On Freedom

Snyder defines solidarity as the fifth form of freedom and presents it as the practical recognition that individuals cannot become or remain free on their own. He links sovereignty, unpredictability, mobility, and factuality to social structures that others build and maintain. Care for the young, support for mobility into adulthood, and the institutions that make knowledge and truthful speech possible all depend on collective effort. Solidarity, he says, is the mark of a just person and the guiding light of a country that wants to be “a land of the free” (212).

He argues that freedom of speech requires both individual declarations and social accommodations. Witnesses who testify to atrocity rely on networks that preserve, verify, and disseminate their accounts. Snyder cites Holocaust and contemporary Ukrainian initiatives to show how institutional support turns isolated testimony into public truth. He maintains that people are not free if their truths remain unheard, and he connects this to civic failures such as the slow recognition of the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, from 2014 to 2019.

Snyder frames voting as applied solidarity rather than a strictly individual act. He reviews US history from Reconstruction to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, noting how formal equality can mask substantive barriers, and how legal protections are vulnerable to retrenchment. He links the 1961 Freedom Rides and the 1963 March on Washington to a broader project of completing the nation’s promise of equality.

Snyder then describes “civil society” as developed by Eastern European dissidents: voluntary associations that let people pursue shared commitments outside state control. He recounts the Solidarity movement in Poland as a case where horizontal organization supported social trust, reduced despair, and facilitated a transition away from authoritarianism. He argues that those who affirm individual freedom incur obligations to sustain the society that makes freedom possible.

He contrasts this with the post-1989 embrace of negative freedom in parts of Europe, as neoliberal economists and political leaders developed a false confidence that markets alone would deliver liberty. He says this “politics of inevitability” (218) sidelined the dissident vocabulary of responsibility and solidarity and, over time, contributed to drift toward a “politics of eternity” in several states.

Snyder criticizes billionaires’ techno-utopian narratives, plans to outlast climate apocalypse through private exit strategies, and immortality projects as forms of escapism that block collective problem-solving. He claims that climate policy, public health, and scientific investments such as fusion power provide realistic ways to extend life and expand freedom for many, whereas personal life-extension or planetary exit do not. He emphasizes that space exploration ultimately depends on solving energy and climate challenges on Earth first.

He asks why advanced extraterrestrial civilizations do not contact us and proposes that self-undermining information systems may doom societies at the point of digital maturity. He critiques mid-century behaviorist techniques scaled through social media and contends that conspiracy amplification and climate denial impede both freedom and scientific progress.

Reframing free markets, he argues that negative freedom—freedom understood mainly as the removal of barriers—easily prioritizes abstractions (“free markets”) over people and bodies (Leib). He details how commercialized US medicine, driven by billing and screens, correlates with worse health outcomes relative to peer nations, and he frames this as a case where treating bodies as commodities undermines freedom. Snyder warns against “efficiency” language that ignores purpose, noting historical cases where efficiency talk rationalized exploitation.

Snyder argues that American libertarianism functions as an ideology of submission to an imagined “free market.” Snyder notes that “free” markets are an illusion: Markets require rules and public investments, and he documents how the tech and fossil-fuel industries, among others, depend on state action and subsidies. He argues that libertarianism narrows politics to impulse and consumption, blocks social mobility by protecting concentrations of wealth, opposes factuality through climate denial, and discourages solidarity by promising that social harmony will arise naturally from mutual self-interest. He presents this as a “death cult” when it treats market purity as sacred and discourages responsibility toward people.

Snyder defines totalitarianism as a single, societal concept of truth that fuses what is and what ought to be. He distinguishes this from what he calls “notalitarianism,” in which there is no truth, and politics is governed by emotion alone. He argues that both dissolve the space where freedom operates, inviting “us and them” politics and undermining courage and commitment. He closes by rejecting America’s “false tragedy of choice,” especially the supposed trade-off between entrepreneurship and social justice. He claims that these values often support each other—through public schools, antitrust, health care, and fair opportunity—and that solidarity helps societies hold multiple goods together over time, combining values as circumstances allow.