Historian specializing in Central Europe and the Holocaust, Timothy Snyder is a professor at Yale University (Connecticut) and a researcher at the Institute of Human Sciences in Vienna (Austria). Author, notably, of Bloodlands. Europe between Hitler and Stalin (Gallimard, 2012), he has just published Of freedom (Gallimard, 416 pages, 26 euros).
You have devoted your career to state violence, with a particular interest in the Holodomor, the great famines organized by Stalin in Ukraine in the 1930s, and the Shoah. You now turn towards freedom. For what ?
In my previous works, I wanted to understand what remains the main historical issue of the 20th century: what made these atrocities possible, why did they occur in Central and Eastern Europe? In Tyranny. Twenty lessons from the 20th century [Gallimard, 2017]a pamphlet warning against the dangers of Trumpism, I was trying to explain to my fellow Americans how we can prevent the spread of this violence. But, in a certain way, a fundamental question remained unanswered, which I could no longer dodge: what is this precious good, freedom, that must be preserved? What are the necessary conditions for its preservation? All these years of research have led me to finally question this theme: what is freedom, and how can we ensure that it remains flourishing?
However, in your book, you speak out against the dominant definition of freedom in the United States, a so-called “negative” freedom, because it is based on the absence of hindrance, particularly from the State. What leads you to question it?
Negative liberty is a simple and elegant idea, but also misleading. Defining freedom as the simple absence of barriers or any form of oppression amounts to stating a half-truth, which becomes false if we consider that it alone exhausts the subject. So, of course, we must recognize that nothing should hinder us, but we cannot be satisfied with this form of emancipation. Once we remove the barrier that obstructs our movements, it remains to know who we are, who we are going to become, what values are important to us and how we intend to put them into practice. Limiting freedom to the absence of evil is insufficient. Freedom is also based on the presence of good, of what allows the flourishing of our humanity. Security, education, solidarity, for example, are essential to freedom; this must not be seen only as resistance to oppression, but also as a creative and fruitful force.
