Another Freedom: The Alternative History of an Idea by Svetlana Boym (review)

When we think of freedom as a topic of intellectual inquiry, we most immediately think of it as part of political theory and political philosophy. As such it has a history from Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Politics to the present. Svetlana Boym’s work takes this topic in another direction, inviting us to consider freedom not only conceptually but also as an element of the human condition that can be comprehended in literary, aesthetic, cultural, and even personal terms. Her book begins by noting the sense of beginning that was felt at the opening of the twenty-first century. We look to the past with nostalgia (on which Boym has done an earlier book), but we look to the future with considerable uncertainty.

Boym’s book “is an attempt to rescue another history of freedom and propose a new vocabulary that goes beyond today’s political debates” (1). History is always the treasure-house we must visit to find ways to confront the future. An essential term of the new vocabulary Boym seeks is “adventure,” which she takes from the German sociologist Georg Simmel. Adventure allows us to transform our present condition by testing limits, moving between convention and invention. It allows us to “enter into a dialogue with the world and with the stranger within us” (5). Adventure as a key to freedom is a way to confront our humanity and in so doing not only to transcend restrictions but also to take a positive stance on the world. It involves not only a sense of freedom from, but of freedom for. As Boym states, “The adventure of freedom in this understanding is about reframing but not breaking and removing all frames” (6). Among the questions we must face in order to engage in the adventure of freedom are: “What, if anything, must we be certain of in order to tolerate uncertainty? How much common ground or shared trust is needed to allow for the uncommon experiences of freedom?” (1).

One point Boym makes both at the beginning and at the end of her account is that freedom does not coincide with any national border. The adventure of freedom can and has been undertaken by individuals in every sort of society, in totalitarian as well as nontotalitarian states. But freedom seems to require some degree of national or global financial stability, which depends increasingly on technological development. Boym, however, is clear that “the space of freedom” as she calls it does not grow automatically even if social and economic conditions are stable. As she states, “We know that neither capitalism alone nor technological advances will take care of freedom by itself, glorious promises aside” (299). To what then are we to turn?

The body of Boym’s work—its six chapters—are what she calls “freedom stories” or experiments that can shed light on the dilemmas of freedom that are present throughout history and cut across cultures. “These experiments allow us to explore the relationship between freedoms in the plural (political freedoms, human rights) and Freedom in the singular (religious, artistic, or existential freedom) and look at the moments in which political and artistic understandings of freedom become intertwined” (2). These stories of freedom are drawn from a storehouse of rich literary, philosophical, historical, and political sources ranging from an analysis of the Prometheus myth to the art historian Aby Warburg’s conception of the “world house” based on the serpent mythology of Southwest native Americans to Pushkin’s unique reading of Tocqueville’s theory of democracy to a cold war conversation between Isaiah Berlin and Anna Akhmatova to Dostoevsky’s concept of “freer freedom” to the intimate involvements between Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger to the literature of the Gulag system. Interwoven with this range of discussions are views of modernity and society of Nietzsche, Kafka, Benjamin, Bakunin, Marx, Kierkegaard, Mallarmé, Shklovsky, and others. It is a panorama of learning...