Two weeks ago, I had the privilege of moderating a book discussion with Lea Ypi at the Albanian embassy in DC. In preparation, I finally got around to reading her much-lauded memoir, Free: Coming of Age at the End of History. If you yet haven’t heard of Lea or her book, you should make amends by buying it immediately. And if you’re not the impulsive type and are less susceptible to my powers of suggestion, take a glance at Charles King’s beautiful review in the Post — maybe that’ll do the trick.
Ypi’s Free got me thinking about how I approach big questions — and why I find myself so easily falling back into the pose of a critic. I am rarely willing to back any kind of thoroughgoing positive vision of the world. Instead, I poke holes. Ypi is certainly not the calloused cynic that I can at times be. But her book nevertheless resonated powerfully with me.
The book’s title alone should get Wisdom of Crowds readers interested. “The End of History” refers to Frank Fukuyama’s famous thesis about how liberal democracy and capitalism are an evolutionary end-point. Having vanquished all ideological rivals due to its superior fitness (providing prosperity and liberty for its citizens, while building a fearsome economic engine to power its military ambitions), capitalist liberal democracy would be the model to which all humanity would aspire. Thus spake Fukuyama.
Free offers a kind of rebuke.
Ypi was born in Durrës, and was 11 when Communism collapsed across Albania in 1990. The first part of the memoir recounts her early childhood and upbringing. She is a precocious child and a star pupil, sharp enough to notice that certain things about her family don’t make sense. For example, they have a strange aversion to having a photo of the dictator Enver Hoxha in the house, a man young Lea was taught to adore in school. And when her classmates ask about another prominent Ypi who had collaborated with the Italians before the Albanian Communists took over, her parents deny all links. But it’s increasingly clear to Lea that her family is somehow marked under Communism.
Then there is upheaval. The second part of the book details the changes that follow the arrival of multi-party elections in Albania. Lea remembers the immediate run-up to the collapse of Communism — students chanting “freedom, democracy” as she cowers under an already beheaded statue of Stalin. Ypi’s parents quickly start speaking more openly, cursing the Communists and revealing that a lot of the inscrutable references they made to each other over the years, even in private, were coded (“graduating from university” meant being released from prison, being “expelled” meant being handed a death sentence, “dropping out” meant suicide, a certain stern “professor” was a sadistic warden). Both parents join new political parties, and her mother fully embraces the liberal credo.
But Ypi is a professor of political theory, and not a mere memoirist. During our panel discussion, she said that she had set out to write a treatise about competing notions of freedom in socialist and liberal societies, and fell into doing a memoir almost by chance. She started writing during a Covid lockdown in Berlin. The uncertainty of the moment reminded her of the contingency of her youth — the feeling that everything was up for grabs, and the insight that deeply felt moral convictions and foundational definitions, especially having to do with concepts like freedom and liberty, could be rewritten overnight. In thinking back to her tumultuous youth, she said she found a way to write the book she intended to write from the start.
The text is carefully peppered with various allusions to “freedom” throughout. In the book’s “Communist” first half, there is a lot of party dogma to be digested. But delivered through the voice of an intelligent but naive child, it is imbued with a kind of innocent optimism and almost sounds appealing.
Here is one such instance, where young Lea compares the idyll of Albanian socialism with the rapaciousness of the capitalist West.
There were privileged, entitled children who, like their bourgeois parents, had everything they wanted but never shared it with the less fortunate, whose hardship they ignored. There were also poor and oppressed children who had to sleep rough, whose parents could not afford to pay the bills at the end of the month, who had to beg for food in restaurants and train stations, who could not attend school regularly because they were forced to work, who dug diamonds in mines and lived in shantytowns.
We knew we would never meet these poor children, humiliated and oppressed by the capitalists, because they could never travel. We sympathized with their predicament but did not think we shared their fate. We knew it was difficult for us to travel abroad because we were surrounded by enemies. Moreover, our holidays were subsidized by the Party. Perhaps one day the Party would be powerful enough to have defeated all our enemies, and would pay for everyone to travel abroad too. In any case, we were already in the best place. They had nothing. We knew we did not have everything. But we had enough, we all had the same things, and we had what mattered most: real freedom.
We had freedom for all, not just for the exploiters. We worked not for the capitalists but for ourselves, and we shared the products of our work. We didn’t know greed or have to feel envy. Everyone’s needs were satisfied, and the Party helped us develop our talents.
And then there’s the countervailing liberal dogma of the second half. In this part of the book, the sermons don’t come from Lea herself, but from those around her — her parents and various politicians.
[O]ur planned economy was considered to be the equivalent of madness. The cure was a transformative monetary policy: balancing budgets, liberalizing prices, eliminating government subsidies, privatizing the state sector, and opening up the economy to foreign trade and direct investment. The market’s behavior would then adjust itself, and the emerging capitalist institutions would become efficient without great need for central coordination.
A crisis was foreseen, but people had spent a lifetime making sacrifices in the name of better days to come. This would be their last effort. With drastic measures and goodwill, the patient would soon recover from the shock and enjoy the benefits of the therapy. Speed was of the essence. Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek replaced Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels almost overnight.
“Freedom works,” U.S. Secretary of State James Baker told a spontaneous crowd of more than three hundred thousand gathered in the capital to welcome the first state visit by an American official. The spirit of the new laws, Baker emphasized, announcing the support of the United States for the transition to freedom, mattered as much as their letter. Both his government and private American organizations would be involved to help get things right. They would help us construct “democracy, markets, and a constitutional order.”
The difference in tone between the two passages has a lot to do with the development of the character of “Lea”. In the first part, she’s still a believer, even if her otherwise seamless world is wearing thin around the edges. In the second part, she is disoriented — she hears the new dogma embraced by those around her, but appears to be too shell-shocked from her earlier disillusionment to be able to fully embrace it.
And then finally, true cataclysm comes to Albania. All the liberal optimism that bubbled up in the wake of Communism sinks almost overnight. When a set of intricate pyramid schemes collapse taking a huge chunk of Albanians’ savings with them, civil war breaks out. Liberal promises of a better future didn’t just prove hollow; they brought actual war on the heels of a period of heightened dislocation birthed by “shock therapy”.
Free, therefore, as I read it, is not just a treatise comparing socialist and liberal conceptions of freedom. It is a book that counsels deep skepticism at all totalizing concepts — especially tantalizing political ones that claim to represent “the good”.
But my read is not Ypi’s. In the final chapter, she gives us a glimpse of her own politics. She teaches Marx at the London School of Economics, much to the consternation of her relatives back home. They joke about it, she dodges their criticism. But unlike me, she still believes. “In some ways, I have gone full circle,” she writes. “When you see a system change once, you start believing that it can change again. Fighting cynicism and political apathy turns into what some might call a moral duty.”
During our event at the Albanian embassy, an audience member asked Ypi about religious pluralism and religious freedom. She took the question in a different way than was perhaps intended. She said that she herself, born into a Muslim family, is not a believer. But she thinks that you absolutely have to believe in something. What is most striking about large parts of Central and Eastern Europe (and probably even Russia) is that people have lost faith. Communism took away their religion and then collapsed on itself, she said. An experiment with liberal democracy and capitalism has in a lot of places also yielded deep disappointments and disillusionment. And faith in the transformative project of the European Union is also fading fast. There’s probably nowhere else in the world with a larger concentration of people who legitimately don’t believe in anything, she concluded.
We’ll have Ypi on the podcast at some point in the near future to unpack just that thought. It struck me as incredibly important on many levels. There’s the personal question: Can life be fulfilling if you don’t believe in some bigger narrative of redemption? But also a bigger, more political one: How do you organize and govern a bunch of people who believe in nothing?
This post is part of our collaboration with the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Governance and Markets.
I sure hope those legacy systems survive Damir, because I've been asking myself the exact same question for a while now. What do you rally around when pluralism is everywhere??
This book seems apt for my next read. I just finished The Long loneliness, and I'm curious how these two would interplay with ideas of equality and justice, especially with regards to the poor, and the dregs of capitalism.
As to the other question, I'm sure people would want to define 'fulfilling,' but I don't believe life can be meaningful without some infrastructure of belief. Even the atheists and agnostics around me create little mythologies/theologies to get through the day. If I hear: "everything happens for a reason" one more time I may lose my mind.
Ypi's 'Free' was maybe the best book I read last year. And, yes, she would make a fabulous guest. Her current series on "Freedom" in David Runciman's "Past, Present and Future" podcast is also fascinating. As for believing in something; it seems what she has found to believe in, or at least rehabilitate, is the German idealistic philosophical tradition: 'relations' define us, no one is free unless everyone is, etc. I haven't heard anyone interview her who was qualified to challenge her on that belief.