Tyranny and Freedom

This is a lecture course and enrollment will not be capped.

Instructor: Timothy Snyder

We are called to remember. And yet we are told that the past does not repeat. How is the sensible citizen to remember the past in a way that is both sensible and useful? What might the particular history of the Jews in twentieth-century Europe illuminate about the possibilities for tyranny in the twenty-first century world?

This course engages these issues at three levels, asking first how an interpretation of the Holocaust might allow us to see the risks of the contemporary world differently, then how to understand the history of the 2010s, and finally what can be done to coordinate an understanding of the past with a richer and broader view of freedom in the future. Each session will be divided between a lecture and discussion. Participants will be expected to do the reading before each session and come prepared with at least one question.

Course Materials:
Students should purchase these books before the first day of class:

• Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning by Timothy Snyder (Purchase)
• The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America by Timothy Snyder (Purchase)
• On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century by Timothy Snyder (Purchase)
• Our Malady: Lessons in Liberty from a Hospital Diary by Timothy Snyder (Purchase)
• "And we dream as electric sheep" (Read in Eurozine or New York Review under the title "What Turing Told us About the Digital Threat to a Human Future”)

Timothy Snyder is the Richard C. Levin Professor of History at Yale University and a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. He speaks five and reads ten European languages. His eight chief books are Nationalism, Marxism, and Modern Central Europe: A Biography of Kazimierz Kelles-Krauz (1998); The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569-1999 (2003); Sketches from a Secret War: A Polish Artist’s Mission to Liberate Soviet Ukraine (2005); The Red Prince: The Secret Lives of a Habsburg Archduke (2008); Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (2010), Thinking the Twentieth Century (with Tony Judt, 2012); Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning (2015); On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (2017); The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America (2018); and Our Malady: Lessons in Liberty from a Hospital Diary (2020). He has also co-edited three further books: The Wall Around the West: State Borders and Immigration Controls in Europe and North America (2001); Stalin and Europe: Terror, War, Domination (2013); and The Balkans as Europe (2018). His essays are collected in Ukrainian History, Russian Politics, European Futures (2014), and The Politics of Life and Death (2015).

Snyder's work has appeared in forty languages and has received a number of prizes, including the Emerson Prize in the Humanities, the Literature Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Václav Havel Foundation prize, the Foundation for Polish Science prize in the social sciences, the Leipzig Award for European Understanding, the Dutch Auschwitz Committee award, and the Hannah Arendt Prize in Political Thought. Snyder was a Marshall Scholar at Oxford, has received the Carnegie and Guggenheim fellowships, and holds state orders from Estonia, Lithuania, and Poland. He has appeared in documentaries, on network television, and in major films. His books have inspired poster campaigns and exhibitions, films, sculpture, a punk rock song, a rap song, a play, and an opera. His words are quoted in political demonstrations around the world, most recently in Hong Kong. He is researching a family history of nationalism and finishing a philosophical book about freedom.

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