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In the Preface to On Freedom, Snyder describes visiting war-torn Ukraine in 2022 and states what he hopes the book will accomplish. Having written several novels on mass killing and multiple books on tyranny in America, Snyder hopes that On Freedom will serve to describe positive goals that America can strive toward. He distinguishes between freedom in the negative sense, an absence of oppression, and freedom in the positive sense, the ability to affirm and pursue a vision of the well-lived life. The book will be divided into five forms of freedom: sovereignty, unpredictability, mobility, factuality, and solidarity. There will be a chapter for each form of freedom, as well as a final chapter describing how freedom can create an ideal government. Each chapter will offer a series of short vignettes, meditations on the chapter theme.

The Introduction consists of short vignettes from Snyder’s life. “Jubilee” takes place in 1976, the Bicentennial of the United States. Snyder recalls ringing a bell on his family’s farm in Ohio at age 6 and thinking about the Liberty Bell. He did not understand at the time that American independence 200 years prior did not mean freedom for all Americans. “Flights” describes the engineering accomplishments of Ohioans such the Wright Brothers, inventor Charles Kettering, and Neil Armstrong. Snyder was born just after the moon landing in 1969 and later was inspired by the 1981 launch of the space shuttle Columbia.

“Holocausts” recalls Snyder, as a young teen, interviewing his grandmother about World War II for a school assignment. By 1984, the threat of nuclear holocaust during the Cold War overshadowed the Jewish Holocaust of several decades prior. Snyder notes that people had forgotten the threat of fascism at home. “Bells” follows Snyder to Moscow in 1990, during the breakup of the USSR, where he was invited to present some of his college essays. During a tour, he is shown the “Tsar Bell,” a gigantic metal bell that was meant to represent the power of an absolute ruler. The bell sits abandoned on the ground, useless. “Equilibrium” describes the economic shift in the former USSR as it broke apart. Many people believed that a capitalist equilibrium would generate freedom for the new nations.

“Exceptionalism” explains that after the USSR collapsed, people’s confidence that capitalism and private property were the keys to freedom prevented them from considering the potential limitations and failings of capitalism. “Oligarchs” examines the emergence of Russian democracy, the later rise of Vladimir Putin, and the heavy influence of Russian politics on American politics, specifically Donald Trump’s first term as president. “Staying” describes how, during the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, President Zelens’kyi responded to the invasion of his country by resolving to stay and fight, when Russian and American intelligence had predicted that he would flee and Ukraine would fall in a matter of days. For Snyder, Zelens’kyi’s decision to stay hints at what positive freedom looks like.

Next section Chapter 1: Sovereignty

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