Freedom
An Unruly History
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- € 20,99
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- € 20,99
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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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Utrecht University historian de Dijn (French Political Thought from Montesquieu to Tocqueville) explores how the concept of political freedom evolved from ancient Greece through the Cold War in this thought-provoking work of scholarship. Complicating the recent history of European and American politicians and commentators who define freedom as the limited role of government in an individual's life, de Dijn reveals that ancient Greek and Romans writers explored the notion of freedom in terms of democratic self-rule. Their ideas were revived by Renaissance thinkers including Petrarch and Machiavelli, and eventually instigated a series of 18th-century revolutions in the Americas and Europe. According to de Dijn, backlash to those revolutions helped shift the concept of freedom in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, as German philosopher Johann August Eberhard differentiated between civil and political liberty, and Swiss-French intellectual Benjamin Constant furthered that distinction as one between ancient and modern sensibilities. De Dijn's deep-dive into this abstract concept 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. Dense yet accessible, this deeply informed history of an idea has the potential to combat political polarization.
