-
Access our Top 20
Books of 2024!
The invention of modern freedom - the equating of liberty with restraints on state power - was not the natural outcome of such secular Western trends as the growth of religious tolerance or the creation of market societies. Rather, it was propelled by an antidemocratic backlash following the Atlantic Revolutions.
We tend to think of freedom as something that is best protected by carefully circumscribing the boundaries of legitimate state activity. But who came up with this understanding of freedom, and for what purposes? In a masterful and surprising reappraisal of more than two thousand years of thinking about freedom in the West, Annelien de Dijn argues that we owe our view of freedom not to the liberty lovers of the Age of Revolution but to the enemies of democracy.
The conception of freedom most prevalent today―that it depends on the limitation of state power―is a deliberate and dramatic rupture with long-established ways of thinking about liberty. For centuries people in the West identified freedom not with being left alone by the state but with the ability to exercise control over the way in which they were governed. They had what might best be described as a democratic conception of liberty.
Understanding the long history of freedom underscores how recently it has come to be identified with limited government. It also reveals something crucial about the genealogy of current ways of thinking about freedom. The notion that freedom is best preserved by shrinking the sphere of government was not invented by the revolutionaries of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries who created our modern democracies―it was invented by their critics and opponents. Rather than following in the path of the American founders, today's "big government" antagonists more closely resemble the counterrevolutionaries who tried to undo their work.
"[P]ersuasive and clearly backed by impressive scholarship...A brilliantly crafted, compelling, and deeply relevant history for our times." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"De Dijn's deep-dive into this abstract concept helps explain how partisans on both the right and the left can claim to be protectors of liberty, yet hold radically different understandings of its meaning. Dense yet accessible, this deeply informed history of an idea has the potential to combat political polarization." - Publishers Weekly
"Ambitious and bold, this book will have an enormous impact on how we think about the place of freedom in the Western tradition." - Samuel Moyn, author of Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World
"At once magisterial and finely grained, this is history on the grand scale. De Dijn succeeds in bringing, with clarity and a lightness of touch, the weight of the past to bear on freedom and its fragilities in our own time." - Darrin M. McMahon, author of Divine Fury: A History of Genius
"With remarkable sweep and erudition, de Dijn recounts the whole history of thinking about freedom in the West. In the process, she also profoundly upends the standard liberal narrative, convincing us that what we understand by freedom today―namely, the opportunity to be left alone to do our own thing―is a recent invention. This is an important book for historians, political theorists, and all readers who like big ideas." - Sophia Rosenfeld, author of Democracy and Truth: A Short History
"De Dijn has written a marvelous book on the history and various meanings of freedom. Its scope is enormous, its writing elegant, its insights strikingly original. We will all be reading this book for many years to come." - Michael P. Zuckert, author of Launching Liberalism
This information about Freedom was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Annelien de Dijn is Professor of Modern Political History at Utrecht University and the author of French Political Thought from Montesquieu to Tocqueville. Her research has been supported by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study, and the Independent Social Research Foundation.
 (1).gif)
Beliefs are what divide people. Doubt unites them
Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!
Your guide toexceptional books
BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.
