My book traces the genealogy of a key political concept: freedom. It shows that current understandings of freedom – the idea that freedom depends on the limitation of state power – must be understood as a deliberate and dramatic rupture with long-established ways of thinking about liberty. For centuries, I show, most people in the so-called West identified freedom not with being left alone by the state, but with their ability to exercise control over the way in which they were governed. They had, in other words, what might best be described as a ‘democratic’ conception of freedom. It only became common to think about freedom as something that required the limitation of state power in the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This shift in thinking about freedom was partly motivated by a genuine concern with the position of vulnerable minorities such as religious dissenters. But more often the fight against democracy in the name of freedom was provoked by fears that the newly enfranchised masses would use state power for economic redistribution.

In tracing the genealogy of freedom, my book draws on the methods and best practices of a different disciplines, including history, political theory, sociology and cultural studies. Written in a direct and engaging style, it will appeal not just to professional historians and philosophers, but also to a broader audience of politicians, journalists, students and other general readers. In short, my book proposes a new approach, and suggests new solutions, to one of the most topical questions of contemporary politics: how to be free in a society or as a society.