On Freedom

Drawing on Edith Stein’s philosophy of empathy, Snyder distinguishes between the Körper—an object-body governed by physical laws—and the Leib, a living body with feeling, agency, and a subjective “zero point.” Stein argues that knowledge of self arises by acknowledging others as subjects; Snyder presents this as foundational for freedom. Treating people as objects produces ignorance and vulnerability to manipulation, while recognizing their agency and subjectivity creates the understanding required to act with purpose. From this base, he critiques “negative freedom” as a mistake that ignores what bodies need to understand and build together; for him, freedom is positive, oriented to capacities and structures.

Again drawing from Stein, he connects Nazi racial ideology, which imagined a Volkskörper (a body of “the people,” imagined as exclusively the “Aryan” people) menaced by Fremdkörper (a foreign body), to the dehumanization and murder of Jewish people. Snyder cites the early-20th-century French philosopher Simone Weil, who describes our bodies as the site where gravity meets grace and insists that recognizing the stranger helps us see ourselves. Weil’s life and ideas anchor a view of sovereignty as an ability to translate constraints into purposes in the world.

Sports and ritual serve as further examples. In stadiums, children absorb symbols and songs, prompting Snyder to ask what the National Anthem means to bodies of different histories. He cites comparative measures of freedom and well-being to suggest that polities oriented toward “freedom to” often perform better, even by “freedom from” metrics. He interlaces this with the story of his own 2019 medical crisis—his ruptured appendix went undiagnosed, leading to life-threatening sepsis. Illness blurs the line between Leib and Körper, as the ill body is both object and suffering subjectivity. He ties these experiences to historical failures to recognize all bodies as equally human and argues that life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness depend on embodied conditions that sustain agency.

Returning to music and memory, Snyder describes children playing klezmer in the White Synagogue in Sejny, Poland—a site desecrated by the Nazi occupation and later converted to a Jewish museum and cultural center—their breath and movement carrying a Jewish past into the present. He observes how the capacity to learn, play, and dance ties bodies in the present to those of the past and future. He then sets this recognition against a backdrop of present-day propaganda and war: Russian messaging around the invasion of Ukraine reduces Leib to Körper and primes violence. In a Kyiv rehabilitation center, Snyder watches wounded soldiers train with prosthetics and reflects that his own thinking relies on the presence of others. He recalls collaborating in person with his friend Tony Judt as Judt’s amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, a terminal illness) progressed, showing how shared attention summons capacities otherwise dormant.

Teaching Edith Stein in a maximum-security prison, Snyder insists on classroom presence once pandemic protocols allow. Students extend empathy to Ukraine, linking Russia’s dehumanization of the Ukrainian people to the unfreedom of perpetrators. They question Stein’s historical limits, recognize European colonialism against Europeans, and align their experiences as incarcerated people with those of Ukrainians under occupation; Ukrainian colleagues later encounter the students’ ideas in turn. Snyder argues that “negative freedom” obscures oligarchy and fascism in Russia and threatens the United States by privatizing shared problems and separating people from one another.

Drawing on his own experiences with the aftermath of Jim Crow segregation in the 1970s, he shows how deliberate policy choices craft segregated spaces that are then described as natural. Language and membership rules shape who is present, and absence invites mob mentality; denying others’ Leib induces people to surrender their own.

Snyder then relocates sovereignty from the state to the person by insisting that the individual’s political life begins with birth. He critiques the myth of the social contract, as articulated by Enlightenment thinkers like John Locke, that starts from an idealized adult subjectivity. For Snyder, legitimacy rests on enabling the sovereignty of children: Governments that support birth, caregiving, early education, and time—especially the time of mothers and caregivers—build the capacities freedom requires. He synthesizes research on early childhood: Constant contact, trust, play, and guided choice help children name emotions and evaluate, expanding their perceived alternatives and resistance to manipulation. Because individuals become free only through the caregiving work of others, a society committed to freedom values caregivers and creates conditions for their work.

He applies this to women’s bodies, arguing for policies that reduce unfreedom around rape, childbirth, and parental time. Negative freedom, he says, gives no guidance here; positive freedom requires structures that make desired lives possible. Sovereignty, he concludes, is natal and generational: It starts from birth and grows through the presence, care, and recognition that enable people to translate necessity into purpose and values into action.