Cover
Titel
Freedom. An Unruly History


Autor(en)
De Dijn, Annelien
Erschienen
Cambridge, MA 2020: Harvard University Press
Anzahl Seiten
432 S.
Preis
$ 35.00; £ 28.95; € 31,50
Rezensiert für H-Soz-Kult von
Margarete Tiessen, Magdalene College, University of Cambridge

Annelien De Dijn’s remarkably ambitious attempt to account for over two thousand years of Western thinking about the concept of freedom is designed to provoke contestation. „We owe our view of freedom not to the liberty lovers of the Age of Revolution, but to the enemies of democracy“, the book cover reads. What, then, is this view of freedom that the author sees dominating contemporary public discourse? It is a definition that hinges on the restriction of state power. “Today most people tend to equate freedom with the possession of inalienable individual rights”, De Dijn writes, “rights that demarcate a private sphere no government may infringe on.” (p. 1) The author is certain, however, that this view is a not only a fairly recent invention but “a deliberate and dramatic rupture with long-established ways of thinking about liberty” (p. 1).

Instead, De Dijn seeks to bring to the fore what she calls the “democratic conception of freedom”. As early as antiquity, “a free state was one in which the people ruled itself”, she explained in an interview that accompanied the publication of the book, “[…] the key to preserving political freedom was staving off elite domination, not establishing mechanisms to patrol the boundaries of state power”.1 We now, however, “have come to think that democratic majorities, not elite rule, are the real threat to liberty”.2 Erroneously so, De Dijn leaves the reader to add. Where and when, then, and perhaps more importantly, why, did things change so drastically?

De Dijn divides her study into three parts, each comprising two lengthy chapters. She leads the reader from the alleged invention of freedom as democracy, that is popular control over government, within the political life and the political debates of Greek and Roman antiquities (part I) to the Atlantic Revolutions (part II) through to the twenty-first century (part III). This structure is immensely important for the argument of the book, since De Dijn views the described rupture in the West’s thinking about freedom not as the result of a striving for religious independence or for unhindered economic activity in the early-modern period. For her, a long struggle over political participation is decisive and allows for a crucial shift in perspective: by focusing on the intentional use of the concept of freedom for political purposes, individual agency becomes all-important. De Dijn, thus, skillfully manages to write the long history of an idea without imposing mythological genealogies.

The first chapter reconstructs the tension between a „Greek cult of freedom“ that was based on the ideal of popular self-government and the oligarchic and sophist critiques of this cult. Members of the Athenian elite, including Thucydides and Plato, viewed the rule of the many as a threat to their own status within the city state, De Dijn explains. A similar conflict between popular and elitist government characterised the founding of the Roman Republic. In her second chapter, De Dijn recounts how both Lucius Brutus’ fight against Rome’s early kings and the subsequent plebeian attempt to curtail the power of the patricians were described as a struggle of democratic freedom against the tyranny of the few by historians such as Livy – if only to place Rome in the succession of the Greek city states. According to De Dijn, Livy’s concern lived on within the Roman Republic and even the Empire, for instance in the celebration of Julius Caesar’s assassinators as “tyrannicides” (p. 92).

Following a lamentably brief (and somewhat stereotypical) portrayal of the Middle Ages, the political writings of European humanists take centre stage. The third chapter traces the rediscovery of the ancient ideal of freedom as self-government in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italy and transalpine Europe. De Dijn rejects the argument that the Reformation or the emergence of the natural-rights doctrine led to a radical transformation in the definition of freedom, emphasizing instead the continuous dominance of the democratic element. The fourth chapter presents the Atlantic Revolutions as the historical culmination and, at the same time, the “curtain call” (p. 215) of this intellectual continuity. Henceforth, the proponents of democracy would draw on the model of the revolutionaries rather than on that of the ancients.

The book’s key claim is introduced towards the end of the second part: neither the Atlantic Revolutions themselves, nor, more precisely, their declarations of rights, disseminated the understanding of freedom as relying on the safeguarding of individual rights, but the „powerful backlash against democracy“ which they sparked (p. 227). The fifth chapter outlines the introduction of this novel way of thinking about freedom by European intellectuals such as Johann August Eberhard and Edmund Burke. De Dijn also reconstructs the many ways in which their “counterrevolutionary critique of democratic freedom was picked up by new intellectual movements in the first decades of the nineteenth century” (p. 249). Opposed to both revolutionary terror and a return to absolutism, European liberals, most influentially, began to look for a “third way” (p. 250). Examining what freedom truly meant was central to this agenda. The sixth chapter portrays in detail the theoretical implications of the antidemocratic redefinition of freedom in the aftermath of the Atlantic Revolutions. Most important, to De Dijn, is the fact that democracy and freedom were now presented as yet to be reconciled ideals – thus the coinage of the term of “liberal democracy” (p. 286). The new concept of freedom depended not on democratic governance but on limited state power, individual rights, an independent judiciary, and restrictive suffrage. This understanding of freedom gained particular prominence in the US towards the end of the nineteenth century. However, it did not go uncontested. “Radicals, socialists, populists, and progressives” (p. 311) continued to uphold the ideal of democratic freedom and even began to extend the democratic principle to the economic sphere. Only in the context of the Cold War and the ideologically dualist battles of the „free“ versus the „unfree world“ could the elitist, laissez-faire conception of freedom rise to almost unquestionable dominance in the West.

It is impossible, in this context, to even list the numerous political clashes between advocates of anti-democratic and democratic freedom which De Dijn sees dominating the history of the West since the 1848 revolutions. The book’s epilogue demonstrates that De Dijn does not shy away from entering this political struggle herself. She concludes her study by expressing puzzlement over the fact that, nowadays, “even among self-professed centrist or liberal intellectuals, there is a tendency to think of democracy as primarily a threat to liberty” (p. 344). Vocal American intellectuals such as the journalist Fareed Zakaria or the political scientist Yascha Mounk, De Dijn argues, continued to present freedom and democracy as hardly reconcilable opposites. One might, thus, indeed “do well to remember that, for the founders of our modern democracies, freedom, democracy, and equality were […] inherently intertwined” (p. 345).

Of course, De Dijn’s is not the first study to rely on the historical tension between the ideal of freedom and that of democracy for the advancement of its argument.3 However, equating freedom and popular self-government for the largest part of the history of Western political philosophy is a remarkably bold, stimulating new proposition and one that requires more thorough substantiation than even an investigation as overarching as the one presented may offer. At times the reader, therefore, cannot help but wonder whether the story told by De Dijn is perhaps one overly simplified for the admittedly important purpose of recovering the theoretical richness of the concept of freedom within Western thought.

However, even if one disagrees with her reading of the history of freedom in the West, De Dijn has undeniably presented an impressively cohesive theoretical synthesis. Moreover, she displays great sensitivity towards those principally excluded even from popular self-government throughout her investigation. All in all, one can, thus, only hope that this book will become a lasting point of inspiration – or of irritation – not just for historians of political thought but for anyone entering the public arena in the name of freedom.

Notes:
1 Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins, What We Call Freedom Has Never Been About Being Free in: The Nation, https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/annelien-de-dijn-freedom-unruly-history-interview/ (29 October 2020).
2 Ibid.
3 See, for instance, Edmund Fawcett, Liberalism. The Life of an Idea, Princeton (NJ) 2014; see also, for the German case in the twentieth century, Jens Hacke, Existenzkrise der Demokratie. Zur politischen Theorie des Liberalismus in der Zwischenkriegszeit, Berlin 2018.

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