In an era of rising authoritarianism, democratic backsliding, and governments across the world wrapping repression in the language of liberty, On Freedom (Crown, 2024) by historian Timothy Snyder is a passionate plea to uphold freedom as the foundation of all political activity. To him, freedom is not a value to be chanted but rather a series of activities that ensure the realization of potential inherent to every human being. His focus in this book is distinguishing negative freedom, or freedom from, from positive freedom, or freedom to.
Negative freedom is a conception of freedom that defines freedom as the removal of certain obstacles only—which can be race, ethnicity, class, or a colonizer. Snyder gives the example of the colonized states, which failed to recognize that breaking free from the colonizers was only the beginning of their struggle. Positive freedom, on the other hand, is recognizing that freedom is always freedom to do activities that are essential to ensure that freedom is for everyone. Positive freedom is the route to make freedom available for everyone, not a select few with state or corporate power. Snyder puts forward five forms of this freedom—sovereignty, unpredictability, mobility, factuality, and solidarity.
The first chapter is on sovereignty. Snyder introduces two terms, which he recounts throughout the book—Leib and Körper. The former means a living body, where "living" includes the ability to govern itself, whereas "Körper" means just a body, subject to physical laws. Snyder brings up the Covid-19 vaccine crisis, where big pharmaceuticals treated the bodies of the victims as Körper to profit, not Leib to save. This fundamental empathy of treating oneself as a sovereign Leib and treating others as such is being free.
Unpredictability, the second form, is perhaps the most counterintuitive. Being unpredictable means being creative, recognizing the differences within humans while being cooperative. He encourages his readers to be unpredictable, to not be led by political demagogues and social media, but rather to appreciate creativity and the realization of new values through multiple combinations of them.
The third form is mobility. This part focuses on the state’s role in creating opportunities for its citizens. Mobility was the crux of the American Dream, and it was largely a result of Roosevelt’s New Deal and other social and economic programs to facilitate it. But in the Reagan era, these rights were overturned, with Reagan arguing that “the state” was the obstacle to freedom. In practice, these meant freedom only for oligarchs. To build freedom for everyone, social mobility is essential. Without social mobility, one cannot be sovereign or unpredictable—they have to be suppressed either under the state or the so-called free market, and that is unfreedom.
Factuality, the fourth form, takes on particular urgency in an era of conspiracy theories, AI-generated misinformation, and climate change denialism. Snyder's argument is that historically, freedom of speech was about speaking truth to power and protecting the people who spoke truth to power, and it should be exercised with responsibility to be scientific and fact-based.
Lastly, he discusses solidarity as a form of freedom, because no one is actually free while others are unfree. Without solidarity, divisions are inevitable, and they collectively reduce everyone’s freedom. Therefore, Snyder remarks, an individual cannot be free on his own—they needs structures that have been built by previous generations and the support of others who take care of them.
The book closes with a warning directed at democracies that perform the aesthetics of freedom while institutionalizing its opposite. For Bangladesh and Syria, countries that have recently removed authoritarian governments, this is not an abstract concern. Snyder's message is pointed: removing a dictator is negative freedom. What comes after, the slow, collective, continuous work of building institutions that make freedom real for everyone, is where the harder struggle begins.
On Freedom is not without its gaps. Snyder's focus on the American and European experience means the Global South appears mostly as illustration rather than subject. Readers in Dhaka will find the framework useful but will need to do their own work applying it to a political context Snyder does not fully reckon with. That is a limitation worth naming. But the book's core argument—that freedom is a practice, not a possession, and that it requires structures, solidarity, and honesty to survive—is one that travels.
Sadman Ahmed Siam is a student at the Islamic University of Technology.
