During my brief time at Harvard as a graduate student, one of my favorite places to write on campus was the Law School Library. A short walk from my small Cambridge apartment (and right next to my gym), the tall, imposing columns on Langdell Hall’s edifice communicated a sense of order and authority. Once inside the main reading rooms, the sight of similar columns rose above the top of the bookshelves, and as the eye continued upward, Latin phrases such as LEX EST SUMMA RATIO INSITA IN NATURA (Law is the highest reason implanted in nature) and JUDICATE EGENO ET PUPILLO HUMILEM ET PAUPEREM JUSTIFICATE (Judge the poor and fatherless, do justice to the afflicted and needy) adorned the circumference of the ceiling, quoting both Cicero and the Biblical Psalmist respectively (and thus furthering Harvard’s bizarre, continued obsession with Latin). 

It was a convenient, silent space for working on the papers that I had put off until the last minute (aka. all of them). While the space possessed a perpetual aura of desperation accentuated by the unceasing sound of keyboards clicking from the hands of sleepless, overly-caffeinated law students, the shared quiet rooms were also some of the most productive spaces on campus. After a long night/morning of writing nonsense that I hoped my professors wouldn’t grade too harshly, I exited through the main stairwell, where I passed by a plaque that read “You are ready to aid in the shaping and application of those wise restraints that make men free,” a phrase that was also repeated in several of my classes. Written by John MacArthur Maguire, Professor of Law from 1923-57, this declaration will sound familiar to anyone who has graduated from Harvard Law, as it is said to every graduate at their Commencement Ceremony. 

During my few years at Harvard, this phrase rooted itself in my brain, and I would toss and turn it with a curious sense of fascination, enjoying the dialectical/paradoxical relationship between freedom and restraint. Yet, the more I played with the phrase, the stranger it became. Why do “wise restraints” inherently make us free? What exactly is meant by freedom here? Is it the freedom to live one’s life as one pleases, free of interference by neighbor or government? Is it the freedom to have a voice in how I am governed, which is the guarantee that democracy promises? Is this freedom political, economic, moral, or some combination of them all?

As it turns out, freedom has meant many different things over the past few millennia of Western history. What do we mean when we speak of freedom? How do we organize ourselves and our society to ensure the principles of freedom and liberty are upheld and extended to all people? Are freedom and democracy synonymous, or wholly distinct concepts? In her 2020 book, Freedom: An Unruly History, professor of Modern Political History at Utrecht University Annelien de Dijn provides a historical overview of the idea of freedom and how it has shifted through the centuries. By tracing the development of the concepts surrounding freedom from Ancient Greece to the 20th century, de Dijn ultimately argues that our modern conception of freedom (freedom from any form of state intervention and government overreach) is rooted in the staunchly anti-democratic sentiments of the early 19th-century counter-revolutionary movement. 

Overview: 

To support her claim, de Dijn takes the reader through a 2000+ span of Western intellectual history, analyzing the works of various philosophers, political theorists, and economists to tease out the debates that occurred in each of these eras regarding the tricky nature of freedom. Far from being a static and secure concept, de Dijn reveals that our understanding of freedom has undergone dramatic shifts throughout the centuries. While freedom, according to de Dijn, has been understood as popular self-government, political emancipation, and mass enfranchisement (the democratic ideal) for most of Western history, it went through a significant change in the post-Revolutionary era, and this altered legacy remains dominant among us even today.  

1. Freedom in Ancient Greece

Starting in Ancient Greece -- as most surveys of Western history do -- de Dijn examines the relationship between the Greek city-states (particularly Athens and Sparta), the effects of the Peloponnesian War, and the writings of various philosophers such as Plato, who believed that the ideal society would be ruled by a wise “philosopher king.” In Athens, a form of radical democracy was practiced through the casting of lots for public office, thereby allowing any male citizen to serve in the affairs of the polis for a short period. Athenian citizens would also receive financial incentives to attend political assemblies, allowing even poor citizens to participate in the affairs of the state by supplementing their income. 

However, philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle, and Philo Judaeus were also wary of democracy. Fearing that democracy's empowerment of the poor would lead to licentiousness and anarchy, each proposed his alternative (Plato’s rule by a “philosopher king,” Aristotle's moderate democracy of elected officials, and Philo’s internal turn toward personal freedom attained through moral living). 

2. The Rise and Fall of Roman Liberty

In the Roman Republic, the political system retained an important democratic element (the assemblies) while also mixing in monarchical and aristocratic features (the consuls and Senate, respectively). The period was defined by a waxing and waning tension between ordinary citizens and political elites, leading to conflicts between the populares (who wanted to reform the system, such as introducing a secret ballot, to give poor Romans a greater voice in how they were governed) and the optimates (who saw the populares as power-hungry and fought against to defend the status quo).

The populares believed reforms were needed to keep the elite from becoming a detached, hereditary ruling class, while the optimates “feared that giving ordinary Romans too much political power would eventually make the rise of tyrannical demagogues inevitable” (87). These disagreements often led to long periods of political violence, such as assassinations. Despite their differences regarding how freedom should be maintained, both parties understood freedom to be communal self-government. 

As Caesar started amassing power (and eventually became emperor for life in 44 BC) however, he was vehemently opposed by the optimates, such as Cato of Utica. After Caesar’s murder by Brutus and Cassius, their fellow optimate Cicero successfully branded Mark Antony (the likely contender for emperor) a public enemy in the eyes of the Senate, invoking the concept of “libertas more than sixty times in the course of his fourteen orations” (94). However, this could not stop the military ascendency of Antony, and he managed to capture Cicero and execute him, while Brutus and Cassius, after their defeat at Phillipi, committed suicide.

These men, wanting the return to the days of the Republic before Sulla, failed to slow the growing role of autocratic rule in Rome, thus leading to the rise of the Roman Empire. While the cult of freedom was looked upon with an air of Romantic nostalgia by writers such as Livy, Plutarch, and Tacitus, the rise of Christianity gave the defenders of the empire new ammunition to justify monarchy. As Roman intellectuals began to accept imperial rule as intrinsically good, Christian theologians buttressed these arguments, emphasizing inner, spiritual freedom over external, political change.

3. The Renaissance of Freedom 

However, the revival of the cult of freedom was revived by the humanists of the Italian Renaissance. Obsessed with the newly rediscovered works of the ancients, the humanists began to write treatises defending the concept of freedom as popular self-government. De Dijn argues against the idea that the Reformation dramatically expanded or contributed to this sudden shift in thinking about freedom, and that while natural rights philosophers such as Locke, Rousseau, and Spinoza identified freedom with “the ability to live under laws of one’s own making” (177), these ideas took until the late 18th century to take root, eventually culminating in the Atlantic Revolutions. 

4. Freedom in the Atlantic Revolutions

The American and French Revolutions, inspired by the revival of the ancient cult of freedom by the Renaissance humanists, fought for the right to govern themselves, thus recentering the concept of popular sovereignty as the foundation for liberty. Emphasizing the concept of “no taxation without representation,” the American revolutionists’ primary complaint with England was their disenfranchisement in the way they were governed. Several writers also included the concept of economic equality as a precondition for democratic self-government. As a result of these dramatic shifts, these revolutionaries toppled oligarchic powers, executed kings, and replaced them with a system that, with notable exceptions, was democratic in nature. 

Yet, of course, this democratic sentiment had limits, as the revolutionaries also maintained traditional hierarchies and power structures, most notably the disenfranchisement of women, enslaved persons, and the poor. Those revolutionaries who protested against the “slavery” of being ruled by monarchical and elite governments often participated in the institution of literal slavery within their estates. While these democratic principles did not go far enough in regards to the rights of women and the enslavement of African Americans, these revolutionary ideals would continue to inspire abolitionists and suffrage movements in the century to come. 

5. Inventing Modern Liberty 

Yet, this extension of voting rights, the installation of more popularly elected governments, and the fallout following the Reign of Terror sparked a conservative, counterrevolutionary movement that helped to dramatically redefine the concept of freedom. In Restoration Europe, the failure and terror following the French Revolution led many conservatives to defend the institution of monarchy as they fought for the restoration of royal rule. They feared that, in a democracy, “the poor would plunder the rich,” and these fears were shared by the emergence of a new political movement: liberalism. Seeking a third way between revolutionary democracy and royal absolutism, liberals began to subtly redefine the concept of freedom.

While freedom, up to this point, was deeply intertwined with democracy, liberal writers argued that freedom had more to do with the size of government, rather than who ruled. Liberals began to make a distinction between ancient political freedom and modern civil liberties; whereas the ancients believed that freedom resided in popular control over the state, the modern conception of liberty took keeping government out of citizens’ personal affairs and minimizing government interference as the highest expression of liberty. These liberal thinkers, such as John Stuart Mill, argued that democracies inevitably lead to a tyranny of the majority and despotism, and therefore politics must restrict the powers of government through checks and balances, particularly an independent judiciary which would protect citizens from majoritarian overreach. 

6. The Triumph of Modern Liberty

This antidemocratic understanding of liberty (civil over political) took hold more strongly in the wake of the failed 1848 revolutions in France. In America, the effects of the Civil War and the mass migration of immigrants of the late 19th century sparked anxieties over the power of popular will. This resulted in increased restrictions to voting rights, such as the introduction of poll taxes and literacy tests. While these measures were fought tooth-and-nail by socialists and radical democrats (who insisted on economic freedom as a necessary part of political freedom), liberal thinkers, increasingly influenced by the anti-democratic notion of freedom, enshrined these concepts by influencing the realm of law, which insists on freedom as protecting the individual from government interference. 

The rise of socialist and radical democratic sentiments late 19th and early 20th centuries were driven out by Cold War liberals like Hayek and Berlin who revived the negative conception of freedom from the early 19th century (freedom from any form of state intervention, even if democratically sanctioned). While originally invented in the 19th century to defend the interest of political elites against the rising tides of democracy, this anti-democratic concept of freedom was solidified in America after 1945 in the face of the country’s growing distrust of the state and their rivalry with the Soviet Union.

Thus, by the era of the Cold War, “the counter revolutionary conception of freedom invented in the 1790s was reimagined as the very essence of Western civilization” (340). Freedom is now predominantly not seen as something positive (the freedom to vote and participate in government), but rather wholly negative (freedom from government interference and the encroachment on one’s rights). Through subjecting the egalitarian and radically democratic elements of freedom to various tempering machinations such as a divided chamber and an unelected judiciary court, de Dijn argues that freedom has transformed from an emancipatory ideal to a weaponized concept used to defend the interest of elites. Freedom is now identified with personal security and one’s rights, but de Dijn urges us to remember that “for the founders of our modern democracies, freedom, democracy, and equality were not in tension, but were inherently intertwined” (345). 

Commendations: 

Despite covering over two thousand years of history, de Dijn does a phenomenal job in giving the reader a fairly comprehensive, yet succinct overview of the intellectual history of freedom (in a political sense) in Western Europe and America. De Dijn readily admits the narrow scope of the book from the outset. While the narrative could’ve been informed by historical conversations happening in the Middle East and the Far East, de Dijn still pulls from an impressively wide range of thinkers and historical actors. She regularly points out the narrow scope of the extension of democracy, as it was withheld from slaves and women from Ancient Greece to the modern era. Her inclusion of these more marginalized voices also helped to make this work well-rounded and comprehensive. Despite her sweeping grand narrative, de Dijn does well to keep her analysis nuanced, generally avoiding sweeping generalizations while also keeping the writing style relatively light and imminently accessible. 

De Dijn’s central argument -- that the historical conception of the freedom to exercise popular sovereignty has fallen way to an antidemocratic understanding of freedom as primarily from popular government -- is well-argued, challenging both conservatives and liberals in equal measure for accepting the basic premise of individual privilege over collective freedom. She also reveals that these tensions and debates surrounding freedom are nothing new; rather they’ve been repeated time and again with remarkable consistency through the course of Western history, and have sparked countless political movements, for better or worse. 

Whether or not you agree with de Dijn’s conclusions about the value of unfettered democracy, her intervention is important to consider. The differing visions of freedom are not, of course, mutually exclusive, and have been held in tension with one another over the years. De Dijn’s remarkable work reveals how these various ideals of freedom have been mobilized to protect particular interests. For me, I wonder just how useful the signifier of “freedom” is anymore. It is a historically loaded term riven with contradictory meanings, and I wonder whether it is still useful for organizing a collective movement.  

De Dijn also emphasizes the importance of storytelling, visual art, and myth-making in the replication of certain ideas of freedom. Citizens of the Roman Empire looked toward the Greeks and the days of the early Republic nostalgically as the paradigm of freedom. The Renaissance humanists pined for the days of Greek art, architecture, and literature as they lamented what they thought was the cultural degradation of their own society. After the Atlantic Revolutions, politicians and philosophers of the following centuries would refer back to the glorious days of the birth of America and the “genius” of the Founding Fathers, sentiments still shared by American conservatives and liberals alike to this day. While freedom seems to be a calling card signifier of the Right, I wonder just how much the Left could benefit from emphasizing economic freedom and democracy within the workplace, an idea that has been largely dormant since the Cold War. 

Critique: 

On the other hand, since the volume covers so much ground in its grand, sweeping history, some aspects are either overlooked or simplified. De Dijn’s academic focus is on late 18th and early 19th-century French history, and these chapters are the most fully developed. By extension, some other sections are less developed, such as the medieval era, which leaves the reader with a large gap in the historical narrative. She did bring up the growing tension between ecclesiastical powers and secular courts in the Middle Ages, which was an interesting avenue to pursue and, as someone with a deep affinity for medieval history and how it is often passed over in most retellings of history, I deeply appreciated the handful of pages that de Dijn dedicated to the subject. Yet, I think these concepts could have been explored a bit further, especially in regards to the voluntarism-intellectualism debate between Duns Scotus and Thomas Aquinas, which served as the background for the subsequent debates on natural rights that would be taken up later by Locke, Hobbes, and Rousseau. 

I am also a bit wary of some of how the totality of certain philosophers' works was a bit oversimplified for the sake of the narrative. In particular, de Dijn argues that Locke defended an ancient conception of freedom as democratic participation, as he saw the enactment of laws to be justified only under “the consent of the society, over whom no body [sic] can have a power to make Laws, but by their own consent, and by Authority received from them” (176). While de Dijn is right to point out Locke’s position on the institution of laws, Locke also famously argued that natural rights were the precondition for popular sovereignty, not the other way around. Locke’s emphasis on property rights and the limits of legislative authority makes him an awkward fit within de Dijn’s narrative, and her reading of him only reflects a portion of his work. 

This one-sided depiction also applies to other thinkers, such as Isaiah Berlin. De Dijn depicts Berlin as believing “that freedom as noninterference -- what he called ‘negative’ liberty -- was the only kind of freedom worth having, and that any other, more ‘positive’ definition of the concept was an obfuscation or a lie” (336). Yet, the footnote for this claim, when traveling to the citations, only suggests to the reader a source that contradicts this claim, offering, as opposed to her reading, “a different reading of Berlin’s Two Concepts, arguing that Berlin was a defender of both negative and positive liberty” (402). While I appreciate de Dijn’s effort to give different perspectives, it is odd to relegate such a reading to the notes section, while barreling ahead full steam in the narrative on her idiosyncratic reading. This happens often throughout the text, which leads me to wonder just how much these sources are cherry-picked to make her argument more plausible.

Furthermore, when it comes to the role of religion in developing these concepts of freedom, de Dijn interprets Christianity as an inherently conservative force. While she does admit that early Christians took an ambivalent stance toward monarchy, she ultimately rules that Christianity’s emphasis on individual, spiritual freedom precluded any notion of political liberty. While she does make many fair and accurate points in this regard, there’s little discussion about the emancipatory emphasis of African American expressions of Christianity throughout America’s history. Also, as the narrative progresses into the 20th century, there’s no discussion of the role of Christian liberation theology and how it pushes back against the pietist mode of freedom. 

This omission is primarily because de Dijn’s narrative only takes us into the 1950s and the start of the Cold War. For de Dijn, the concept of freedom expressed by Friedrich Hayek and Isaiah Berlin remains the standard for Western discourses on freedom today. There’s not much engagement at all with the contemporary conversations on freedom, save for a few pages in the epilogue. It would have been enlightening to analyze how these concepts were further solidified in the neoliberal consensus of the Reagan and Thatcher administrations, as well as the overall rightward shift in American politics. De Dijn’s work could have been more fleshed out in regards to the latest resurgence of Leftist thought and activism in the past decade or so, and how the ancient conceptions of freedom are now coming back ever so slowly (the discussions about gerrymandering, the right to vote, automatic registration, DC statehood, etc). 

Conversation: 

In the absence of real class solidarity, the near-total influence of multinational corporations on the political arena, and an increasingly fragmented, polarized population that distrusts the democratic process, I fear that many of us will lose the hope of affecting meaningful change in the absence of political and economic freedom. Here, I think that de Dijn is wholly correct in her diagnosis of the lack of conversation of positive freedom, and the need to reconsider it in our contemporary discourse. Since progressive policy is popular with the majority of American citizens, radical democratic freedom could be a viable way to secure more equal rights (political and economic) for all, which is one reason why American Republicans are still afraid of mass enfranchisement under the cover of “election security.” 

On the other hand, with the increasing role of surveillance capitalism, social media, and data farming, I am at least a bit sympathetic to the concerns of those who fear government overreach and the erosion of privacy. Yet, I recognize that rather than through democracy, these are a result of the unfettered neoliberal policies of deregulation and the increasing privatization of public utilities and goods. This notion of the private citizen and their anxieties are nowhere to be found in de Dijn’s account, although it undoubtedly shapes modern narratives and the value we place on negative freedom. 

While de Dijn is quite correct in saying that the concerns of those critical of democracy were often fueled by a fear of economic redistribution rather than personal liberty, she also doesn’t address why there are good reasons for limiting legislative power or instituting a judicial system that enumerates our rights. De Dijn seems to imply that majoritarian democracies will inherently secure and respect individual rights, but she never really explains how or why this would be the case. The tension between political and civil liberty is not as opposed to one another as de Dijn depicts, and how to secure both personal liberty and ensure popular consensus in governance has been hotly contested since the days of Athenian democracy. 

I do not think, as such, that these competing conceptions of freedom represent a zero-sum game. While I agree that there has been a decreased emphasis on freedom as the ability to participate in the political process, I do also think that there is value in securing and protecting the individual from arbitrary abuses from the state (especially in the absence of democratic freedom). For example, from the many lessons we’ve learned in the past several years of the BLM movement, it is that we need to radically rethink and restructure the power of policing in this country. As such, we need to be able to both hold our representatives and institutions accountable through popular means (positive freedom/democracy), as well utilize the judiciary system to protect the rights of those most vulnerable to abuse (racial and sexual minorities, immigrants and refugees, those in poverty, etc) while we work to build a more just society. 

I do agree with de Dijn that the primary threat to democracy today is from the minority rule of corrupted elites, rather than some notion of illiberal populism. US democracy has been in crisis for decades, and the rightward shift of our political system has created an environment in which the wealthy protect their interests through disenfranchising voters and passing policies that deepen their pockets while remaining unpopular among the majority of the electorate. Yet, while de Dijn is correctly convinced that we are currently stuck in an era of identifying freedom with the absence of the state in the daily affairs of citizens, her solution -- to swing the pendulum back toward viewing freedom as the ability to make collective, democratic decisions over the way we live -- seems a bit simplistic. Negative freedom is the necessary shadow side of positive freedom, and we do need both to work through the complex antagonisms that they present us. 

Conclusion:

Overall, Freedom: An Unruly History is an ambitious and widely comprehensive survey of the concept of political freedom, tracing its evolution from ancient Greece to the Cold War. Although there are gaps in the narrative and a few one-sided depictions of various philosophers and political theorists, de Dijn complicates our traditional view of freedom, showing us how it has meant wildly different things to thinkers across the centuries. De Dijn shows us how our modern conception of freedom (the limitation of government interference in the lives of citizens) is rooted in the antidemocratic backlashes following the Atlantic Revolutions, and how we might recover the ancient ideal of freedom as popular self-government in the 21st century.

Freedom seems like a lofty ideal, but it can also be brandished as a powerful weapon to defend one’s interests. Everyone on the political spectrum in the West, regardless of ideological persuasion, defends the principles of freedom (at least in word, if not deed). Yet, how is it possible for us to be so deeply polarized around this concept? For those who are perplexed by how liberals, conservatives, and leftists define and conceptualize freedom in different ways, this book serves as a useful introduction to this thorny issue. 

Coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic, we have seen the utilization of freedom from the American right to argue against wearing masks, taking vaccines, or doing anything at all that would help the nation overcome the virus. As a result, more than half a million Americans were killed by an entirely preventable virus, which was exacerbated by the previous administration’s wholly inept response. Conservatives claim that college campuses are restricting their freedom of speech and that providing universal health care takes away their right to choose. These ideas are all predicated on the modern idea of freedom as the limitations of the government in telling one how to live one’s life and have a deep hold on the American imagination, shaped as it is through an excessive focus on individualism and self-reliance. 

As such, anti-government sentiment is strong among the American public, making any meaningful democratic change through policy exceptionally difficult. If Leftists are to make any inroads in organizing a mass movement and effectively communicating our policies, we must remember the foundations of political liberty: that economic and political freedom are an inherently socialist values. We should promote democracy in all areas of life, including the workplace, as we work for the economic freedom of all people through collective, majoritarian action. Freedom: An Unruly History reminds us of the constant backlash that democracy has faced over the centuries, how we should manage these tensions between personal liberty and radically democratic politics, and just how democratic these “wise restraints that make us free” really are.