This book explores what Europeans in the twentieth century understood by individual freedom and how they endeavored to achieve it, often against the odds. The Introduction lays out its conceptual bases, arguing that the quest was multi-faceted and unfolded in nonlinear ways, which jars with teleological narratives of the rise and decline of “the individual.” It disputes Annelien de Dijn’s recent account of one dominant concept of modern liberty and is attentive to mainstream as well as marginalized versions of individual freedom, questioning Michel Foucault’s idea that the former were “imposed on us” through disciplinary power. Instead, the book borrows from sociologist Georg Simmel and political philosopher Isaiah Berlin to stress the subjective, gradual, and unpredictable character of individual freedom and the fact that it was pursued against a range of obstacles and constraints. It tells a story of conflict-ridden expansion. Men and women had to claim their personal freedom in a context marked by world wars, the expanding power of the state, the constraints of work life, pre-established moral norms, the growing influence of America, and the uncertain future of colonial rule.

This chapter introduces the conceptual claim of this book that the idea of a competition-democracy nexus is grounded in a normative commitment to a republican conception of economic liberty as non-domination originating in ancient Roman thought. The chapter first shows how the existing ‘special interest capture’ and ‘conventional liberty’ accounts fail to make sense of the competition–democracy nexus. It then explores the republican conception of liberty as non-domination as an alternative explanation of the idea of a competition–democracy nexus. It shows that this republican understanding of economic liberty is the only explanatory variable that can explain why competition enhances and the concentration of economic power undermines democracy and why competition law is the right tool to address this problem.

The deliberate targeting of Japanese civilians in the firebombing of sixty cities and in the use of the atomic bomb to break morale and compel unconditional surrender raised serious moral issues. But should historians read today’s values back to the Asia Pacific War? There is a longstanding debate among historians over whether it is their place to pass judgment or whether they should maintain a detached and objective position in their work. In this chapter, we see how carpet bombing, targeting of civilians, and finally Hiroshima and Nagasaki were so horrific that it became difficult to maintain moral neutrality. Instead, the main lines of debate and controversy centered on the issue of what standards should be applied. We explore the varieties of moral judgments reached by historians and the norms that should govern the issue.

Chapter 1 sets out the main questions and contentions in the book. It explores the concept of freedom and identifies it as a central concept in Athenian democratic ideology in both the private and public spheres. Scholarly debates on the concept of freedom are outlined, with an especial emphasis on Isaiah Berlin’s notion of positive and negative freedom and its application to Athens in subsequent scholarship. Distinguishing democratic freedom from negative and republican versions, I argue that Athenians understood freedom as the ability to do “whatever one wished,” which I classify as a modified version of positive freedom. The focus on citizen agency in accomplishing his will differentiates Athenian democracy from other constitution types and affects its institutional features. The chapter closes with a brief overview of the rest of the chapters.

Chapter 2 surveys phrases with the verb boulomai that describe the ability to do “whatever one wishes” or to live “however one wishes” as freedom in order to demonstrate that democratic freedom was understood as the ability to bring one’s will to fruition. These phrases are found in a wide range of genres, including history, philosophy, oratory, drama, and epigraphy. By defining themselves as free in contrast to slaves, Athenians perceived their actions and decisions as emanating from themselves rather than a master. Freedom was thus defined as not simply a prerequisite status for citizenship, in contrast to birth or wealth, but a personal capacity for action. This positive freedom was a central aspect of citizen identity, rendering scholarly accounts focused on negative freedom incomplete. The distinctive feature of democratic freedom was the insistence on the self as master of action; as a citizen, one did what one wished. Positive freedom gave rise to procedural components in Athenian administration and law, notably voluntarism and accountability, as well as served as a distinctive core marker of identity in contrast with other states, such as Sparta and Persia.

The epilogue to this book zooms in on a telling and difficult conversation between two highly influential friends at the transatlantic Anglo-Saxon epicentre of the extraordinary period in the history of the West, Europe, and European integration which this book is about (George Kennan and Isaiah Berlin). In doing so, the epilogue, in a more essayistic way, reconnects to the prologue and reflects upon the conclusion of this book and its deeper meaning for present-day Europe.

Shortly after completing the manuscript of Austerlitz in the year 2000, W.G. Sebald was awarded a NESTA Fellowship in order to research his next book, which he referred to as the ‘W. W.’ (World War) Project. His grant application refers to ‘an extensive narrative which will encompass the period 1900-1950’. Over the next eighteen months he visited France and Germany several times in order to visit sites, archives and people. This essay examines Sebald’s plans for the project as well as interviews and recollections from the time, including reflections on his own family history and his late schoolfriend, Barbara Aenderl. It considers how the finished book might have developed the more traditional approach to narrative evident in Austerlitz, culminating in a comparison with Tolstoy’s War and Peace, a text which also combines fiction, history and critical reflection. Through considering both Tolstoy’s view of history and Isaiah Berlin’s famous essay on the subject, it suggests that Sebald’s unfinished World War Project would have constituted a similar panoramic attempt to interrogate both history and fiction as modes of writing.

This chapter offers a pluralist reading of transitional justice built around three meanings of pluralism. The first is value pluralism – the idea, dear to Isaiah Berlin, that values are irreducibly manifold, potential conflicting and frequently incommensurable in such a way that they cannot be ranked or weighed on any single scale. The second meaning of pluralism is cultural pluralism. It refers to the fact that there are many different cultures, many different collective ways of life, none of which can claim superiority. While insisting on the possibility of a cross-cultural conversation around core values, the proposed pluralist approach rejects the normal model’s tendency to reduce transitional justice to one set of (Western) cultural forms. The third form of pluralism briefly considered is legal pluralism, meaning the coexistence of competing legal orders. Discussing Rwanda’s experience with the so-called gacaca courts, the chapter suggests a pluralist understanding of the rule of law flexible enough to accommodate cultural variation while remaining committed to what I take to be its universal core. The chapter ends by proposing a pluralist method for thinking about transitional justice, which is linked to basic commitments referred to as sense of reality, anti-monism, situated thinking, decolonised cosmopolitanism and fallibilistic mentality. The chapter argues that these commitments can help mitigate a number of problematic trends in contemporary transitional justice discourse and practice.

This introduction provides an overview of the historiography of freedom and of republicanism, placing Skinner’s work on neo-Roman freedom in that context.

This chapter construes positive freedom as an ideal of individual self-mastery.So understood, positive freedom concerns internal factors that, in Isaiah Berlin’s words, “determine someone to do, or be, this rather than that?”Self-mastery is a matter of being determined in the right ways by these internal factors.This chapter first explains how self-mastery contributes to the quality of the lives of those who achieve it.It does so in different, but complementary ways, ways which have not been distinguished or adequately appreciated in the literature on the topic.The chapter next argues that self-mastery is one component of the kind of freedom that a well-functioning state ought to promote in its members.Self-mastery is an individual achievement, but the state can promote it by establishing conditions that facilitate its realization.In presenting these arguments, the chapter rejects the view – sometimes advanced by proponents of positive freedom – that the value of external negative freedom is reducible to its contribution to positive freedom, but it concurs with the view – often advanced by proponents of positive freedom – that the state’s concern with freedom should not be limited to external factors, such as constraining coercion or ensuring that all have access to an adequate range of options.

Conceptions of negative liberty invariably refer to the removal of objective hindrances to physical action. Conceptions of positive liberty, by contrast, refer to the provision of goods that facilitate forms of empowerment and capacitation. This chapter argues that some of the goods necessary for empowerment and capacitation are subjective, or psychological, most (if not all) of which depends, in one form or another, on what philosophers since Hegel has dubbed "recognition." This chapter has three parts. Drawing from a sample of recognition theorists (Taylor, Honneth, Habermas, and Pippin), Part One defends the salience of recognition for empowerment, capacitation, and agency. Part two then describes forms of psycho-social pathology (damaged agency) that misrecognition of the absence of recognition typically causes. Part three concludes by defending the psychological and ontological validity of recognition as a coherent dimension of social freedom against some frequently raised objections.