“What do you think?” asked Mariia, smiling, in her bright dress, as I ducked under the doorframe of her orderly little hut and stepped back into the sunshine and rubble. “Everything as it should be?” It was. Her rugs and blankets, laid out in nice rectilinear patterns, recalled Ukrainian futurist art. The cords leading to her generator were tidily arranged, and water bottles were near at hand. A thick book lay open on her bed.
Outside her metal domicile, a temporary dwelling provided by an international organization, woolen sweaters were drying on a line. A pretty wooden drawer, lined in felt, rested on a bench, like an open Pandora’s box. When I complimented her on it, Mariia offered the drawer to me as a gift. It was a lonely relic of her house, just in front of us, a ruin after bombs and shells. She looked up nervously at a passing plane. “Everything happened,” she sighed, “and none of it was necessary.”
Like every house in the village, Mariia’s was destroyed during the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Posad Pokrovs’ke, in the far south of the country, was at the edge of the Russian advance. It rests among fields of sunflowers in this fertile region. The Ukrainian army pushed the Russians out of artillery range in late 2022, making it safe to return, or to visit, as I am doing now, in September 2023.
Taking a seat on the bench and listening to Mariia, I think about freedom. The village, one would say, has been liberated. Are its people free?
To be sure, something terrible has been removed from Mariia’s life: the daily threat of violent death, an occupation by torturers and murderers. But is that, even that, liberation?
Mariia is eighty-five years old and living alone. Now that she has her neat little residence, she is certainly freer than when she was homeless. That is because family and volunteers came to help. And because a government has acted, one to which she feels connected by her vote. Mariia does not complain of her own fate. She cries when she speaks of the difficult challenges faced by her president.
The Ukrainian word de-occupation, which she and I are using in conversation, is more precise than the conventional liberation. It invites us to consider what, beyond the removal of oppression, we might need for liberty. It takes work, after all, to get one older woman into a position where she can greet guests and perform the normal interactions of a dignified person. I have trouble imagining Mariia being truly free without a proper house with a chair and without a clear path to the road for her walker.
Freedom is not just an absence of evil but a presence of good.
Southern Ukraine is steppe; northern Ukraine is forest. Visiting a de-occupied town in the north of the country, I had similar thoughts about freedom. Having dropped off my children at friendly schools in New Haven, Connecticut, I made the journey to an abandoned school building in Yahidne, which Russian occupiers had transformed into a small concentration camp. For most of the time that the village was occupied, the Russians had packed 350 civilians, its entire population, into the school basement, an area of less than two hundred square meters. Seventy of the villagers were children, the youngest an infant.
Yahidne was de-occupied in April 2022, and I visited that September. On the ground floor, Russian soldiers had destroyed the furniture. On the walls, they left behind dehumanizing graffiti about Ukrainians. There was no electricity. By the light of my phone, I made my way down to the cellar, and examined the children’s drawings on its walls. I could read what they had written (“No to war”); my children later helped me identify the characters (such as an Impostor from the game Among Us).
By a doorframe were two lists, written in chalk, of the names of the perished: on one side, those executed by the Russians (of whom, best as I could tell, there were seventeen); on the other, those who died from exhaustion or illness (of whom, best as I could tell, there were ten).
By the time I arrived in Yahidne, the survivors were no longer in the cellar. Were they free?
A liberation suggests a woe that has dissipated. But the adults need support, the children a new school. It is so very important that the town is no longer occupied. But it would be wrong to end the story of Yahidne when the survivors emerged from underground, just as it would be wrong to end the story of Posad Pokrovs’ke when the bombing stopped.
The gentleman entrusted with the key to the Yahidne school asked for help to build a playground. It might seem like a strange desire, amid a war of destruction. Russians kill children with missiles, and kidnap them for assimilation. But the absence of these crimes is not enough; de-occupation is not enough. Children need places to play, run, and swim, to practice being themselves. A child cannot create a park or a swimming pool. The joy of youth is to discover such things in the world. It takes collective work to build structures of freedom, for the young as for the old.
I came to Ukraine during the war while writing this book about freedom. Here its subject is palpable, all around. A month after Russia invaded Ukraine, I spoke with some Ukrainian lawmakers: “We chose freedom when we did not run.” “We are fighting for freedom.” “Freedom itself is the choice.”
It was not just the politicians. Talking in wartime Ukraine to soldiers, to widows and farmers, to activists and journalists, I heard the word freedom over and over. It was interesting how they used it. With much of their country under genocidal occupation, Ukrainians would seem to have good reason to speak of freedom as a liberation from, as an absence of evil. No one did.
When asked what they meant by freedom, not a single person with whom I spoke specified freedom from the Russians. One Ukrainian told me, “When we say freedom, we do not mean ‘freedom from something.’ ” Another defined victory as being “for something, not against something.” The occupiers had gotten in the way of a sense that the world was opening up, that the next generation would have a better life, that decisions made now would matter in years to come.
It was essential to remove repression, to gain what philosophers call “negative freedom.” But de-occupation, the removal of harm, was just a necessary condition for freedom, not the thing itself. A soldier in a rehabilitation center told me that freedom was about everyone having a chance to fulfill their own purposes after the war. A veteran awaiting a prosthesis said that freedom would be a smile on his son’s face. A young soldier on leave said that freedom was about the children he would like to have. Their commander in his hidden staff room, Valeriy Zaluzhnyi, told me that freedom meant a normal life with prospects.
Freedom was a future when some things were the same and others were better. It was life expanding and growing.
In this book, I aim to define freedom. The task begins with rescuing the word from overuse and abuse. I worry that, in my own country, the United States, we speak of freedom without considering what it is. Americans often have in mind the absence of something: occupation, oppression, or even government. An individual is free, we think, when the government is out of the way. Negative freedom is our common sense.
To be sure, it is tempting to think of liberty as us against the world, which the notion of negative freedom allows us to do. If the barriers are the only problem, then all must be right with us. That makes us feel good. We think that we would be free if not for a world outside that does us wrong. But is the removal of something in the world really enough to liberate us? Is it not as important, perhaps even more important, to add things?
If we want to be free, we will have to affirm, not just deny. Sometimes we will have to destroy, but more often we will need to create. Most often we will need to adapt both the world and ourselves, on the basis of what we know and value. We need structures, just the right ones, moral as well as political. Virtue is an inseparable part of freedom.
“Stone Walls do not a Prison make / Nor Iron bars a Cage”—said the poet. Sometimes they do, and sometimes they don’t. Oppression is not just obstruction but the human intention behind it. In Ukraine’s Donetsk, an abandoned factory became an art lab; under Russian occupation, the same building became a torture facility. A school basement, as in Yahidne, can be a concentration camp.
Early Nazi concentration camps, for that matter, were in bars, hotels, and castles. The first permanent one, Dachau, was in an abandoned factory. Auschwitz had been a Polish military base meant to defend people from a German attack. Kozelsk, a Soviet POW camp where Polish officers were held before their execution, had been a monastery—the one where Fyodor Dostoevsky, in The Brothers Karamazov, set the dialogue with the famous question: If God is dead, is everything permitted?
No larger force makes us free, nor does the absence of such a larger force. Nature gives us a chance to be free, nothing less, nothing more. We are told that we are “born free”: untrue. We are born squalling, attached to an umbilical cord, covered in a woman’s blood. Whether we become free depends upon the actions of others, upon the structures that enable those actions, upon the values that enliven those structures—and only then upon a flicker of spontaneity and the courage of our own choices.
The structures that hinder or enable are physical and moral. It matters how we speak and think about freedom. Liberty begins with de-occupying our minds from the wrong ideas. And there are right and wrong ideas. In a world of relativism and cowardice, freedom is the absolute among absolutes, the value of values. This is not because freedom is the one good thing to which all others must bow. It is because freedom is the condition in which all the good things can flow within us and among us.
Nor is it because freedom is a vacuum left by a dead God or an empty world. Freedom is not an absence but a presence, a life in which we choose multiple commitments and realize combinations of them in the world. Virtues are real, as real as the starry heavens; when we are free, we learn them, exhibit them, bring them to life. Over time, our choices among virtues define us as people of will and individuality.
When we assume that freedom is negative, the absence of this or that, we presume that removing a barrier is all that we have to do to be free. To this way of thinking, freedom is the default condition of the universe, brought to us by some larger force when we clear the way. This is naïve.
Americans are told that we were given freedom by our Founding Fathers, our national character, or our capitalist economy. None of this is true. Freedom cannot be given. It is not an inheritance. We call America a “free country,” but no country is free. Noting a difference between the rhetoric of the oppressors and the oppressed, the dissident Eritrean poet Y. F. Mebrahtu reports that “they talk about the country, we talk about the people.” Only people can be free. If we believe something else makes us free, we never learn what we must do. The moment you believe that freedom is given, it is gone.
We Americans tend to think that freedom is a matter of things being cleared away, and that capitalism does that work for us. It is a trap to believe in this or any other external source of freedom. If we associate freedom with outside forces, and someone tells us that the outside world delivers a threat, we sacrifice liberty for safety. This makes sense to us, because in our hearts we were already unfree. We believe that we can trade freedom for security. This is a fatal mistake.
Freedom and security work together. The preamble of the Constitution instructs that “the blessings of liberty” are to be pursued alongside “the general welfare” and “the common defense.” We must have liberty and safety. For people to be free, they must feel secure, especially as children. They must have a chance to know one another and the world. Then, as they become free people, they decide what risks to take, and for what reasons.
When Russia invaded Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelens’kyi did not tell his people that they needed to trade liberty for safety. He told them that he was staying in the country. After my visit to Yahidne, I spoke to him in his office in Kyiv, behind the sandbags. He called de-occupation a chance to restore both security and freedom. He said that the “deprivation of freedom was insecurity,” and that “insecurity was the deprivation of freedom.”
Freedom is about knowing what we value and bringing it to life. So it depends on what we can do—and that, in turn, depends on others, people we know and people we don’t.
As I write this preface on a westbound night train from Kyiv, I know how long I have before I reach the Polish border. I have a bit of security in that knowledge, and a bit of freedom to work—thanks to the labor of other people. Someone else laid the rail lines and repairs them when they are shelled, someone else built the carriages and looks after them, someone else is driving the train. When the Ukrainian army de-occupies cities, it raises the flag and shares the photos. But Ukrainians tend to regard cities as liberated when rail service has been restored.
Russian propagandists claim that there is no right and no good, and so everything is permitted. The consequences of that view are all around me in de-occupied Ukraine, in the death pits I saw at Bucha, in ruined settlements such as Posad Pokrovs’ke, in concentration camps such as Yahidne. Russian soldiers in Ukraine speak of cities they destroy as “liberated.” And indeed: all barriers, from their perspective, have been removed. They can bulldoze the rubble and the corpses, as in Mariupol, build something else, sell it. In that negative sense of free, they are free to murder and steal.
The wheels and tracks beneath me are not making me free, but they are carrying me forward, creating conditions for my freedom that I could not create myself. I would be a less free person right now were there no train, or had Russia destroyed the Kyiv rail station. People in Ukraine were not freer when Russia destroyed public utilities and public schools.
We enable freedom not by rejecting government, but by affirming freedom as the guide to good government. Reasoning forward from the right definition of freedom, I believe, will get us to the right sort of government. And so this book begins with an introduction about freedom, and ends with a conclusion about government. The five chapters in between show the way from philosophy to policy.
How does freedom figure in our lives? The connections between freedom as a principle and freedom as a practice are the five forms of freedom.
The forms create a world where people act on the basis of values. They are not rules or orders. They are the logical, moral, and political links between common action and the formation of free individuals. The forms resolve two apparent conundrums: a free person is an individual, but no one becomes an individual alone; freedom is felt in one lifetime, but it must be the work of generations.
The five forms are: sovereignty, or the learned capacity to make choices; unpredictability, the power to adapt physical regularities to personal purposes; mobility, the capacity to move through space and time following values; factuality, the grip on the world that allows us to change it; and solidarity, the recognition that freedom is for everyone.
The labor of freedom begins after the labor of a mother. A baby has the potential to evaluate the world and change it, and it develops the requisite capabilities with the support of and in the company of others. This is sovereignty.
Coming of age, a young human being learns to see the world as it is and to imagine how it might be. A sovereign person mixes chosen virtues with the world outside to make something new. Thus unpredictability is the second form of freedom.
Our bodies need places to go. We cannot as young people create for ourselves the conditions that will allow us to be sovereign and unpredictable. But once those conditions have been created, we rebel against the very institutions that made them possible and go our own way. And this mobility, the third form of freedom, is to be encouraged.
We are free to do only the things we know how to do, and free to go only to places where we can go. What we don’t know can hurt us, and what we do know empowers us. Freedom’s fourth form is factuality.
No individual achieves freedom alone. Practically and ethically, freedom for you means freedom for me. This recognition is solidarity, the final form of freedom.
The solution to the problem of freedom is not, as some on the Right think, to mock or abandon government. The solution is also not, as some on the Left think, to ignore or cast away the rhetoric of freedom.
Freedom justifies government. The forms of freedom show us how.
This book follows the logic of an argument and the logic of a life. The first three forms of freedom pertain to different phases of life: sovereignty to childhood; unpredictability to youth; mobility to young adulthood. Factuality and solidarity are the mature forms of freedom, enabling the others. Each form has a chapter.
In the introduction, I draw on my own life, beginning with the first time I remember thinking about freedom: during the summer of 1976, the American bicentennial year. I will try to show, on the basis of five decades of my own mistakes, how some misunderstandings of freedom arose, and how they might be corrected. The conclusion describes a good government, one that we might create together. There I imagine an America that has reached the year 2076, its tercentennial, as a land of the free.
The chapters are divided into vignettes. Some of them include memories that sprang to mind as I was trying to address a philosophical issue. The flashes of recollection enable some reflection. They allow me to apply a humble version of the Socratic method to my earlier self: questioning the sense of words and the habits of life, to awaken what is, in some sense, already known. The point is to elicit truths about this country and about freedom that were not evident to me in the moment—and that would not be evident to me now had I not passed through those earlier experiences.
This is a philosophical method (I hope) fitting for a historian, which is what I am. I rely on historical examples and know more about the past of some regions than others. This is a book about the United States, but I draw comparisons with western Europe, eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and Nazi Germany.
I am in discussion here with philosophers ancient, modern, and contemporary. Sometimes I leave the references implicit; those who care will catch them. I do cite explicitly five thinkers: Frantz Fanon, Václav Havel, Leszek Kołakowski, Edith Stein, and Simone Weil. These figures are not American and are not well known in the United States; with minor exceptions, they neither resided in the country nor wrote about it. A prodding from another tradition (or a term from another language) can shake us free of misapprehensions. I adapt from each thinker a concept that advances the argument; I do not claim that they agree with one another (or with me) on every issue.
This book is conservative, in that it draws from tradition; but radical, in that it proposes something new. It is philosophy, but it cleaves to experience. A few phrases in this book are text messages that I wrote to myself in intermittent moments of consciousness in a hospital bed, during an illness that nearly took my life. Arguments were conceived while teaching a class inside an American maximum security prison. I wrote much of what follows during three journeys to wartime Ukraine.
The fundamental questions were posed by readers. My books Bloodlands and Black Earth, studies of mass killing, led to public discussions that moved me toward the ethical subject of this book. If I can describe the worst, can I not also prescribe the best? After I published the political pamphlet On Tyranny and a contemporary history called The Road to Unfreedom, I was asked what a better America would look like. This is my answer.
Defining freedom is a different sort of ambition from defending it. I interrogate my former self; I interrogate others; and others interrogate me. The method is part of the answer: there may be truth about freedom, but we will not get to it in isolation or by deduction. Freedom is positive; getting words around it, like living it, is an act of creation.
This book is meant to exemplify the virtues it commends. It is, I hope, reasonable, but also unpredictable. It is intended to be sober, but also experimental. It celebrates not who we are, but the freedom that could be ours.
The sun rises outside my window. The border approaches. I begin my reflection on a summer day.
T.S.
Kyiv-Dorohusk train
Wagon 10, Compartment 9
6:10 a.m., September 10, 2023