ON POSITIVE FREEDOM
AND BELOVED...
Amazing how much I owe literary writers for my political consciousness. I’m reading Timothy Snyder’s analysis of negative freedom versus positive freedom — freedom from vs freedom to — and how the US obsession with negative freedom has fueled oligarchical power and un-freedom in general.1
The Snyder immediately sent me back to Morrison’s Beloved, where I first learned about these concepts — specifically that moment when Sethe realizes: Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another.
The dilemma of negative vs positive freedom, dramatized in one searing sentence (a sentence that takes on special urgency for those of us whose bodies are always being conceived by our hegemons as cage-ready).
As Morrison makes clear: surviving foregrounds negative freedom.
True living, true emancipation, however, requires positive freedom.
For both Morrison and Snyder, negative freedom, no matter how tactically necessary it might seem, eventually leads back to the very oppression it promises to liberate us from. Negative freedom keeps the chain painfully near, but it is positive freedom alone that will abjure the chain forever.
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For a quick look at the concept see https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/sep/23/on-freedom-by-timothy-snyder-review-an-essential-manifesto-for-change and https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/21/opinion/ukraine-america-russia-freedom.html
Also the following CBC podcast is a good overview if you need a taste before grabbing the book.
Thank you, for keeping your finger steadily on the pulse of moral leadership Snyder's work (thank you for putting it on the map of this distracted reader) is essential reading. And to pull the Beloved passage into your post.... lovely. Toni said it all. Like you said, at the 92 Y, I can go to sleep tonight in peace. Snyder, and Morrison and Junot Díaz are keeping (positive) freedom alive. 🙏🏽
I read Beloved this year - late to the greatness as usual. I still feel the dark radiance of the story, ghosts alive, the buried always waking. I hope history, looking back on Now, will note how the positive freedoms roared while the negative freedoms whispered, and democracy, yet again, held on by a few votes of the brave. Thanks, Junot, for the encouragement.