Winner of the PROSE Award
An NRC Handelsblad Best Book of the Year

“Ambitious and impressive…At a time when the very survival of both freedom and democracy seems uncertain, books like this are more important than ever.”
—The Nation

“Helps explain how partisans on both the right and the left can claim to be protectors of liberty, yet hold radically different understandings of its meaning…This deeply informed history of an idea has the potential to combat political polarization.”
—Publishers Weekly

“Ambitious and bold, this book will have an enormous impact on how we think about the place of freedom in the Western tradition.”
—Samuel Moyn, author of Not Enough

“Brings remarkable clarity to a big and messy subject…New insights and hard-hitting conclusions about the resistance to democracy make this essential reading for anyone interested in the roots of our current dilemmas.”
—Lynn Hunt, author of History: Why It Matters

For centuries people in the West identified freedom with the ability to exercise control over the way in which they were governed. The equation of liberty with restraints on state power—what most people today associate with freedom—was a deliberate and dramatic rupture with long-established ways of thinking. So what triggered this fateful reversal? In a masterful and surprising reappraisal of more than two thousand years of Western thinking about freedom, Annelien de Dijn argues that this was not the natural outcome of such secular trends as the growth of religious tolerance or the creation of market societies. Rather, it was propelled by an antidemocratic backlash following the French and American Revolutions.

The notion that freedom is best preserved by shrinking the sphere of government was not invented by the revolutionaries who created our modern democracies—it was first conceived by their critics and opponents. De Dijn shows that far from following in the path of early American patriots, today’s critics of “big government” owe more to the counterrevolutionaries who tried to undo their work.

"Ambitious and impressive…Explores an alternate history of the concept from the ancient world to the Age of Revolution to the Cold War, charting those moments when new notions of freedom—such as freedom from government supervision or repression—deviated from its more classical and longstanding definition as self-government… At a time when the very survival of both freedom and democracy seems uncertain, books like this are more important than ever, as our societies contemplate both the heritage of the past and the prospects for the future." - The Nation

"A sweeping history of the idea of freedom in the West, from Ancient Greece, to our time…Shows how the notion of democratic freedom has developed and deepened…Importantly, de Dijn traces how the Old Oligarchy—which was overthrown by Athenian democracy—feared the redistributive power of political democracy. From the time of Ancient Athens until today, this fear has been a constant in reactionary thought." - Jacobin

"Thought-provoking…Helps explain how partisans on both the right and the left can claim to be protectors of liberty, yet hold radically different understandings of its meaning…This deeply informed history of an idea has the potential to combat political polarization." - Publishers Weekly

"Works through the intellectual history of the idea of freedom from antiquity to the present and puts those ideas in their political and historical context to show how the idea of freedom was used…Challenge[s] us to look at our history to better understand our present and to fight for our future." - Public Books

"Annelien De Dijn delivers a compelling and accessible analysis of a highly relevant subject…In a post-pandemic world that has exposed the fragile tension between individual rights, collective interests and democratic legitimacy, De Dijn’s plea for a re-evaluation of our understanding of liberty deserves to be listened to." - Legal History Review

"Beautifully written…De Dijn’s work is singularly ambitious and iconoclastic, seeking to restructure a field thick with entrenched interpretation while sending a message about the necessary reform of the politics of the present." - Journal of Modern History