On Freedom

One of Snyder’s central arguments in On Freedom is that liberty cannot be reduced to the absence of interference. The idea of “negative freedom,” long influential in Western political thought, suggests that people are free when no external obstacles or authorities constrain them. Snyder critiques this view as inadequate and repressive, arguing that it ignores the embodied and social conditions that make agency possible. As he writes, “Negative freedom is not a misunderstanding but a repressive idea. It is itself a barrier: a barrier of an intellectual and moral kind” (39). By labeling negative freedom as an obstacle, Snyder shows how defining liberty only as “freedom from” produces passivity and vulnerability rather than sovereignty.

Instead, he presents freedom as responsibility—an active capacity cultivated in relationship with others and supported by democratic institutions. Drawing on Edith Stein, who distinguished between the object-body (Körper) and the lived body (Leib), Snyder explains that freedom begins not in isolation but in recognition: We know ourselves as subjects only by acknowledging others as subjects too. Empathy is an essential form of knowledge, without which individuals fall prey to manipulation.