Freedom: An Unruly History
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 her new book Prof. Annelien de Dijn (History and Art History) answers these questions.
A democratic conception of 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. The dominant conception of freedom today is a deliberate and enormous rupture with those ideas.
Enemies of democracy
Understanding the long history of thinking about freedom shows how recent our current perspective actually is. In fact, this perspective was not invented by the revolutionaries of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries who created our modern democracies, but by their critics and opponents.
Review
On March 22, a positive review of the book appeared in American magazine . According to the reviewer, De Dijn "shows how the very nature of freedom can be interpreted in different ways by different people at different times. More specifically, she challenges conservatives who wrap their ideology in the glorious banner of freedom, revealing the long history of a very different vision of human liberation, one that emphasizes collective self-government over individual privilege. In doing so, she shows how philosophers, kings, and ordinary folk have used (and sometimes misused) the past to build the present and imagine the future."
- Title: Freedom: An Unruly History
- Author: Annelien de Dijn
- Publisher: Harvard 木瓜福利影视 Press
- ISBN: 9780674988330