Reminder that The Nation carries a strong Left bias (https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/media-bias-ratings). They've featured Professor Annelien de Dijn's work in an interview previously in 2020 (https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/annelien-de-dijn-f...), and it's clear from that interview that her core perspective on freedom aligns with The Nation's left-leaning worldview that state actions restricting individual liberties don't constitute a violation of freedom. De Dijn's work is funded by the ISRF, a Netherlands-based organization that funds (typically progressive) social science work via grants.

Of course, de Dijn's words can be interpreted on their own merit without regards to her bias or the bias of these publications. My opinion, however, is that her writings seem to amount to an unconvincing claim that state-imposed restrictions do not constitute a violation of freedoms, because the state is a collective representation formed via a Democratic process. Essentially, she does not place value on the notion of the individual, or on concepts like tyrannies of the majority, which an emphasis on individual freedoms protects against. This is clearest in her pro-lockdown articles (https://theconversation.com/why-lockdowns-dont-necessarily-i...), where she says "even the strictest lockdown can count on broad democratic support, and the rules remain subject to scrutiny by our representatives and the press, they do not infringe on our freedom".

The rest of her support for her opinions about freedom seems rather arbitrary - appeals to historical authorities like selectively chosen philosophers, and vague dots connected across historical events to trivialize the value of individual freedom and place collectivist rule on a pedestal. This type of historical framing to justify or vilify a contemporary political position just feels too speculative to be helpful. I've seen this in other contexts as well, for example when people will claim that zoning laws are "racist" because they were used by racists in a discriminatory manner many decades ago - I'm simply not sure what relevance it bears on the conversation today.

In this article, the author presents de Dijn's book as a balanced and comprehensive analysis of the history of freedom. But the article's author's bias is clear in sentences like "she challenges conservatives who wrap their ideology in the glorious banner of freedom, revealing the long history of a very different vision of human liberation, one that emphasizes collective self-government over individual privilege". Individual freedom is recast as "privilege", a scary negative term to The Nation's readers, while restrictions of freedoms by the state are recast as "collective self-government" when really it should be seen more as "collectivist rule".

Ultimately, I'm not sure an academic debate on this topic is worth it. It's pretty simple - do you believe a large government should dictate how every individual, every jurisdiction, every organization within its borders should live? Or should it err on the side of being permissive and granting local and individual freedoms? It's a question of personal values, and not something that has to be justified using selectively chosen elements of Western history.