Annelien de Dijn, "Freedom: An Unruly History" (Harvard UP, 2020)
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 reappraisal of more than two thousand years of thinking about freedom in the West, Annelien de Dijn argues in her Freedom: An Unruly History (Harvard University Press) 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…
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