Freedom: An Unruly History

by Annelien De Dijn

Overview

Winner of the PROSE Award
An NRC Handelsblad Best Book of the Year

“Ambitious and impressive…At a time when the very survival of both freedom and democracy seems uncertain, books like this are more important than ever.”
—The Nation

“Helps explain how partisans on both the right and the left can claim to be protectors of liberty, yet hold radically different understandings of its meaning…This deeply informed history of an idea has the potential to combat political polarization.”
—Publishers Weekly

“Ambitious and bold, this book will have an enormous impact on how we think about the place of freedom in the Western tradition.”
—Samuel Moyn, author of Not Enough

“Brings remarkable clarity to a big and messy subject…New insights and hard-hitting conclusions about the resistance to democracy make this essential reading for anyone interested in the roots of our current dilemmas.”
—Lynn Hunt, author of History: Why It Matters

For centuries people in the West identified freedom with the ability to exercise control over the way in which they were governed. The equation of liberty with restraints on state power—what most people today associate with freedom—was a deliberate and dramatic rupture with long-established ways of thinking. So what triggered this fateful reversal? In a masterful and surprising reappraisal of more than two thousand years of Western thinking about freedom, Annelien de Dijn argues that this was not the natural outcome of such secular trends as the growth of religious tolerance or the creation of market societies. Rather, it was propelled by an antidemocratic backlash following the French and American Revolutions.

The notion that freedom is best preserved by shrinking the sphere of government was not invented by the revolutionaries who created our modern democracies—it was first conceived by their critics and opponents. De Dijn shows that far from following in the path of early American patriots, today’s critics of “big government” owe more to the counterrevolutionaries who tried to undo their work.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674245594
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	08/25/2020
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	432
File size:	46 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Annelien de Dijn is Professor of Modern Political History at Utrecht University and the author of French Political Thought from Montesquieu to Tocqueville. Her research has been supported by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study, and the Independent Social Research Foundation.

Table of Contents

Cover Title Page Copyright Contents Introduction: An Elusive Concept��������������������������������������� Part I. The Long History of Freedom 1. Slaves to No Man: Freedom in Ancient Greece 2. The Rise and Fall of Roman Liberty�������������������������������������������� Part II. Freedom’s Revival 3. The Renaissance of Freedom 4. Freedom in the Atlantic Revolutions��������������������������������������������� Part III. Rethinking Freedom 5. Inventing Modern Liberty 6. The Triumph of Modern Liberty��������������������������������������� Epilogue: Freedom in the Twenty-First Century Notes Acknowledgments Illustration Credits Index������������

Editorial Reviews

For two millennia liberty was conceived as popular self-government. But nineteenth-century liberals and conservatives redefined freedom as the guarantee of individual rights against state power, and democratic equality as a threat to liberty. This timely book presents urgent and persuasive arguments to rethink liberty and democracy in an era of fast-increasing inequality.

Siep Stuurman

A sweeping history of the idea of freedom in the West, from Ancient Greece, to our time…Shows how the notion of democratic freedom has developed and deepened…Importantly, de Dijn traces how the Old Oligarchy—which was overthrown by Athenian democracy—feared the redistributive power of political democracy. From the time of Ancient Athens until today, this fear has been a constant in reactionary thought.

Jacobin - Paul Sutton

Ambitious and impressive…Explores an alternate history of the concept from the ancient world to the Age of Revolution to the Cold War, charting those moments when new notions of freedom—such as freedom from government supervision or repression—deviated from its more classical and longstanding definition as self-government… At a time when the very survival of both freedom and democracy seems uncertain, books like this are more important than ever, as our societies contemplate both the heritage of the past and the prospects for the future.

The Nation - Tyler Stovall

De Dijn has written a marvelous book on the history and various meanings of freedom. Its scope is enormous, its writing elegant, its insights strikingly original. We will all be reading this book for many years to come.

Michael P. Zuckert

Ambitious and bold, this book will have an enormous impact on how we think about the place of freedom in the Western tradition.

Samuel Moyn

With remarkable sweep and erudition, de Dijn recounts the whole history of thinking about freedom in the West. In the process, she also profoundly upends the standard liberal narrative, convincing us that what we understand by freedom today—namely, the opportunity to be left alone to do our own thing—is a recent invention. This is an important book for historians, political theorists, and all readers who like big ideas.

Sophia Rosenfeld

This book brings remarkable clarity to a big and messy subject, the definition of freedom in the Western tradition. New insights and hard-hitting conclusions about the resistance to democracy make this essential reading for anyone interested in the roots of our current dilemmas.

Lynn Hunt

Beautifully written…De Dijn’s work is singularly ambitious and iconoclastic, seeking to restructure a field thick with entrenched interpretation while sending a message about the necessary reform of the politics of the present.

Journal of Modern History - Richard Whatmore

Works through the intellectual history of the idea of freedom from antiquity to the present and puts those ideas in their political and historical context to show how the idea of freedom was used…Challenge[s] us to look at our history to better understand our present and to fight for our future.

Public Books - Michael Mirer

Annelien De Dijn delivers a compelling and accessible analysis of a highly relevant subject…In a post-pandemic world that has exposed the fragile tension between individual rights, collective interests and democratic legitimacy, De Dijn’s plea for a re-evaluation of our understanding of liberty deserves to be listened to.

Legal History Review - Christophe Maes

A wonderful book—extremely well written, engaging, and compelling. De Dijn offers a sweeping history of the notion of freedom across 2,000 years, arguing that identifying liberty with limited government, the way we do today, is a very modern idea.

Helena Rosenblatt

At once magisterial and finely grained, this is history on the grand scale. De Dijn succeeds in bringing, with clarity and a lightness of touch, the weight of the past to bear on freedom and its fragilities in our own time.

Darrin M. McMahon

★ 2020-03-29
An authoritative history of changing Western ideas of freedom.

In this sweeping narrative, which covers more than two millennia, Utrecht University historian de Dijn advances two central arguments, each persuasive and clearly backed by impressive scholarship. The first is that the original Western understanding of freedom, born with the Greeks, was what we call popular government, or rule by the people. Yet gradually and more decisively, since the American and French revolutions, freedom has come to be seen as the condition of being left alone by government, a condition embodying another, distinct kind of liberty: inner freedom and freedom of conscience. The author’s second argument, the freshest and likely to be the most influential, is that this shift—a “dramatic rupture” and “backlash”—owes itself not to liberal thinkers but rather to conservative, counterrevolutionary opponents of democracy who feared government in the people’s hands. Nevertheless, within the context of the Cold War, this ideal of freedom, originating with the anti-revolutionary right, “ultimately came to be reimagined as the key value of Western civilization.” Yet because of the expansion of political and other rights to women, workers, and minorities, what’s today taken to be the “liberal understanding of freedom”—freedom from government—can actually be seen in many quarters as “a thinly veiled defense of elite interests rather than an appealing political idea,” as it was in earlier times. A narrative exposition rather than a critique of others’ interpretations, the book is unusually easygoing for a scholarly work on an elusive subject. The author’s main strength is her clarifying directness. Analytical rather than argumentative, she shows how in our time, political freedom—“freedom for,” that is, control by the people—has given way to private freedom—“freedom from,” a moral ideal with antidemocratic implications. Thus endures the tension between collective and individual freedoms.

A brilliantly crafted, compelling, and deeply relevant history for our times. (29 photos)

Kirkus Reviews