Revisiting ancient and modern liberty: On de Dijn’s Freedom: An Unruly History
| Author | Lena Halldenius |
| DOI | 10.1177/14748851211017103 |
| Published date | 01 January 2022 |
| Date | 01 January 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Review Articles |
Review Article EJPT
Revisiting ancient and
modern liberty: On de
Dijn’s Freedom: An
Unruly History
Lena Halldenius
Lund University, Sweden
Annelien de Dijn, Freedom: An Unruly History, Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA, 2020;
406 pp. £25, ISBN 978-0-674-98833-0 (hardcover).
Abstract
Annelien de Dijn’s Freedom: An Unruly History is a rich and thought-provoking work in
intellectual history, tracing thinking and debating about political freedom in the West
from ancient Greece to our own times. The ancient notion of freedom as self-
government (what Quentin Skinner calls neo-roman liberty) is referred to as the
‘democratic conception’. The argument is that this conception survived through the
renaissance, the early-modern period and the 18th-century Atlantic revolutions only to
be deliberately scrapped in the 19th century in favour of liberal freedom – absence of
state interference – thus severing the ancient links between freedom and democracy
and turning democracy into a threat to freedom. The book is an impressive achieve-
ment and the use of sources staggeringly wide. However, though the liberal turn is
certainly a fact of history, I am not convinced that it was such a decisive break, nor that
the relations between conceptions of freedom and attitudes to democracy are as clear-
cut as de Dijn needs them to be. De Dijn claims, with regret, that the liberal view
remains our view and is now an essential part of Western civilization, but I find that to
be empirically under-substantiated. By using the liberal turn to define an age, de Dijn
lets history play out through the lens of the elite.
Keywords
Ancient Greece, ancient Rome, Atlantic revolutions, democracy, freedom, liberalism,
renaissance humanism
Corresponding author:
Lena Halldenius, Lund University, PO Box 192, Lund, 221 00, Sweden.
Email: Lena.Halldenius@mrs.lu.se
European Journal of Political Theory
!The Author(s) 2021
Article reuse guidelines:
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DOI: 10.1177/14748851211017103
journals.sagepub.com/home/ept
2022, Vol. 21(1) 197–207
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