How Should We Think About Freedom?

Freedom is the main idea of American political life, but no one knows what it means. The right treats it as the highest value, but defines it very narrowly, as the absence of hindrances. The left supports policies that are liberating, but concedes the idea of freedom to the right. Intellectuals propose that freedom will be brought by larger forces, such as economics or technology, which perverts the very idea of individual agency. Americans associate freedom with abstractions and phantoms, such as the "free market," which means granting their own rights to entities that do not actually exist. Meanwhile, the digital world remodels thought and behavior towards conformism and polarization. What would it take to have a country of free speakers and free people?

In this lecture, Timothy Snyder defines freedom as the capacity to choose among values, envision futures, and realize some of them. He makes the case that freedom takes five forms: sovereignty, unpredictability, mobility, solidarity, and factuality. Finally, he presents a vision of a future where Americans are far freer than we are today, and in which their freedom leaves them more secure and more capable of addressing the ecological and other existential threats we face as a species.