Snyder — On Freedom
Timothy Snyder, On Freedom (Crown, 2024)
The Argument
Freedom has been misunderstood in America as negative freedom — freedom from constraint, freedom from government, freedom from obligation. Snyder argues this conception traces directly to the plantation: the only people who needed the government to leave them alone were slaveholders. Genuine freedom is positive — the freedom to thrive, to take risks, to choose futures collectively. You can’t be free alone. Freedom requires conditions, institutions, and other people.
Snyder draws on Isaiah Berlin’s negative/positive liberty distinction (without naming Berlin directly) and extends it through his own experience as a historian of totalitarianism and his time in wartime Ukraine. His core claims:
Freedom is a practice, not a state. You don’t have freedom. You do freedom — through participation, through institution-building, through the ongoing work of maintaining the conditions that make genuine choice possible. This echoes Arendt’s public realm and the vault’s insistence that governance is a practice, not a structure.
Negative freedom produces unfreedom. When “freedom” means only “the government leaves me alone,” the result is not liberation but exposure — to market forces, to employers, to landlords, to anyone with more power than you. The absence of government is not the presence of freedom. It’s the presence of whoever fills the vacuum.
Freedom requires solidarity. The Ukrainian resistance demonstrates what Snyder considers genuine freedom: people who chose to stay, to fight, to build, to maintain institutions under extreme pressure — not because they were free from something, but because they knew what they were free for.
Relevance to the Project
Snyder’s reframing is useful for the manifesto’s American audience. “Freedom” is the most powerful word in American political vocabulary, and it’s been captured by the negative-freedom frame (property rights, deregulation, individual autonomy). The project can recapture it.
The CLT offers positive freedom:
- Freedom to have secure housing without market precarity
- Freedom to participate in governing your community
- Freedom to know your neighbors and be known by them
- Freedom to build a life without the growth imperative
The market offers only negative freedom: freedom from government interference in housing — which means freedom for landlords to charge what they want, freedom for investors to speculate, freedom for the market to price you out. Snyder’s frame makes the case that this isn’t freedom at all.
The “freedom is a practice” claim reinforces the vault’s anti-Reification thesis: freedom isn’t something you have (a legal status, a set of rights). It’s something you do — through cooperative governance, through shared maintenance, through the ongoing work of sustaining commons. When the practice stops, the freedom dies, regardless of what the documents say.
Limitations
The reviews are mixed on whether Snyder delivers on the philosophical promise. The book is more personal and anecdotal than systematic — useful for the manifesto’s emotional register, less useful as a rigorous framework. The vault already has this argument through Self-Determination Theory (autonomy as genuine choice), Arendt — Men in Dark Times (freedom as action in the public realm), and Brown — Undoing the Demos (negative freedom colonized by neoliberal rationality). Snyder makes it more accessible and more American.