We are free when we have the right and the liberty to choose for ourselves. Freedom is among the most highly prized of our values.
- I do not believe we can have any freedom at all in the philosophical sense, for we act not only under external compulsion but also by inner necessity. Schopenhauer’s saying— “A man can surely do what he wills to do, but he cannot determine what he wills”—impressed itself upon me in youth and has always consoled me when I have witnessed or suffered life’s hardships. This conviction is a perpetual breeder of tolerance, for it does not allow us to take ourselves or others too seriously; it makes rather for a sense of humor. [Albert Einstein]
- . . . true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. . . People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made. [Franklin D. Roosevelt]
- Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom. [attributed to Viktor E. Frankl]
To take full advantage of our autonomy – to see what is possible, to plan and to choose – we must be free. Freedom is the state of being free, as contrasted with the process of liberation. Given the luxury of doing so, people value their freedom above nearly everything else – or so they think.
The matter is complicated. In the United States, freedom has come to refer to a right to pursue wealth within the prevailing capitalist system. In some ways, that is similar to the so-called freedom to own slaves, which also prevailed in the United States. It ignores the practical realities of capitalism as it has evolved: under capitalism as it has evolved, a few people “win”, while everyone else, relatively, loses. This consolidates power in a few hands, which is an antithesis of freedom.
By contrast, Hannah Arendt argued for a concept of freedom that is both personal and political: “Arendt looks at human life in terms of early human activity and makes some distinctions in human life: labor, work, and action. Of these three, only action expresses the highest human potential and possibility, freedom.” Joseph Raz “argued that law and policy should reflect a vision of the human good, with the good of personal autonomy—enabling people to be ‘authors of their own lives’—at its heart.”
Real
True Narratives
Personal freedom:
- Myra B. Young Armstead, Freedom’s Gardener: James F. Brown, Horticulture, and the Hudson Valley in Antebelllum America (New York University Press, 2012). “He believed in public order, personal responsibility and self-discipline.”
- Erica Benner, Be Like the Fox: Machiavelli’s Lifelong Quest for Freedom (W.W. Norton & Company, 2017). “Machiavelli: Good Guy or Bad? This Biography Argues for the Former”
- Sophia Rosenfeld, The Age of Choice: A History of Freedom in Modern Life (Princeton University Press, 2025), is “a rich, compelling account of how the experience of choosing ceased to be the object of suspicion and condemnation and became instead the hallmark, at least in liberal, democratic societies, of any life worth living. . . . a shopper’s decision as whether to buy a purple or yellow calico seems too trivial to notice. But Rosenfeld convincingly argues that the republican agitator and the bargain hunter are bound up in the same story and that a surprisingly crucial role in this story is played by women.”
Social freedom:
- Maggie Nelson, On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint (Graywolf, 2021): “She doesn’t aim to provide a positive account of the meaning of freedom. But if we understand freedom, above all, through our opposition to bondage, we can learn a great deal, as her book shows, from carefully cataloging and challenging the many ways of being unfree.”
- Alice L. Baumgartner, South to Freedom: Runaway Slaves to Mexico and the Road to the Civil War (Basic Books, 2020): “Enslaved, Terrorized, Disenfranchised: Black Americans Still Found Ways to Change America”.
- Angela Merkel, Freedom: Memoirs 1954-2021 (St. Martin’s Press, 2024): “Freedom was unthinkable, until it wasn’t. Merkel devotes a long section of her book to the rapid and unexpected events that followed November 1989. The fall of the Berlin Wall presented her, at 35, with a new life. ‘I expected many things,” she once said, “but not the gift of freedom before I reached retirement age.’”
Privacy as an element of freedom:
- Lori Andrews, I Know Who You Are and I Saw What You Did: Social Networks and the Death of Privacy (Free Press, 2012): how personal data are exploited by Web sites, search engines and Internet technologies.
- Paul R. Abramson, Steven Pinkerton and Mark Huppin, Sexual Rights in America: The Ninth Amendment and the Pursuit of Happiness (NYU Press, 2003).
- John W. Johnson, Griswold v. Connecticut: Birth Control and the Constitutional Right of Privacy (University Press of Kansas, 2005) [links to the full text of the Court’s opinion, and oral arguments, in this landmark case, which established a constitutionally protected right of privacy].
- Amy Gajda, Seek and Hide: The Tangled History of the Right to Privacy (Viking, 2022): “The law professor Amy Gajda writes about the tug of war between the right to know and the right to be let alone.”
On the dark side:
Russia and its gulags:
- Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History (Doubleday, 2003)
- Jehanne M. Gheith and Katherine R. Jolluck, Gulag Voices: Oral Histories of Soviet Incarceration and Exile (Palgrave MacMillan, 2011).
- Golfo Alexopoulos, Illness and Inhumanity in Stalin’s Gulag (Yale University Press, 2017).
- Masha Gessen, The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia (Riverhead Books, 2017): “Gessen . . . tells Russia’s story through the eyes of seven Russians.”
- Witold Szablowski, Dancing Bears: True Stories of People Nostalgic for Life Under Tyranny (Penguin Press, 2018): “. . . he provokes a far-reaching and unresolved conversation about what freedom really means.”
Tyrants:
- Ezra F. Vogel, Deng Xiaopeng and the Transformation of China (Belknap Press, 2011): “. . . for most of his long career Deng Xiaoping did less for China than he did to it.”
Dark days for Freedom in the United States:
- Adam Hochschild, American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis (Mariner, 2022): “By some measures — and certainly in many quarters of the American left — the years 1917-21 have a special place in infamy. The United States during that time saw a swell of patriotic frenzy and political repression rarely rivaled in its history. President Woodrow Wilson’s terror campaign against American radicals, dissidents, immigrants and workers makes the McCarthyism of the 1950s look almost subtle by comparison.”
Technical and Analytical Readings
Privacy, an aspect of freedom:
- Garret Keizer, Privacy (Picador, 2012): a definition of privacy that “seems to fit within the European tradition of conceiving privacy as a way of protecting human dignity (as opposed to the American one, which is more interested in privacy as a way of protecting liberty).”
- Daniel Solove, Understanding Privacy (Harvard University Press, 2008).
- Helen Nissenbaum, Privacy in Context: Technology, Policy, and the Integrity of Social Life (Stanford Law Books, 2009).
- Wolfgang Sofsky, Privacy: A Manifesto (Princeton University Press, 2008).
- Ellen Alderman and Caroline Kennedy, The Right to Privacy (Alfred A. Knopf, 1995).
Technology and freedom:
- Daniel H. Holtzman, Privacy Lost: How Technology Is Endangering Your Privacy (Jossey-Bass, 2006).
- Jamie Susskind, The Digital Republic: On Freedom and Democracy in the 21st Century (Pegasus Books, 2022): “As Susskind makes clear, the problem of big tech will not be solved by lobbing barbed critiques or by waiting for corporations to do the right thing. What we need are new laws that will force the companies to be less dominant and do less damage. Susskind offers an array of solutions, and they are the most important part of the book.”
Photographs
Documentary and Educational Films
Imaginary
Fictional Narratives
Personal freedom:
“Well, Tom,” said St. Clare, the day after he had commenced the legal formalities for his enfranchisement, “I’m going to make a free man of you; — so have your trunk packed, and get ready to set out for Kentuck.” The sudden light of joy that shone in Tom’s face as he raised his hands to heaven, his emphatic “Bless the Lord!” rather discomposed St. Clare; he did not like it that Tom should be so ready to leave him. “You haven’t had such very bad times here, that you need be in such a rapture, Tom,” he said drily. “No, no, Mas’r! ’tan’t that, — it’s bein’ a freeman! that’s what I’m joyin’ for.” “Why, Tom, don’t you think, for your own part, you’ve been better off than to be free?” “No, indeed, Mas’r St. Clare,” said Tom, with a flash of energy. “No, indeed!” “Why, Tom, you couldn’t possibly have earned, by your work, such clothes and such living as I have given you.” “Knows all that, Mas’r St. Clare; Mas’r’s been too good; but, Mas’r, I’d rather have poor clothes, poor house, poor everything, and have ’em mine, than have the best, and have ’em any man’s else,—I had so, Mas’r; I think it’s natur, Mas’r.” [Harriett Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin or Life Among the Lowly (1852), Volume II, Chapter 28, “Reunion”.]
Novels, from the dark side:
- Dave Eggers, The Circle: A Novel (Alfred A. Knopf, 2013): a seeming heaven of creature comforts and high good taste is a hell in which “(a)nonymity is banished” and “everyone’s past is revealed”.
- Thomas Pynchon, Bleeding Edge: A Novel (Penguin, 2013): the main concern of “America’s great clown laureate of paranoia”, reflected in his literary work, is dehumanization as a result of “vast and totalizing systems of control.”
- Rachel Kushner, The Mars Room: A Novel (Scribner, 2018), “is a major novel, a sustained performance, one that broods on several exigent ideas. The sense of constriction I mentioned above plays out in many ways. Nearly every character has had radically limited options from birth.”
- Angie Cruz, Dominicana: A Novel (Flatiron Books, 2019): “The titular Dominicana of Angie Cruz’s third novel refers to both her narrator, Ana, and a hollow ceramic doll that serves as a vessel for all her secrets. It’s an apt metaphor for Ana’s role in her family: carrying within herself all their hopes to eventually build a life in the United States.”
- Yoko Ogawa, The Memory Police: A Novel (Pantheon, 2019): “Objects don’t vanish, exactly; people wake up knowing they are ‘gone,’ and destroy them. Those who can’t forget receive a visit from the Memory Police, who enforce the disappearances by carting off families and eliminating contraband while betraying no signs of their intent.”
- Carolina De Robertis, Cantoras: A Novel (Knopf, 2019): “In 1977, five rebellious friends (cantoras, or singers, as lesbians were called) escape the spying neighbors and disapproving parents of Montevideo for the remote seaside fishing village of Cabo Polonio. They want to be alone, to eat, drink and talk openly in 'a circle of the possible.'”
- Ali Smith, Companion Piece: A Novel (Pantheon, 2022), “is set in a pandemic-ravaged, post-Brexit Britain, with a perplexing choice at its center.”
- Lydia San Andres, Compromised Into a Scandalous Marriage: A Novel (Harlequin Historical, 2022): “Sebastian’s public resistance to the brutal traditions of the sugar industry has its mirror in Paulina’s domestic struggle to escape her greedy brother’s control: You don’t have to think about post-colonialism when reading about what goes down at the governor’s ball, but you’ll still be left gasping if you do. Sweet but satisfying, this book is as good a vacation as you can have without leaving home.”
Social freedom:
- Rinsai Rossetti, The Girl With Borrowed Wings: A Novel (Dial Books, 2012), is a young person’s novel in which the author “uses the colors of nature to convey the disparity between who Frenenqer is expected to be and the person she truly is . . .”
- Neel Mukherjee, A State of Freedom: A Novel (W.W. Norton & Company, 2018): “A Novel That Echoes Naipaul, Exploring the Limits of Freedom ”
- V.S. Naipaul, In a Free State: A Novel (HarperCollins, 1971): “These new stories focus on the failure of heart, on the animallike cruelty man exhibits to other men and on the avarice that, as Chaucer's Pardoner told, is the root of all evil. Are we in a free state really? Or are organisms driven by the violent compulsions within us?”
- Jessamine Chan, The School for Good Mothers: A Novel (Simon & Schuster, 2022): a wayward mother of three small children “is sentenced to a prisonlike rehabilitation program where she must complete nine units of study — Fundamentals of Care and Nurture, Dangers Inside and Outside the Home, the Moral Universe and so forth — and pass a series of tests or risk having her parental rights permanently revoked. She is allowed to speak to Harriet at ever-dwindling intervals, missing her daughter’s birthday and first day of school and all the milestones in between. She must practice her new skills on a robot doll.”
Poetry
Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high / Where knowledge is free / Where the world has not been broken up into fragments / By narrow domestic walls
Where words come out from the depth of truth / Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection / Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way / Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit
Where the mind is led forward by thee / Into ever-widening thought and action / Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.
[Rabindranath Tagore, “Where the Mind Is Without Fear”]
Other poems:
- Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, “Bury Me in a Free Land”
Music: Composers, artists, and major works
Western “Classical” compositions:
- Vincent d'Indy, Symphony on a French Mountain Air (Symphony sur un Chant Montagnard Francais) (1886) (approx. 24-27’): as its title suggests, this “symphony” for orchestra and piano evokes a feeling of being atop a scenic mountain on a beautiful day. Top performances are conducted by Cluytens in 1953, Munch in 1958, Ormandy in 1958, and Goossens.
- Reinhold Glière, The Red Poppy , Op. 70 (1928) (approx. 86-108’), is a ballet glorifying the ideals of the Russian Revolution of 1917. “By pure chance, (Glière) stumbled across a story published in Pravda, telling the saga about a Soviet ship with food supplies impounded in China. Glière engaged the librettist Mikhail Kurilko to write a scenario within the aesthetic constraints of socialist realism. Set in a port in Kuomintang China in the 1920’s, The Red Poppy eventually became the first truly Soviet ballet.”
- Elena Ruehr, Toussaint Before the Spirits (2003) (approx. 49’): “Toussaint summons Gran Bwa, the spirit of the forest and of healing. Through her, both Moyse and Toussaint realize that the Tree of Liberty cannot be destroyed and that all three of them embody the tree . . .”
- Leoš Janáček, Taras Bulba, JW6/15 (1918) (approx. 22-26’), reflects the indomitability of its subject. At least that is one say to see it. The story comes from a Nikolai Golgol story (1835).
- Don Gillis, Symphony No. 3, “A Symphony for Free Men” (1942) (approx. 38’)
- Ivan Karabits, “Musician” (approx. 7’)
- Boris Lyatoshinsky, Sonata for Violin and Piano, Op. 19 (1926) (approx. 20’)
- John Dante Prevedini, On Liberty – An Augenmusik Piano Suite (approx. 46’): “Prevedini’s nine meditations on the theme of ‘liberty’ includes a graphic score inviting performers to improvise on each theme.”
- Shawn E. Okpebholo, Songs in Flight (2025) (approx. 64’) is a song cycle about enslavement in North America.
Albums:
- Boukman Eksperyans, Libète (Pran Pou Pran’l!) [Freedom (Let’s Take It!)] (1994) (50’), “finds them in good spirits, despite the sorry state of their country. The sound is still based on Haitian political and religious syncretism, Afro-pop instrumental and percussive profluence, and American guitar riffs . . .”
- Henry Butler, “The Village” (1987) (51’)
- Eric Revis, “Slipknots Through a Looking Glass” (2020) (57’): “The music thrives in the space between structure and indeterminacy. Revis' pieces are thoughtfully crafted but they don't feel overly mapped out, allowing the space required for the players' individual personalities to shine.”
- Airto Moreira, “Free” (1971) (55’): “The music combines together jazz, Brazilian music, and aspects of fusion and funk quite successfully.”
- Roy Brooks, with George Coleman, Woody Shaw, Hugh Lawson and Cecil McBee, “The Free Slave” (46’)
- Joey DeFrancesco & The People, “Project Freedom” (2017) (64’)
- Dr. Lonnie Smith, “Breathe” (2021) (64’): “Smith’s takes on Timmy Thomas’s ‘Why Can’t We Live Together’ and Donovan’s ‘Sunshine Superman’ feature droll readings by Iggy Pop—just the kind of goofy notion you might expect from a man who has adopted a doctoral designation and dons a trademark turban because, well, he feels like it.”
- Ivo Perelman, Matthew Shipp, William Parker & Bobby Kapp, “Heptagon” (2017) (45’)
- Yothu Yindi, “Freedom” (1993) (53’), with lyrics, from a world-renowned Australian aboriginal group
- Yothu Yindi, “Homeland Movement” (1989) (39’), about the movement to establish free aboriginal communities
- We Banjo 3, “Open the Road” (2022) (43’), is “gutsy, no holds barred leap into the great beyond - An expansion of horizons into Americana and the bluegrass heartlands”
- Soweto Gospel Choir, “Freedom” (2018) (47’): here are the lyrics.
- Solomiya Ivakhiv & Angelina Gadeliya, “Ukraine - Journey to Freedom” (2016) (91’), consists of works from Ukrainian composers.
- Dave Liebman, “Live at Smalls” (2023) (73’): “Free jazz is and will always be a fertile mind-field, an active landscape where veterans such as the quintet here at Smalls, post-plague, in a city pulled apart by fact and fiction, pull all their resources and years together to create and sustain an elemental connection, a trust with themselves, with the surrounding, extant forces, with the greater spirit and will of all.”
- Júlio Resende & Fado Jazz, “Sons of Revolution” (2023) (43’): “Without the revolution, I wouldn't even exist. My father is from Angola, he emigrated to Portugal after the revolution, and met my mother. The freedom to express myself is one of the dearest things to me, and jazz is the music that enables that the most—without any borders or restrictions.” [Resende]
- Maria Cecilia Muñoz & Tiffany Butt, “Libertad: The Will to Freedom” (2024) (70’)
- Black Artist Group, “For Peace and Liberty: In Paris, Dec. 1972” (1972) (36’): “The band had brought the industrial sounds of St. Louis and the pastoral clamor of rural Missouri to the cultural capital of Europe.”
- Orchestre Maquis du Zaire & Orchestre Safari Sound, “Zanzibara 11 - Congo in Dar: Dance No Sweat” (2025) (71’) “tells the story of two groups that burgeoned during the fruitful time of post-independence Congo . . .”
From the dark side:
- Leos Janacek’s dark-toned opera, From the House of the Dead (Z mrtvého domu), JW I/11 (1930) (approx. 99-100’) (libretto begins at p. 37), celebrates freedom as an elusive ideal. The story is about prisoners in a Siberian prison camp. After a protagonist is killed, a wounded eagle is set free, symbolizing the ideal. Here are links to performances conducted by Boulez, Abbado, Young, Jindra, and Mackerras.
- Frances Poulenc, Figure humaine for 12 voices, FP 120 (1943) (19-22’): Human voices, standing alone (a capella), expressing the cry of oppressed peoples for freedom.
- Behzad Abdi, “Hafez” (2013) (approx. 105’), is an example of art reflecting life. The composer was born in Iran in 1973, only six years before an oppressive new government banned opera. This opera is about a courageous poet who confronted an oppressive regime in his time.
- The Jazz Crusaders, “Freedom Sound” (1961) (33’)
Music: songs and other short pieces
- Nawang Khechog, “Freedom”
- Nawang Khechog, “Tibetan Freedom Chant”
- Nawang Khechog, “Freedom in Exile”
Freedom in personal relationships:
- Alicia Keys, "No One" (lyrics)
- Pharrell Williams, “Freedom” (lyrics)
- Queen, “I Want to Break Free” (lyrics)
- Franz Schubert (composer), “Der Knabe” (The Boy), D. 692 (1820) (lyrics)
Visual Arts
Film and Stage
- Kiss of the Spider Woman, a film illustrating the vastly different approaches to freedom that shape and color the human community: “By the end of the film, what started out as a contest between two opposite personalities has expanded into a choice between two completely different attitudes toward life. And the choice is not sexual, although for a long time it seems so. It is between freedom and slavery.”
- Hair, about a young man in his last few days before entering the military service during the Vietnam war
From the dark side:
- Pan’s Labyrinth: a “meditation on the costs and limitations of totalitarianism”
- Rabbit-Proof Fence, dramatizing the true story of three aboriginal girls who walk 1,200 miles to return home after being taken from their families by government officials
- Timbuktu, on oppression in Mali