On Sunday, October 26, 2025, my wife and I attended a public lecture by historian Timothy Snyder about his latest book, On Freedom, at Seattle’s Benaroya Hall. The event was sponsored by Seattle Arts and Lectures.

Timothy Snyder recently moved to the University of Toronto where he holds the Temerty Chair in Modern European History at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. He was formerly Levin Professor of History at Yale University.

Here’s my summary of his remarks. (You can read my full review of On Freedom here.)

Snyder spoke to a packed audience for about 20 minutes and then spent the next hour or so in an on-stage interview with author Jodi-Ann Burey. Burey was a terrific interviewer. It’s clear she is knowledgeable and had carefully read On Freedom, and perhaps some of Snyder’s other books too. She asked great questions that drew out deep, thoughtful answers.

“The value of values”

Snyder calls freedom the “value of values.” It’s the one value that makes all the others possible. I’ll try to explain his idea as best I can.

Good things exist in the world, things that we value. Things like honesty, loyalty, and perseverance, and also health, travel, and nature.

Values cannot be added up or ranked. They are incommensurable, meaning there’s no common standard you can use to measure them against each other. And they don’t always fit together very well:

• It’s hard to be both punctual and spontaneous, especially at the same time.
• It’s hard to be both loyal and honest. Sometimes you have to tell a friend or a boss they’re wrong.

Freedom lets us integrate our values, combine them, balance them off against each other from one situation to the next, as we think best. My values and my choices will be different than yours. That’s how it should be. Freedom is the value of values because freedom enables us to choose how we integrate our values in a way that defines us as unique individuals.

Positive and Negative freedom

Snyder distinguishes between positive and negative freedom. Negative freedom is freedom from: freedom from constraints and restrictions like school dress codes or government regulations. Positive freedom is freedom to: freedom to change jobs, move to a different city or country, imagine a different future.

Americans, he says, over-emphasize negative freedom. Paradoxically, this makes us less free.

Negative freedom, the absence of restraints, means the powerful control everyone else, and in the end, enslave them. America fought a civil war because powerful people in the South wanted the “freedom” to continue owning slaves.

Freedom of speech in the negative sense means the absence of restrictions. In practice, Snyder says, what it really means is the wealthy take control of the media. Their voices get amplified. The rest of us get muted, drowned out by torrents of misinformation and outrage. On the other hand, freedom of speech in the positive sense, the real purpose of freedom of speech, is the ability to speak truth to power without fear of bodily injury or death.

Insistence on small government is another form of negative freedom. One outcome, for example, is letting poor health care persist. It means people are stuck in their jobs for fear of losing their health care. It means shorter lifespans and more people who are “unnecessarily dead.” When you are dead, you are most certainly not free. Good health care is a form of positive freedom. It enables people to make their choices, integrate their values, and act in the world.

Negative freedom is not enough.

Getting rid of government is the wrong approach, Snyder says. The purpose of government is to create the conditions for freedom. In other words, we create freedom together. It’s a collective, social project. Not an individual one. It’s also a generational project. We create the conditions for our children to be free.

That’s important because, in Snyder’s view, positive freedom starts with the body, and it starts at infancy. An infant will not thrive with negative freedom only. An infant needs constraints and boundaries and it needs the structures and supports that free people create together to form a healthy functioning society. We all need those supports, not just infants, because we all have bodies. In this light, our current health care system, he says, only makes sense if we do not think about the body, if we do not recognize that we will all, at some point in our lives, get sick, and ultimately die.

Similarly, Snyder says empathy belongs to freedom. Through empathy we learn from others. We learn what they value. We learn what we have in common. Since freedom is a collective project, freedom is impossible without empathy.

Being unpredictable

In On Freedom, Snyder describes five forms of positive freedom: sovereignty, unpredictability, mobility, factuality and solidarity. In person, he only talked about unpredictability. He said that was his favorite form.

Our fears and our appetites make us predictable and controllable. That’s how dictators want us. Corporations too. That’s why social media algorithms are so powerful.

But by exercising positive freedom, by choosing our values and choosing how we integrate them, we become unpredictable. Snyder says we should be predictable to ourselves – we should understand our own values and how we integrate them – but unpredictable to others, especially to those who would control us.

How do we respond to this moment?

Many in the audience were eager to hear Snyder’s advice about what we should do now to resist America’s slide into autocracy under Donald Trump. For specific tactics he pointed to his earlier book, On Tyranny. He focused his remarks on some important high-level ideas.

There can be no effective resistance without a vision for the future. There’s no against without a for. If you’re just fighting for a return to the status quo, you will lose. That’s because you’ll be fighting against a tidal wave of fake history, and against people who have a legitimate desire for change.

We can’t go back to the status quo anyway because it lies in ruins. The country will be vastly different after Trump. We have to create what’s on the other side. We have to build something new based on moral values.

He said not to expect the Democratic Party to save the country. It can’t. It’s not built for that. In any case, it’s our job. So he urged people to seek out “uncomfortable coalitions.” You can’t do this online. Get your body outside. Meet with strangers in unfamiliar places. You won’t agree on everything. You might agree on enough.

For each of us:

• Remember that freedom starts with the body. Your physical presence is key.
• Showing up takes “a quantum of courage.”
• It’s not your job to fix everything.
• Your job is to do something.
• Act to become the person who has something to say or contribute on the other side of today’s crisis.
• Act where you have some standing, where you have knowledge, where you have something to offer.
• Act with other people, other bodies.
• Do it regularly because you can never predict the moment when resistance will break through.

Working together through acts of positive freedom, Snyder concluded, we can, and we must, build a different, better country.