The State Versus Freedom

In an interview with The Nation, historian Tony Judt says consciously choosing to build a social democratic state is an expression of our freedom, not a limit on it. “Roughly speaking, Stalin versus the tea party: That’s a caricature of the twentieth century. But it’s one that we have to a large degree internalized, so when people think of the political choices facing them, they think of them in terms of maximized individual freedom versus maximized collective repression…We need to change that conversation so we can think of the state not as some external creature that history has imposed upon us but simply as a way of collective organization that we chose to place onto ourselves.”