Freedom: An Unruly History

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.