create a free market, you will not end up with a market you end up with, you'll end up with with murder and theft. i mean an actual market, an actual absence of government regulation means the contract are impossible because they're not enforceable. it means there's not going to be the infrastructure. it means that it's not a crime for someone. kill you and sell your kidneys because after all, that's a transaction. so why shouldn't it be free, right? so on its own terms, the free market makes sense. but there's a deeper the deeper problem is the philosophical problem, the moral problem, the american problem is is what you've already said. if the moment you take that adjective free and you take it away from people and you put it onto anything else and i mean anything else, even including the things we do it, we do it habitually all the time. but the moment do that, you're making an authoritarian move because what you're saying is, i'm going to count on something else outside of me to bring me freedom. and that by cannot be freedom.

it can only freedom if it's you on the basis what you care about working in some with but in some way against the world, you know, creating some warm friction that's freedom. saying that the market, anything else is free and it's going bring me freedom is always going to be authoritarian because it creates the mental habit that someone else can take, someone something else can take can take could take care freedom for me, which of course, is not. but it's not just that. it's a mistake. it's a particular kind of psychological or spiritual mistake because you're training yourself to be submissive, to which doesn't really even exist the way that you want it to exist. great. i want to shift registers for a moment. you've made a really bold choice in this book, which is tell the story of freedom in part your own personal stories. and i think some of the most beautiful moments in this book are when we learn about your childhood playing baseball or

spending with your grandma, about your cutting, your son's umbilical cord when. he's born and even your brush with a deathly illness a few years ago. so i'm wondering what why did you decide to bring personal stories and what's so important about the personal stories in your argument for freedom. that's that's a really that's a that's that's a really good question. and because you're right, it's a it's a significant choice. and i want to stress that this is not a book about how i was right. like, it's more a book of how i've been wrong. and i think that's the correct way. okay. so maybe i'm right about this, but i think that's the correct way structure. thinking about freedom because i don't i don't think freedom is a

subject it's not a subject like, you know, predicting the movement of billiard balls. i think the nature freedom is such that it's not proposed emotional. it has to do with the things we actually care about and things we actually care about. they have a different geometry from the geometry of of the physical world. and what's beautiful about freedom is that it's the state where those things can become real, you know, where our values, the things we actually care about, we have enough agency, enough support, enough power to get some of those things out into our own lives and not a universe, and thereby making the universe interesting. and more and more. and so when i write my life, i, i'm trying not to do the thing which would maybe be expected. the thing which would me to expect. it would be to say, okay, here's a kid. like he grows like he's on a farm, he's ringing a bell, like he has this great american life. everything's and in many i would have had a great american life.

i, i think, been able to live a life which is unusually free but not because everybody can and and i'm trying show how one kind of trajectory is can be is unusual and i'm trying to show how someone in that trajectory has to learn from other people and has to recognize his own mistakes and like i'm trying to kind of applying socratic method to myself like when i was six, when i was 12, when i was 18, i thought this, i thought this, i thought this. when i was 50 and i got sick, i thought this and i was wrong, right i was wrong. and maybe the way i was wrong is suggestive. a general mistake, right? so like when i got sick and almost died, lot of things were going on. but one of the things which was going on was i was my basic thinking, which was i'm a hard individualist and i don't need anybody's help. that was a basic part of the problem. and that way of thinking can be really helpful, can also be overdone, counterproductive and even deadly individually, but also socially and politically.

because if some people think we're the people who are the hardest individuals who never needs help, then we might also think, well, those other people, they're always sponging off the government and if we have health care, they'll somehow take advantage of it. and once you get to that thought, then you find yourself it impossible for there to be health care for everybody. and when you make it impossible for there to be health care for everybody, you're making everybody less free, which we have, which we have done. so that's that's part of it. and then mean part of it's also that it is i mean although i use use lots of i try to use philosophers who aren't american because i'm trying to come in from an angle and bring in words and ideas that are maybe unfamiliar and therefore helpful. i want it to be meaningfully set in the united states i wanted i people to know that like my notion, america is very tangible. it involves these, these all these, these, these, these, these very obviously sometimes you've ostentatiously like with baseball, american things and

that these things which we're used to holding unseen before our eyes are holding our hands like sports. they can we can use those things to, think about freedom in a different way. and to think about ourselves in a different way. but i can only really do that if real that i was a pitcher, for example or if it's real that my daughter is a pitcher. i can only do that if that if the physical is actually true and i can work from it. great. so in that sense, it's a book also how you've learned, right? or how how you how your own life experiences continue to teach about freedom. and i think one of the places that seems really important for that learning is the prison, right? you write a lot about the challenges of in a place that values freedom but also has a system of mass. and you also do a lot of your own teaching within prisons, and you write about that, about your experience teaching incarcerated students and how they are teaching you. and so i'm wondering what what is it about your experiences in the prison system that you think

is for us to learn about freedom? okay. first of all, i don't overstate any of this. i taught i taught as i taught a really important semester, long seminar on freedom, on the philosophy of freedom in the maximum security facility. and then that was helping me to write the book. and then i went back a year later and workshops the manuscript of the book in the same prison with with generally the same students and that partly because it goes back what i've seen before about about a test on yourself so i mean these my students who are all men and who are almost entirely african-american generally younger, though not all of them than me they've had different american experience. and i know like i know that abstractly, but i can't i don't really feel that unless i'm in their space, at least for a little bit, or they're in my space, it makes a huge difference that we're in the room together and i'm looking at

them and i see how they react to certain ideas physically and i see how they interact with with one another. that's there's no substitute for that. that's a that's like a baseline. got to be with the other person. the whose experience are different than yours. and with these, you know with my incarcerated students who i was able to teach thanks to thanks to the the yale prison education initiative like it's no virtue of mine. they made it extremely easy for me to to get into this very teaching space. i'm you were also you also i mean it's very simple and it's almost like it's it's almost embarrassingly dumb. but i'm going to say it anyway. you realize how much talent there is in places that are very different from your place. so i'm in a history department or a public affairs school or whatever, and maybe the university. and then i teach a in in a maximum security prison. and the seminar is actually better than the seminars i teach at yale. and that's partly because the

guys have a lot time and they really want to be there. various reasons. they really want. they know what they want, what they really want seminar. they want a professor. they want that structure. they want to learn. but also it's because some of them are just very, very gifted people. and then that forces you back into the question of why like what is it about the country i'm living in where i'm very talented people end up in such different places and where the lifting of them takes place when they're so young right. and that lead, you know, that leads back to some of the arguments about structure. sure. but i was trying to make in the book where i'm trying, you know, kind of going back to your earlier questions, i'm trying to go from positive freedom as an idea to talk to government as as a practice to thinking about the stages of life and these guys help me a lot with that. they really they affirm some of the things i was thinking or pushed me further on on some of

the things, for example, unpredictability for me is very important because i think that we're free and we're unpredictable. i think is the core of freedom, not rationality. i think it's really unpredictability but they push me hard on that because what they said was, look, there was too much unpredictability in our lives. that was the problem. and they're right. and, you know, the way to square the circle is that in order to create conditions where you and i, everybody can be our quirky, unpredictable selves and combine values in new ways and make them new values for that to happen, we have to have a certain level of predictability in the world around us. not too much climate change. not not not too many political disasters. the predictable of health care and predictability of retirement, pensions and school, all of that can be built into lives. and that helps people become themselves because it gets us out of a world of fear and anxiety. that's just that's just one example. but, you know, the fundamental

thing which i knew i was going to get tested on, i needed to get tested on for this book to work at all was the trajectory of my life, which you mentioned before. i can work from the trajectory of my life like it is an american life. it has it has many stereotypical features, you know, from the from the rose it from the of corn to the baseball field. it has many stereotypical features, but i think it's not okay for me to talk about that trajectory if it's not encountering other trajectories, too. and know one, it's okay for me to live a life, but it's not okay if i do it in a way that those guys cannot understand. and so i had to make sure that like every time i was using, they could say, okay, can use me that way, right? or if i was going to talk about me in the 4th of july, which is how the book begins, i had to listen to their talking about what the 4th of july meant, meant for them. not because i can make the book about everybody because it has to be intelligible for everybody. and like that notion of

intelligibility requires more stretching maybe than you think. so they were very helpful for for me for that. i also think that notion of intelligibility is important for one of the core arguments in your book is that freedom requires. and so i'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about the role solidarity in freedom. you know, thanks for solidarity. solidarity comes as as the last in the of the fight forms, but it kind of circles around to embrace all of the others, you know, sovereignty is is is about the beginning of life. for me, unpredictability is about the early stages of life and dealing with the predictability, the physical world and dealing with to predict what, i think of as the predictive fine power of the digital world and mobility is kind of a is about getting out

into the world and you know what what institutions do we have to have in place so people can rebel right? solidarity circles back on all those earlier forms because excuse me, without without solidarity, none of the rest of it is really going to make sense starting from the beginning, if if i don't recognize you as a person, then i'm not going to understand myself. that's a very that's the starting point in a way from the whole argument which comes from which comes ed stein and simon bey in this book. but also philosophically, if i'm not able if i'm not able to reason about freedom, a way which includes you as well as me, that i'm not really reasoning about freedom. okay, that's pretty that's not a hard step to take, but then you move from there to sociologically or politically, historically, and you get back on to some of the territory we're talking about before where in fact the word freedom hasn't

begun from a recognition that i need to see somebody else's perspective, to see myself. it hasn't begun from a recognition of human equality, but has instead begun from a position which says, i'm free because of the stuff i already have defending the stuff i already have is freedom, even if that means not recognizing others. and it means the continue ation of injustice. i'm trying to get over that because i mean honestly, just like as a philosophical challenge, trying to get over it, not just as a political one, i mean primarily as a philosophic one. and i think if you saw the philosophical problem, you end up solving the political problem, too, or you reveal the political problem. so if you if you define freedom, the right way as including solidarity, then you end up that makes the political problem clearer or where the historical problem in america clearer. this, by the way, i mean the terms solidarity comes to me from a very specific place. i'm i'm a historian, eastern europe and much of this thought, much of this book is populated by by the thoughts of dissidents

who i admired, who were also often about freedom from prison in a specific way. in the second half of the 20th century and, one of the insights of one of these dissidents or, one of the sayings of one of these dissidents, a man called out of mason neck in poland was there is no freedom without solidarity. and that was a play on words. their labor movement was called solidarity. but i think it's actually literally true. i think it's i think the right way to begin discussion. you actually can't have freedom without, solidarity. you might think you can and you certainly can use the word a lot without feeling any solidarity. you understand its importance, but i don't think you can actually get to freedom without solidarity. great. thank you. you know, i think also in hearing your referencing of many different thinkers political theorist dissidents, there's a real subtext to, the book that this that's studying and especially study of the humanity. this can help to make us free.

right. you're drawing so much from history, from literature from political thought, from other people's visions to assess what freedom for us and how to nurture it. so i'm wondering if you can talk a little more about the role, the humanities and the kind of freedom that you're advocating for. yeah. thank you for noticing that i that was like this is a serious book. it's about what i think is the most serious subject of all. but it's also meant to be a playful book because i freedom has to be playful i think a free life is going to involve play it's going involve unpredictable connections. and i wanted that to show through in the book i mean not that i hope the book is coherent and i believe it is, but i wanted to write it in a way which allow other thinkers to have interesting kinds of apertures into the story rather than just saying, okay, there was a check. his was boscobel and he said this. i wanted the reader to see how

it was precisely rock and roll music that brought him into the public sphere and that is not exactly an accident. this sort certain kind of logic to that which has to do with the role that rock and roll played in freedom in that particular time and place, but maybe also more broadly with the way that art is, the thing which sometimes shakes us up. so i i'm glad you mentioned because i this this is a book where i talk about the iliad and i talk about i talk about there's a very humanities references in this book. there are a couple of pages where i talk about plato. socrates pops up here and there, but there are also some hopefully i appreciate you're saying this some less expected humanities references as well. and i wanted that all to coexist. and going directly now, your question and starting negatively. i think the decline of freedom is directly connected to the dismissal of of history and of

the humanities because again, thinking about it negatively, it's it's the humanities which allow us to see the trauma mendacity wide and colorful and unpredictable range of human thought. if when you when you dive into the humanities, there is a there's a you acquire or you acquire a sense of the normality of the strangeness. right. and then later the strangeness of the normal but the normality of the strange that there is so, so ways to think about life, even just within one tradition. i mean, even within, say, english literature, just that if you go deep into english literature, it's incredible how many different ways there are thinking about the purposes of life. just there. and then you can move to french literature and then you can move to german philosophy, and then you can move to you know, then you can move to nordic and and trends, polar shamanism know. but from any perspective you're going to find all of this

richness and that itself is a lesson which we need to have because we tend to think that whatever like if we think that the values that we can the esthetic moral value that that are real are just the ones that happen to be in front of our face right now. then we're living very narrowly, and that's kind of sad in itself, but it's also politically really disempowering because it leaves us unable. imagine how things could be different, or it means that our sense, the difference of difference is something what we've got. but more or less so like turn up volume, turn down the volume on the status quo, make it more calm, make it less calm or something like that. whereas in fact. and i'm going to talk a little bit to history history shows all of these things which actually happened, most of which were not expected, a lot of which were quite strange and that if you have some sense of that past, then you can feel some of the

lines that are coming from the past into the present and you can think, okay, we could follow that line or that line or that line and. then you get a sense of how the future is broader than you think, and you also get a sense how people are trying to hold you down by not teaching you parts of the past so you don't see those lines in the future. you can only see the future the way that they're the future to you. so i you're you're right. i mean, this book i'm really trying this is meant to be a book which shows, you know, knock on wood. i mean, it's it's meant to be a book which can show what the what the humanity can do. because i that i think that this, you know, i love the sciences. i study sciences. you know, my kids study the sciences. my brother's a physicist. it's but this move that we have made to say that all problem are technical problems, this that you know, the world is full of how there's no room for why that's not just incurs wrecked

is a description of the world. it it leaves it leaves unable not to ask questions, but to do the things which from asking the questions so so yes is i'm affirming your question. yes absolutely. you know, you do focus on a lot of dissidence as you noted in the answer just now, and there is a playfulness to that as well. and i think part of it is also, you know, dissidents and some of these really important thinkers have a lot to teach us about freedom, but also that freedom doesn't necessarily require all of us to be heroes, right, to be the strongest or to be the dissident. we don't need to be mastering fate and conquering dragons in order to practice freedom. right. freedom can sometimes be as you open the book with the comforts of home pursuing a job that you enjoy right living a life without fear of tyranny and so what is it about the ordinariness, the everyday ness of freedom is so powerful.

i love that question partly because it can it contains within it a a of the dominant notion of freedom. so in the dominant notion of freedom, we don't know what we were for. we just know that are some big threat. and that notion of freedom gets played out for us again and again and again in our entertainment. and that really reinforces it. so like in, you know, i say this as somebody who consumes a lot of hollywood movies. i mean, this book is largely about raising children. and in my case, you know, it may not be the best of parents that's involved watching a lot of movies and, you know, the logic is often that there's a threat it comes from the outside. it's somehow embodied. it's clear. and as soon as you get rid of that, all is going to be okay,

you know, then there's a gentleman like there's a there's a there's a resolution tension. everything's going to be fine. and and that's how we think. war, too. we think, okay, well, there's a, you know, the right army defeats, the wrong army and the story and the story's over, but the story's not over mean in real life. and i think i've mentioned this in the same part of the book where i talked about ukraine and the occupation in real life when the nurses and the doctors got to the concentration camps in 1945, they said, this is just the beginning we now have to try create the conditions so that these people can be free. they sometimes said, because it's not just even if the bad thing is literally nazi concentration camps, just getting rid of the nazis, just give that big bad thing isn't the end of the story. it's only it's only the beginning of the story. and in the name of what are you doing it like? what is it? what is it for? and so i love your question

because it also removes some of the intimidation factor from all this like i do in the book about some people who did some some pretty heroic things, but when they did so and i think this is true without exception when they did so it wasn't in the name of some big heroic idea, it was always in the name of the things that they happened to care and their commitments to those things which then got them into a position where they felt like they had no choice but to do right thing. and then they took then they took a hit for then they went to prison for that. so it was it's never a case, someone heroically rising up, you know, with a sword on the horse and vanquishing it or trying to vanquish it's. always the case of people saying in this complex life that i'm leading there's a little sphere here where i think things are important. and i to hold on to that, i just i just at some point i can't let that go.

and the dissidents, as you say, are actually really beautiful examples of this. we we when we think of the anti-caa meanest dissidents who are the ones who i know something about in some cases know personally, knew personally that they all their structure of thinking was there are some good things and these good things are normal. they're the language i speak of, the friendships i have in books i want to read or write and the way i want to live. it's like a it's not it's normality. but i'm trying to defend and that's and it's this it's the state, the communist state, which is abnormal, which is not letting me do normal things. and so therefore i'm going to do everyday stuff, like i'm going to record when the communist state does things like repress people and if necessary, then i will go to prison because i'm doing this reporting. it often amounted to something just like that and and so there's a there's an organic connection between caring about the good things, the everyday

good things like, like vaclav havel, who's a very important figure in this book, his examples, the kinds of things people care about are is the beer okay? like literally, are we making good beer? like that sort of thing. it's the it's the things that we actually happen to care about that are important. and that's enough is the point. like if we can get if you can get that right and recognize that is not about it's it's not that the only free person is that person in a in a in a documentary or a hollywood movie you who vanquish the evil thing that the free person is the person who could own up to caring about things. the free person. the person who can make who can get in communication with other people who care about those unpredictable things, who can who can live these interesting, unpredictable lives with other people. and that's, you know, that that's freedom. that if that's freedom, then together we should act and vote in such a way that we can create the that we can have those kinds of free lives, that that's what it amounts to.

that's what it amounts to. and of course, there are situations on the margin like in ukraine today where, people actually have to take huge risks. but if we can recognize that for the things, the little things we care about, we just sometimes have to take small risks. but we do we have to take small then i think the the whole picture presents itself a bit differently. and more accessibly and more truly. but, you know, the idea of living unpredictable lives together and creating structures to that you know sounds like democracy to me in a certain right if we think about democracy as the people's equal capacity to shape their governing systems, what do you see as the relationship between democracy and freedom freedom? thanks for that. because i this was this is a book about freedom and i wanted to set aside talking about democracy till i to the end because democracy like freedom

is it's so encrusted with stereotype and it's a habitual form of political speech that i wanted to first establish the freedom part and then move on democracy. so in the book, the argument for democracy is made at the end, in the conclusion and it's it arises from the case that i think that i've made for freedom. so the the case that i'm making for democracy arises from the arguments for freedom. so if if freedom is if i'm right, that freedom is about you say unpredictability, right? that's the third form of freedom. if that's then democracy is a good form of government, because the we vote is unpredictable or should be i mean, one of the problems is that we've become way too predictable for the people who poll us and surveil us. but the vote should be unpredictable. it should be unpredictable. who's going to run for office? these things should be known. advance democracy is also, you know, just staying in these

categories that i use democracy is also about solidarity, which is the form of freedom. and you mentioned it earlier, it only really works if i care about your vote, if i think democracy is just an individual right to my vote, isn't really going to work because the fact that, okay, for me it's easier for me to vote doesn't mean that it's easy or even for other people to vote. and if it's not easy or legal for other people to vote, then it's not a democracy. so we have to. so the act of voting has to involve solidarity or else it's not going to lead you to a democratic place or to take another example, sovereignty like democracy marks the coming of age because at a certain age we're regarded as being mature enough to vote or factuality i'm joking around now, but that's the fourth form of freedom in the book. you can't have without factuality, because if we don't have a shared sense of whether, you know, the city council person is corrupt or whether there's led the water or whether there is such a thing as lead, if we don't basic factual

knowledge that we can share, then can't have the discussions which lead to sensible voting and policy making after that, and then the other side, democracy is actually fact generating, unlike tyranny, because democracy at behind a record of voting like numbers of votes type votes for where, for what and so on. democracy itself generates a kind of historical trace which one person rule does it doesn't generate. so i try to make the case for democracy purely on the basis of the that i'm characterizing freedom. the other thing which is really important about democracy and freedom is that freedom has to be about time. going back to what i said towards the beginning about ukrainians, the future, like if we don't have a sense of a fourth dimension, that there's a future out there, then we can't really be free because. we are or value commitments in our to realize those values in the world.

and again when i say that it's that may sound like very abstract. you know, vaulting language, but i mean it in a very simple way, like our plans for the world be things like, i'm going to have a kid, you know, i'm going to get a different job. i, i want i want to dress differently, you know, i want to make new friends. i'm none of those make sense if we think the future closed off, if we think we get anywhere, if we think nobody can get anywhere, if there's no sense of future time and democracy generates that sense, it helps to generate that sense because unlike forms of government, in a democracy, you know, there's going to be other election two years, four years, whatever, six years down the line, but you're going to have a chance. so democracy teaches people to think forward in time. and in that sense, it helps to help, but it doesn't do it on its own, but it helps to generate sense of a future that you might be able to fill with other things. so speaking of voting and elections. let's turn from small democracy to a big d democratic party. in the 2024 elections right?

one of the you know, the moves of the democratic party right now, especially for the you know, kamala harris is presidential campaign is to try to re-embrace a new language of freedom, trying to take freedom back. i think the republican party's focus perhaps on individual freedom and free markets. and part of what we see somebody like, you know, kamala harris arguing for is that freedom needs to be more robust. it needs to more government support for things like, you know, ending poverty and homelessness. and also making larger arguments that freedom needs to be about the freedom, reproductive freedom for women to be able to make choices about their bodies in their childbearing. how do you see the landscape of freedom, the 2024 election through the lens of some of your concerns and also through some of the ways in which you're trying to advocate for new forms of freedom.

mm hmm. mean for me, obviously, it's intriguing and encouraging in general way. i was i was lucky enough to be talking to jamie raskin about this book at politics and prose, the d.c. bookstore, the other night and representative raskin was was saying, like, this is a time when we're thinking about freedom. this is the book we need for it. and i was very kind of and of course, it's also a coincidence because i spent i spent a long time trying to work this stuff out. and i'm happy that the book is here at a moment when, you know, people are talking about the politics of freedom. and also and to your question about how i think it's all working. it's it's interesting as you say that they're trying to dislodge freedom from the right and take for the center or take it for the democrats. it's interest, though, because it's not just a political new. it also it also involves a

certain amount of and you're already suggesting this, but a certain amount of massaging the meaning of freedom and it to explain this i think it helps to go back and and and invoke the notions of negative and positive freedom because the way that the way that the right generally talks about freedom if it talks about it at all. because interestingly, word has become much less resonant on the right side of american politics. but if it talks about freedom at all, it's it's negative freedom. so it's freedom for, you know, elon musk's giant media company not to be regulated. right. that's what basically what we mean. that's what's by freedom. it's freedom for the people who already have lots of money to continue to have lots of money. it's it's negative. and of course, that can be projected to everybody. the claim can be we're keeping government off all of your backs. but in a in a society with so much inequality of every sort, keeping the government off of all of our backs is also really unequal because it creates, as

we already talked about, it creates space for who already have power and money to continue have power and money and to make the rest us less free. and so that but that's the philosophical basis that is negative freedom or freedom from. and that doesn't hold that doesn't hold up philosophically because freedom from only really makes sense as part freedom to the reason why we don't want the barriers is because we're the people and because we're the people we want to not only not have barriers, we want to have we want to not only not have bad stuff, oppression, we want a good stuff. we have encouragement and support and opportunities and mobility and chances and surprises and a future that's freedom. right? the reason why the bad stuff is, is because the good stuff is good and laying all this out because just to answer your question, because i'm seen this a little bit in the way that democrats are moving the term freedom when they start it they were pretty squarely trying to take away from the republicans rhetorically negative freedom.

they were saying we're the ones who are going to keep government off your back, not republicans. the republicans are going to put government your back or in your bodies. the government. the republicans are the ones who are going to have an intrusive, tyrannical form of government. we're not going to do that. we're going to have the absence of that. and, of course, powerful. and it's probably but once once the word is been, you take negative freedom and the democrats, you can then kind of realize, okay, well, wait, reproductive freedom isn't just an absence of freedom, isn't just an absence. right? it's also a presence. the women. it shouldn't just be that they're denied. women should be given things. it just be not terrible. it should be easy. it should be accessible like health care should be something which allows people not just to stay alive, like health should allow people to not just make choices, but health care should allow people to have lives easier lives, right? so you go step by step and suddenly you realize that on

that example, which is a central example in this campaign, you're slipping from freedom. freedom, the freedom to and then once you make that switch, once you toggle you realize, well, wait a minute, a lot of things which we talk in terms of freedom from are better talked about in terms freedom, too. and we can just talk about freedom, too. we can say, well, wait a minute, if we better health care, we would be more free if there was more parental leave, we would in fact be more free. there are things the government do and that only the government can do because it requires this kind of co-op rate of generational work that can make us less free. and so that's what i mean. that's the part i find interesting because, you know, as we've talked about, like, i think the correct definition of has to be positive. and so they were moving in. tim walz's moves into that realm of freedom to freedom is positive are what like for me as the person try to think about this philosophic plea, i find

the most encouraging right. thank you. the realm of positive freedom is a great way to our discussion today, so thank you so much, professor timothy snyder, for chatting with me about freedom today. i really enjoyed it. thank you so much for preparing. thanso i am introduce saying mil

moritz. he is the