Freedom – Word and Deed (From Antiquity to Woke)

Pavel Holländer’s book Freedom – Word and Deed, with the subtitle From Antiquity to Woke, presents a journey through the birth and metamorphoses of freedom as a concept and freedom as an act. It offers readers the opportunity to embark on a journey of knowledge and reflection, to be both observers and participants in an attempt to disentangle the knot in which concepts and history intermingle, and in which the word “freedom” alternately acquires its content not only in the works of philosophers, theologians, and lawyers, but also in political declarations and speeches, on battlefields, in courtrooms, and in the dramas of human destinies. The author is concerned with the journey and the search, not with final and definitive answers. The shared journey in pursuit of the concept of freedom will certainly not yield a universal prediction of the future; its aim is to outline the structure of the concept of freedom in European culture, to partially uncover its historical modifications, as well as its interrelations with other key civilisational values. The journey offers a view of historical contexts, of the historical weight of traditions, historical models, and great figures of the past, and at the same time of historical challenges and the historical causes of paradigmatic conceptual, political, technological, and economic revolutions and turning points. In this sense, the book Freedom – Word and Deed offers not only a journey through the birth and metamorphoses of freedom as a concept and freedom as an act, but also seeks to move closer to an understanding of the present.
Author: Pavel Holländer