essay about freedom to write is an absolute freedom

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Why the “freedom writers essay” is an inspiring tale of hope, empathy, and overcoming adversity.

Education has always been a paramount aspect of society, shaping individuals’ intellect and character. Within the vast realms of academia, written expressions have played a pivotal role in documenting and disseminating knowledge. Among these, the essays by Freedom Writers stand out as a testament to the importance of personal narratives and the transformative power they hold.

By delving into the multifaceted dimensions of human experiences, the essays penned by Freedom Writers captivate readers with their raw authenticity and emotional depth. These narratives showcase the indomitable spirit of individuals who have triumphed over adversity, providing invaluable insights into the human condition. Through their stories, we gain a profound understanding of the challenges faced by marginalized communities, shedding light on the systemic issues deeply ingrained in our society.

What makes the essays by Freedom Writers particularly significant is their ability to ignite a spark of empathy within readers. The vivid descriptions and heartfelt accounts shared in these personal narratives serve as a bridge, connecting individuals from diverse backgrounds and fostering a sense of understanding. As readers immerse themselves in these stories, they develop a heightened awareness of the struggles faced by others, ultimately cultivating a more inclusive and compassionate society.

The Inspiring Story of the Freedom Writers Essay

The Freedom Writers Essay tells a powerful and inspiring story of a group of students who were able to overcome adversity and find their own voices through the power of writing. This essay not only impacted the education system, but also touched the hearts of many individuals around the world.

Set in the early 1990s, the Freedom Writers Essay highlights the journey of a young teacher named Erin Gruwell and her diverse group of students in Long Beach, California. Faced with a challenging and often hostile environment, Gruwell used literature and writing as a platform to engage her students and help them express their own experiences and emotions.

Through the use of journals, the students were able to share their personal stories, struggles, and dreams. This essay not only became a therapeutic outlet for the students, but it also allowed them to see the power of their own voices. It gave them a sense of empowerment and hope that they could break free from the cycle of violence and poverty that surrounded them.

As their stories were shared through the Freedom Writers Essay, the impact reached far beyond the walls of their classroom. Their words resonated with people from all walks of life, who were able to see the universal themes of resilience, empathy, and the importance of education. The essay sparked a movement of hope and change, inspiring individuals and communities to work together towards a more inclusive and equitable education system.

The Freedom Writers Essay is a testament to the transformative power of education and the incredible potential of young minds. It serves as a reminder that everyone has a story to tell and that through the written word, we can create understanding, bridge divides, and inspire change.

In conclusion, the Freedom Writers Essay is not just a piece of writing, but a catalyst for change. It showcases the remarkable journey of a group of students who found solace and strength in their own stories. It reminds us of the importance of empowering young minds and providing them with the tools necessary to overcome obstacles and make a difference in the world.

Understanding the background and significance of the Freedom Writers essay

The Freedom Writers essay holds a notable history and plays a significant role in the field of education. This piece of writing carries a background rich with hardships, triumphs, and the power of individual expression.

Originating from the diary entries of a group of high school students known as the Freedom Writers, the essay documents their personal experiences, struggles, and remarkable growth. These students were part of a racially diverse and economically disadvantaged community, facing social issues including gang violence, racism, and poverty.

Despite the challenging circumstances, the Freedom Writers found solace and empowerment through writing. Their teacher, Erin Gruwell, recognized the potential of their stories and encouraged them to share their experiences through written form. She implemented a curriculum that encouraged self-expression, empathy, and critical thinking.

The significance of the Freedom Writers essay lies in its ability to shed light on the experiences of marginalized communities and bring attention to the importance of education as a means of empowerment. The essay serves as a powerful tool to inspire change, challenge social norms, and foster understanding among diverse populations.

By sharing their narratives, the students of the Freedom Writers not only found catharsis and personal growth, but also contributed to a larger discourse on the impact of education and the role of teachers in transforming lives. The essay serves as a reminder of the profound impact that storytelling and education can have on individuals and communities.

Learning from the Unique Teaching Methods in the Freedom Writers Essay

The Freedom Writers Essay presents a remarkable story of a teacher who uses unconventional teaching methods to make a positive impact on her students. By examining the strategies employed by the teacher in the essay, educators can learn valuable lessons that can enhance their own teaching practices. This section explores the unique teaching methods showcased in the Freedom Writers Essay and the potential benefits they can bring to the field of education.

Empowering student voice and promoting inclusivity: One of the key themes in the essay is the importance of giving students a platform to express their thoughts and experiences. The teacher in the Freedom Writers Essay encourages her students to share their stories through writing, empowering them to find their own voices and fostering a sense of inclusivity in the classroom. This approach teaches educators the significance of valuing and incorporating student perspectives, ultimately creating a more engaging and diverse learning environment.

Building relationships and trust: The teacher in the essay invests time and effort in building meaningful relationships with her students. Through personal connections, she is able to gain their trust and create a safe space for learning. This emphasis on building trust highlights the impact of positive teacher-student relationships on academic success. Educators can learn from this approach by understanding the importance of establishing a supportive and nurturing rapport with their students, which can enhance student engagement and motivation.

Using literature as a tool for empathy and understanding: The teacher in the Freedom Writers Essay introduces her students to literature that explores diverse perspectives and themes of resilience and social justice. By incorporating literature into her curriculum, she encourages her students to develop empathy and gain a deeper understanding of the experiences of others. This approach underscores the value of incorporating diverse and relevant texts into the classroom, enabling students to broaden their perspectives and foster critical thinking skills.

Fostering a sense of community and belonging: In the essay, the teacher creates a sense of community within her classroom by organizing activities that promote teamwork and collaboration. By fostering a supportive and inclusive learning environment, the teacher helps her students feel a sense of belonging and encourages them to support one another. This aspect of the teaching methods showcased in the Freedom Writers Essay reinforces the significance of collaborative learning and the sense of community in fostering academic growth and personal development.

Overall, the unique teaching methods presented in the Freedom Writers Essay serve as an inspiration for educators to think outside the box and explore innovative approaches to engage and empower their students. By incorporating elements such as student voice, building relationships, using literature for empathy, and fostering a sense of community, educators can create a transformative learning experience for their students, ultimately shaping them into critical thinkers and compassionate individuals.

Exploring the innovative approaches used by the Freedom Writers teacher

The Freedom Writers teacher employed a range of creative and groundbreaking methods to engage and educate their students, fostering a love for learning and empowering them to break the cycle of violence and poverty surrounding their lives. Through a combination of empathy, experiential learning, and personal storytelling, the teacher was able to connect with the students on a deep level and inspire them to overcome the obstacles they faced.

One of the innovative approaches utilized by the Freedom Writers teacher was the use of literature and writing as a means of communication and healing. By introducing the students to powerful works of literature that tackled relevant social issues, the teacher encouraged them to explore their own identities and experiences through writing. This not only facilitated self-expression but also fostered critical thinking and empathy, as the students were able to relate to the characters and themes in the literature.

The teacher also implemented a unique system of journal writing, where the students were given a safe and non-judgmental space to express their thoughts, emotions, and personal experiences. This practice not only helped the students develop their writing skills but also served as a therapeutic outlet, allowing them to process and reflect upon their own lives and the challenges they faced. By sharing and discussing their journal entries within the classroom, the students built a strong sense of community and support among themselves.

Another innovative strategy utilized by the Freedom Writers teacher was the integration of field trips and guest speakers into the curriculum. By exposing the students to different perspectives and experiences, the teacher broadened their horizons and challenged their preconceived notions. This experiential learning approach not only made the subjects more engaging and relatable but also encouraged the students to think critically and develop a greater understanding of the world around them.

In conclusion, the Freedom Writers teacher implemented a range of innovative and effective approaches to foster learning and personal growth among their students. Through the use of literature, writing, journaling, and experiential learning, the teacher created a supportive and empowering environment that allowed the students to overcome their adversities and become agents of change. These methods continue to inspire educators and highlight the importance of innovative teaching practices in creating a positive impact on students’ lives.

The Impact of the Freedom Writers Essay on Students’ Lives

The Freedom Writers Essay has had a profound impact on the lives of students who have been exposed to its powerful message. Through the personal stories and experiences shared in the essay, students are able to gain a deeper understanding of the challenges and resilience that individuals can possess. The essay serves as a catalyst for personal growth, empathy, and a desire to make a positive difference in the world.

One of the key ways in which the Freedom Writers Essay impacts students’ lives is by breaking down barriers and promoting understanding. Through reading the essay, students are able to connect with the struggles and triumphs of individuals from diverse backgrounds. This fosters a sense of empathy and compassion, allowing students to see beyond their own experiences and appreciate the unique journeys of others.

In addition to promoting empathy, the Freedom Writers Essay also inspires students to take action. By showcasing the power of education and personal expression, the essay encourages students to use their voices to effect change in their communities. Students are empowered to stand up against injustice, advocate for those who are marginalized, and work towards creating a more inclusive and equitable society.

Furthermore, the essay serves as a reminder of the importance of perseverance in the face of adversity. Through the stories shared in the essay, students witness the determination and resilience of individuals who have overcome significant challenges. This inspires students to believe in their own ability to overcome obstacles and pursue their dreams, no matter the circumstances.

Overall, the impact of the Freedom Writers Essay on students’ lives is profound and far-reaching. It not only educates and enlightens, but also motivates and empowers. By exposing students to the power of storytelling and the potential for personal growth and social change, the essay equips them with the tools they need to become compassionate and engaged citizens of the world.

Examining the transformation experienced by the Freedom Writers students

The journey of the Freedom Writers students is a testament to the power of education and its transformative impact on young minds. Through their shared experiences, these students were able to overcome adversity, prejudice, and personal struggles to find their voices and take ownership of their education. This process of transformation not only shaped their individual lives but also had a ripple effect on their communities and the educational system as a whole.

The transformation experienced by the Freedom Writers students serves as a powerful reminder of the potential within every student, regardless of their background or circumstances. It highlights the importance of creating an inclusive and supportive educational environment that encourages self-expression, empathy, and a belief in one’s own abilities. By fostering a love for learning and empowering students to embrace their unique voices, education can become a catalyst for positive change, both within individuals and society as a whole.

Addressing Social Issues and Promoting Empathy through the Freedom Writers Essay

In today’s society, it is important to address social issues and promote empathy to create a more inclusive and harmonious world. One way to achieve this is through the powerful medium of the written word. The Freedom Writers Essay, a notable piece of literature, serves as a catalyst for addressing social issues and promoting empathy among students.

The Freedom Writers Essay showcases the experiences and struggles of students who have faced adversity, discrimination, and inequality. Through their personal narratives, these students shed light on the social issues that exist within our society, such as racism, poverty, and violence. By sharing their stories, they invite readers to step into their shoes and gain a deeper understanding of the challenges they face. This promotes empathy and encourages readers to take action to create a more equitable world.

Furthermore, the Freedom Writers Essay fosters a sense of community and unity among students. As they read and discuss the essay, students have the opportunity to engage in meaningful conversations about social issues, sharing their own perspectives and experiences. This dialogue allows them to challenge their beliefs, develop critical thinking skills, and broaden their horizons. By creating a safe space for open and honest discussions, the Freedom Writers Essay creates an environment where students can learn from one another and grow together.

In addition, the essay prompts students to reflect on their own privileges and biases. Through self-reflection, students can gain a better understanding of their own place in society and the role they can play in creating positive change. This reflection process helps students develop empathy for others and encourages them to become active agents of social justice.

In conclusion, the Freedom Writers Essay serves as a powerful tool for addressing social issues and promoting empathy among students. By sharing personal narratives, fostering dialogue, and prompting self-reflection, this essay encourages students to confront societal challenges head-on and take meaningful action. Through the power of the written word, the essay helps create a more inclusive and empathetic society.

Analyzing how the essay tackles significant societal issues and promotes empathy

In this section, we will examine how the essay addresses crucial problems in society and encourages a sense of understanding. The essay serves as a platform to shed light on important social issues and foster empathy among its readers.

The essay delves into the depths of societal problems, exploring topics such as racial discrimination, stereotyping, and the achievement gap in education. It presents these issues in a thought-provoking manner, prompting readers to reflect on the harsh realities faced by marginalized communities. Through personal anecdotes and experiences, the essay unveils the profound impact of these problems on individuals and society as a whole.

Furthermore, the essay emphasizes the significance of cultural understanding and empathy. It highlights the power of perspective and the importance of recognizing and challenging one’s own biases. The author’s account of their own transformation and ability to connect with their students serves as an inspiring example, urging readers to step outside their comfort zones and embrace diversity.

By confronting and discussing these social issues head-on, the essay not only raises awareness but also calls for collective action. It encourages readers to become advocates for change and actively work towards creating a more inclusive and equitable society. The essay emphasizes the role of education in addressing these societal problems and the potential for growth and transformation it can bring.

In essence, the essay provides a platform to examine important societal problems and promotes empathy by humanizing the issues and encouraging readers to listen, understand, and work towards positive change.

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Essays About Freedom: 5 Helpful Examples and 7 Prompts

Freedom seems simple at first; however, it is quite a nuanced topic at a closer glance. If you are writing essays about freedom , read our guide of essay examples and writing prompts.

In a world where we constantly hear about violence, oppression, and war, few things are more important than freedom . It is the ability to act, speak, or think what we want without being controlled or subjected. It can be considered the gateway to achieving our goals , as we can take the necessary steps. 

However, freedom is not always “doing whatever we want.” True freedom means to do what is righteous and reasonable, even if there is the option to do otherwise. Moreover, freedom must come with responsibility ; this is why laws are in place to keep society orderly but not too micro-managed, to an extent.

5 Examples of Essays About Freedom

1. essay on “freedom” by pragati ghosh, 2. acceptance is freedom by edmund perry, 3. reflecting on the meaning of freedom by marquita herald.

• 4.  Authentic Freedom by Wilfred Carlson

5. What are freedom and liberty? by Yasmin Youssef

1. what is freedom, 2. freedom in the contemporary world, 3. is freedom “not free”, 4. moral and ethical issues concerning freedom, 5. freedom vs. security, 6. free speech and hate speech, 7. an experience of freedom.

“Freedom is non denial of our basic rights as humans. Some freedom is specific to the age group that we fall into. A child is free to be loved and cared by parents and other members of family and play around. So this nurturing may be the idea of freedom to a child. Living in a crime free society in safe surroundings may mean freedom to a bit grown up child.”

In her essay, Ghosh briefly describes what freedom means to her. It is the ability to live your life doing what you want. However, she writes that we must keep in mind the dignity and freedom of others. One cannot simply kill and steal from people in the name of freedom ; it is not absolute. She also notes that different cultures and age groups have different notions of freedom . Freedom is a beautiful thing, but it must be exercised in moderation. 

“They demonstrate that true freedom is about being accepted, through the scenarios that Ambrose Flack has written for them to endure. In The Strangers That Came to Town, the Duvitches become truly free at the finale of the story. In our own lives, we must ask: what can we do to help others become truly free?”

Perry’s essay discusses freedom in the context of Ambrose Flack’s short story The Strangers That Came to Town : acceptance is the key to being free. When the immigrant Duvitch family moved into a new town, they were not accepted by the community and were deprived of the freedom to live without shame and ridicule. However, when some townspeople reach out, the Duvitches feel empowered and relieved and are no longer afraid to go out and be themselves. 

“Freedom is many things, but those issues that are often in the forefront of conversations these days include the freedom to choose, to be who you truly are, to express yourself and to live your life as you desire so long as you do not hurt or restrict the personal freedom of others. I’ve compiled a collection of powerful quotations on the meaning of freedom to share with you, and if there is a single unifying theme it is that we must remember at all times that, regardless of where you live, freedom is not carved in stone, nor does it come without a price.”

In her short essay, Herald contemplates on freedom and what it truly means. She embraces her freedom and uses it to live her life to the fullest and to teach those around her. She values freedom and closes her essay with a list of quotations on the meaning of freedom , all with something in common: freedom has a price. With our freedom , we must be responsible . You might also be interested in these essays about consumerism .

4.   Authentic Freedom by Wilfred Carlson

“Freedom demands of one, or rather obligates one to concern ourselves with the affairs of the world around us. If you look at the world around a human being, countries where freedom is lacking, the overall population is less concerned with their fellow man, then in a freer society . The same can be said of individuals, the more freedom a human being has, and the more responsible one acts to other, on the whole.”

Carlson writes about freedom from a more religious perspective, saying that it is a right given to us by God. However, authentic freedom is doing what is right and what will help others rather than simply doing what one wants. If freedom were exercised with “doing what we want” in mind, the world would be disorderly. True freedom requires us to care for others and work together to better society . 

“In my opinion, the concepts of freedom and liberty are what makes us moral human beings. They include individual capacities to think, reason, choose and value different situations. It also means taking individual responsibility for ourselves, our decisions and actions. It includes self-governance and self-determination in combination with critical thinking, respect, transparency and tolerance. We should let no stone unturned in the attempt to reach a state of full freedom and liberty, even if it seems unrealistic and utopic.”

Youssef’s essay describes the concepts of freedom and liberty and how they allow us to do what we want without harming others. She notes that respect for others does not always mean agreeing with them. We can disagree, but we should not use our freedom to infringe on that of the people around us. To her, freedom allows us to choose what is good, think critically, and innovate. 

7 Prompts for Essays About Freedom

Freedom is quite a broad topic and can mean different things to different people. For your essay, define freedom and explain what it means to you. For example, freedom could mean having the right to vote, the right to work, or the right to choose your path in life. Then, discuss how you exercise your freedom based on these definitions and views. 

The world as we know it is constantly changing, and so is the entire concept of freedom . Research the state of freedom in the world today and center your essay on the topic of modern freedom . For example, discuss freedom while still needing to work to pay bills and ask, “Can we truly be free when we cannot choose with the constraints of social norms?” You may compare your situation to the state of freedom in other countries and in the past if you wish. 

A common saying goes like this: “Freedom is not free.” Reflect on this quote and write your essay about what it means to you: how do you understand it? In addition, explain whether you believe it to be true or not, depending on your interpretation. 

Many contemporary issues exemplify both the pros and cons of freedom ; for example, slavery shows the worst when freedom is taken away, while gun violence exposes the disadvantages of too much freedom . First, discuss one issue regarding freedom and briefly touch on its causes and effects. Then, be sure to explain how it relates to freedom . 

Some believe that more laws curtail the right to freedom and liberty. In contrast, others believe that freedom and regulation can coexist, saying that freedom must come with the responsibility to ensure a safe and orderly society . Take a stand on this issue and argue for your position, supporting your response with adequate details and credible sources. 

Many people, especially online, have used their freedom of speech to attack others based on race and gender, among other things. Many argue that hate speech is still free and should be protected, while others want it regulated. Is it infringing on freedom ? You decide and be sure to support your answer adequately. Include a rebuttal of the opposing viewpoint for a more credible argumentative essay. 

For your essay, you can also reflect on a time you felt free. It could be your first time going out alone, moving into a new house, or even going to another country. How did it make you feel? Reflect on your feelings, particularly your sense of freedom , and explain them in detail. 

Check out our guide packed full of transition words for essays .If you are interested in learning more, check out our essay writing tips !

The Freedom to Write

This week’s writing prompt.

Every Fourth of July, we celebrate the birth of our country and all of its accompanying freedoms. We have many ways to experience and exercise our freedom. Writing is one.

Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Jane Smiley, author of Some Luck , shared her reaction to a note in a friend’s office one day:

“Over her desk, above her typewriter, she’d tacked up a phrase: ‘NOBODY ASKED YOU TO WRITE THAT NOVEL.’

The line reminded me that writing is a voluntary activity. I could always stop. I could always go on. And since no one’s asking me to do it, I’ve always seen writing as an exercise of freedom, rather than an exercise of obligation. Yes, writing is my job—but I could always stop and do something else. Once writing becomes an exercise of freedom, it’s filled with energy.” [1]

Not only do we enjoy freedom of speech in our great country, but we also have the freedom to express ourselves creatively. As Smiley says, we are free to write, or not. No one makes us write.

• What do you think about Smiley’s perception of the freedom to write?
• Do you agree with her? Why or why not?
• Describe the freedom that writing provides you.
• Do you view writing as a get to or a have to activity?
• Has writing been instrumental in liberating you in an area of your personal life?

It’s a brand new month, and all posts in response to our writing prompts in July are entered into our drawing to win a free online coaching video—that’s a $20 value! Go for it!

[1] Fassler, Joe. “’Writing Is an Exercise in Freedom’: How Pulitzer Winner Jane Smiley Motivates Herself.” The Atlantic , Atlantic Media Company, 3 Dec. 2014, www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/10/ideas-motivate-great-writing/381224/. Accessed July 1, 2019.

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Freedom to Write Index 2021

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Introduction

On February 1, 2021, a military coup violently disrupted Myanmar’s fragile and uncertain experiment with civilian rule. Writers and filmmakers were among those immediately imprisoned. Protesters and poets were soon shot in the streets. As this report goes to press, the world’s eyes are on Russia’s brutal, devastating assault on Ukraine—its people, language and culture, and democracy. Putin’s unbridled aggression, however, is part of a larger resurgence of authoritarianism around the globe.

The past year has repeatedly seen authoritarian forces seek to reclaim powers and territories that had previously passed outside their control; the echoes of the past are heard not only in Europe, but in Myanmar, where the military’s naked attempt to retrieve its lost power brought shock, horror, and then resistance; and in Afghanistan, where the Taliban’s swift recapture of the country following U.S. military withdrawal seemed to—almost overnight—decimate the progress Afghans had painstakingly made over the last 20 years and are struggling to uphold, including with regard to women’s rights, freedom of expression, cultural and artistic creativity, and the development of independent media. From Tunisia to Sudan to Nicaragua, old forces re-exerted themselves and moved to quash democratic progress. And in Hong Kong, a city with a robust history of vibrant freedoms, the reach of the Chinese government has been extended, most formally in the application of the National Security Law against writers and independent media. This has not only led to a crackdown, but also created a climate of looming fear and a sense that safety may only lie in silence, or exile. In Russia, a concerted effort to eliminate what remained of independent media and the space for dissent over recent years laid the groundwork for Putin to maintain total information control in wartime.

In democracies as well, authoritarian tactics are being employed. Censorship and intimidation of dissenting voices is rife in India. In the United States, efforts to ban books and enact laws that would bar discussion of certain topics in classrooms spiked in 2021. Much of this debate centered around the freedom to contend with and openly debate the complexities of history. This, too, has echoes around the globe. Just before Russian troops began this latest incursion into Ukraine, Putin gave a speech in which he attempted to rewrite Ukraine’s history to suit his own ends. For years now, Putin has held in prison the historian Yury Dmitriev on specious charges of child pornography; Dmitriev’s true crime was uncovering and documenting mass graves from the Stalinist era, a historical truth that contradicted Putin’s attempts to whitewash and glorify the memory of Stalin. Government attempts to silence those who study, document, and debate history are typically also an attempt to exert a sole narrative over the past, one that serves the interests of the present.

Yet in all of these cases, authoritarian regimes have been met with resistance. In Myanmar, widespread and sustained civil disobedience—including the creative resistance of writers and artists—followed the coup. Afghan women refused to be silenced and they, too, have taken to the streets. Belarusians have continued their resistance against a president holding onto power despite an election he seemed to think he could steal without a fight. And today, Putin must contend not only with the fierce resistance of the Ukrainian people, but also Russians inside the country and around the world who persist in speaking the truth.

As truth-tellers, creative visionaries, and documentarians, writers have been at the forefront of these movements to resist authoritarianism, and they have been targeted as a result. The Iranian Writers’ Association has become a prime target of its government for its persistence in celebrating literature, condemning censorship, and commemorating past attempts to silence Iranian writers. PEN America’s sister organization PEN Belarus, despite being formally dissolved by a Belarusian court in August 2021, perseveres in documenting its government’s assaults on writers, artists, and all those who insist on their right to speak freely. 1 PEN America, “Court Formally Dissolves PEN Belarus,” press release, August 9, 2021, pen.org/press-release/court-formally-dissolves-pen-belarus/ Myanmar’s creative community has braved brutal violence and used their writing and artwork to resist the coup and represent the public’s demands for freedom. 2 “Stolen Freedoms: Creative Expression, Historic Resistance, and the Myanmar Coup,” PEN America, December 16, 2021, pen.org/report/stolen-freedoms-creative-expression-historic-resistance-and-the-myanmar-coup/ Cuban artists and writers have persisted, despite repeated arrests, in critiquing their government and calling for change.

In these countries and others, and as PEN America’s Freedom to Write Index documents, writers and public intellectuals have been unjustly locked up for their exercise of free expression; dozens are currently serving sentences of 10 years or more for their words. In countries notorious for poor prison conditions, the mistreatment of political prisoners through solitary confinement or torture has been compounded by the grave threats to their health posed by COVID-19 and its spread inside jails. But governments’ attempts to muzzle dissent have failed to extinguish individual writers’ voices. In the face of repression, literary communities have come together in defense of writers under threat; writers in prison have gone on hunger strikes—not to call for their own release, but on behalf of others unjustly jailed. Translators have made threatened writers’ words available to a global audience. And across the world, advocates and allies have read aloud the words of those whose governments would see them silenced, and shared the work of those whose governments would see it destroyed. And that work has offered hope to all who seek to push back against the forces of repression.

In the face of an authoritarian resurgence, writers are at the forefront of the defense of free expression and also have an essential role to play, pushing back against attempts to control the narrative; sustaining cultures and languages under threat; holding governments to account—on issues as varied as corruption, their response to COVID-19, or upholding basic rights; and envisioning new possibilities for the future. The freedom to write guarantees our collective ability to imagine and to inspire, and it demands our defense.

The Global Picture

During 2021, according to data collected for the Freedom to Write Index, at least 277 writers , academics, and public intellectuals in 36 countries—in all geographic regions around the world—were unjustly held in detention or imprisoned in connection with their writing, their work, or related advocacy. This number is slightly higher than the 273 individuals counted in the 2020 Freedom to Write Index, and significantly higher than the total in 2019 (238). By far the most significant increase was seen in Myanmar , as a result of the crackdown that followed the military coup there on February 1, 2021, which has included the deliberate targeting of writers and the broader creative community. The numbers of those detained in Saudi Arabia , Turkey , and Belarus dropped from 2020, although many of those released from prison in Saudi Arabia continue to face draconian, unjust conditions on their release, including constraints on their freedom of movement and expression. In Belarus, the sharp uptick in detentions—many of them short-term—that accompanied the protests after the stolen election of August 2020 dropped off, though 2021 increasingly saw targeted arrests of writers and others who continued to speak out, and longer-term detentions.

Writers Imprisoned Globally: 2021

A worsening and in some cases violent closure of civil society in many countries led to a reshuffling of the world’s top jailers of writers and public intellectuals. Two countries, however, remained stable in their notoriously high rankings: China and Saudi Arabia remained the first and second-worst jailers of writers, with 85 and 29 writers detained, respectively. Myanmar escalated to the third-worst jailer of writers and public intellectuals, with 20 individuals newly detained in 2021 and 26 total behind bars; Myanmar was jointly ranked ninth last year with 8 detentions. These three countries alone accounted for half of all cases, just over 50 percent of the total. Myanmar catapulted into third place due to a widespread crackdown on civil society and free expression in the wake of the February 2021 coup, in which the military seized power and prevented the elected parliament from forming a new government. Many writers, creative artists, and influential cultural figures were targeted during the first hours of the coup; over the course of 2021, at least 26 detentions of writers and intellectuals were documented.

In Iran , a significant uptick was also documented: at least 21 writers were in prison or detention during the year, remaining the fourth-worst jailer of writers around the world as documented in 2020. While some writers counted in Iran in the 2020 Index have been released, at least 8 writers were newly jailed during 2021. Rounding out the top five with 18 writers held in detention—compared to 25 last year—is Turkey , where a decline was documented due to the welcome release of writers; some had been detained for more than four years. Other prevalent threats against writers in Turkey such as physical attacks and protracted legal trials, even against writers in exile, were documented throughout 2021, though not captured in this figure.

As has been documented previously in the Freedom to Write Index, the overwhelming majority of writers and public intellectuals held behind bars during 2021 are men. This disparity has widened: women comprise 12 percent of the 2021 Index count, as compared to 16 percent in 2019. Countries that have detained the highest number of women writers and public intellectuals track closely with those who have jailed the highest total number of writers. Collectively, authorities in China, Myanmar, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Turkey—the top five countries that jailed the most writers during 2021—accounted for 27 of the 33 women writers in the 2021 Index. The remaining six women writers were jailed in Egypt, Belarus, India, and Vietnam, all countries ranking in the top 10 worst jailers of writers.

While many writers included in the Index hold multiple professional designations and are, for example, both literary writers and poets, the most prevalent professions of those incarcerated in 2021 were literary writers (111), scholars (59), poets (68), singer/songwriters (27), publishers (12), editors (9), translators (8), and dramatists (4). Notably, the number of poets jailed during 2021 increased compared to the 57 jailed during 2020, likely reflecting the bold stance many poets have taken on sensitive political and social themes, as well as the key role they have played in pushing back against authoritarianism in countries like Myanmar. Of the 277 individuals counted in this year’s Index, 4 died while in custody and 197—nearly three-quarters—remain in state custody at the time of this report’s publication. By holding these individuals behind bars, their governments are depriving them of their individual right to free speech, while also robbing the broader public of access to their innovative and influential voices of dissent, criticism, creativity, and conscience.

The majority of the writers and intellectuals included in the 2021 count were initially imprisoned or detained prior to 2021, or had faced previous detention or imprisonment. Of the 277 in prison or detention during 2021, roughly 72 percent had also spent multiple days behind bars in 2020. A smaller but significant subset of these writers, roughly 53 percent, were counted in the 2019 and 2020 Indexes as well. In addition to long-term imprisonments, this percentage includes cases of writers who have been repeatedly detained and released over the course of the past three years, indicating the continued pressure and repression many writers face. This year’s count of 277 also includes 15 cases of individuals who were detained or imprisoned prior to 2021 but whose status, or further information about their case and writing only became publicly known during the past year. Such cases are common, especially in environments where there is little transparency to the judicial process, extensive surveillance and self-censorship, and extremely limited access to information or media freedom; for example, China, including Tibet and Xinjiang, accounts for 7 of these 15 cases. In many such cases, detention is not confirmed until formal charges are brought. The 2021 Index includes 60 writers and intellectuals, in 20 different countries and territories, who were newly detained or imprisoned in 2021—a decline in new detentions and imprisonments in comparison to 2020.

Regarding the types of legal charges brought against jailed writers, many of the trends documented in the 2019 and 2020 Freedom to Write Indexes persisted in 2021. Threat to national security remains the primary category of legal charges that authorities around the world use to justify jailing writers and public intellectuals: at least 55 percent of detentions are based on allegations that writers have undermined national security. Examples of these charges include “membership in a banned group,” which are in some cases levied against writers for belonging to writers’ associations or cultural organizations; and “conspiracy to seize” or “subversion of” state power, often levied against writers who analyze politics, participate in public discourse, or write critically about government affairs. Other less widespread but frequent charges wielded against writers and public intellectuals include illegal assembly and organizing; retaliatory criminal charges such as tax crimes, fraud, and “resistance”; and criminal insult or defamation laws.

Situations in which charges are undisclosed or have yet to be brought against a writer—otherwise known as arbitrary detentions—made up at least 22 percent of the cases in this year’s Index. Arbitrary detentions represent a total lack of due process and deny writers and public intellectuals any recourse to challenge the claims against them; in some cases, they can last for decades. All eight of the cases counted in Eritrea are considered arbitrary, as few details have been disclosed in these cases, and the writers have been held incommunicado, several of them since 2001. Cases of arbitrary detention are also particularly common in Saudi Arabia, where at least 66 percent of the writers and public intellectuals jailed in 2021 were held for no stated reason. This staggering fraction is identical to the percentage documented in 2020, indicating that the prevalence of arbitrary detention has seen no change over the past year. Roughly 53 percent of the writers and public intellectuals in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of China have been detained or imprisoned without legal justification. In contrast, China—when excluding autonomous and special administrative regions—has only one case of arbitrary detention: poet Cui Haoxin , also known as An Ran.

Several places where free expression was severely under threat in 2021 nonetheless do not make a significant appearance in the Index. The return to power of the Taliban in Afghanistan has had a devastating impact on freedom of expression and placed writers, artists, and public intellectuals—especially women and members of ethnic and religious minority groups—in grave danger, yet few detentions have been recorded in the initial months following their takeover. The introduction of the oppressive National Security Law in Hong Kong in 2020 has seemingly only led to a handful of new cases of writers behind bars, and despite the further crackdown on free expression in Russia, it does not appear among the countries most responsible for detaining writers and intellectuals. This illustrates that while these numbers are an important indicator of the gravity of threats writers and intellectuals face for exercising their freedom of expression, they tell only part of the story of how free expression may be chilled.

While the COVID-19 pandemic has not, by and large, led to the more dramatic society-wide crackdowns on free expression that initially seemed possible, it has nonetheless had an insidious effect on writers and public intellectuals around the world, with the introduction of new “fake news” laws targeting dissent, new and subtle forms of surveillance, reduced opportunities for global connection and income, and the erosion of support systems that individuals under threat rely on to continue their work. It has also continued to vastly increase the health risks for writers behind bars. As the difference in the pandemic’s trajectory across countries becomes more stark, it is essential for advocates to keep top of mind the impact it continues to have on writers under threat, and especially those from already vulnerable communities.

Regional Breakdown

Governments in the Asia-Pacific region continued to jail the most writers and intellectuals for their writing or expression, with their share of the global total increasing in 2021, largely due to the crackdown in Myanmar. In total, 137—or nearly half of the global count—were jailed in countries in the Asia-Pacific, with the vast majority of those, 85, held in China. Following the February 2021 coup, Myanmar catapulted up to second in the region, with 26 held, while significant numbers continued to be jailed in Vietnam (10) and India (8). Countries in the Middle East and North Africa have also jailed significant numbers of writers and intellectuals, most notably Saudi Arabia (29), Iran (21), and Egypt (14). Countries in this region made up nearly 30 percent of the global count of imprisoned and detained writers, at least 82 individuals, in 2021.

​​Detentions and imprisonments of writers and intellectuals in Europe and Central Asia —accounting for 14 percent of the global total—occurred largely in two countries: Turkey and Belarus. Turkey moved to the fifth-place position, having held 18 of the 39 prisoners and detainees in Europe and Central Asia during 2021. The ongoing crackdown against those who have vocally opposed Belarus’s stolen 2020 presidential election continued to result in arrests and detentions in 2021, placing Belarus in seventh place worldwide, with 10 writers counted in the Index. Countries in sub-Saharan Africa contributed to roughly 4 percent of the 2021 Index, with 11 writers and public intellectuals detained or imprisoned. The vast majority of those were in Eritrea, which placed 10th with 8 writers behind bars. In the Americas , only Nicaragua and Cuba are represented, making up 3 percent of the 2021 Index total. Detentions of writers and public intellectuals in Cuba account for 7 of the 8 writers detained or imprisoned.

Top 10 Countries of Concern

China continued to top the list of countries detaining writers and intellectuals, with 85 detained or imprisoned in 2021, far more than any other country. Following China, the other top jailers of writers and intellectuals were Saudi Arabia, Myanmar, and Iran, each of which engaged in a concentrated targeting of dissenting voices in 2021 and held 20 or more writers behind bars. Saudi Arabia’s overall numbers decreased slightly from 2020 due to significant numbers of political prisoners being conditionally released during 2021, as did overall numbers in Turkey, where a handful of writers were additionally released upon completion of their years-long sentences. There was a considerable jump in detentions in Myanmar in the wake of the February 2021 coup, after which writers and creative artists were targeted for arrest alongside politicians and other influential figures. A smaller increase was apparent in Iran due to an ongoing crackdown against dissenting voices in which a number of writers were newly detained or summoned to serve previously imposed sentences in 2021.

During 2021, China remained stable in its position as the top jailer of writers and public intellectuals in the world. The total number of writers and public intellectuals in China, which includes the Xinjiang and Tibetan Autonomous Regions and Hong Kong, increased slightly from 81 to 85. The vast majority of these 85 writers have been in prison for at least several years, with 53 of them having been counted in both the 2019 and 2020 Freedom to Write Index reports as well. The myriad reasons that the authorities jail writers in China vary; writers whose words question prevailing public opinions or challenge the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) narratives are especially at risk of detention and imprisonment. And the Chinese government’s response to writers and public intellectuals exercising their universal rights to free expression is swift and wide-ranging.

Within China (excluding Tibet, Xinjiang, Hong Kong, and Inner Mongolia 3 The Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region has been included in previous publications of the Freedom to Write Index, but PEN America did not identify cases of detained or imprisoned writers or public intellectuals in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region during 2021 according to our methodology. ), PEN America places the number of imprisoned writers or public intellectuals at 38. This number includes many writers and dissidents who have criticized government policy or the CCP’s leadership. The initial rationales for detaining these writers are often unstated or unclear, demonstrating the outsized scope of writing, speech, and other forms of expression that can be potentially considered “criminal.” Detained dissident writer Guo Quan ’s trial for criticizing the government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic online began in September 2021. According to Guo’s lawyer, the prosecution cited almost 20 articles Guo wrote in its case against him for “inciting subversion of state power.” His articles criticized the CCP’s response to the pandemic, but his writings about social injustice and government corruption were also cited as evidence. 4 Debi Edward, “The missing number behind China’s coronavirus crisis,” ITV News, February 21, 2020, itv.com/news/2020-02-21/the-missing-number-behind-china-s-coronavirus-crisis ; Xue Xiaoshan, “Veteran Chinese Democracy Activist Stands Trial For ‘Subversion’ Over Articles,” Radio Free Asia, September 10, 2021, rfa.org/english/news/china/trial-09102021103820.html In 2020, Xu Zhiyong , an essayist, legal scholar, and critic of President Xi’s policies, was initially detained on the same charge; but during January 2021, authorities escalated the charges from “inciting subversion” to “subversion,” increasing his potential sentence to life in prison. 5 PEN America, “Reports: China to Escalate Charges Against PEN America Honoree Xu Zhiyong,” press release, January 22, 2021, pen.org/press-release/reports-china-to-escalate-charges-against-pen-america-honoree-xu-zhiyong/ Artist, activist, and online writer Chen Yunfei was detained on March 25, 2021, on the charge of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble,” after he published his thoughts on China’s nine-year compulsory education law based on his visits to schools in the Sichuan province. In contrast with President Xi’s declared emphasis on “rule of law,” the law against “picking quarrels” has been used by authorities as a catch-all criminal provision that is unclear, broad, and confusingly applied. 6 Guo Rui, ‘Picking quarrels and provoking trouble’: how China’s catch-all crime muzzles dissent,” South China Morning Post, August 25, 2021, scmp.com/news/china/politics/article/3146188/picking-quarrels-and-provoking-trouble-how-chinas-catch-all In December 2021, Chen was ultimately convicted of a different crime—he was sentenced to four years in prison for a retaliatory charge of “child molestation.” Chen vehemently rejects the charge as intended to discredit his work and slander his reputation. 7 Sun Chen, “Court in China’s Chengdu jails veteran rights activist on ‘trumped-up charge’,” Radio Free Asia, December 6, 2021, rfa.org/english/news/china/charge-12062021141519.html

In some cases, a writer’s mere public stature and past history as a person critical of the government is reason enough for Chinese authorities to jail them. In May 2021, writer and former Guizhou University economics professor Yang Shaozheng went missing. Though no reason has yet been disclosed for his arrest, Yang had been dismissed from Guizhou University in 2018 for writing two articles that questioned the CCP; specifically, the monetary costs of the party’s millions of official personnel. 8 Editorial Board, “Opinion: A professor dared tell the truth in China—and was fired,” The Washington Post , August 23, 2018, washingtonpost.com/opinions/a-professor-dared-tell-the-truth-in-china–and-was-fired/2018/08/23/9fd81eee-a653-11e8-a656-943eefab5daf_story.html In June 2021, Yang was charged with “inciting subversion of state power” and placed under residential surveillance in a designated location (RSDL), 9 “Locked Up: Inside China’s Secret RSDL Jails,” Safeguard Defenders, October 5, 2021, safeguarddefenders.com/sites/default/files/pdf/Locked%20Up%20%28High%20Res%20version%29.pdf a form of extrajudicial detention. At the end of 2021, he was formally arrested and reported to be held at a detention facility in Guiyang City. 10 “前贵州大学教授杨绍政被正式批捕 (Yang Shaozheng, former professor of Guizhou University and critic of government policies, is formally arrested),” Radio Free Asia , November 11, 2021, rfa.org/mandarin/Xinwen/6-11112021115902.html Outspoken poet Zhang Guiqi , also known as Lu Yang, was arrested on the same charge for undisclosed reasons. He was detained throughout 2021 in Shandong, after a secret trial in September 2020 in which no sentence was announced. 11 “256. Zhang Guiqi,” Independent Chinese PEN Center, accessed February 24, 2022, chinesepen.org/english/256-zhang-guiqi Experts suspect his detention is related to a video in which he called on President Xi to resign, but reiterate that the lack of legal transparency makes the exact reason difficult to discern. 12 “Police in China’s Shandong Detain Outspoken Poet For ‘Subversion’,” Radio Free Asia , May 14, 2020, rfa.org/english/news/china/poet-detained-05142020134933.html Hui Muslim poet Cui Haoxin , also known by his pen name An Ran, was arbitrarily detained in early January 2020 and has not been heard from since. Cui used online platforms and poetry to write about and protest the Chinese government’s mistreatment of Muslim minorities, including the mass detentions of Uyghurs in Xinjiang. 13 “China Detains Hui Muslim Poet Who Spoke Out Against Xinjiang Camps,” Radio Free Asia , January 27, 2020, rfa.org/english/news/china/poet-01272020163336.html ; Associated Press, “Chinese Muslim poet Cui Haoxin fears his people will suffer as history repeats itself in wave of religious repression,” South China Morning Post, December 28, 2018, scmp.com/news/china/politics/article/2179831/chinese-muslim-poet-fears-his-people-will-suffer-history-repeats Employing arbitrary detention and vague charges—many of which international jurists have decried as in contravention with rights to free expression and due process—Chinese authorities continue to demonstrate their sweeping ability to jail writers and public intellectuals.

After being detained even once, writers can face intensified surveillance and restrictions on their travel and must essentially continue to live with targets on their backs, under constant threat of being captured again. Writer and democracy activist Yang Maodong , also known by his pen name Guo Feixiong, was detained at Pudong International Airport in Shanghai in late January 2021, when he tried to visit his ailing wife in the United States. 14 Chris Buckley, “A Chinese Dissident Tried to Fly to His Sick Wife in the U.S. Then He Vanished,” The New York Times , February 2, 2021, nytimes.com/2021/02/02/world/asia/china-dissident-yang-maodong.html Authorities in Guangzhou had confiscated Yang’s passport after his 2019 release from a politically motivated prison sentence. The day before he planned to fly, Yang had written an open letter to President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Keqiang, urging them to allow him to travel on humanitarian grounds. Instead, authorities forcibly disappeared him; a year later—and two days after his wife’s death—Yang was formally arrested for “inciting subversion of state power.” 15 Helen Davidson, “Chinese activist told he could not visit dying wife is re-arrested,” The Guardian , January 18, 2022, theguardian.com/world/2022/jan/18/chinese-activist-yang-maodong-told-he-could-not-visit-dying-wife-is-re-arrested Writer and #MeToo activist Sophia Huang Xueqin , who previously served four months in detention for her public support of sexual assault victims, was also forcibly disappeared while trying to leave China, en route to study at the University of Sussex in England in September 2021. Despite returning Huang’s passport earlier in 2021 and continuing to surveil her for a year after her release, Chinese authorities secretly detained Huang in RSDL and later transferred her to a Guangzhou detention facility for “inciting subversion of state power. 16 Alice Su, “They helped Chinese women, workers, the forgotten and dying. Then they disappeared,” Los Angeles Times, December 1, 2021, latimes.com/world-nation/story/2021-12-01/china-disappearances-gender-labor-class The trial of writer and poet Xie Fengxia , for “picking quarrels and provoking trouble,” began in April 2021. Just two years prior, Xie was released from prison; but he was surveilled, followed by local authorities, and “invited” for questioning at police stations following his release. After posting a poem commemorating Lin Zhao, a dissident of the Cultural Revolution, he was promptly detained again. 17 “185. Xie Fengxia,” Independent Chinese PEN Center, accessed February 24, 2022, chinesepen.org/english/185-xie-fengxia

In Hong Kong , several writers were newly detained in 2021, raising the number of writers and public intellectuals jailed from last year’s three to five. The crackdown under the draconian National Security Law borrows a tactic from Beijing’s repression of free expression, resting on ambiguously defined national security crimes. 18 Javier C. Hernández, “Harsh Penalties, Vaguely Defined Crimes: Hong Kong’s Security Law Explained,” June 30, 2020, nytimes.com/2020/06/30/world/asia/hong-kong-security-law-explain.html Under the law’s provisions, Hong Kong authorities have detained columnists, academics, and public intellectuals who have written in support of pro-democracy protests, and levied heavy penalties against the institutions that stand by them. A number of individuals who were prominent in the 2014 Occupy Central Movement in Hong Kong were also re-detained or newly charged under the repressive provisions of the National Security Law. Legal scholar and influential pro-democracy writer Benny Tai Yiu-ting was re-detained after a revocation of his bail stemming from a 2019 politically motivated detention. 19 Jasmine Siu, “Benny Tai sent back to jail to await Hong Kong court’s ruling in Occupy Central appeal,” South China Morning Post , March 4, 2021, sg.news.yahoo.com/benny-tai-sent-back-jail-095645191.html Social media activist and writer Joshua Wong , who rose to prominence as a youth activist when he was first charged in 2015, faced a slew of new charges brought against him during the year under the National Security Law, in addition to past charges that kept him imprisoned throughout the year. 20 Reuters, “Hong Kong activist Joshua Wong jailed an additional 10 months over June 4 assembly,” CNBC, May 6, 2021, cnbc.com/2021/05/06/hong-kong-activist-joshua-wong-jailed-an-additional-10-months-over-june-4-assembly.html

The highly publicized closure of pro-democracy newspaper Apple Daily served as a bellwether of media censorship and arrests of writers. On June 17, 2021, 500 police officers raided the newspaper’s office, seized journalistic materials, and froze millions of assets. 21 “HK’s Apple Daily raided by 500 officers over national security law,” Reuters , June 17, 2021, reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/hong-kongs-apple-daily-newspaper-says-police-arrest-five-directors-2021-06-16 One of the first targets of the law when it was first implemented in 2020 was Apple Daily ’s founder, publisher, and opinion writer Jimmy Lai , who spent the entirety of 2021 in jail. The paper’s five most senior staff were eventually arrested. 22 Iain Marlow, “The Assault on Apple Daily,” Bloomberg , February 3, 2022, bloomberg.com/features/2022-apple-daily-china-hong-kong-crackdown Apple Daily chief editorial writer Yeung Ching-kei and columnist Fung Wai-kong were detained less than 10 days after the raid and arrested on suspicion of violating the National Security Law. 23 Helen Davidson, “Hong Kong police arrest editorial writer at Apple Daily newspaper,” The Guardian , June 23, 2021, theguardian.com/world/2021/jun/23/hong-kong-police-arrest-editorial-writer-at-apple-daily-newspaper ; Helen Davidson, “Hong Kong police arrest senior Apple Daily journalist at airport,” The Guardian , June 27, 2021, theguardian.com/world/2021/jun/28/hong-kong-police-arrest-apple-daily-journalist-airport-fung-wai-kong Eleven days later, the reader-funded and independent Stand News preemptively removed all of its columnists and opinion writing published before May. At the end of 2021, Stand News was also raided and shut down by the Hong Kong authorities. 24 “Security law: Stand News opinion articles axed, directors resign amid reported threats to Hong Kong digital outlets,” Hong Kong Free Press , June 28, 2021, hongkongfp.com/2021/06/28/security-law-stand-news-opinion-articles-axed-directors-resign-amid-reported-threats-to-hong-kong-digital-outlets/ ; “Hong Kong pro-democracy Stand News closes after police raids condemned by U.N., Germany,” Reuters , December 29, 2021, reuters.com/business/media-telecom/hong-kong-police-arrest-6-current-or-former-staff-online-media-outlet-2021-12-28

Hong Kong police have also targeted libraries in an attempt to bar access to pro-democracy writing and quash the potential spread of public dissent. When the law was first implemented in the summer of 2020, books by Wong were swiftly removed. 25 Agence France-Presse , “Democracy books disappear from Hong Kong libraries, including title by activist Joshua Wong,” Hong Kong Free Press , July 4, 2020, hongkongfp.com/2020/07/04/democracy-books-disappear-from-hong-kong-libraries-including-title-by-activist-joshua-wong In the summer of 2021, an inquiry was launched into Shek Tong Tsui Public Library after it featured books written by Jimmy Lai on a “librarian’s choice” shelf. The inquiry resulted in one unnamed librarian’s suspension and the prohibition of lending any book titles that a government department believed breached the National Security Law. 26 Ng Kang-chung, “Hong Kong librarian suspended after books by jailed Apple Daily founder Jimmy Lai put on recommended reading shelf,” South China Morning Post, July 1, 2021, sg.news.yahoo.com/hong-kong-librarian-suspended-books-114304238.html Later in the summer, five unnamed members of a speech therapists’ union were arrested for creating and publishing three electronic children’s books that illustrated the 2019 pro-democracy protests using imagery of sheep and wolves. 27 Agence France-Presse, “Five arrested in Hong Kong for sedition over children’s book about sheep,” The Guardian , July 22, 2021, theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/22/five-arrested-in-hong-kong-for-sedition-over-childrens-book-about-sheep In the face of these detentions and imprisonments, concerns about running afoul of the ambiguously defined crimes of the National Security Law have resulted in a tangible atmosphere of self-censorship. At the 2021 Hong Kong Book Fair—the first since 2019—books that could potentially be considered politically risky were culled from display, as publishers and exhibitors reportedly exercised a new spirit of self-discipline in curating their selections. 28 Sara Cheng and Joyce Zhou, “Self-censorship expected as Hong Kong book fair held under national security law,” Reuters , July 13, 2021, reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/self-censorship-expected-hong-kong-book-fair-held-under-national-security-law-2021-07-13 In preparation for the fair, one participating publisher said, “[W]e self-censor a lot this time. We read through every single book and every single word before we bring it here.” 29 Associated Press, “Self-censorship hits Hong Kong book fair in wake of national security law,” The Guardian , July 15, 2021, theguardian.com/books/2021/jul/15/self-censorship-hits-hong-kong-book-fair-in-wake-of-national-security-law

In Tibet , the number of writers and public intellectuals detained or imprisoned during 2021 increased from six to eight. Writers and public intellectuals are commonly detained for reasons ranging from critically responding to state encroachments on Tibetan language and education, to alleged displays of support for the Dalai Lama, to broader expressions of support for free expression or denunciations of censorship. The charges brought against them are often related to spurious national security crimes, or are undisclosed to the public. In March 2021, writer Gangkye Drubpa Kyab —a poet, teacher, former political prisoner, and author of books on the 2008 Tibetan unrest—was arrested in Kardze, but his whereabouts and the charges against him remain unknown. 30 Choekyi Lhamo, “Chinese police detain six noted Tibetans in Kardze,” Phayul , April 15, 2021, phayul.com/2021/04/15/45489 Prominent writer Go Sherab Gyatso disappeared in October 2020, and later appeared in state custody in the Tibetan Autonomous Region. In 2021 the Chinese government responded to a United Nations request for further information about Go Sherab Gyatso’s incommunicado detention and reasons for his arrest, claiming that he was detained for “inciting secession.” Four months later, he was sentenced to 10 years in prison on the charge, which rights groups and his relatives believe is in connection with his writing that touched on Tibetan politics and free expression. 31 “Arbitrarily detained Tibetan Scholar, Go Sherab Gyatso covertly sentenced to 10 years,” Central Tibetan Administration, December 16, 2021, tibet.net/arbitrarily-detained-tibetan-scholar-go-sherab-gyatso-covertly-sentenced-to-10-years ; Lhuboom, “Tibetan writer given 10-year prison term in secret trial,” Radio Free Asia , December 10, 2021, rfa.org/english/news/tibet/trial-12102021135859.html ; “China: Release Tibetan scholar Gō Sherab Gyatso from arbitrary detention,” Tibetan Centre for Human Rights and Democracy,  April 16, 2021, tchrd.org/china-release-tibetan-scholar-go-sherab-gyatso-from-arbitrary-detention In a similarly clandestine fashion, poet and writer Gendun Lhundrub has remained in detention without trial or public information about his arrest since December 2020. 32 “Qinghai monk writer missing for more than a year after Chinese ‘arrest’,” Tibetan Review , January 26,  2022, tibetanreview.net/qinghai-monk-writer-missing-for-more-than-a-year-after-chinese-arrest

The majority of cases in Tibet include writers who have been imprisoned for multiple years. Well-known online writer and editor of the first-ever Tibetan literary website Chomei, Kunchok Tsephel Gopey Tsang had been in prison since 2009 for “leaking state secrets.” While no evidence for this charge has been made public, it is likely related to his website and writing focused on Tibetan literature; Chomei had been censored online prior to Kunchok Tsephel Gopey Tsang’s imprisonment. 33 “Founder of Tibetan cultural website sentenced to 15 years in closed-door trial in freedom of expression case,” International Campaign for Tibet, November 16, 2009, savetibet.org/founder-of-tibetan-cultural-website-sentenced-to-15-years-in-closed-door-trial-in-freedom-of-expression-case ; “Tibetan Literary Website Founder Sentenced to 15 Years in Prison,” Free Tibet, accessed March 11, 2022, freetibet.org/freedom-for-tibet/political-prisoners/case-studies/kunchok-tsephel/     Monk and online writer Jo Lobsang Jamyang has been serving a seven-year and six-month sentence for “leaking state secrets” since 2015. Tibetans familiar with Jamyang’s writing suspect that his articles on free expression and environmental degradation and debates with other Tibetan writers may have led to his imprisonment. 34 “Lobsang Jamyang,” Committee to Protect Journalists, accessed March 22, 2022, cpj.org/data/people/lobsang-jamyang Further details are unknown, as Jamyang was convicted in secret by a Wenchuan county court in Ngaba prefecture. 35 Yeshe Choesang, “Tibetan writer Lomig is handed 7-year term on unknown charges,” The Tibet Post , May 9, 2016, thetibetpost.com/en/news/tibet/5000-tibetan-writer-lomig-is-handed-7-year-term-on-unknown-charges ; Tenzin Gaphel, “Tibetan writer Lomig arbitrarily arrested in restive Ngaba County,” Tibet Express , April 22, 2015, tibetexpress.net/1265/tibetan-writer-lomig-arbitrarily-arrested-in-restive-ngaba-county Multiple songwriters, including Trinley Tsekar , Khado Tsetan , and Lhundrub Drakpa , also remain detained for writing lyrics that explore Tibetan identity, culture, and critical opinions of the Chinese government’s policies. 36 “China imprisons two Tibetans for song praising His Holiness the Dalai Lama,” Central Tibetan Administration, July 21, 2020, tibet.net/china-imprisons-two-tibetans-for-song-praising-his-holiness-the-dalai-lama ; “China sentences Tibetan singer to six years in prison,” Central Tibetan Administration, October 30, 2020, tibet.net/china-sentences-tibetan-singer-to-six-years-in-prison

In Xinjiang , the brutal repression of Uyghur and other Turkic minorities alongside the crackdown on cultural institutions has continued. At least 34 writers and public intellectuals were detained or imprisoned for their writing and work in the region during 2021, almost as many as in the rest of China. However, as noted in previous years’ reports, this figure is certainly an incomplete accounting of the actual number. As human rights groups actively work to document the scale of internment in Xinjiang, efforts are stymied by the government’s censorship of domestic media, restricted foreign media access, and pervasive surveillance. 37 For additional information on the detention of writers, intellectuals, and other cultural figures in Xinjiang, see the following reports from the Uyghur Human Rights Project: Detained and Disappeared: Intellectuals Under Assault in the Uyghur Homeland , March 25, 2019, uhrp.org/report/detained-and-disappeared-intellectuals-under-assault-uyghur-homeland-html ; UHRP Update: The Persecution of the Intellectuals in the Uyghur Region Continues , January 28, 2019, uhrp.org/report/persecution-intellectuals-uyghur-region-continues-html ; UHRP Report: The Persecution of the Intellectuals in the Uyghur Region: Disappeared Forever? , October 2018, uhrp.org/report/persecution-intellectuals-uyghur-region-disappeared-forever-html During 2021, information leaks from a police database in Ürümqi further revealed how Muslims and ethnic minorities—such as Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and Kyrgyz—are systematically surveilled through the collection of online communication, mobile phone data, and location data. 38 Yael Grauer, “Revealed: Massive Chinese Police Database,” The Intercept , January 29, 2021, theintercept.com/2021/01/29/china-uyghur-muslim-surveillance-police Writers who publish in their native languages and support literary institutions have been detained on spurious national security crimes of “extremism” and “separatism,” or have yet to be given any reason at all for their arrest.

Many writers and public intellectuals at the helm of institutions like magazines and publishing houses have been detained or imprisoned, effectively criminalizing institutions of literature and culture. Qurban Mamut , a Uyghur poet and longtime editor of culture journal Xinjiang Civilization , went missing in 2017 and was later confirmed to have been detained. Despite working within the confines of state censorship at Xinjiang Civilization , Mamut went missing a few months after he visited his son Bahram Sintash, who lives in the United States. 39 Austin Ramzy, “China Targets Prominent Uighur Intellectuals to Erase an Ethnic Identity,” The New York Times , January 5, 2019, nytimes.com/2019/01/05/world/asia/china-xinjiang-uighur-intellectuals.html ; “Qurban Mamut, a retired Uyghur editor held incommunicado in China,” Uyghur PEN, accessed March 1, 2022, uyghurpen.org/qurban-mamut-a-retired-uyghur-editor-held-incommunicado-in-china Tashpolat Tiyip —the former president of Xinjiang University, geography professor, and author of five books—also went missing in 2017 after he left Xinjiang for Germany to attend a conference. Two years after his disappearance, the UN urged the Chinese government to disclose his location and clarify the terms of his imprisonment. He has reportedly been held on separatism charges, and his family has received reports that he received a suspended death sentence, though the Chinese government has refuted this, claiming he was detained under corruption charges and not subject to a death sentence. 40 “China urged to disclose location of Uyghur academic Tashpolat Tiyip,” Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, December 26, 2019, ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2019/12/china-urged-disclose-location-uyghur-academic-tashpolat-tiyip ; Amy Anderson, “Death sentence for a life of service,” Art of Life in Chinese Central Asia, January 22, 2019, u.osu.edu/mclc/2019/01/25/death-sentence-for-a-life-of-service ; “President of Xinxiang University Arrested Four Years Ago. Whereabouts Unknown to This Day,” Committee of Concerned Scientists, May 5, 2021, concernedscientists.org/2021/05/president-of-xinxiang-university-arrested-four-years-ago-whereabouts-unknown-to-this-day At least five writers and public intellectuals who worked at the Kashgar Publishing House remained in detention during 2021. Deputy editor-in-chief Ablajan Siyit ; editor Memetjan Abliz Boriyar ; two retired editors-in-chief, Osman Zunun and Abliz Ömer ; and retired editor and poet Haji Mirzahid Kerimi were all arrested in 2017 and 2018 for their involvement in publishing books deemed “problematic.” 41 Shohret Hoshur, “Veteran Editor of Uyghur Publishing House Among 14 Staff Members Held Over ‘Problematic Books’,” Radio Free Asia , November 26, 2018, rfa.org/english/news/uyghur/editor-11262018155525.html Tragically, retired editor Kerimi died on January 9, 2021 while serving his prison sentence. 42 Shohret Hoshur, “Prominent Uyghur Poet and Author Confirmed to Have Died While Imprisoned,” Radio Free Asia , January 25, 2021, rfa.org/english/news/uyghur/poet-01252021133515.html

A sizeable 16 of the 34 writers PEN America documented as detained or imprisoned in Xinjiang in 2021 are also scholars of Uyghur literature, folklore, and politics. Historical researcher, literary critic, and writer Yalqun Rozi has been in prison since 2016 and is serving a 15-year sentence for his role in compiling and editing Uyghur literature textbooks that Chinese authorities claimed were “separatist.” 43 Helen Davidson, “China hands death sentences to Uyghur former officials,” The Guardian , April 9, 2021, theguardian.com/world/2021/apr/09/china-uyghur-death-sentences-xinjiang-education-directors Prominent folklorist and ethnographer Rahile Dawut has been in detention since 2017 after she attempted to travel from Ürümqi to Beijing. Dawut’s scholarship focuses on minority cultures and sacred Islamic sites in Central Eurasia; she founded the Minorities Folklore Research Centre at Xinjiang University and has authored several books and scholarly articles. 44 “Uyghur Scholar Rahile Dawut Named Honorary Professor in the Humanities by the Open Society University Network,” Bard News, December 8, 2020, bard.edu/news/rahile-dawut-named-first-osun-honorary-professor-in-the-humanities-2020-12-08 Former coworkers of Dawut’s confirmed her imprisonment in July 2021, while the Chinese government has yet to release information to the public or her family. 45 Shohret Hoshur and Gulchehra Hoja, “Noted Uyghur Folklore Professor Serving Prison Term in China’s Xinjiang,” Radio Free Asia , July 13, 2021,  rfa.org/english/news/uyghur/rahile-dawut-07132021175559.html Reported retaliation for speaking publicly about these cases coupled with a lack of press freedom in Xinjiang results in delayed public knowledge around many cases of jailed writers. In August 2021, three coworkers of another Xinjiang University professor, Gheyratjan Osman , confirmed that Osman was detained in 2018 and currently serving 10 years in prison for “separatism.” Osman was a literature professor who published dozens of books and hundreds of scholarly articles on Uyghur language and folklore. 46 “Urgent Actions Needed to Stop Cultural Rights Violations Against Uyghurs,” Chinese Human Rights Defenders, October 5, 2021,   nchrd.org/2021/10/urgent-actions-needed-to-stop-cultural-rights-violations-against-uyghurs Finally, 2021 marked the seventh year that Uyghur economist, online writer, and 2014 PEN Freedom to Write honoree Ilham Tohti has been held in Chinese state custody for his writings intended to foster understanding between Uyghurs and Han Chinese. 47 Andrew Jacobs, “China Charges Scholar With Inciting Separatism,” The New York Times , February 26, 2014, nytimes.com/2014/02/27/world/asia/ilham-tohti.html While Tohti is not imprisoned in Xinjiang, his unjust imprisonment is emblematic of the treatment many Uyghur writers face. He has been imprisoned incommunicado for the last five years and has been permitted no contact with his family or lawyers. Tohti’s daughter Jewher Ilham has nevertheless advocated fervently for his release, bringing attention to tragically similar accounts of unjustly detained Uyghurs and other political prisoners in Xinjiang. 48 Colm Keena, “‘We don’t know if he is alive’: Uighur woman speaks out on jailing of father in Xinjiang,” Irish Times , April 29, 2021, irishtimes.com/news/world/asia-pacific/we-don-t-know-if-he-is-alive-uighur-woman-speaks-out-on-jailing-of-father-in-xinjiang-1.4551124

New Threats Against Writers

In 2021, at least 60 writers and public intellectuals were newly detained. These detentions of first instance represent roughly one-fifth of the 2021 Index count. This represents a moderate decline from last year’s 79, when the COVID-19 pandemic intensified existing challenges for free expression in authoritarian states; new cases in 2020 were documented in China (12), Egypt (6), Iran (5), and Vietnam (5), and most notably, Belarus (5), where, as part of a broader crackdown, Alexander Lukashenka arrested writers, public intellectuals, and artists who used their writing and creative free expression to protest Belarus’s stolen 2020 presidential election. 

This year, new detentions primarily took place in Myanmar (20), where the military detained a number of influential writers starting as soon as they launched their coup on February 1, and continued to crack down on those using creative expression to protest and speak out against their takeover and in support of human rights; this came against the backdrop of arrests of thousands of protesters and the killing of hundreds of civilians. At least six Myanmar poets who gathered in downtown Yangon were arrested and detained for taking part in a poets’ protest involving readings and art sales in support of civil resistance on Pansodan Road. 257 Thin Lei Win, “Young, creative and angry: Myanmar’s youth pushes back,” Nikkei Asia , February 19, 2021, asia.nikkei.com/Life-Arts/Young-creative-and-angry-Myanmar-s-youth-pushes-back ; Mon Mon Myat, “Is Civil Disobedience Myanmar’s New Normal?,” The Irrawaddy , February 15, 2021 irrawaddy.com/opinion/civil-disobedience-myanmars-new-normal.html The second-highest source of new cases was Iran, where at least eight writers were newly detained for their free expression work and writing, ranging from poetry to philosophical and historical research. At least half of these eight were detained for writing considered “propaganda against the regime,” including author Yasin Qasemi Bajd , who writes about religion and society; rapper Toomaj Salehi , whose lyrics have criticized the government; religious historian Touraj Amini ; and philosophy researcher Nima Ghasemi .

At least 32 other writers were also newly detained in Cuba, Nicaragua, Tunisia, Algeria, Sudan, Kuwait, Palestinian Territories, Qatar, Spain, United Kingdom, Azerbaijan, and Kazakhstan; in addition to in China, India, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey, the more egregious jailers. In Algeria, Abdennour Abdesselam , a prominent cultural advocate of the Kabyle people—a Berber ethnic group indigenous to Kabylia in northern Algeria—as well as an author and linguist, was detained on September 13, 2021, in a government crackdown on dissent in the Kabliya region. 258 “Algerian journalist, others detained in growing crackdown,” Associated Press , September 15, 2021 apnews.com/article/africa-arrests-journalists-language-algiers-0288bed39fa8ece0320874ac94a2ea05 In Tunisia, where the democratic progress seen since the 2011 Arab Spring revolution suffered a devastating reversal this year after President Kais Saied suspended Parliament and dismissed the government, popular online satirist and blogger Salim Al-Jabali was detained, tried in front of a military court, and sentenced to six months in prison for Facebook posts in which he criticized President Saied. 259 “Tunisia arrests popular blogger for insulting president,” Middle East Eye , June 2, 2021, middleeasteye.net/fr/actu-et-enquetes/tunisie-blogueur-arrestation-liberte-expression-kais-saied-ben-ali ; Mayara, “Le blogueur Slim Jebali condamné à 6 mois de prison,” Tunisie Numerique , November 13, 2021, tunisienumerique.com/le-blogueur-slim-jebali-condamne-a-6-mois-de-prison The name of Al-Jabali’s satirical Facebook page, “The Minister of Hypertension and Diabetes,” references the physical effects of stress. 260 “Tunisia condemned for trying an activist in military courts,” Monitor de Oriente , June 5, 2021, monitordeoriente.com/20210605-tunez-es-condenado-por-juzgar-a-un-activista-en-tribunales-militares/ ; “Tunisia arrests popular blogger over insulting President Kais Saied,” Middle East Eye , June 1, 2021, middleeasteye.net/news/tunisia-arrests-blogger-over-insulting-president-kais-saied Nicaraguan sports reporter turned critical blogger Miguel Mendoza Urbina was detained in June 2021 and later sentenced to nine years in prison for “conspiracy to undermine national integrity” and supposedly spreading false news for his online posts about President Daniel Ortega. 261 “Prosecutor’s Office used Twitter and Facebook posts to convict journalist Miguel Mendoza,” Article 66 , February 8, 2022, articulo66.com/2022/02/08/fiscalia-utilizo-publicaciones-de-twitter-y-facebook-para-condenar-al-periodista-miguel-mendoza/ In late October 2021, the Hamas Internal Security Forces arrested Palestinian opinion writer and journalist Alaa Al-Mashrawi for unknown reasons and released him after 78 days in detention. 262 “Hamas security arrests journalist Alaa al-Mashrawi and confiscates 2 computers and 4 phones from his home,” Skeyes Media , October 31, 2021, skeyesmedia.org/ar/News/News/31-10-2021/9644 ; Alaa Al-Mashrawi, “Touching moments for the moment journalist Alaa Al-Masharawi met his family,” Facebook, January 16, 2022, facebook.com/alamashharawi/posts/2191296781024138

Like the poets in Myanmar, poets and songwriters around the world used their lyricism and incisive words to perform and share commentary and criticism with the public. Kuwaiti poet Jamal Al-Sayer was detained for his poem about corruption under the charge of “insulting the Emir,” spreading false news that could harm Kuwait’s image, and “misusing his mobile phone.” 263 “​​Kuwait arrests poet activist for ‘insulting’ emir, family says,” Reuters , July 7, 2021, reuters.com/world/middle-east/kuwait-arrests-poet-activist-insulting-emir-family-says-2021-07-07/ Sudanese poet Yousef El Dosh was interrogated and detained for five days in March 2021 on a complaint by the military-led Transitional Sovereignty Council for his recitation of his poem on television. The subject of El Dosh’s poem was a violent military shooting of protesters holding a sit-in in Khartoum in 2019, known as the June 3 Massacre. 264 “Khartoum poet released from prison,” Dabanga , March 11, 2021, dabangasudan.org/en/all-news/article/khartoum-poet-released-from-prison ; “Sudanese poets: With Youssef El-Dosh against the ‘Transitional’,” Almayadeen , March 8, 2021, almayadeen.net/news/culture/1463274/%D8%B4%D8%B9%D8%B1%D8%A7%D8%A1-%D8%B3%D9%88%D8%AF%D8%A7%D9%86%D9%8A%D9%88%D9%86:-%D9%85%D8%B9-%D9%8A%D9%88%D8%B3%D9%81-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%AF%D9%88%D8%B4-%D8%B6%D8%AF-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%B9%D8%B3%D9%83%D8%B1 ; Zeinab Mohammed Salih, “Sudanese authorities raid offices of 2019 massacre tribunal,” Al Jazeera , March 9, 2022, aljazeera.com/news/2022/3/9/sudanese-authorities-raid-offices-of-2019-massacre-tribunal In Spain, Pablo Rivadulla began his nine-month imprisonment in February 2021 for his tweets and song lyrics that ostensibly “praised terrorism.” 265 Alfonso L. Congostrina, “Spanish rapper convicted over tweets arrested after ignoring prison deadline,” El Pais , February 16, 2021, english.elpais.com/society/2021-02-16/spanish-rapper-convicted-over-tweets-arrested-after-ignoring-prison-deadline.html Two Cuban songwriters and rappers Ramón Eusebio López Díaz and Richard Zamora —known as El Invasor and El Radikal respectively—were newly detained during the summer of 2021. Both rappers are known for their hip-hop songs that are often critical of the Cuban government’s repression and in support of free expression. 266 Santiago Pérez, “Cuba to Prosecute People Detained During Recent Protests,” The Wall Street Journal , July 20, 2021, wsj.com/articles/cuba-to-prosecute-people-detained-during-recent-protests-11626786827 ; “The regime frees rapper El Invasor, detained after forcibly removing him from his home,” Diario de Cuba , June 22, 2022, diariodecuba.com/derechos-humanos/1624313508_32078.html El Invasor, for example, has written songs about repression of free expression such as “Voy a hablar por mí” ( I Will Speak for Myself ) and “Suéltenlos” ( Let Them Go ). Both rappers were arrested the day after they joined major protests in Cuba on July 11.

Based on an examination of case data since the inaugural Freedom to Write Index 2019, nearly a dozen writers and public intellectuals have been subject to at least one further repeated arrest, detention, or reimprisonment following a prior release from prison. These situations of repeated jailings demonstrate the persistent intimidation and threats writers often face, especially if they continue to speak and write freely. Writer and academic Benny Tai Yiu-ting from Hong Kong had his bail revoked after authorities slapped him with another spurious case, charging him among a swath of pro-democracy figures under the National Security Law. While some in the case were granted bail, the court revoked Tai’s existing release conditions and kept him in custody. 267 Jasmine Siu, “Benny Tai sent back to jail to await Hong Kong court’s ruling in Occupy Central appeal,” South China Morning Post, March 4, 2021, scmp.com/news/hong-kong/law-and-crime/article/3124100/benny-tai-sent-back-jail-await-hong-kong-courts-ruling In most cases, these situations also underscore the precarious nature of being conditionally released from jail or prison, a status that dangles a sword of Damocles over those subject to it. Blogger Huynh Thuc Vy from Vietnam was abruptly rearrested in 2021 after the government sent a letter annulling the conditions of her bail, claiming that she negatively influenced security, order, and social safety during the postponement of her sentence. 268 My Hang, “Huynh Thuc Vy ‘peacefully received’ news of execution of prison sentence for ‘insulting the National Flag,’” BBC News , December 1, 2021, bbc.com/vietnamese/vietnam-59486915 Judicial controls imposed on writers who have been released from prison after serving their sentences, such as travel bans and formal state surveillance, have led to further detentions of Guo Quan , Yang Maodong , and Sophia Huang Xueqin in China since 2019. While the release of an individual from jail or prison is always welcome news and an essential first step towards fully restoring their freedom, conditions that limit writers’ speech or work amount to arbitrary, unwarranted punishments that place continued constraints on their freedom to write.

In a handful of these cases, repeated arrests appear intended to essentially tire out their target and force submission, especially when the individual persists in writing and speaking out. Cuban lyricist and rapper Maykel Castillo Pérez was released after serving a year in prison in 2019, but was then arbitrarily arrested at least four separate times in 2020 and at least three separate times in 2021. He was most recently detained on May 18, 2021 and has remained in jail since. 269 “Régimen cubano libera al rapero Maykel Osorbo,” ADN Cuba, April 18, 2020, adncuba.com/noticias-de-cuba/derechos-humanos/regimen-cubano-libera-al-rapero-maykel-osorbo ; Lázaro Javier Chirino, “Policía cubana detiene al rapero Maykel Osorbo: No sabemos dónde lo tienen, aseguran sus amigos,” Ciber Cuba, April 8, 2020, cibercuba.com/noticias/2020-08-04-u199482-e199482-s27061-policia-cubana-detiene-al-rapero-maykel-osorbo-no-sabemos ; “Rapero cubano Maykel Osorbo es detenido a golpes por 7 policías,” Periódico Cubano , September 28, 2020, periodicocubano.com/el-rapero-cubano-maykel-osorbo-detenido-a-golpes-por-7-agentes-de-la-policia/ ; “Directorio Democrático Cubano denuncia incremento de la represión en Cuba,” Martí, November 16, 2020, radiotelevisionmarti.com/a/directorio-democr%C3%A1tico-cubano-denuncia-incremento-de-la-represi%C3%B3n-en-cuba/279018.html ; “Arrestan en Cuba a Maykel Osorbo, cantante de ‘Patria y vida,’” El Pitazo, March 9, 2021, elpitazo.net/internacional/arrestan-en-cuba-a-maykel-osorbo-cantante-de-patria-y-vida/ ; Karla Pérez, “ONU exige al régimen cubano dar a conocer paradero de Maykel Osorbo,” ADN Cuba, May 28, 2021, adncuba.com/noticias-de-cuba/derechos-humanos/onu-exige-conocer-paradero-de-osorbo Ugandan satirical novelist and fiction writer Kakwenza Rukirabashaija was arrested in 2021, after already enduring two separate detentions in 2020 for his fiction novel The Greedy Barbarians . Before his third arrest, he had published another book— Banana Republic —and received the PEN Pinter International Writer of Courage Award conferred by English PEN. In December 2021, he was abruptly arrested and charged with “offensive communication” for tweeting. In January 2022, after Rukirabashaija was finally released—and after he was tortured in custody and his lawfully ordered release was delayed—plainclothes state agents seized him mere hours after his release on bail and detained him in an unknown location. 270 “Ugandan novelist detained again despite release order: Lawyer,” Al Jazeera, January 25, 2022, aljazeera.com/news/2022/1/25/ugandan-novelist-detained-again-despite-release-order-lawyer ; “Ugandan author Kakwenza Rukirabashaija flees the country: Lawyer,” Al Jazeera , February 9, 2022, aljazeera.com/news/2022/2/9/ugandan-author-flees-after-alleged-torture-says-lawyer Mohamed Tajadit , an Algerian poet and activist, was detained in April 2021, one week after he was released from a four-month sentence for participating in the Hirak ( hirak meaning “movement” in Arabic) protests and speaking out against the president. This was the third time in three years Tajadit, who is affectionately known as the “poet of the Hirak” 271 “Three Algerian activists on hunger strike hospitalized in prison protest,” Al Arabiya News, January 6, 2021, english.alarabiya.net/News/north-africa/2021/01/06/Three-Algerian-activists-on-hunger-strike-hospitalized-in-prison-protest for reciting his verses during demonstrations, has been detained. 272 Jasper Hamann, “Algeria: Hirak Protesters Call For Ramadan Amnesty For Activists,” Morocco World News, April 10, 2021, moroccoworldnews.com/2021/04/339426/algeria-hirak-protesters-call-for-ramadan-amnesty-for-activists

Languishing Behind Bars: Long-term Imprisonments and Life Sentences

At least 62 of the writers included in the 2021 Freedom to Write Index are serving long-term sentences, ranging from 10 years to life in prison. Of these, at least 11 writers are serving sentences of life imprisonment—including the 7 Eritrean writers who have been detained incommunicado and without charge since the early 2000s after a crackdown on independent media and who are effectively condemned to de facto life sentences—and at least 34 writers had been serving sentences of more than 15 years. These 62 writers represent just over a fifth of the total number of writers behind bars, illustrating the extreme costs associated with free expression in many of the world’s most closed and repressive countries, where the legal system has been completely subverted to political prerogatives and delivers harsh penalties rather than upholding the rule of law.

Because these cases can go years without a significant development, they often get little international media or foreign government attention, which can inadvertently further the interests of the governments behind these detentions; they wish to make these “problematic” individuals go away, and long sentences, often combined with significant restrictions on access or communications with the detained individual, can effectively achieve that goal. It can also be understandably difficult for family and other advocates to sustain energy over such long periods, and governments enacting these long punishments rely on the likelihood of that fatigue. The Freedom to Write Index often focuses on new detentions and those individuals caught up in recent turmoil in places like Myanmar or Belarus. But it is also essential to shine a light on the writers and intellectuals whom governments are working hard to keep in the shadows.

The majority of these cases are in China, although Vietnam and Eritrea also stand out for their high concentrations of lengthy sentences and long-term imprisonments. In Vietnam, 70 percent of jailed writers are serving sentences of 10 or more years in prison, while six of the eight imprisoned writers in Eritrea have been arbitrarily detained for over 20 years; and one Eritrean writer for over 15 years. While few imprisoned writers around the world currently face an official death penalty, the handing down of long sentences and open-ended detentions is often itself a “life sentence,” particularly in the cases of writers who are elderly or in poor health at the start of their sentence, and are frequently subjected to poor prison conditions, torture, and a lack of access to medical care. For example, the celebrated writer and publisher Haji Mirzahid Kerimi was said to have suffered from a serious health condition before passing away in Chinese custody at the age of 82. 273 “Prominent Uyghur Poet and Author Confirmed to Have Died While Imprisoned,” Radio Free Asia , January 25, 2021, rfa.org/english/news/uyghur/poet-01252021133515.html Known for his books and poems about Uyghur literature and history, Kerimi died in January 2021 while serving an 11-year prison sentence for his writing. Kazakh poet and author Aron Atabek was released on medical parole in October 2021 after serving most of his 18-year prison sentence in Kazakhstan. 274 “Kazakh Court Orders Release Of Jailed Dissident Poet, Reportedly In Poor Health,” Radio Free Europe, October 1, 2021, rferl.org/a/aron-atabek-release-prison-kazakhstan/31487474.html While incarcerated, he endured periods of solitary confinement, torture, and beatings, on top of already suffering from heart disease, diabetes, and arthritis. In November 2021, Atabek died while being treated in a Kazakh hospital for COVID-19, just one month after being released. 275 “Released After 18 Years In Prison, Dissident Kazakh Poet Dies After COVID-19 Hospitalization,” Radio Free Europe, November 24, 2021, rferl.org/a/kazakhstan-atabek-dissident-poet-dead/31577362.html

Abduljalil Al-Singace represents another case in which long-term detentions pose severe and life-threatening health risks. A Bahraini blogger, human rights activist, and engineer, Al-Singace is a decade into a lifetime prison sentence. Best known for his blog Al-Faseelah , where he published articles critical of Bahrain’s authoritarian governance, Al-Singace was first arrested in January 2009 for “inciting hatred against the regime,” and was later sentenced to life imprisonment for his peaceful role in Bahrain’s 2011 uprising. 276 “Abduljalil Al-Singace,” Bahrain Institute for Rights and Democracy, accessed March 10, 2022, ​​ birdbh.org/abduljalil-al-singace/ ; “Sick Human Rights Defender Must be Release,” Amnesty International, February 14, 2022, amnesty.org/en/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/MDE1152322022ENGLISH.pdf Since then, Al-Singace has been subjected to torture, denial of medical care, and long periods of incommunicado detention. In June 2021, United Nations experts called on Bahrain to immediately release Al-Singace, reporting that he had been forced to make confessions and that his religious books had been confiscated. Soon after, on July 8, 2021, he began a hunger strike to protest the conditions of his imprisonment, demanding the return of a book he had been writing about Bahraini language dialects that was confiscated by prison officials. 277 “Timeline: Dr Abduljalil Al-Singace’s Hunger Strike,” Bahrain Institute for Rights and Democracy, accessed March 10, 2022, birdbh.org/2021/01/timeline-dr-abduljalil-alsingaces-hunger-strike/ ; “Bahrain: UN expert alarmed by prolonged detention of human rights defenders,” UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights Defenders, June 22, 2021, srdefenders.org/bahrain-un-expert-alarmed-by-prolonged-detention-of-human-rights-defenders; “Bahrain: Request for support to free imprisoned human rights defender Dr Abduljalil Al-Singace, on hunger strike since July 2021,” PEN International, January 17, 2022, pen-international.org/news/bahrain-request-for-support-to-free-imprisoned-human-rights-defender-dr-abduljalil-alsingace-on-hunger-strike-since-july-2021/ After more than 240 days of his hunger strike, his severely deteriorating health and lack of adequate medical treatment raise serious concerns that his life is at risk. 278 “Timeline: Dr Abduljalil Al-Singace’s Hunger Strike,” Bahrain Institute for Rights and Democracy, accessed March 10, 2022, birdbh.org/2021/01/timeline-dr-abduljalil-alsingaces-hunger-strike/

In the case of Russian historian Yury Dmitriev , an initial conviction and sentence of 3 and a half years opened the door for the court to increase his sentence twice, ultimately handing him 15 years in prison. Dmitriev is best known for his research and writing that has uncovered the burial places and mass graves of thousands of victims of Stalin-era mass executions. His work to uncover the truth behind these horrific atrocities have made him a target of the Putin regime, which has worked to rehabilitate the Soviet era and whitewash Stalin-era atrocities. 279 Alec Luhn, “Gulag grave hunter unearths uncomfortable truths in Russia,” The Guardian , August 3, 2017, theguardian.com/world/2017/aug/03/gulag-grave-hunter-yury-dmitriyev-unearths-uncomfortable-truths-russia In September 2020, 2 months after his initial sentencing of 3 and a half years—and in a closed-door hearing without his lawyer—two acquittals in Dmitriev’s case were overturned and his prison sentence was extended to 13 years. With time served, he was set to be released the next month; but in this extrajudicial move, his imprisonment was extended. In a cruel move, a court added two more years to Dmitriev’s sentence on December 27, 2021. 280 Kristina Safonova, “Unusual, even for Russia,” Meduza , September 30, 2020, meduza.io/en/feature/2020/09/30/unusual-even-for-russia ; “Russian court extends jail term for Gulag historian to 15 years,” Reuters , December 27, 2021, reuters.com/world/europe/russian-court-extends-jail-term-gulag-historian-15-years-2021-12-27/ Dmitriev is also the head of the Karelian branch of Russia’s oldest and most prominent human rights organization, Memorial. On December 28, 2021, as part of the regime’s apparent campaign to obscure history, the Russian Supreme Court ordered Memorial to liquidate itself and close down. 281 Andrew E. Kramer and Ivan Nechepurenko, “Russian Court Orders Prominent Human Rights Group to Shut,” The New York Times , December 28, 2021, nytimes.com/2021/12/28/world/europe/russia-memorial-human-rights.html

Scholars, authors, and activists who are members of ethnic or religious minority groups are often at an increased risk of forced disappearances, open-ended detentions, and long-term prison sentences. In Xinjiang, China, for example, Uyghur Muslim writers are commonly arrested and held incommunicado, only to resurface years later in Chinese-run detention centers, often hit with heavy sentences of more than 15 years in prison. Such is the case of poet Gulnisa Imin , a prolific writer and teacher of Uyghur literature. On December 4, 2015, Gulnisa Imin began her “One Thousand and One Nights” poetry project, writing and releasing one poem per night, often expressing anguish over China’s crackdown on Uyghur society. 282 Abdullah Qazanchi and Abduweli Ayup, “The Disappearance of Uyghur Intellectual and Cultural Elites: A New Form of Eliticide,” Uyghur Human Rights Project, December 7, 2021, uhrp.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/The-Disappearance-of-Uyghur-Intellectual-and-Cultural-Elites_2021-12-07-1.pdf ; Shohret Hoshur, “Uyghur poet imprisoned on separatism charges in China’s Xinjiang,” Radio Free Asia , December 15, 2021, rfa.org/english/news/uyghur/gulnisa-emin-12152021171144.html In March 2018, on the 345th night of her poetry series, she was suddenly cut off from the internet and disappeared. 283 Shohret Hoshur, “Uyghur poet imprisoned on separatism charges in China’s Xinjiang,” Radio Free Asia, December 15, 2021, rfa.org/english/news/uyghur/gulnisa-emin-12152021171144.html Apparently arrested on the grounds that her poetry “spread thoughts of separatism,” it was not until December 2021 that her detention was confirmed, along with her sentence of 17 years and 6 months in prison. 284 “Gulnisa ​​Emin, the author of ‘One Thousand and One Nights,’ was sentenced to 17 years and 6 months in prison,” Radio Free Asia , December 6, 2021, rfa.org/uyghur/xewerler/ming-bir-keche-12062021140942.html Ablikim Kalkun , a Uyghur comedian and creative artist, ​​was also handed an 18-year sentence in late 2019 on similar charges, though once again, reports confirming his detention didn’t surface until fall 2020. 285 “Xinjiang Authorities Jail Prominent Uyghur Comedian Over ‘Extremist and Separatist’ Songs,” Radio Free Asia, October 6, 2020, rfa.org/english/news/uyghur/comedian-10062020124834.html

Two Uyghur writers on PEN America’s case list, Ilham Tohti and Nagyz Muhammed , are currently serving sentences of life imprisonment. Nagyz Muhammed is a poet who worked to preserve Uyghur culture and heritage before his arrest in 2018, during a period that saw a heightened wave of arbitrary arrests and disappearances of Uyghur activists and scholars. 286 Chris Buckley, “China’s Prisons Swell After Deluge of Arrests Engulfs Muslims,” The New York Times , August 31, 2019, nytimes.com/2019/08/31/world/asia/xinjiang-china-uighurs-prisons.html Muhammed was handed a lifetime prison sentence in September 2020. 287 “China: Further information: Life imprisonment for missing Kazakh writer: Nagyz Muhammed,” Amnesty International, October 29, 2020, amnesty.org/en/documents/asa17/3279/2020/en/ Likewise, Ilham Tohti, a world-renowned writer, economist, and professor, is serving a sentence of life in prison on charges of separatism. 288 Edward Wong, “China Sentences Uighur Scholar to Life,” The New York Times , September 23, 2014, nytimes.com/2014/09/24/world/asia/china-court-sentences-uighur-scholar-to-life-in-separatism-case.html?smid=url-share Detained by Chinese authorities in January 2014, Tohti has been called a “Uyghur Mandela” for his decades spent working to promote peace and understanding between Uyghurs and Han Chinese. 289 Helena Kennedy, “We Uyghurs Have No Say by Ilham Tohti review – a people ignored,” The Guardian , March 9, 2022, theguardian.com/books/2022/mar/09/we-uyghurs-have-no-say-ilham-tohti-review-background-genocide-china Since his arrest, he has been held incommunicado, with no access to family or lawyers since 2017, while allegations of his torture in custody continue to cause concern for his health and well-being. 290 “PEN Condemns the Denial of Family Visits or Support in Prison for Ilham Tohti,” PEN America, May 15, 2015, pen.org/pen-condemns-the-denial-of-family-visits-or-support-in-prison-for-ilham-tohti/ ; “China: Human rights defenders given long jail terms, tortured – UN expert,” United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, June 28, 2021, ohchr.org/en/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=27221&LangID=E ; “Ilham Tohti,” United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, accessed March 17, 2022, uscirf.gov/religious-prisoners-conscience/forb-victims-database/ilham-tohti In 2014, he was the recipient of PEN America’s Freedom to Write Award, and in December 2019, Tohti’s daughter accepted the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought on his behalf. 291 “PEN Honors Ilham Tohti with PEN/Barbara Goldsmith Freedom to Write Award,” PEN America, March 31, 2014, pen.org/press-release/pen-honors-ilham-tohti-with-penbarbara-goldsmith-freedom-to-write-award/ ; Jonas Ekblom, “Daughter accepts EU Parliament prize on behalf of Uighur activist,” Reuters , December 18, 2019, reuters.com/article/us-eu-sakharov-prize/daughter-accepts-eu-parliament-prize-on-behalf-of-uighur-activist-idUSKBN1YM1GQ

In extreme cases, long-term imprisonments are compounded by capital punishment. In Iran, the writer and activist Arzhang Davoodi , detained since 2003, faces the death penalty for his peaceful political advocacy and writing. Since his initial arrest, Davoodi has suffered prolonged periods of solitary confinement, torture, and repeated transfers, while being denied access to his family and lawyers. 292 “Iran: A Renewed Call For Information About Political Prisoner Arzhang Davoodi And To Save His Life,” National Council of Resistance of Iran, June 2, 2021, ncr-iran.org/en/ncri-statements/iran-a-renewed-call-for-information-about-political-prisoner-arzhang-davoodi-and-to-save-his-life/ In 2014, he was sentenced to death after already enduring 11 years of detention. 293 “Iranian writer sentenced to death: Arzhang Davoodi,” Amnesty International, July 24, 2014, amnesty.org/en/documents/mde13/042/2014/en/ Junaid Hafeez , a writer and academic who lectured at Bahauddin Zakariya University in Pakistan, was arrested in March 2013 for allegedly insulting the Prophet Muhammad on social media. 294 “Junaid Hafeez: Academic sentenced to death for blasphemy in Pakistan,” BBC News , December 21, 2019, bbc.com/news/world-asia-50878432 He has been held in solitary confinement, since 2014, after his lawyer, Rashid Rehman, was murdered in retaliation for agreeing to defend his case. 295 “Pakistan ‘blasphemy lawyer’ shot dead in Multan office,” BBC News , May 7, 2014, bbc.com/news/world-asia-27319433 In 2019 Hafeez was found guilty of blasphemy and sentenced to death. 296 Asad Hashim, “Pakistani academic Junaid Hafeez sentenced to death for blasphemy,” Al Jazeera , December 21, 2019, aljazeera.com/news/2019/12/21/pakistani-academic-junaid-hafeez-sentenced-to-death-for-blasphemy

Many of these cases fall off the public radar as the years accumulate and the initial sense of outrage has waned. Such cases require sustained attention in order to draw media attention and to support lobbying efforts before governments and international organizations to work to secure their release.

On January 8, 2022, the Iranian poet, screenwriter, and filmmaker Baktash Abtin died of COVID-19 in a Tehran hospital, while still in state custody serving a six-year sentence in retaliation for his writing and his advocacy for free expression in Iran. Abtin, alongside his fellow members of the Iranian Writers’ Association, Reza Khandan Mahabadi and Keyvan Bajan , had received the PEN/Barbey Freedom to Write Award in October 2021.

Abtin’s devastating and preventable death highlights the severity of the conditions for prisoners in Iran, and the government’s callous disregard for those unjustly detained in its prisons. And it makes plain the heightened dangers facing those in prison around the world in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic; even as some of the world begins to emerge from the constraints of the worst stages of the pandemic, the risks to those behind bars remain high. Abtin’s death also illustrates the courage that writers exhibit when they speak up against repression, when they dare to dissent, and when they insist on continuing to create, no matter the potential cost.

Global solidarity for writers behind bars plays an essential role in sustaining them and their families, and in ensuring that government attempts to silence them do not succeed. Continuing to elevate their work and draw public and media attention to their plight can help to tip the scales for governments and make release more likely. This year’s Index includes many writers who have since been freed, reflecting the fact that such efforts can work, but also the reality that many of the writers released in 2021 still face conditions on their freedom that limit their ability to travel and, in some cases, to speak or write freely.

In videotaped remarks he made to accept the Freedom to Write award while on a brief furlough from prison last fall, Baktash Abtin said, “I hope for a day when no one in the world is imprisoned for their thoughts and for having such a beautiful demand as freedom.” His death must serve as a source of inspiration to continue to call for the freedom of all writers unjustly detained around the world.

About the Freedom to Write Index

The 2021 Freedom to Write Index provides a count of the writers, academics, and public intellectuals who were held in prison or detention during 2021 in relation to their writing or for otherwise exercising their freedom of expression. For the past century, PEN America and the global PEN network have defended the rights of writers and intellectuals to express themselves freely, and advocated on behalf of those who have faced threats as a result of their writing or other forms of expression. The criteria for inclusion in the Freedom to Write Index thus adhere closely to PEN International’s standards for selection for their annual Case List .

The Index is a count of individuals who primarily write literature, poetry, or other creative writing; essays or other nonfiction or academic writing; or online commentary. The Index includes journalists only in cases where they also fall into one of the former categories, or are opinion writers or columnists. To be included in the count, individuals must have spent at least 48 hours behind bars in a single instance of detention between January 1 and December 31, 2021.

For the purposes of the Index and the status designations used to classify cases, imprisonment is considered to be when an individual is serving a sentence following a conviction, while detention accounts for individuals held in custody pending charges, or those who have been charged and are being held prior to conviction. Writers are, of course, also subject to other types of threats, including censorship, harassment, legal charges without detention, or physical attacks, and these are also analyzed to a lesser degree in this report.

PEN America works closely with the PEN International Secretariat and Writers in Prison Committee (WiPC), as well as other members of the global PEN network. The Index and this report draw significantly from PEN International’s Case Lists , which in turn reflect input from PEN Centers around the world. The cases included in the Index are also based on PEN America’s own internal case list, the Writers at Risk Database , and PEN America’s Artists at Risk Connection (ARC) case list. Additionally, PEN America draws from press reports; reports from the families, lawyers, and colleagues of those in prison; and data from other international human rights, press freedom, academic freedom, and free expression organizations. The methodology behind the Index is explained in greater detail here .

The annual Freedom to Write Index has become an essential component of PEN America’s long-standing Writers at Risk Program, which encompasses support for and advocacy on behalf of writers under threat around the world. Another flagship component of PEN America’s year-round advocacy is the PEN/Barbey Freedom to Write Award , given annually to an imprisoned writer targeted for exercising their freedom of expression. Of the 51 jailed writers who have received the Freedom to Write Award from 1987 to 2021, 45 have been released due in part to the global attention and pressure the award generates. PEN America also publishes the Writers at Risk Database , a searchable catalog of the writers, journalists, artists, academics, and public intellectuals under threat around the world, including those counted in the 2019 Index and 2020 Index . This database offers researchers, rights advocates, and the public a wealth of actionable evidence of ongoing global threats to free expression.

Acknowledgments

PEN America is deeply grateful to the John Templeton Foundation for its generous support of the Freedom to Write Index and Writers at Risk Database. PEN America also extends its thanks to PEN International—both the Secretariat and the Writers in Prison Committee (WiPC)—for its collaboration on this project. The Freedom to Write Index report was written by PEN America Director of Free Expression at Risk Programs Dr. Karin Deutsch Karlekar and Free Expression Programs Coordinator Veronica Tien. Free Expression Programs interns Daria Locher and Rosy Fitzgerald provided essential support with research, data analysis, drafting, references, and fact-checking. Washington Director Nadine Farid Johnson provided support drafting and reviewing, and Legislative and Research Analyst Andy Gottlieb also provided essential review and support. Eurasia Program Director Polina Sadovskaya, Artists at Risk Connection (ARC) Director Julie Trébault, and Artists at Risk Connection Program Assistant Juliette Verlaque provided assistance on case research.

The report was reviewed and edited by James Tager, PEN America’s director of research, and by Summer Lopez, senior director of Free Expression Programs, who also provided guidance and oversight for the project.

PEN America offers special thanks to interns, volunteers, and fellows Ashley Arancibia, Jake Neuberger, Chiara Caremoli, D. Zhang, Violet Barton, Elizabeth Huang, Juan Fueyo-Gomez, Tala Semaan, and Dounia Benslimane for their support with research and fact-checking throughout the year.

Freedom of Expression Essay

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Searching for freedom of expression essay? Look no further! This argumentative essay about freedom of expression, thought, & speech, will inspire you to write your own piece.

Introduction

• The Key Concepts

Freedom of expression refers to the right to express one’s opinions or thoughts freely by utilizing any of the different modes of communication available. The ideas aired should, however, not cause any intentional harm to other personality or status through false or ambiguous statements. Communication of ideas can be achieved through speech, writing or art. Freedom of expression, unlike freedom of thought, may be regulated by the appropriate authorities in any society in order to avoid controversies between different individuals.

The extent to which this limitation or censorship is done varies from nation to nation and is dependent on the government of the day. According to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, every individual has the right to search for information, access and impart variety of ideas irrespective of the frontiers.

Freedom of Expression: The Key Concepts

The subject of freedom of expression has always been controversial, especially when considering political aspects. A state is perceived to have the mandate to impede people from convening groups in which they air their opinions if those views can result in direct harm to other people.

However, the interference would only be an exception if doing so results in more beneficial outcomes than standing aside. For one to be in a position to gauge the eventuality of a gain or a loss, then there should be absolute freedom of expression on all matters irrespective of the nature of the sentiments made.

Arguments for absolute freedom of expression can be a made by evaluating the purpose for which the ideas are expressed and the manner in which we evaluate what is true or false. According to Mill (Eisenach, 2004), the right to express one’s opinions offers humanity a rare chance to switch over an error for the truth if the idea expressed happens to be true.

In case the opinion happens to be wrong, mankind stands a chance of getting a clearer picture of the known truth through collusion with a mistake. Therefore, freedom of expression acts in the best interests of mankind as it endeavors to progress and its limitation deprives people of the prospects of growth.

Whether we let expression of an opinion to be limited or censored, whereas it could be true, then we present ourselves as beyond reproach. We consider all that we know to be the truth and therefore dispel all opinions that question this truth. It is possible for people or authorities to be in fault. For instance, what we consider to be morally right or wrong may not be so.

The lines that define moral rights and wrongs were set by people who could possibly have mistaken. In order to draw the limit, one must differentiate between sureness and the truth. Our certainty that a particular idea is false does not in any way excuse its expression. Suppressing such an idea would not only justify our confidence of the opinion being wrong, but also proves that we are flawless.

If limitation of people’s freedom of expression in matters such as racism is based on certainty that mankind does not stand to lose any benefit, then this sureness should be founded in the freedom itself. We can only consider ourselves to be certain when there have been no opinions raised to question the truths we hold. Therefore, in order to boost our certainty, we have to leave room for the opposing beliefs.

There are governments that censor the expression of certain ideas not because they are false, but because they are considered to be hazardous to the society. Mill argues that in such a situation, the hazard in the expressed opinions is questionable. The only way to ascertain that the opinion is in fact dangerous is not to suppress its expression but to allow its free discussion.

Secondly, if the opinion that is being limited is true, then the alternative view held by the government must be false. Experience has shown that all beliefs that are false are never constructive in the long run. Therefore, the government that prefers to hold a false conviction in place of a hazardous truth does not act in the best interests of its people.

In many instances, the silenced view may be a mistake. However, most of these mistakes do carry with them a scrap of truth. On the other hand, the existing view on each of the different topics often does not contain the entire truth. By listening to the opinions of others on the matter, an opportunity to learn the rest of the uncovered truths presents itself.

For instance in politics, we could have two political parties with different agendas. One wants to institute reforms while another desires to ensure stability. People may not be in a position to discern what should be retained or altered, but ensuring the parties at opposing ends ensures each party checks on the performance of the other. In the long run, we strike for a beneficial balance between their supposed agendas (Bhargava, 2008).

Moreover, if the opinion being expressed is entirely true, it may not be considered so with certainty. For confidence to feature, these views must be contested against other rational opinions of others in order to single out the supporting arguments. It is expected that those who believe in their opinions will place strong arguments in their favor (Matravers, 2001).

If an authority believes in the rationality of its ideas, then it should leave room for the expression of opposing ideas. For instance, if any reigning political party has faith in the views it has concerning the development of the country’s economy, it should not be wary of an opposition party with contradicting views. After all what they stand for has factual backing (O’Rourke, 2001).

Lastly, the battle for supremacy between different opinions opens up a more comprehensive understanding of our beliefs. We begin to comprehend what is required of us and are, thus, in a position to act on them. Human beliefs do not exhibit any motivation and the debates that arise are what add fuel to the fire.

Holding beliefs with a conservative mindset only serves to hinder our acceptance of the possible alternatives (Jones, 2001). Therefore, opposition exhibited in the freedom of speech opens up a lee way for open-mindedness besides posing a challenge to hypocrisy and logical sluggishness.

The absence of restrictions on people’s freedom of oppression allows for the exchange of error for truth or the clarification of the existing truth. It also reinforces our certainty in the opinions we consider true besides increasing our open-mindedness and thoughtfulness. For governments, it ensures those entrusted with the leadership of the country have reasonable opinions that work for the common good of the country’s citizens.

Free discussion and analysis of different ideas will, thus, result in the prosperity of mankind rather than the detrimental effects it is assumed to bring.

Freedom of Expression FAQ

• What Is Freedom of Expression? Freedom of expression is the ability of individual people and groups to express their thoughts, beliefs, emotions, and ideas without any restrictions or censorship from the government. This freedom is protected by the First Amendment of the US Constitution.
• How Does Freedom of Expression Protect Individual Liberty? The First Amendment of the US Constitution guarantees freedom of expression to all citizens. This means that the US Congress does not have the right to restrict the media or people from speaking freely. People also have the right to peaceful assemblies and petitions to the government.
• Why Is Freedom of Expression Important for Democracy? Freedom of expression is an essential human right. It guarantees the free exchange of information, opinions, and ideas in the public space, allowing people to independently form their own views on all the essential issues.

Bhargava, H. (2008). Political Theory: An Introduction . Delhi: Pearson Education.

Eisenach, E. (2004). Mill and Moral Character . New York: Penn State Press.

Jones, T. (2001). Modern Political Thinkers and Ideas: An Historical Introduction . New York: Routledge.

Matravers, D. (2001) Reading Political Philosophy: Machiavelli to Mill . New York: Routledge.

O’Rourke, K. (2001). John Stuart Mill and Freedom of Expression: The Genesis of a Theory . Connecticut: Taylor & Francis.

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• Attorney Client Privilege: Alton Logan’s Law Case
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• Chicago (A-D)
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Jean-Paul Sartre

Few philosophers have been as famous in their own life-time as Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80). Many thousands of Parisians packed into his public lecture, Existentialism is a Humanism , towards the end of 1945 and the culmination of World War 2. That lecture offered an accessible version of his difficult treatise, Being and Nothingness (1943), which had been published two years earlier, and it also responded to contemporary Marxist and Christian critics of Sartre’s “existentialism”. Sartre was much more than just a traditional academic philosopher, however, and this begins to explain his renown. He also wrote highly influential works of literature, inflected by philosophical concerns, like Nausea (1938), The Roads to Freedom trilogy (1945–49), and plays like No Exit (1947), Flies (1947), and Dirty Hands (1948), to name just a few. He founded and co-edited Les Temps Modernes and mobilised various forms of political protest and action. In short, he was a celebrity and public intellectual par excellence, especially in the period after Liberation through to the early 1960s. Responding to some calls to prosecute Sartre for civil disobedience, the then French President Charles de Gaulle replied that you don’t arrest Voltaire.

While Sartre’s public renown remains, his work has had less academic attention in the last thirty or so years ago, and earlier in France, dating roughly from the rise of “post-structuralism” in the 1960s. Although Gilles Deleuze dedicated an article to his “master” in 1964 in the wake of Sartre’s attempt to refuse the Nobel Prize for literature (Deleuze 2004), Michel Foucault influentially declared Sartre’s late work was a “magnificent and pathetic attempt of a man of the nineteenth century to think the twentieth century” (Foucault 1966 [1994: 541–2]) [ 1 ] . In this entry, however, we seek to show what remains alive and of ongoing philosophical interest in Sartre, covering many of the most important insights of his most famous philosophical book, Being and Nothingness . In addition, significant parts of his oeuvre remain under-appreciated and thus we seek to introduce them. Little attention has been given to Sartre’s earlier, psychologically motivated philosophical works, such as Imagination (1936) or its sequel, The Imaginary (1940). Likewise, few philosophers have seriously grappled with Sartre’s later works, including his massive two-volume Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960), or his various works in existential psychoanalysis that examine the works of Genet and Baudelaire, as well as his multi-volume masterpiece on Flaubert, The Family Idiot (1971–2). These are amongst the works of which Sartre was most proud and we outline some of their core ideas and claims.

1. Life and Works

2. transcendence of the ego: the discovery of intentionality, 3. imagination, phenomenology and literature, 4.1. negation and freedom, 4.2 bad faith and the critique of freudian psychoanalysis, 4.3 the look, shame and intersubjectivity, 5. existential psychoanalysis and the fundamental project, 6. existentialist marxism: critique of dialectical reason, 7. politics and anti-colonialism, a. primary literature, b. secondary literature, other internet resources, related entries.

Sartre’s life has been examined by many biographies, starting with Simone de Beauvoir’s Adieux (and, subsequently, Cohen-Solal 1985; Levy 2003; Flynn 2014; Cox 2019). Sartre’s own literary “life” exemplifies trends he thematized in both Words and Being and Nothingness , summed up by his claim that “to be dead is to be prey for the living” (Sartre 1943 [1956: 543]). Sartre himself was one of the first to undertake such an autobiographical effort, via his evocation of his own childhood in Words (1964a)—in which Sartre applies to himself his method of existential psychoanalysis, thereby complicating this life/death binary.

Like many of his generation, Sartre lived through a series of major cultural and historical events that his existential philosophy responded to and attempted to shape. He was born in 1905 and died in 1980, spanning most of the twentieth century and the trajectory that the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm refers to as the “age of extremes”, a period that was also well-described in the middle of that century in Albert Camus’ The Rebel , notwithstanding that the reception of Camus’ book in Les Temps Modernes in 1951–2 caused Sartre and Camus to very publicly fall out.

The major events of Sartre’s life seem relatively clear, at least viewed from an external perspective. A child throughout World War 1, he was a young man during the Great Depression but born into relative affluence, brought up by his grandmother. At least as presented in Word s, Sartre’s childhood was filled with books, the dream of posterity and immortality in those books, and in which he grappled with his loss of the use of one eye and encountered the realities of his own appearance revealed through his mother’s look after a haircut—suffice to say, he was not classically beautiful.

Sartre’s education, by contrast, was classical—the École Normale Supérieure. His education at the ENS was oriented around the history of philosophy, and the influential bifurcation of that time between the neo-Kantianism of Brunschvicg and the vitalism of Bergson. While Sartre failed his first attempt at the aggregation, apparently by virtue of being overly ambitious, on repeating the year he topped the class (de Beauvoir was second, at her first attempt and at the age of 21, then the youngest to complete). Sartre then taught philosophy at various schools, notably at Le Havre from 1931–36 and while he was composing his early philosophy and his great philosophical novel, Nausea . He never entered a classical university position.

Although Sartre’s philosophical encounter with phenomenology had already occurred (around 1933), which de Beauvoir described as causing him to turn pale with emotion (de Beauvoir 1960 [1962: 112]), with the onset of World War 2 Sartre merged those philosophical concerns with more obviously existential themes like freedom, authenticity, responsibility, and anguish, as translated into English from the French angoisse by both Hazel Barnes and Sarah Richmond. He was a Meteorologist in Alsace in the war and was captured by the German Army in 1940 and imprisoned for just under a year (see War Diaries ). During this socio-political turmoil, Sartre remained remarkably prolific. Notable publications include his play, No Exit (1947), Being and Nothingness (1943), and then completing Existentialism is a Humanism (1946), Anti-semite and Jew (1946), and founding and coediting Les Temps Modernes , commencing from 1943 (Sartre’s major contributions are collected in his series Situations , especially volume V).

Sartre continued to lead various social and political protests after that period, especially concerning French colonialism (see section 7 below). By the time of the student revolutions in May 1968 he was no longer quite the dominant cultural and intellectual force he had been, but he did not retreat from public life and engagement and died in 1980. Estimates of the numbers of those attending his funeral procession in Paris range from 50–100,000 people. Sartre had been in the midst of a collaboration with Benny Levy regarding ethics, the so-called “Hope Now” interviews, whose status remain somewhat controversial in Sartrean scholarship, given the interviews were produced in the midst of Sartre’s illness and shortly before he died, and the fact that the relevant audio-recordings are not publicly available.

One of the most famous foundational moments of existentialism concerns Sartre’s discovery of phenomenology around the turn of 1932/3, when in a Parisian bar listening to his friend Raymond Aron’s description of an apricot cocktail (de Beauvoir 1960 [1962: 135]). From this moment, Sartre was fascinated by the originality and novelty of Husserl’s method, which he identified straight away as a means to fulfil his own philosophical expectations: overcoming the opposition between idealism and realism; getting a view on the world that would allow him “to describe objects just as he saw and touched them, and extract philosophy from the process”. Sartre became immediately acquainted with Emmanuel Levinas’s early translation of Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations and his introductory book on Husserl’s theory of intuition. He spent the following year in Berlin, so as to study more closely Husserl’s method and to familiarise himself with the works of his students, Heidegger and Scheler. With Levinas, and then later with Merleau-Ponty, Ricœur, and Tran Duc Thao, Sartre became one of the first serious interpreters and proponent of Husserl’s phenomenology in France.

While he was studying in Berlin, Sartre tried to convert his study of Husserl into an article that documents his enthusiastic discovery of intentionality. It was published a few years later under the title “Intentionality: a fundamental idea of Husserl’s phenomenology”. This article, which had considerable influence over the early French reception of phenomenology, makes explicit the reasons Sartre had to be fascinated by Husserl’s descriptive approach to consciousness, and how he managed to merge it with his previous philosophical concerns. Purposefully leaving aside the idealist aspects of Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology, Sartre proposes a radicalisation of intentionality that stresses its anti-idealistic potential. Against the French contemporary versions of neo-Kantianism (Brochard, Lachelier), and more particularly against the kind of idealism advocated by Léon Brunschvicg, Sartre famously claims that intentionality allows us to discard the metaphysical oppositions between the inner and outer and to renounce to the very notion of the interiority of consciousness. If it is true, as Husserl states, that every consciousness is consciousness of something, and if intentionality accounts for this fundamental direction that orients consciousness towards its object and beyond itself, then, Sartre concludes, the phenomenological description of intentionality does away with the illusion that makes us responsible for the way the world appears to us. According to Sartre’s radicalised reading of Husserl’s thesis, intentionality is intrinsically realistic: it lets the world appear to consciousness as it really is , and not as a mere correlate of an intellectual act. This realistic interpretation, being perfectly in tune with Sartre’s lifelong ambition to provide a philosophical account of the contingency of being—its non-negotiable lack of necessity—convinced him to adopt Husserl’s method of phenomenological description.

While he was still in Berlin, Sartre also began to work on a more personal essay, which a few years later resulted in his first significant philosophical contribution, Transcendence of the Ego . With this influential essay Sartre engages in a much more critical way with the conception of the “transcendental ego” presented in Husserl’s Ideas and defends his realistic interpretation of intentionality against the idealistic tendencies of Husserl’s own phenomenology after the publication of Logical Investigations . Stressing the irreducible transparency of intentional experience—its fundamental orientation beyond itself towards its object, whatever this object may be—Sartre distinguishes between the dimensions of our subjective experiences that are pre-reflectively lived through, and the reflective stance thanks to which one can always make their experience the intentional object towards which consciousness is oriented. One of Sartre’s most fundamental claims in Transcendence of the Ego is that these two forms of consciousness cannot and must not be mistaken with one another: reflexive consciousness is a form of intentional consciousness that takes one’s own lived-experiences as its specific object, whereas pre-reflexive consciousness need not involve the intentional distance to the object that the act of reflection entails. In regard to self-consciousness, Sartre argues there is an immediate and non-cognitive form of self-awareness, as well as reflective forms of self-consciousness. The latter is unable to give access to oneself as the subject of unreflected consciousness, but only as the intentional object of the act of reflection, i.e., the Ego in Sartre’s terminology. The Ego is the specific object that intentional consciousness is directed upon when performing reflection—an object that consciousness “posits and grasps […] in the same act” (Sartre 1936a [1957: 41; 2004: 5]), and that is constituted in and by the act of reflection (Sartre 1936a [1957: 80–1; 2004: 20]). Instead of a transcendental subject, the Ego must consequently be understood as a transcendent object similar to any other object, with the only difference that it is given to us through a particular kind of experience, i.e., reflection. The Ego, Sartre argues, “is outside, in the world . It is a being of the world, like the Ego of another” (Sartre 1936a [1957: 31; 2004: 1]).

This critique of the transcendental Ego is less opposed to Husserl than it may seem, notwithstanding Sartre’s reservations about the transcendental radicalisation of Husserl’s phenomenology. The neo-Humean claim that the “I” or Ego is nowhere to be found “within” ourselves remains faithful to the 5th Logical Investigation , in which Husserl had initially followed the very same line of reasoning (see Husserl 1901 [2001: vol. 2, 91–93]), before developing a transcendental methodology that substantially modified his approach to subjectivity (as exposed in particular in Husserl 1913 [1983]). However, for the Husserl of the Ideas Pertaining to a Phenomenology (published in 1913), the sense in which a perceptual object, which is necessarily seen from one side but also presented to us as a unified object (involving other unseen sides), requires that there be a unifying structure within consciousness itself: the transcendental ego. Sartre argues that such an account would entail that the perception of an object would always also involve an intermediary perception—such as some kind of perception or consciousness of the transcendental ego—thus threatening to disrupt the “transparency” or “translucidity” of consciousness. All forms of perception and consciousness would involve (at least) these two components, and there would be an opaqueness to consciousness that is not phenomenologically apparent. In addition, it appears that Husserl’s transcendental ego would have to pre-exist all of our particular actions and perceptions, which is something that the existentialist dictum “existence precedes essence”, which we will explicate shortly, seems committed to denying. Without considering here the extent to which Husserl can be defended against these charges, Sartre’s general claim is that the notion of a self or ego is not given in experience. Rather, it is something that is not immanent but transcendent to pre-reflective experience. The Ego is the transcendent object of one’s reflexive experience, and not the subject of the pre-reflective experience that was initially lived (but not known).

Sartre devotes a great deal of effort to establishing the impersonal (or “pre-personal”) character of consciousness, which stems from its non-egological structure and results directly from the absence of the I in the transcendental field. According to him, intentional (positional) consciousness typically involves an anonymous and “impersonal” relation to a transcendent object:

When I run after a streetcar, when I look at the time, when I am absorbed in contemplating a portrait, there is no I. […] In fact I am plunged in the world of objects; it is they which constitute the unity of my consciousness; […] but me, I have disappeared; I have annihilated myself. There is no place for me on this level. (Sartre 1936a [1957: 49; 2004: 8])

The tram appears to me in a specific way (as “having-to-be-overtaken”, in this case) that is experienced as its own mode of phenomenalization, and not as a mere relational aspect of its appearing to me . The object presents itself as carrying a set of objective properties that are strictly independent from one’s personal relation to it. The streetcar is experienced as a transcendent object, in a way that obliterates and overrides , so to speak, the subjective features of conscious experience; its “having-to-be-overtaken-ness” does not belong to my subjective experience of the world but to the objective description of the way the world is (see also Sartre 1936a [1957: 56; 2004: 10–11]). When I run after the streetcar, my consciousness is absorbed in the relation to its intentional object, “ the streetcar-having-to-be-overtaken ”, and there is no trace of the “I” in such lived-experience. I do not need to be aware of my intention to take the streetcar, since the object itself appears as having-to-be-overtaken, and the subjective properties of my experience disappear in the intentional relation to the object. They are lived-through without any reference to the experiencing subject (or to the fact that this experience has to be experienced by someone ). This particular feature derives from the diaphanousness of lived-experiences. In a different example of this, Sartre argues that when I perceive Pierre as loathsome, say, I do not perceive my feeling of hatred; rather, Pierre repulses me and I experience him as repulsive (Sartre 1936a [1957: 63–4; 2004: 13]). Repulsiveness constitutes an essential feature of his distinctive mode of appearing, rather than a trait of my feelings towards him. Sartre concludes that reflective statements about one’s Ego cannot be logically derived from non-reflective (“ irréfléchies ”) lived-experiences:

Thus to say “I hate” or “I love” on the occasion of a singular consciousness of attraction or repulsion, is to carry out a veritable passage to the infinite […] Nothing more is needed for the rights of reflection to be singularly limited: it is certain that Pierre repulses me, yet it is and will remain forever doubtful that I hate him. Indeed, this affirmation infinitely exceeds the power of reflection. (Sartre 1936a [1957: 63–4; 2004: 13])

This critique of the powers of reflection forms one important part of Sartre’s argument for the primacy of pre-reflective consciousness over reflective consciousness, which is central to many of the pivotal arguments of Being and Nothingness , as we indicate in the relevant sections below.

For many of his readers, the book on the Imaginary that Sartre published in 1940 constitutes one of the most rigorous and fruitful developments of his Husserl-inspired phenomenological investigations. Along with the The Emotions: Outline of a Theory which was published one year before (Sartre 1939b), Sartre presented this study of imagination as an essay in phenomenological psychology, which drew on his lifetime interest in psychological studies and brought to completion the research on imagination he had undertaken since the very beginning of his philosophical career. With this new essay, Sartre continues to explore the relationship between intentional consciousness and reality by focusing upon the specific case of the intentional relations to the unreal and the fictional, so as to produce an in-depth analysis of “the great ‘irrealizing’ function of consciousness”. Engaging in a detailed discussion with recent psychological research that Sartre juxtaposes with (and against) fine-grained phenomenological descriptions of the structures of imagination, his essay proposes his own theory of the imaginary as the corollary of a specific intentional attitude that orients consciousness towards the unreal.

In a similar fashion to his analysis of the world-shaping powers of emotions (Sartre 1939b), Sartre describes and highlights how imagination presents us with a coherent world, although made of objects that do not precede but result from the imaging capacities of consciousness. “The object as imaged, Sartre claims, is never anything more than the consciousness one has of it” (Sartre 1940 [2004: 15]). Contrary to other modes of consciousness such as perception or memory, which connect us to a world that is essentially one and the same, the objects to which imaginative consciousness connects us belong to imaginary worlds, which may not only be extremely diverse, but also follow their own rules, having their own spatiality and temporality. The island of Thrinacia where Odysseus lands on his way back to Ithaca needs not be located anywhere on our maps nor have existed at a specific time: its mode of existence is that of a fictional object, which possesses its own spatiality and temporality within the imaginary world it belongs to.

Sartre stresses that the intentional dimension of imaging consciousness is essentially characterised by its negativity. The negative act, Sartre writes, is “constitutive of the image” (Sartre 1940 [2004: 183]): an image consciousness is a consciousness of something that is not , whether its object is absent, non-existing, or fictional. When we picture Odysseus sailing back to his native island, Odysseus is given to us “as absent to intuition”. In this sense, Sartre concludes,

one can say that the image has wrapped within it a certain nothingness. […] However lively, appealing, strong the image, it gives its object as not being. (Sartre 1940 [2004: 14])

The irrealizing function of imagination results from this immediate consciousness of the nothingness of its object. Sartre’s essay investigates how imaging consciousness allows us to operate with its objects as if they were present, even though these very objects are given to us as non-existing or absent. This is for instance what happens when we go to the theatre or read a novel:

To be present at a play is to apprehend the characters on the actors, the forest of As You Like It on the cardboard trees. To read is to realize contact with the irreal world on the signs. In this world there are plants, animals, fields, towns, people: initially those mentioned in the book and then a host of others that are not named but are in the background and give this world its depth. (Sartre 1940 [2004: 64])

The irreality of imaginary worlds does not prevent the spectator or reader from projecting herself into this world as if it was real . The acts of imagination can consequently be described as “magical acts” (Sartre 1940 [2004: 125]), similar to incantations with respect to the way they operate, since they are designed to make the object of one’s thought or desire appear in such a way that one can take possession of it.

In the conclusion of his essay, Sartre stresses the philosophical significance of the relationship between imagination and freedom, which are both necessarily involved in our relationship to the world. Imagination, Sartre writes, “is the whole of consciousness as it realizes its freedom” (Sartre 1940 [2004: 186]). Imaging consciousness posits its object as “out of reach” in relation to the world understood as the synthetic totality within which consciousness situates itself. For Sartre, the imaginary creation is only possible if consciousness is not placed “in-the-midst-of-the-world” as one existent among others.

For consciousness to be able to imagine, it must be able to escape from the world by its very nature, it must be able to stand back from the world by its own efforts. In a word, it must be free. (Sartre 1940 [2004: 184])

In that respect, the irrealizing function of imagination allows consciousness to “surpass the real” so as to constitute it as a proper world : “the nihilation of the real is always implied by its constitution as a world”. This capacity of surpassing the real to make it a proper world defines the very notion of “situation” that becomes central in Sartre’s philosophical thought after the publication of the Imaginary . Situations are nothing but “the different immediate modes of apprehension of the real as a world” (Sartre 1940 [2004: 185]). Consciousness’ situation-in-the-world is precisely that which motivates the constitution of any irreal object and accounts for the creation of imaginary worlds—for instance, and perhaps above all, in art:

Every apprehension of the real as a world tends of its own accord to end up with the production of irreal objects since it is always, in a sense, free nihilation of the world and this always from a particular point of view. (Sartre 1940 [2004: 185])

With this conclusion, which prioritises the question of the world over that of reality, Sartre begins to move away from the realist perspective he was initially aiming at when he first discovered phenomenology, so as to make the phenomenological investigation of our “being-in-the-world” (influenced by his careful rereading of Heidegger in the late 30s) his new priority.

Although Sartre never stated it explicitly, his interest in the question of the unreal and imaging consciousness appears to be intimately connected with his general conception of literature and his self-understanding of his own literary production. The concluding remarks of the Imaginary extend the scope of Sartre’s phenomenological analyses of the irrealizing powers of imagination, by applying them to the domain of aesthetics so as to answer the question about the ontological status of works of art. For Sartre, any product of artistic creation—a novel, a painting, a piece of music, or a theatre play—is just as irreal an object as the imaginary world it gives rise to. The irreality of the work of art allows us to experience—though only imaginatively—the world it gives flesh to as an “analogon” of reality. Even a cubist painting, which might not depict nor represent anything, still functions as an analogon, which manifests

an irreal ensemble of new things , of objects that I have never seen nor will ever see but that are nonetheless irreal objects. (Sartre 1940 [2004: 191])

Likewise, the novelist, the poet, the dramatist, constitute irreal objects through verbal analogons.

This original conception of the nature of the work of art dominates Sartre’s critical approach to literature in the many essays he dedicates to the art of the novel. This includes his critical analyses of recent writers’ novels in the 30s—Faulkner, Dos Passos, Hemingway, Mauriac, etc.—and the publication in the late 40s of his own summative view, What is literature? (Sartre 1948a [1988]). In a series of articles gathered in the first volume of his Situations (1947, Sit. I ), Sartre defends a strong version of literary realism that can, somewhat paradoxically, be read as a consequence of his theory of the irreality of the work of art. If imagination projects the spectator within the imaginary world created by the artist, then the success of the artistic process is proportional to the capacity of the artwork to let the spectator experience it as a reality of its own, giving rise to a full-fledged world. Sartre applies in particular this analysis to novels, which must aim, according to him, at immersing the reader within the fictional world they depict so as to make her experience the events and adventures of the characters as if she was living them in first person. The complete absorption of the reader within the imaginary world created by the novelist must ultimately recreate the particular feel of reality that defines Sartre’s phenomenological kind of literary realism (Renaudie 2017), which became highly influential over the following decades in French literature. The reader must be able to experience the actions of the characters of the novel as if they did not result from the imagination of the novelist, but proceeded from the character’s own freedom—and Sartre goes as far as to claim that this radical “spellbinding” (“envoûtante”, Sartre 1940 [2004: 175])) quality of literary fiction defines the touchstone of the art of the novel (See “François Mauriac and Freedom”, in Sartre Sit. I ).

This original version of literary realism is intrinsically tied to the question of freedom, and opposed to the idea according to which realist literature is expected to provide a mere description of reality as it is . In What is Literature? , Sartre describes the task of the novelist as that of disclosing the world as if it arose from human freedom—rather than from a deterministic chain of causes and consequences. The author’s art consists in obliging her reader “to create what [she] discloses ”, and so to share with the writer the responsibility and freedom involved in the act of literary creation (Sartre 1948a [1988: 61]). In order for the world of the novel to offer its maximum density,

the disclosure-creation by which the reader discovers it must also be an imaginary engagement in the action; in other words, the more disposed one is to change it, the more alive it will be.

The conception of the writer’s engagement that resulted from these analyses constitutes probably the most well-known aspect of Sartre’s relation to literature. The writer only has one topic: freedom.

This analysis of the role of imaginative creations of art can also help us to understand the role of philosophy within his own novels, particularly in Nausea , a novel which Sartre began as he was studying Husserl in Berlin. In this novel Sartre’s pre-phenomenological interest for the irreducibility of contingency intersects with his newly-acquired competences in phenomenological analyses, making Nausea a beautifully illustrated expression of the metaphysical register Sartre gave to Husserl’s conception of intentionality. The feeling of nausea that Roquentin, the main character of Sartre’s novel, famously experienced in a public garden while obsessively watching a chestnut tree, accounts for his sensitivity to the absolute lack of necessity of whatever exists. Sartre understands this radical absence of necessity as the expression of the fundamental contingency of being. Roquentin’s traumatic moment of realisation that there is absolutely no reason for the existence of all that exists illustrates the intuition that motivated Sartre’s philosophical thinking since the very beginning of his intellectual career as a student at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, as Simone de Beauvoir recalls (1981 [1986]). It constitutes the metaphysical background of his interpretation of intentionality, which he would come to develop and systematise in the early dense parts of Being and Nothingness . While the experience of nausea when confronting the contingency of the chestnut tree does not give us conceptual knowledge, it involves a form of non-conceptual ontological awareness that is of a fundamentally different order to, and cannot be derived from, our conceptual understanding and knowledge of brute existence.

4. Being and Nothingness

Being and Nothingness (1943) remains the defining treatise of the existentialist “movement”, along with works from de Beauvoir from this period (e.g., The Ethics of Ambiguity ). We cannot do justice to the entirety of the book here, but we can indicate the broad outlines of the position. In brief, Sartre provides a series of arguments for the necessary freedom of “human reality” (his gloss on Heidegger’s conception of Dasein), based upon an ontological distinction between what he calls being-for-itself ( pour soi ) and being-in-itself ( en soi ), roughly between that which negates and transcends (consciousness) and the "pure plenitude" of objects. That kind of metaphysical position might seem to “beg the question” by assuming what it purports to establish (i.e., radical human freedom). However, Sartre argues that realism and idealism cannot sufficiently account for a wide range of phenomena associated with negation. He also draws on the direct evidence of phenomenological experience (i.e., the experience of anguish). But the argument for his metaphysical picture and human freedom is, on balance, an inference to the best explanation. He contends that his complex metaphysical vision best captures and explains central aspects of human reality.

As the title of the book suggests, nothingness plays a significant role. While Sartre’s concern with nothingness might be a deal-breaker for some, following Rudolph Carnap’s trenchant criticisms of Heidegger’s idea that the “nothing noths/nothings” (depending on translation from the German), Sartre’s account of negation and nothingness (the latter of which is the ostensible ground of the former) is nevertheless philosophically interesting. Sartre does not say much about the genesis of consciousness or the for-itself, other than that it is contingent and arises from “the effort of an in-itself to found itself” (Sartre 1943 [1956: 84]). He describes the appearance of the for-itself as the absolute event, which occurs through being’s attempt “to remove contingency from its being”. Accordingly, the for-itself is radically and inescapably distinct from the in-itself. In particular, it functions primarily through negation, whether in relation to objects, values, meaning, or social facts. According to Sartre this negation is not about any reflective judgement or cognition, but an ontological relation to the world. This ontological interpretation of negation minimises the subjectivist interpretations of his philosophy. The most vivid example he provides to illustrate this pre-reflective negation is the apprehension of Pierre’s absence from a café. Sartre describes Pierre’s absence as pervading the whole café. The café is cast in the metaphorical “shade” of Pierre not being there at the time he had been expected. This experience depends on human expectations, of course. But Sartre argues that if, by contrast, we imagine or reflect that someone else is not present (say the Duke of Wellington, an elephant, etc.), these abstract negative facts are not existentially given in the same manner as our pre-reflective encounter with Pierre’s absence. They are not given as an “objective fact”, as a “component of the real”.

Sartre provides numerous other examples of pre-reflective negation throughout Being and Nothingness . He argues that the apprehension of fragility and destruction are likewise premised on negativity, and any effort to adequately describe these phenomena requires negative concepts, but also that they presuppose more than just negative thoughts and judgements. In regard to destruction, Sartre suggests that there is not less after the storm, just something else (Sartre 1943 [1956: 8]). Generally, we do not need to reflectively judge that a building has been destroyed, but directly see it in terms of that which it is not —the building, say, in its former glory before being wrecked by the storm. Humans introduce the possibility of destruction and fragility into the world, since objectively there is just a change. Sartre’s basic question is: how could we accomplish this unless we are a being by whom nothingness comes into the world, i.e., free? He poses similar arguments in regard to a range of phenomena that present as basic to our modes of inhabiting the world, from bad faith through to anguish. In all of these cases Sartre argues that while we can expressly pose negative judgements, or deliberately ask questions that admit of the possibility of negative reply, or consciously individuate and distinguish objects by reference to the objects which they are not, there is a pre-comprehension of non-being that is the condition of such negative judgements.

Although the for-itself and the in-itself are initially defined very abstractly, the book ultimately comes to say a lot more about the for-itself, even if not much more about the in-itself. The picture of the for-itself and its freedom gradually becomes more “concrete”, reflecting the architectonic of the text, which has more sustained treatments of the body, others, and action, in the second half. Throughout, Sartre gives a series of paradoxical glosses on the nature of the for-itself—i.e., a “being which is what it is not and is not what it is” (Sartre 1943 [1956: 79]). Although this might appear to be a contradiction, Sartre’s claim is that it is the fundamental mode of existence of the for-itself that is future-oriented and does not have a stable identity in the manner of a chair, say, or a pen-knife. Rather, “existence precedes essence”, as he famously remarks in both Being and Nothingness and Existentialism is a Humanism .

In later chapters he develops the basic ontological position in regard to free action. His point is not, of course, to say we are free to do or achieve anything (freedom as power), or even to claim that we are free to “project” anything at all. The for-itself is always in a factical situation. Nonetheless, he asserts that the combination of the motives and ends we aspire to in relation to that facticity depend on an act of negation in relation to the given. As he puts it: “Action necessarily implies as its condition the recognition of a “desideratum”; that is, of an objective lack or again of a negatité” (Sartre 1943 [1956: 433]). Even suffering in-itself is not a sufficient motive to determine particular acts. Rather, it is the apprehension of the revolution as possible (and as desired) which gives to the worker’s suffering its value as motive (Sartre 1943 [1956: 437]). A factual state, even poverty, does not determine consciousness to apprehend it as a lack. No factual state, whatever it may be, can cause consciousness to respond to it in any one way. Rather, we make a choice (usually pre-reflective) about the significance of that factual state for us, and the ends and motives that we adopt in relation to it. We are “condemned” to freedom of this ontological sort, with resulting anguish and responsibility for our individual situation, as well as for more collective situations of racism, oppression, and colonialism. These are the themes for which Sartre became famous, especially after World War 2 and Existentialism is a Humanism .

In Being and Nothingness he provides various examples that are designed to make this quite radical philosophy of freedom plausible, including the hiker who gives in to their fatigue and collapses to the ground. Sartre says that a necessary condition for the hiker to give in to their fatigue—short of fainting—is that their fatigue goes from being experienced as simply part of the background to their activity, with their direct conscious attention focusing on something else (e.g., the scenery, the challenge, competing with a friend, philosophising, etc.), to being the direct focus of their attention and thus becoming a motive for direct recognition of one’s exhaustion and the potential action of collapsing to the ground. Although we are not necessarily reflectively aware of having made such a decision, things could have been otherwise and thus Sartre contends we have made a choice. Despite appearances, however, Sartre insists that his view is not a voluntarist or capricious account of freedom, but one that necessarily involves a situation and a context. His account of situated freedom in the chapter “Freedom and Action” affirms the inability to extricate intentions, ends, motives, and reasons, from the embodied context of the actor. As a synthetic whole, it is not merely freedom of intention or motive (and hence even consciousness) that Sartre affirms. Rather, our freedom is realised only in its projections and actions, and is nothing without such action.

Sartre’s account of bad faith ( mauvaise foi ) is of major interest. It is said to be a phenomenon distinctive of the for-itself, thus warranting ontological treatment. It also feeds into questions to do with self-knowledge (see Moran 2001), as well as serving as the basis for some of his criticisms of racism and colonialism in his later work. His account of bad faith juxtaposes a critique of Freud with its own “depth” interpretive account, “existential psychoanalysis”, which is itself indebted to Freud, as Sartre admits.

We will start with Sartre’s critique of Freud, which is both simple and complex, and features in the early parts of the chapter on bad faith in Being and Nothingness . In short, Freud’s differing meta-psychological pictures (Conscious, Preconscious, Unconscious, or Id, Ego, Superego) are charged with splitting the subject in two (or more) in attempting to provide a mechanistic explanation of bad faith: that is, how there can be a “liar” and a “lied to” duality within a single consciousness. But Sartre accuses Freud of reifying this structure, and rather than adequately explaining the problem of bad faith, he argues that Freud simply transfers the problem to another level where it remains unsolved, thus consisting in a pseudo-explanation (which today might be called a “homuncular fallacy”). Rather than the problem being something that pertains to an embodied subject, and how they might both be aware of something and yet also repress it at the same time, Sartre argues that the early Freudian meta-psychological model transfers the seat of this paradox to the censor: that is, to a functional part of the brain/mind that both knows and does not know. It must know enough in order to efficiently repress, but it also must not know too much or nothing is hidden and the problematic truth is manifest directly to consciousness. Freud’s “explanation” is hence accused of recapitulating the problem of bad faith in an ostensible mechanism that is itself “conscious” in some paradoxical sense. Sartre even provocatively suggests that the practice of psychoanalysis is itself in bad faith, since it treats a part of ourselves as “Id”-like and thereby denies responsibility for it. That is not the end of Sartre’s story, however, because he ultimately wants to revive a version of psychoanalysis that does not pivot around the “unconscious” and these compartmentalised models of the mind. We will come back to that, but it is first necessary to introduce Sartre’s own positive account of bad faith.

While bad faith is inevitable in Sartre’s view, it is also important to recognise that the “germ of its destruction” lies within. This is because bad faith always remains at least partly available to us in our own lived-experience, albeit not in a manner that might be given propositional form in the same way as knowledge of an external object. In short, when I existentially comprehend that my life is dissatisfying, or even reflect on this basis that I have lived an inauthentic life, while I am grasping something about myself (it is given differently to the recognition that others have lived a lie and more likely to induce anxiety), I am nonetheless not strictly equivalent or identical with the “I” that is claimed to be in bad faith (cf. Moran 2001). There is a distanciation involved in coming to this recognition and the potential for self-transformation of a more practical kind, even if this is under-thematised in Being and Nothingness .

Sartre gives many examples of bad faith that remain of interest. His most famous example of bad faith is the café waiter who plays at being a café waiter, and who attempts to institutionalise themselves as this object. While Sartre’s implied criticisms of their manner of inhabiting the world might seem to disparage social roles and affirm an individualism, arguably this is not a fair reading of the details of the text. For Sartre we do have a factical situation, but the claim is that we cannot be wholly reduced to it. As Sartre puts it:

There is no doubt I am in a sense a café waiter—otherwise could I not just as well call myself a diplomat or reporter? But if I am one, this cannot be in the mode of being-in-itself. I am a waiter in the mode of being what I am not . (Sartre 1943 [1956: 60])

In subsequent work, racism becomes emblematic of bad faith, when we reduce the other to some ostensible identity (e.g., Anti-semite and the Jew ).

It is important to recognise that no project of “sincerity”, if that is understood as strictly being what one is, is possible for Sartre given his view of the for-itself. Likewise, in regard to any substantive self-knowledge that might be achieved through direct self-consciousness, our options are limited. On Sartre’s view we cannot look inwards and discover the truth about our identity or our own bad faith through simple introspection (there is literally no-thing to observe). Moreover, when we have a lived experience, and then reflect on ourselves from outside (e.g., third-personally), we are not strictly reducible to that Ego that is so posited. We transcend it. Or, to be more precise, we both are that Ego (just as we are what the Other perceives) and yet are also not reducible to it. This is due to the structure of consciousness and the arguments from Transcendence of the Ego examined in section 2 . In Being and Nothingness , the temporal aspects of this non-coincidence are also emphasised. We are not just our past and our objective attributes in accord with some sort of principle of identity, because we are also our “projects”, and these are intrinsically future oriented.

Nonetheless, Sartre argues that it would be false to conclude that all modes of inhabiting the world are thereby equivalent in terms of “faith” and “bad faith”. Rather, there are what he calls “patterns of bad faith” and he says these are “objective”. Any conduct can be seen from two perspectives—transcendence and facticity, being-for-itself and being-for-others. But it is the exclusive affirmation of one or the others of these (or a motivated and selective oscillation between them) which constitutes bad faith. There is no direct account of good faith in Being and Nothingness , other than the enigmatic footnote at the end of the book that promises an ethics. There are more sustained treatments of authenticity in his Notebooks for an Ethics and in Anti-semite and Jew (see also the entry on authenticity ).

Sartre’s work on inter-subjectivity is often the subject of premature dismissal. The hyperbolic dimension of his writings on the Look of the Other and the pessimism of his chapter on “concrete relations with others”, which is essentially a restatement of the “master-slave” stage of Hegel’s struggle for recognition without the possibility of its overcoming, are sometimes treated as if they were nothing but the product of a certain sort of mind—a kind of adolescent paranoia or hysteria about the Other (see, e.g., Marcuse 1948). What this has meant, however, is that the significance of Sartre’s work on inter-subjectivity, both within phenomenological circles and more broadly in regard to philosophy of mind and social cognition, has been downplayed. Building on the insights of Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger, Sartre proposes a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for any theory of the other, which are far from trivial. In Being and Nothingness , Sartre suggests that various philosophical positions—realism and idealism, and beyond—have been shipwrecked, often unawares, on what he calls the “reef of solipsism”. His own solution to the problem of other minds consists, first and foremost, in his descriptions of being subject to the look of another, and the way in which in such an experience we become a “transcendence transcended”. On his famous description, we are asked to imagine that we are peeping through a keyhole, pre-reflectively immersed and absorbed in the scene on the other side of the door. Maybe we would be nervous engaging in such activities given the socio-cultural associations of being a “Peeping Tom”, but after a period of time we would be given over to the scene with self-reflection and self-awareness limited to merely the minimal (tacit or “non-thetic” in Sartre’s language) understanding that we are not what we are perceiving. Suddenly, though, we hear footsteps, and we have an involuntary apprehension of ourselves as an object in the eyes of another; a “pre-moral” experience of shame; a shudder of recognition that we are the object that the other sees, without room for any sort of inferential theorising or cognising (at least that is manifest to our own consciousness). This ontological shift, Sartre says, has another person as its condition, notwithstanding whether or not one is in error on a particular occasion of such an experience (i.e., the floor creaks but there is no-one actually literally present). While many other phenomenological accounts emphasise empathy or direct perception of mental states (for example, Scheler and Merleau-Ponty), Sartre thereby adds something significant and distinctive to these accounts that focus on our experience of the other person as an object (albeit of a special kind) rather than as a subject. In common with other phenomenologists like Merleau-Ponty and Scheler, Sartre also maintains that it is a mistake to view our relations with the other as one characterised by a radical separation that we can only bridge with inferential reasoning. Any argument by analogy, either to establish the existence of others in general or to particular mental states like anger, is problematic, begging the question and having insufficient warrant.

For Sartre, at least in his early work, our experience of being what he calls a “we subject”—as a co-spectator in a lecture or concert for example, which involves no objectification of the other people we are with—is said to be merely a subjective and psychological phenomenon that does not ground our understanding and knowledge of others ontologically (Sartre 1943 [1956: 413–5]). Originally, human relations are typified by dyadic mode of conflict best captured in the look of the other, and the sort of scenario concerning the key-hole we just considered above. Given that we also do not grasp a plural look, for Sartre, this means that social life is fundamentally an attempt to control the impact of the look upon us, either by anticipating it in advance and attempting to invalidate that perspective (sadism) or by anticipating it and attempting to embrace that solicited perspective when it comes (masochism). In Sartre’s words:

It is useless for human reality to seek to escape this dilemma: one must either transcend the Other or allow oneself to be transcended by him. The essence of the relations between consciousness is not the Mitsein (being-with); it is conflict. (Sartre 1943 [1956: 429])

Sartre’s radical criticism of Freud’s theory of the unconscious is not his last word on psychoanalysis. In the last chapters of Being and Nothingness , Sartre presents his own conception of an existential psychoanalysis, drawing on some insights from his attempt to account for Emperor Wilhelm II as a “human-reality” in the 14 th notebook from his War Diaries (Sartre 1983b [1984]). This existential version of psychoanalysis is claimed to be compatible with Sartre’s rejection of the unconscious, and is expected to achieve a “psychoanalysis of consciousness” (Moati 2020: 219), allowing us to understand one’s existence in light of their fundamental free choice of themselves.

The very idea of a psychoanalysis oriented towards the study of consciousness rather than the unconscious seems paradoxical—a paradox increased by Sartre’s efforts to highlight the fundamental differences that oppose his own version of psychoanalysis to Freud’s. Sartre contends that Freud’s “empirical” psychoanalysis

is based on the hypothesis of the existence of an unconscious psyche, which on principle escapes the intuition of the subject.

By contrast, Sartre’s own existential psychoanalysis aims to remain faithful to one of the earliest claims of Husserl’s phenomenology: that all psychic acts are “coextensive with consciousness” (Sartre 1943 [1956: 570]). For Sartre, however, the basic motivation for rejecting Freud’s hypothesis is less an inheritance of Brentano’s descriptive psychology (as was the case for Husserl) than a consequence of Sartre’s fundamental critique of determinism, applied to the naturalist presuppositions of empirical psychoanalysis and the particular kind of determinism that it involves. In agreement with Freud, Sartre holds that psychic life remains inevitably “opaque” and at least somewhat impenetrable to us. He also stresses that the philosophical understanding of human reality requires a method for investigating the meaning of psychic facts. But Sartre denies that the methods and causal laws of the natural sciences are of any help in that respect. The human psyche cannot be fully analysed and explained as a mere result of external constraints acting like physical forces or natural causes. The for-itself, being always what it is not and not what it is, remains free whatever the external and social constraints. Sartre is consequently bound to reject any emphasis on the causal impact of the past upon the present, which he argues is the basic methodological framework of empirical psychoanalysis. That does not mean that past psychic or physical facts have no impact on one’s existence whatsoever. Rather, Sartre contends that the impact of past events is determined in relation to one’s present choice, and understood as the consequence of the power invested in this free choice. As he puts it:

Since the force of compulsion in my past is borrowed from my free, reflecting choice and from the very power which this choice has given itself, it is impossible to determine a priori the compelling power of a past. (Sartre 1943 [1956: 503])

Past events bear no other meaning than the one given by a subject, in agreement with the free project that orients his or her existence towards the future. Conversely, determinist explanations that construe one’s present as a mere consequence of the past proceed from a kind of self-delusion that operates by concealing one’s free project, and thus contributes to the obliteration of responsibility. Sartre hence seeks to redefine the scope of psychoanalysis: rather than a proper explanation of human behaviour that relies on the identification of the laws of its causation, psychoanalysis consists in understanding the meaning of our conducts in light of one’s project of existence and free choice. One might wonder, then, why we need any such psychoanalysis, if the existential project that constitutes its object is freely chosen by the subject. Sartre addresses this objection in Being and Nothingness , claiming that

if the fundamental project is fully experienced by the subject and hence wholly conscious, that certainly does not mean that it must by the same token be known by him; quite the contrary. (Sartre 1943 [1956: 570])

What Freud calls the unconscious must be redescribed as the paradoxical entanglement of a “total absence of knowledge” combined with a “true understanding” ( réelle comprehension ) of oneself (1972, Sit. IX : 111). The legitimacy of Sartre’s existential psychoanalysis of consciousness lies in its ability to unveil the original project according to which one chooses (more or less obscurely) to develop the fundamental orientations of their existence. According to Sartre, analysing a human subject and understanding the meaning that orients their existence as a whole requires that we grasp the specific kind of unity that lies behind their various attitudes and conducts. This unity can only appear once we discover the synthetic principle of unification or “totalization” ( totalisation ) that commands the whole of their behaviours. Sartre understands this totalization as an an-going process that covers the entire course of one’s existence, a process which is constantly reassumed so as to integrate the new developments of this existence. For this reason, this never ending process of totalization cannot be fully self-conscious or the object of reflective self-knowledge. The synthetic principle that makes this totalization possible is identified by Sartre in terms of fundamental choice: existential psychoanalysis describes human subjects as synthetic totalities in which every attitude, conduct, or behaviour finds its meaning in relation to the unity of a primary choice, which all of the subject’s behaviour expresses in its own way.

All human behaviour can thus be described as a secondary particularisation of a fundamental project which expresses the subject’s free choice, and conditions the intelligibility of their actions. On the basis of his diagnosis of Baudelaire’s existential project, for instance, Sartre goes as far as to claim that he is “prepared to wager that he preferred meats cooked in sauces to grills, preserves to fresh vegetables” (Sartre 1947a [1967: 113]). Sartre legitimates such a daring statement by showing its logical connection to Baudelaire’s irresistible hatred for nature, from which his gastronomic preferences must derive, and which Sartre identifies as the expression of the initial free choice of himself that commands the whole of the French poète maudit ’s existence. In Sartre’s words:

He chose to exist for himself as he was for others. He wanted his freedom to appear to himself like a “nature”; and he wanted this “nature” which others discovered in him to appear to them like the very emanation of his freedom. From that point everything becomes clear. […] We should look in vain for a single circumstance for which he was not fully and consciously responsible. Every event was a reflection of that indecomposable totality which he was from the first to the last day of his life (Sartre 1947a [1967: 191–192]).

Baudelaire’s choice of himself both accounts for the subject’s freedom (insofar as it has been freely accepted as the subject’s own project of existence) and exerts a constraint on particular behaviours and attitudes towards the world, so that he is bound to act and behave in a way that must be compatible with that choice. Although absolutely free, such an initial choice takes the shape and the meaning of an inescapable and relentless destiny —a destiny in which one’s sense of freedom and their inability to act in any other way than they actually did come to merge perfectly: “the free choice which a man makes of himself is completely identified with what is called his destiny” (Sartre 1947a [1967: 192]).

In the years following the publication of Being and Nothingness , Sartre refines this original conception of existential psychoanalysis. He applies it methodically to the biographical analysis of a series of major French writers (Baudelaire first, then Mallarmé, Jean Genêt, Flaubert, and himself in Words ), warning against the dangers of all kinds of determinist interpretations, from the constitution of psychological types to materialist explanations inherited from Marxian historical analyses. Sartre’s analyses become more subtle over time, as he substitutes fine-grained descriptions of the concrete constraints that frame and shape the limits of human lives to the strongly metaphysical theses on freedom that he was first tempted to apply indistinctly to each of these writers. Accordingly, existential psychoanalysis plays a central role in the development of Sartre’s thought from the early 40s up to his last published work on Flaubert. It allows him to unify and articulate two fundamental threads of his philosophical thinking: his ontological analysis of the absolute freedom of the for-itself in Being and Nothingness ; and his later attempt to take into consideration the social, historical and political factors that are inevitably involved in the determination of one’s free choice of their own existence. Already in his War Diaries from 1940, the method of analysis of “human reality” arises from Sartre’s attempt to understand rather than explain (according to Dilthey’s famous distinction) Emperor Wilhelm II’s historical situation and its relation to the aspects of his personal life that express his specific way of being-in-the-world (Sartre 1983b [1984: 308–309]). The application of his method to the specific cases of these French writers allowed him to refine the ahistorical descriptions of his earlier work, by bringing the analysis of the subject’s freedom back to the material/historical conditions (both internal and external) of constitution of their particular modes of existing.

Sartre’s inquiries into existential psychoanalysis also anticipate and intersect with his philosophical investigations on historical anthropology. The progressive-regressive method presented in Search for a Method and Critique of Dialectical Reason (Sartre 1960a [1976]) was first sketched and experimented through Sartre’s essays in existential psychoanalysis. Sartre’s detailed analyses of Flaubert’s biography in The Family Idiot can be read as synthesising the hermeneutical methodology theorised in Search for A Method and the conception of the freedom involved in one’s initial choice of themselves that arose from Being and Nothingness . Moving discretely away from an all-too metaphysical doctrine of absolute freedom, Sartre goes back to the most concrete details of Flaubert’s material conditions of existence in order to account for the specific way in which Flaubert made himself able, through the writing of his novels, to overcome his painful situation as a “frustrated and jealous younger brother” and “unloved child” thanks to a totalizing project that made him “the author of Madame Bovary ” (Sartre 1971–72 [1987, vol. 2: 7]). If Flaubert’s novel and masterpiece is consequently understood and described as the final objectivation of Gustave’s fundamental project, Sartre is now careful to point out the economic, historic and social conditions within which this project only finds its full intelligibility. Sartre’s psychoanalytic method is then expected to reveal, beyond what society has made of Flaubert, what he himself could make of what society has made of him. In order to fly away from the painful reality of his unbearable familial situation, the young Gustave chooses irreality over reality, and chooses it freely, though achingly. From that moment on, his dedication to literature commits him to a fictional world that he couldn’t but choose to elect as the realm of his genius.

While Search for a Method (1957) had been published earlier, it is not until 1960 that Sartre completed the first volume—“Theory of Practical Ensembles”—of what is his final systematic work of philosophy, Critique of Dialectical Reason . The second volume, “The Intelligibility of History”, was published posthumously in French in 1985. It would be 1991 before both volumes were to be available in English, which goes some of the way towards explaining their subsequent neglect. It is also a book that rivals Being and Nothingness for difficulty, even if some of its goals and ambitions can be expressed straightforwardly enough. Never a member of the French Communist Party, Sartre nonetheless begins by laying his Marxist cards on the table:

we were convinced at one and the same time that historical materialism furnished the only valid interpretation of history and that existentialism remained the only concrete approach to reality. (Sartre 1957 [1963: 21])

Critique offers a systematic attempt to justify these two perspectives and render them compatible. In broad terms, some of the main steps needed to effect such a synthesis are clear, most notably to deny or limit strong structuralist and determinist versions of Marxism. Borrowing some themes from Merleau-Ponty’s Humanism and Terror , Sartre maintained that any genuinely dialectical method refuses to reduce; it refuses scientific and economic determinism that treats humans as things, contrary to reductive versions of Marxism. He pithily puts his objection to such explanations in terms of what we might today call the genetic fallacy. Sartre says,

Valery is a petit bourgeois intellectual, no doubt about it. But not every petit bourgeois intellectual is Valery. The heuristic inadequacy of contemporary Marxism is contained in these two sentences. (Sartre 1957 [1963: 56])

Moreover, for Sartre, class struggle is not the only factor that determines and orients history and the field of possibilities. There is human choice and commitment in class formation that is equally fundamental. The way in which this plays out in Critique is through an emphasis on praxis rather than consciousness, which we have seen is also characteristic of his existential psychoanalytic work of the prior decade.

Without being able to adequately summarise the vast Critique here (see Flynn 1984), one of the book’s core conceptual innovations is the idea of the practico-inert. Sartre defines this as “the activity of others insofar as it is sustained and diverted by inorganic inertia” (Sartre 1960a [1976: 556]). The concept is intended to capture the forms of social and historical sedimentation that had only minimally featured in Being and Nothingness . It is the reign of necessity,

the domain … in which inorganic materiality envelops human multiplicity and transforms the producer into its product. (Sartre 1960a [1976: 339])

For Sartre, the practico-inert is the negation of humanity. Any reaffirmation of humanity, in which genuine freedom resides, must take the form of the negation of this negation (negation is productive here, as it also was in Being and Nothingness ). For Sartre, then, there are two fundamental kinds of social reality: a positive one in which an active group constitutes the common field; and a negative one in which individuals are effectively separated from each other (even though they appear united) in a practico-inert field. In the practico-inert field, relations are typified by what Sartre calls seriality, like a number, or a worker in a factory who is allocated to a place within a given system that is indifferent to the individual. Sartre’s prime example of this is of waiting for a bus, or street-car, on the way to work. If the people involved do not know each other reasonably well there is likely to be a kind of anonymity to such experiences in which individuals are substitutable for each other in relation to this imminent bus, and their relations are organised around functional need. If the bus is late, or if there are too many people on it, however, those who are waiting go from being indifferent and anonymous (something akin to what Heidegger calls das Man in Being and Time ) to becoming competitors and rivals. In a related spirit Sartre also discusses the serial unity of the TV watching public, of the popular music charts, bourgeois property, and petty racism and stereotyping as well. These collective objects keep serial individuals apart from one another under the pretext of unifying them. Sartre thus appears to accept a version of the Marxian theses concerning commodity fetishism. This competitive or antagonistic dimension of the practico-inert is amplified in situations of material scarcity. This kind of seriality is argued to be the basic type of sociality, thus transforming the focus on dyadic consciousnesses of Being and Nothingness . In the Critique , otherness becomes produced not simply through the look that Sartre had previously described as the original meaning of being-for-others, but through the sedimentation of social processes and through practico-inert mediation. Society produces in us serial behaviour, serial feelings, serial thoughts, and “passive activity” (Sartre 1960a [1976: 266]), where events and history are conceived as external occurrences that befall us, and we feel compelled by the force of circumstance, or “monstrous forces” as Sartre puts it. It is the practico-inert, modified by material and economic scarcity, which turns us into conflictual competitors and alienates us from each other and ourselves. Only an end to both material scarcity and the alienating mediation of the practico-inert will allow for the actualisation of socialism.

While Sartre is pessimistic about the prospects for any sort of permanent revolution of society, he maintains that we get a fleeting glimpse of this unalienated condition in the experience of the “group in fusion”. This occurs when the members of a group relate to each other through praxis and in a particular way. The group in fusion is not a collective à la the practico-inert, but a social whole that spontaneously forms as a plurality of serial individuals respond to some danger, pressing situation, or to the likelihood of a collective reaction to their stance (Flynn 1984: 114). We could consider what happens when an individual acts so as to make manifest this serial otherness, like Rosa Parkes when she refused to give up her seat and thus drew attention to the specific nature of the colonialist seriality at the heart of many states in the USA. This sometimes creates a rupture and others might follow. Sartre’s own prime example is of a crowd of workers who were fleeing during the French Revolution in 1789. At some point the workers stopped fleeing, turned around and reversed direction, suddenly energised alongside each other by their practical awareness that they were doing something together. For this kind of “fusion” to happen it must fulfil the following four key conditions for genuine reciprocity that Flynn summarises as follows:

• That the other be a means to the exact degree that I am a means myself, i.e., that he be the means towards a transcendent goal and not my means;
• That I recognize the other as praxis at the same time as I integrate him into my totalizing project;
• That I recognize his movement towards his own ends in the very movement by which I project myself towards mine;
• That I discover myself as an object and instrument of his own ends by the same act that makes him an object and instrument of mine. (Flynn 1984: 115, also see previous version of this entry [Flynn 2004 [2013]] and cf. Sartre 1960a [1976: 112–3]).

Sartre calls the resurrection of this freedom an “apocalypse”, indicating that it is an unforeseen and (potentially) revolutionary event that happens when serial abuse and exploitation can no longer be tolerated. The group in fusion has a maximum of praxis and a minimum of inertia, but serial sociality has the reverse.

Unfortunately, Sartre insists that this group in fusion is destined to meet with what he calls an “ontological check” in the form of the institution, which cannot be escaped as some versions of anarchism and Marxism might hope. The group relapses into seriality when groups are formalised into hierarchical institutional structures. Serial otherness comes to implicate itself in interpersonal relations in at least three ways in the institution: sovereignty; authority; and bureaucracy (see Book 2, Chapter 6, “The Institution”). From the co-sovereignty of the group in fusion, someone inevitably becomes sovereign in any new social order. Similarly, a command-obedience relation comes about in institutions, to greater and lesser extents, and there will be exhortations to company loyalty, to do one’s duty, etc. (Flynn 1984: 120). Bureaucratic rules and regulation also inevitably follow, partly as a reaction to fear of sovereignty, and this installs what Sartre calls vertical otherness—top-down hierarchies, as opposed to the horizontal and immanent organisation of the group in fusion (Sartre 1960a [1976: 655–663]). As such, the revolutionary force of the group in fusion is necessarily subject to mediation by the practico-inert, as well as the problems associated with institutionality just described. Although is it still structured through a series of oppositions, the Critique delivers a sophisticated social ontology that both addresses some weaknesses in Sartre’s earlier work and unifies the social and political reflections of much of his later work.

Although it is not possible to address all of Sartre’s rich and varied contributions to ethics and politics here, we will introduce some of the key ideas about race and anti-colonialism that were important themes in his post Being and Nothingness work and are currently significant issues in our times. Sartre was generally stridently anti-colonialist, perhaps even advocating a multiculturalism avant la lettre , as Michael Walzer has argued in his Preface to Anti-semite and Jew (Walzer 1995: xiv). His books and more journalistic writings typically call out what he saw as the bad faith of many French and European citizens.

The issue of race was part of Sartre’s French intellectual scene, and Sartre himself played a major role in facilitating that in the pages of Les Temps Modernes , L’Express , and elsewhere. Debates about the intersection of philosophy and race, and colonialism and multiculturalism, were all being had. These concerned not only the French Algerian and African “colonies” but also Vietnam via Tran Duc Thao, who had challenged Sartre’s efforts to bring phenomenological existentialism together with Marxism. Initially at least, Sartre’s arguments here typically drew on and extended some of the categories deployed in Being and Nothingness . There is an obvious sense in which a critique of racism automatically ensues from Sartrean existentialism. Racism is a form of bad faith, for Sartre, since it typically (perhaps necessarily) involves believing in essences or types, and indeed constructing essences and types. His Notebooks suggest that all oppression rests on bad faith. In racism, in particular, there is an “infernal circle of irresponsible responsibility, of culpable ignorance and ignorance which is knowledge” (Sartre 1943 [1956: 49]), as well as what Sartre calls passive complicity. Many of us (or Sartre’s own French society) may not obviously be bigots, but we sustain a system that is objectively unjust through our choices and sometimes wilful ignorance. In relation to colonialism, Sartre likewise contends that we have all profited from colonialist exploitation and sustained its systems, even if we are not ourselves a “settler”.

This is also the key argument of Anti-semite and the Jew , composed very quickly in 1944 and without much detailed knowledge of Judaism but with more direct knowledge of the sort of passive anti-semitism of many French citizens. The text was written following the Dreyfus affair and before all of the horrors of the holocaust were widely known. Sartre was aiming to understand (and critique) the situation he observed around him, in which the imminent return of the French Jews exiled by the Nazis was not unambiguously welcomed by all. The book is perceptive about its prime targets, the explicit or implicit anti-semite, who defines the real Frenchmen by excluding others, notably the Jew. Now, of course, few of his contemporaries would admit to being anti-semites, just as few would admit to being racist. But there are patterns of bad faith that Sartre thinks are clear: we participate in social systems that force the dilemma of authenticity or inauthenticity upon the Jew, asking them to choose between their concrete practical identities (religious and cultural) and more universal ascriptions (liberty, etc.) in a way that cannot be readily navigated within the terms of the debate. Sartre consistently ascribes responsibility to collectives here, even if those collectives are ultimately sustained by individual decisions and choices. For him, it is not just the assassin say, nor just Eichmann and the Nazi regime, who are held responsible. Rather, these more obviously egregious activities were sustained by their society and the individuals in it, through culpable ignorance and patterns of bad faith.

Sartre also addressed the negritude movement in his Preface to Black Orpheus (1948), an anthology of negritude poetry. He called for an anti-racist racism and saw himself as resolutely on the side of the negritude movement, but he also envisaged such interventions as a step towards ultimately revealing the category of race itself as an example of bad faith. Here the reception from Frantz Fanon and others was mixed. In Black Skin, White Masks (1952), Fanon argues this effectively undermined his own lived-experience and its power (see entries on negritude and Fanon ; cf. also Gordon 1995). Sartre continued to address colonialism and racism in subsequent work, effecting a rapprochement of sorts with Fanon that culminated in his “Introduction” to Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1961), where also Sartre appears to endorse a counter-violence.

Although we have not given much attention to Sartre’s literary and artistic productions since section 3 above, he continued to produce artistic work of political significance throughout his career. Continuous with insights from his What is Literature? , Sartre argues that in a society that remains unjust and dominated by oppression, the prose-writer (if not the poet) must combat this violence by jolting the reader and audience from their complacency, rather than simply be concerned with art for its own sake. His literary works hence are typically both philosophical and political. Although the number of these works diminished over time, there is still a powerful literary exploration of the philosophical and political themes of the Critique in the play, The Condemned of Altona (1960).

We cannot neatly sum up a public intellectual and man of letters, like Sartre, to conclude. We do think, however, that it is arguable, with the benefit of hindsight, that some of Sartre’s interventions are prescient rather than outmoded remnants of the nineteenth century ( à la Foucault). They certainly presage issues that are in the foreground today, concerning class, race, and gender. That doesn’t mean that Sartre got it all correct, of course, whatever that might mean in regard to the complex realities of socio-political life. Indeed, if one is to take a stand on so many of the major socio-political issues of one’s time, as Sartre did, it is inevitable that history will not look kindly on them all. Sartre’s life and writings hence present a complex and difficult interpretive task, but they remain a powerful provocation for thought and action today.

This bibliography presents a selection of the works from Sartre and secondary literature that are relevant for this article. For a complete annotated bibliography of Sartre’s works see

• Contat, Michel and Michel Rybalka, 1974, The Writings of Jean-Paul Sartre , two volumes, Richard C. McCleary (trans.), (Northwestern University Studies in Phenomenology & Existential Philosophy), Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
• 1975, Magazine littéraire , 103–4: 9–49,

and by Michel Sicard in

• 1979, special issue on Sartre, Obliques , 18–19(May): 331–347.

Michel Rybalka and Michel Contat have complied an additional bibliography of primary and secondary sources published since Sartre’s death in

• Rybalka, Michel and Michel Contat, 1993, Sartre: Bibliographie 1980–1992 , (CNRS Philosophie), Paris: CNRS and Bowling Green, OH:: Philosophy Documentation Center, Bowling Green State University.

A.1 Works by Sartre

A.1.1 individual works published by sartre.

• 1957, The Transcendence of the Ego: An Existentialist Theory of Consciousness , Forrest Williams and Robert Kirkpatrick (trans.), New York: Noonday Press.
• 2004, The Transcendence of the Ego: A Sketch for a Phenomenological Description , Andrew Brown (trans.), London: Routledge. doi:10.4324/9780203694367
• 1936b [2012], L’imagination , Paris: F. Alcan. Translated as The Imagination , Kenneth Williford and David Rudrauf (trans.), London: Routledge, 2012. doi:10.4324/9780203723692
• 1938 [1965], La Nausée: Roman , Paris: Gallimard. Translated as Nausea , Robert Baldick (trans.), Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965.
• 1939a [1970], “Une idée fondamentale de la phénoménologie de Husserl: l’intentionnalit”, La Nouvelle Revue française , 304: 129–132. Reprinted in Situations 1. Translated as “Intentionality: A Fundamental Idea of Husserl’s Phenomenology”, Joseph P. Fell (trans.), Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology , 1(2): 4–5, 1970. doi:10.1080/00071773.1970.11006118
• 1939b [1948], Esquisse d’une théorie des émotions , Paris: Hermann. Translated as The Emotions: Outline of a Theory , Bernard Frechtman (trans.), New York: Philosophical Library, 1948.
• 1940 [2004], L’Imaginaire: Psychologie Phénoménologique de l’imagination , Paris: Gallimard. Translated as The Imaginary: A Phenomenological Psychology of the Imagination , Arlette Elkaïm-Sartre (ed.), Jonathan Webber (trans.), London: Routledge, 2004.
• 1956, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology , Hazel E. Barnes (trans.), New York: Philosophical Library.
• 2018, Being and Nothingness: An Essay in Phenomenological Ontology , Sarah Richmond (trans.), London: Routledge.
• 1945–49, Les Chemins de la liberté (The roads to freedom), Paris: Gallimard. Series of novels L’âge de raison (The age of reason, 1945), Le sursis (The reprieve, 1945), and La mort dans l’âme (Troubled sleep, 1949).
• 1946a [2007], L’existentialisme est un humanisme , (Collection Pensées), Paris: Nagel. Translated as Existentialism is a Humanism , John Kulka (ed.), Carol Macomber (trans.), New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007.
• 1946b [1948/1995], Réflexions sur la question juive , Paris: P. Morihien. Translated as Anti-semite and Jew , George J. Becker (trans.), New York: Schocken Books, 1948 (reprinted with preface by Michael Walzer, 1995).
• 1946c [1955], “Matérialisme et Révolution I”, Les Temps Modernes , 9: 37–63 and 10: 1–32. Reprinted in Situations III , Paris: Gallimard, 1949. Translated as , “Materialism and Revolution”, in Literary and Philosophical Essays , Annette Michelson (trans.), New York: Criterion Books, 1955.
• 1947a [1967], Baudelaire , Paris: Gallimard. Translated as Baudelaire , Martin Turnell (trans.), London: H. Hamilton, 1949. Reprinted, Norfolk, CT: New Directions, 1967
• 1947b [1949], Huis-Clos , Paris: Gallimard. First produced 1944. Translated as No Exit , in No Exit, and Three Other Plays , New York: Vintage Books, 1949.
• 1947c [1949], Les Mouches , Paris: Gallimard. First produced 1943. Translated as The Flies , in No Exit, and Three Other Plays , New York: Vintage Books, 1949.
• 1948a [1988], “Qu’est-ce que la littérature?”, Les Temps modernes . Collected in Situations II . Translated in “What Is Literature?” and Other Essays , Bernard Frechtman (trans.), Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988.
• 1948b [1967], “Conscience de soi et connaissance de soi”, Bulletin de la Société française de Philosophie , n° 3, avril-juin 1948. Translated as “Consciousness of Self and Knowledge of Self”, in Readings in Existential Phenomenology , Nathaniel Lawrence and Daniel O’Connor (eds), Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1967.
• 1948c [1949], Les mains sales: pièce en sept tableaux , Paris: Gallimard. First produced 1948. Translated as Dirty Hands , in No Exit, and Three Other Plays , New York: Vintage Books, 1949.
• 1952a [1963], Saint-Genêt, Comédien et martyr , Paris: Gallimard. Translated as Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr , Bernard Frechtman (trans.), New York: George Braziller, 1963.
• 1952b [1968]. “Les communistes et la paix”, published in Situations VI . Translated as “The Communists and Peace”, in The Communists and Peace, with A Reply to Claude Lefort , Martha H. Fletcher and Philip R. Berk (trans.), New York: George Braziller, 1968.
• 1957 [1963/1968], Questions de méthode , Paris: Gallimard. Later to be a foreword for Sartre 1960. Translated as Search for a Method , Hazel E. Barnes (trans.), New York: Knopf, 1963. Reprinted New York: Random House, 1968.
• 1960a [1976], Critique de la Raison dialectique, tome 1, Théorie des ensembles pratiques , Paris, Gallimard. Translated as Critique of Dialectical Reason, volume 1: Theory of Practical Ensembles , Alan Sheridan-Smith (trans.), London: New Left Books, 1976. Reprinted in 2004 with a forward by Fredric Jameson, London: Verso. The second unfinished volume was published posthumously in 1985.
• 1960b, Les Séquestrés d’Altona (The condemned of Altona), Paris: Gallimard. First produced 1959.
• 1964a [1964], Les mots , Paris: Gallimard. Translated as The Words , Bernard Frechtman (trans.), New York: Braziller, 1964.
• 1969, “Itinerary of a Thought”, interview with Perry Anderson, Ronald Fraser and Quintin Hoare, New Left Review , I/58: 43–66. Partially published in Situations IX .
• 1971–72 [1981–93], L’Idiot de la famille. Gustave Flaubert de 1821 à 1857 , 3 volumes, Paris: Gallimard. Translated as The Family Idiot: Gustave Flaubert, 1821–1857 , 5 volumes, Carol Cosman (trans.), Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981/1987/1989/1991/1993.
• 1980 [1996], “L’espoir, maintenant”, interview with Benny Lévy, Le Nouvel observateur , n° 800, 801, 802. Reprinted as L’espoir maintenant: les entretiens de 1980 , Lagrasse: Verdier, 1991. Translated as Hope Now: The 1980 Interviews , Adrian van den Hoven (trans.), Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1996.

A.1.2 Collections of works by Sartre

References to Situations will be abbreviated as Sit. followed by the volume, e.g., Sit. V .

• 1947, Situations I: Critiques littéraires , Paris: Gallimard. Partially translated in Literary and Philosophical Essays , Annette Michelson (trans.), London: Rider, 1955. Reprinted New York: Collier Books, 1962.
• 1948, Situations II , Paris: Gallimard.
• 1949, Situations III: Lendemains de guerre , Paris: Gallimard.
• 1964b, Situations IV: Portraits , Paris: Gallimard.
• 1964c, Situations V: Colonialisme et néo-colonialisme , Paris: Gallimard. Translated as Colonialism and Neocolonialism , Azzdedine Haddour, Steve Brewer, and Terry McWilliams (trans), London: Routledge, 2001. doi:10.4324/9780203991848
• 1964d, Situations VI: Problèmes du marxisme 1 , Paris: Gallimard.
• 1965, Situations VII: Problèmes du marxisme 2 , Paris:, Gallimard.
• 1971, Situations VIII: Autour de 68 , Paris: Gallimard.
• 1972, Situations IX: Mélanges , Paris: Gallimard. Material from Situations VIII et IX translated as Between Existentialism and Marxism , John Mathews (trans.), London: New Left Books, 1974.
• 1976, Situations X: Politique et autobiographie , Paris: Gallimard. Translated as Life/Situations: Essays Written and Spoken , Paul Auster and Lydia Davis (trans), New York: Pantheon, 1977.
• 1981, Œuvres romanesques , Michel Contat, Michel Rybalka, G. Idt and G. H. Bauer (eds), Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade.
• 1988, “What is Literature?” and Other Essays , [including Black Orpheus ] tr. Bernard Frechtman et al., intro. Steven Ungar, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
• 2005, Théâtre complet , Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade.

A.1.3 Posthumous works by Sartre

• 1983a, Cahiers pour une morale , Paris: Gallimard. Translated as Notebook for an Ethics , David Pellauer (trans.), Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992.
• 1983b [1984], Carnets de la drôle de guerre, septembre 1939 - mars 1940 , Paris: Gallimard. Reprinted in 1995 with an addendum. Translated as The War Diaries: Notebooks from a Phoney War , Quinton Hoare (trans.), New York: Pantheon, 1984.
• Tome 1: 1926–1939
• Tome 2: 1940–1963
• 1984, Le Scenario Freud , Paris: Gallimard. Translated as The Freud Scenario , Quinton Hoare (trans.), Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1986.
• 1985, Critique de la raison dialectique, tome 2, L’intelligibilité de l’histoire , Paris: Gallimard. Translated as Critique of Dialectical Reason, Volume 2: The Intelligibility of History , Quintin Hoare (trans.), London: Verso, 1991. Reprinted 2006, foreword by Frederic Jameson, London: Verso. [unfinished].
• 1989, Vérité et existence , Paris: Gallimard [written in 1948]. Translated as Truth and Existence , Adrian van den Hoven (trans.), Ronald Aronson (intro.), Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992.
• 1990, Écrits de jeunesse , Michel Contat and Michel Rybalka (eds), Paris: Gallimard.

A.2 Works by others

• Astruc, Alexandre and Michel Contat (directors), 1978, Sartre by Himself: A Film Directed by Alexandre Astruc and Michel Contat with the Participation of Simone de Beauvoir, Jacques-Larent Bost, Andre Gorz, Jean Pouillon , transcription of film, Richard Seaver (trans.), New York: Urizen Books.
• Beauvoir, Simone de, 1947 [1976], Pour une morale de l’ambiguïté , Paris: Gallimard. Translated as The Ethics of Ambiguity , Bernard Frechtman (trans.), New York: Philosophical Library, 1948. Translation reprinted New York: Citadel Press, 1976.
• –––, 1960 [1962], La force de l’âge , Paris: Gallimard. Translated as The Prime of Life , Peter Green (trans.), Cleveland, OH: World Publishing, 1962.
• –––, 1963 [1965], La force des choses , Paris: Gallimard. Translated as Force of Circumstance , Richard Howard (trans.), New York: Putnam, 1965.
• –––, 1981 [1986], La cérémonie des adieux: suivi de, Entretiens avec Jean-Paul Sartre, août-septembre 1974 , Paris: Gallimard. Translated as Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre , Patrick O’Brian (trans.), New York: Pantheon Books, 1984. Translation reprinted London and New York: Penguin, 1988.
• Carnap, Rudolf, 1931, “Überwindung der Metaphysik durch logische Analyse der Sprache”, Erkenntnis , 2(1): 219–241. Translated as “The Elimination of Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis of Language”, Arthur Pap (trans.), in Logical Positivism , A. J. Ayer (ed.), New York: The Free Press, 1959, 60–81. doi:10.1007/BF02028153 (de)
• Contat, Michel and Michel Rybalka, 1970, Les écrits de Sartre: Chronologie, bibliographie commentée , Paris: Gallimard. Translated as Writings of Jean-Paul Sartre, Volume 1: A Bibliographical Life , Richard C. McCleary (trans.), Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1974.
• Deleuze, Gilles, 2004, Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953–1974 , David Lapoujade (trans.), Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e).
• Derrida, Jacques, 1992 [1995], Points de Suspension: Entretiens , Elisabeth Weber (ed.), (Collection la philosophie en effet), Paris: Editions Galilée. Translated as Points: Interviews, 1974–1994 , Peggy Kamuf (trans.), (Meridian), Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995.
• Fanon, Francis, 1952, Peau noire, masques blancs , Paris, Seuil. Translated as Black Skin, White Masks , Richard Philcox (trans.), New York: Grove Books, 2008.
• –––, 1961, Les damnés de la terre , Paris: Maspero. Translated as The Wretched of the Earth , Richard Philcox (trans.), New York: Grove Books, 2005.
• Foucault, Michel, 1966 [1994], “L’homme est-il mort?” (interview with C. Bonnefoy), Arts et Loisirs , no. 38 (15–21 juin): 8–9. Reprinted in Dits et Écrits , Daniel Defert, François Ewald, & Jacques Lagrange (eds.), 540–544, Paris: Gallimard, 1994. 2001, Dits et Écrits , volume 1, Paris: Gallimard.
• Heidegger, Martin, 1957 [1962], Sein und Zeit , Tübingen: M. Niemeyer. Translated as Being and Time, John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (trans), London: SCM Press.
• Husserl, Edmund, 1913 [1983], Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie , Halle: Niemeyer. Translated as Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy , volume 1, F. Kersten (tr.), The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1983.
• –––, 1950 [1960], Cartesianische Meditationen eine Einleitung in die Phänomenologie , The Hague: Nijhoff. Translated as Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology , Dorion Cairns (trans.), The Hague: Nijhoff, 1960.
• –––, 1900/1901, 1913/1921 [1970, 2001], Logische Untersuchungen , two volumes, Halle: M. Niemeyer. Second edition 1913/1921. Translated as Logical Investigations , 2 volumes, J. N. Findlay (trans.), London: Routledge and K. Paul, 1970. Revised English edition, 2 volumes, London: Routledge, 2001.
• Levinas, Emmanuel, 1930 [1963], La théorie de l’intuition dans la phénoménologie de Husserl , Doctoral dissertation, Université de Strasbourg. Published Paris: Vrin, 1963.
• Marcuse, Herbert, 1948, “Existentialism: Remarks on Jean-Paul Sartre’s L’Etre et Le Neant”, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research , 8(3): 309–336. doi:10.2307/2103207
• Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 1947 [1969], Humanisme et terreur: essai sur le problème communiste , (Les Essais [2 sér.] 27), Paris: Gallimard. Translated as Humanism and Terror: An Essay on the Communist Problem , John O’Neill (trans.), Boston: Beacon Press.
• Moran, Richard, 2001, Authority and Estrangement: An Essay on Self-Knowledge , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
• Anderson, Thomas C., 1993, Sartre’s Two Ethics: From Authenticity to Integral Humanity , La Salle, IL: Open Court.
• Aronson, Ronald, 1987, Sartre’s Second Critique , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Baring, Edward, 2011, The Young Derrida and French Philosophy, 1945–1968 , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511842085
• Barnes, Hazel Estella, 1981, Sartre & Flaubert , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Bell, Linda A., 1989, Sartre’s Ethics of Authenticity , Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press.
• Busch, Thomas W., 1990, The Power of Consciousness and the Force of Circumstances in Sartre’s Philosophy , Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
• Cabestan, Philippe, 2004, L’être et la conscience: recherches sur la psychologie et l’ontophénoménologie sartriennes (Ousia 51), Bruxelles: Editions Ousia.
• Catalano, Joseph S., 1974, A Commentary on Jean-Paul Sartre’s “Being and Nothingness” (Harper Torchbooks 1807), New York: Harper & Row. New edition Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980.
• –––, 1986, A Commentary on Jean-Paul Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason, Volume 1, Theory of Practical Ensembles , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Churchill, Steven and Jack Reynolds (eds.), 2014, Jean-Paul Sartre: Key Concepts , New York: Routledge. doi:10.4324/9781315729695
• Cohen-Solal, Annie, 1985 [1987], Sartre , Paris: Gallimard. Translated as Sartre: A Life , Norman MacAfee (ed.). Anna Cancogni (trans.), New York: Pantheon Books, 1987.
• Coorebyter, Vincent de, 2000, Sartre face à la phénoménologie: Autour de “L’Intentionnalité” et de “La Transcendance de l’Ego” (Ousia 40), Bruxelles: Ousia.
• –––, 2005, Sartre, avant la phénoménologie: autour de “La nausée” et de la “Légende de la vérité” (Ousia 53), Bruxelles: Ousia.
• Cox, Gary, 2019, Existentialism and Excess: The Life and Times of Jean-Paul Sartre , London: Bloomsbury.
• Detmer, David, 1988, Freedom as a Value: A Critique of the Ethical Theory of Jean-Paul Sartre , La Salle, IL: Open Court.
• Dobson, Andrew, 1993, Jean-Paul Sartre and the Politics of Reason: A Theory of History. , New York: Cambridge University Press.
• Fell, Joseph P., 1979, Heidegger and Sartre: An Essay on Being and Place , New York: Columbia University Press.
• Flynn, Thomas R., 1984, Sartre and Marxist Existentialism: The Test Case of Collective Responsibility , Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
• –––, 1997, Sartre, Foucault and Historical Reason: volume 1, Toward an Existentialist Theory of History , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• –––, 2004 [2013], “Jean-Paul Sartre”, in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2013 edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = < https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2013/entries/sartre/ >
• –––, 2014, Sartre: A Philosophical Biography , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Gardner, Sebastian, 2009, Sartre’s “Being and Nothingness”: A Reader’s Guide (Continuum Reader’s Guides), London: Continuum.
• Gordon, Lewis R., 1995, Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism , Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press.
• Henri-Levy, Bernard, 2003, Sartre: The Philosopher of the Twentieth Century , Cambridge: Polity Press.
• Howells, Christina (ed.), 1992, The Cambridge Companion to Sartre , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CCOL0521381142
• Jeanson, Francis, 1947 [1980], Le problème moral et la pensée de Sartre (Collection “Pensée et civilisation”), Paris: Éditions du myrte. Translated as Sartre and the Problem of Morality , Robert V. Stone (trans.), (Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy), Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1980.
• Judaken, Jonathan (ed.), 2008, Race after Sartre: Antiracism, Africana Existentialism, Postcolonialism (Philosophy and Race), Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
• McBride, William Leon, 1991, Sartre’s Political Theory , (Studies in Continental Thought), Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
• Existentialist Ontology and Human Consciousness
• Sartre’s French Contemporaries and Enduring Influences: Camus, Merleau-Ponty, Debeauvoir & Enduring Influences
• Sartre’s Life, Times and Vision du Monde
• Existentialist Literature and Aesthetics
• Existentialist Background: Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Jaspers, Heidegger: Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Jaspers, Heidegger
• Existentialist Ethics: Issues in Existentialist Ethics
• Existentialist Politics and Political Theory
• The Development and Meaning of Twentieth-Century Existentialism
• Moati, Raoul, 2019, Sartre et le mystère en pleine lumière (Passages), Paris: Les éditions du Cerf.
• Morris, Katherine J., 2008, Sartre , (Blackwell Great Minds 5), Malden, MA: Blackwell.
• Mouillie, Jean-Marc and Jean-Philippe Narboux (eds.), 2015, Sartre: L’être et le néant: nouvelles lectures , Paris: Les Belles Lettres.
• Murphy, Julien S. (ed.), 1999, Feminist Interpretations of Jean-Paul Sartre , University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press.
• Renaudie, Pierre-Jean, 2017, “L’ambiguïté de la troisième personne”, Revue Philosophique de Louvain , 115(2): 269–287. doi:10.2143/RPL.115.2.3245502
• Reynolds, J. and P. Stokes, 2017, “Existentialist Methodology and Perspective: Writing the First Person”, in The Cambridge Companion to Philosophical Methodology , Giuseppina D’Oro and Søren Overgaard (eds.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 317–336. doi:10.1017/9781316344118.017
• Santoni, Ronald E., 1995, Bad Faith, Good Faith, and Authenticity in Sartre’s Early Philosophy , Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.
• –––, 2003, Sartre on Violence: Curiously Ambivalent , University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press.
• Schilpp, Paul Arthur (ed.), 1981, The Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre , (Library of Living Philosophers 16), La Salle, IL: Open Court.
• Schroeder, William Ralph, 1984, Sartre and His Predecessors: The Self and the Other , London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. doi:10.4324/9780429024511
• Stone, Robert V. and Elizabeth A. Bowman, 1986, “Dialectical Ethics: A First Look at Sartre’s Unpublished 1964 Rome Lecture Notes”, Social Text , 13/14: 195–215.
• –––, 1991, “Sartre’s ‘Morality and History’: A First Look at the Notes for the unpublished 1965 Cornell Lectures”, in Sartre Alive , Ronald Aronson and Adrian van den Hoven (eds), Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 53–82.
• Taylor, Charles, 1991, The Ethics of Authenticity , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Van den Hoven, Adrian and Andrew N. Leak (eds.), 2005, Sartre Today: A Centenary Celebration , New York: Berghahn Books.
• Webber, Jonathan (ed.), 2011, Reading Sartre: On Phenomenology and Existentialism , London ; New York: Routledge. doi:10.4324/9780203844144
• Walzer, Michael, 1995, “Preface” to the 1995 English translation reprint of Sartre’s Anti-semite and Jew , New York: Schocken Books.

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• Jean Paul Sartre: Existentialism , by Christian J. Onof at the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• U.K. Sartre Society
• North American Sartre Society
• Groupe d'Études Sartriennes
• Flynn, Thomas, “Jean-Paul Sartre”, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2022 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = < https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2022/entries/sartre/ >. [This was the previous entry on this topic in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — see the version history .]

aesthetics: existentialist | authenticity | Beauvoir, Simone de | Camus, Albert | existentialism | Fanon, Frantz | Foucault, Michel | Heidegger, Martin | Husserl, Edmund | intentionality | Kierkegaard, Søren | Merleau-Ponty, Maurice | Négritude | Nietzsche, Friedrich | nothingness | phenomenology | self-consciousness: phenomenological approaches to

Acknowledgments

Jack would like to acknowledge Marion Tapper, who taught him Sartre as an undergraduate student. In addition, he would like to thank Steven Churchill, with whom he has worked on Sartre elsewhere and the work here remains indebted to those conversations and collaborations. Thanks also to Erol Copelj for feedback on this essay.

Copyright © 2022 by Jack Reynolds < jack . reynolds @ deakin . edu . au > Pierre-Jean Renaudie < pierre-jean . renaudie @ univ-lyon3 . fr >

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Library of Congress Catalog Data: ISSN 1095-5054

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• > Absolute Freedom
• > The Reason for Freedom: Kant

Book contents

• Frontmatter
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Absolute Freedom
• Part I The Idea of Freedom
• Part II The Practice of Freedom

2 - The Reason for Freedom: Kant

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 January 2023

Even if it should happen that […] this <good > will should be wholly

lacking in power to accomplish its purpose, and if even the greatest

effort should not avail it to achieve anything of its end, […] it would

sparkle like a jewel in its own right […] usefulness or fruitlessness

can neither diminish nor augment this worth.

Kant's account of the end of reason in terms of freedom is above

all aiming to reconcile the modern emancipatory goal with

a new grounding of the sacred and noble.

Much ink has been spilt over the question of our so-called free will, with many, particularly those on the analytic side of philosophy, arguing against the notion. Although freedom-loving individuals might recoil from such skepticism, it is, I believe, warranted insofar as one starts from the notion of the objective will rather than from the notion of freedom itself. Even Fichte and Schelling, philosophers on the continental side of things and, as we shall see in the following chapter, clearly on the side of the “positive freedom” rejected by its namesake, would probably agree that the ego, the will, or the “I” as such is incompatible with their notion of freedom, a notion which is derived, not from the ego, but from its substance, the underlying absolute whose reality is even greater because it is freed from the contingencies of self, ego, or the objective will:

For only that is free which acts according to the laws of its own inner being and is not determined by anything else either within it or outside it […] The Ego, said Fichte, is its own deed; consciousness posits itself—but the Ego is nothing other than this, nothing but the positing itself. However this consciousness, insofar as it is thought of as mere self-apprehension or knowledge of the Ego, is not even the primary position, and like all mere knowledge it presupposes the actual ‘Being.’ But this Being which is assumed as prior to knowledge is no being, even if it is not knowledge either; it is real self-positing, it is a primal and basic willing which makes itself into something and is the basis and foundation of all essence[…] The act which determines man's life in time does not itself belong in time but in eternity.

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• The Reason for Freedom: Kant
• Paul Gordon
• Book: Absolute Freedom
• Online publication: 10 January 2023

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PHIL103: Moral and Political Philosophy

The Ethics of Absolute Freedom

I. individuality, freedom, and ethics..

The modern conception of man is characterized, more than anything else, by individualism.  Existentialism can be seen as a rigorous attempt to work out the implications of this individualism.  The purpose of this lecture is to makes sense of the Existentialist conception of individuality and the answers it gives to these three questions: (1) What is human freedom? What can the absolute freedom of absolute individuals mean? (2) What is human flourishing or human happiness? What general ethic or way of life emerges when we take our individuality seriously? (3) What ought we to do? What ethics or code of action can emerge from a position that takes our individuality seriously.  Although I am sure you will want to take a critical look at the assumptions from which Existentialism arises in your seminars, I will be attempting, sympathetically, to see what follows if one takes these assumptions seriously.

Let's begin by seeing what it could mean to say we are absolute individuals.  When you think of it, each of us is alone in the world.  Only we feel our pains, our pleasures, our hopes, and our fears immediately, subjectively, from the inside.  Other people only see us from the outside, objectively, and, hard as we may try, we can only see them from the outside.  No one else can feel what we feel, and we cannot feel what is going on in any one else's mind.

Actually, when you think of it, the only thing we ever perceive immediately and directly is ourselves and the images and experiences in our mind.  When we look at another person or object, we don't see it directly as it is; we see it only as it is represented in our own experience.  When you feel the seat under your rear-end, do you really feel the seat itself or do you merely feel the sensations transmitted to you by nerve endings in your posterior?.  When you look at the person next to you (contemplating how their rear-end feels), do you really see them as they are on the inside or feel what they feel? You see only the image of them that is presented to your mind through your senses.  This is easily demonstrated by considering how our senses deceive us in optical illusions, but one simple example will have to suffice here.  [split image demonstration] It seems, then, that we are minds trapped in bodies, only perceiving the images transmitted to us through our bodies and their senses.

Each of us is trapped within our own mind, unable to feel anything but our own feelings and experiences.  It is as if each of us is trapped in a dark room with no windows.  Our only access to the outside world being a television screen on one wall on which we (with our mind's eye) perceive the images of other people, places, and things.  Thus, to be an absolute individual is to be trapped within ourselves, unable to perceive or contact anything but the images on our mental tv screen, and to be imperceptible ourselves to anyone outside of us.  In a world where science has opened up and laid bare the nature of subatomic particles, far-away planets, and the workings of our very own bodies and brains, it is to remain, ourselves, hidden from the objective view.  It is to be an island of subjectivity in an otherwise objective world.

Freedom Essay for Students and Children

500+ words essay on freedom.

Freedom is something that everybody has heard of but if you ask for its meaning then everyone will give you different meaning. This is so because everyone has a different opinion about freedom. For some freedom means the freedom of going anywhere they like, for some it means to speak up form themselves, and for some, it is liberty of doing anything they like.

Meaning of Freedom

The real meaning of freedom according to books is. Freedom refers to a state of independence where you can do what you like without any restriction by anyone. Moreover, freedom can be called a state of mind where you have the right and freedom of doing what you can think off. Also, you can feel freedom from within.

The Indian Freedom

Indian is a country which was earlier ruled by Britisher and to get rid of these rulers India fight back and earn their freedom. But during this long fight, many people lost their lives and because of the sacrifice of those people and every citizen of the country, India is a free country and the world largest democracy in the world.

Moreover, after independence India become one of those countries who give his citizen some freedom right without and restrictions.

The Indian Freedom Right

India drafted a constitution during the days of struggle with the Britishers and after independence it became applicable. In this constitution, the Indian citizen was given several fundaments right which is applicable to all citizen equally. More importantly, these right are the freedom that the constitution has given to every citizen.

These right are right to equality, right to freedom, right against exploitation, right to freedom of religion¸ culture and educational right, right to constitutional remedies, right to education. All these right give every freedom that they can’t get in any other country.

Value of Freedom

The real value of anything can only be understood by those who have earned it or who have sacrificed their lives for it. Freedom also means liberalization from oppression. It also means the freedom from racism, from harm, from the opposition, from discrimination and many more things.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

Freedom does not mean that you violate others right, it does not mean that you disregard other rights. Moreover, freedom means enchanting the beauty of nature and the environment around us.

The Freedom of Speech

Freedom of speech is the most common and prominent right that every citizen enjoy. Also, it is important because it is essential for the all-over development of the country.

Moreover, it gives way to open debates that helps in the discussion of thought and ideas that are essential for the growth of society.

Besides, this is the only right that links with all the other rights closely. More importantly, it is essential to express one’s view of his/her view about society and other things.

To conclude, we can say that Freedom is not what we think it is. It is a psychological concept everyone has different views on. Similarly, it has a different value for different people. But freedom links with happiness in a broadway.

FAQs on Freedom

Q.1 What is the true meaning of freedom? A.1 Freedom truly means giving equal opportunity to everyone for liberty and pursuit of happiness.

Q.2 What is freedom of expression means? A.2 Freedom of expression means the freedom to express one’s own ideas and opinions through the medium of writing, speech, and other forms of communication without causing any harm to someone’s reputation.

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‘Freedom’ Means Something Different to Liberals and Conservatives. Here’s How the Definition Split—And Why That Still Matters

W e tend to think of freedom as an emancipatory ideal—and with good reason. Throughout history, the desire to be free inspired countless marginalized groups to challenge the rule of political and economic elites. Liberty was the watchword of the Atlantic revolutionaries who, at the end of the 18th century, toppled autocratic kings, arrogant elites and ( in Haiti ) slaveholders, thus putting an end to the Old Regime. In the 19th and 20th centuries, Black civil rights activists and feminists fought for the expansion of democracy in the name of freedom, while populists and progressives struggled to put an end to the economic domination of workers.

While these groups had different objectives and ambitions, sometimes putting them at odds with one another, they all agreed that their main goal—freedom—required enhancing the people’s voice in government. When the late Rep. John Lewis called on Americans to “let freedom ring” , he was drawing on this tradition.

But there is another side to the story of freedom as well. Over the past 250 years, the cry for liberty has also been used by conservatives to defend elite interests. In their view, true freedom is not about collective control over government; it consists in the private enjoyment of one’s life and goods. From this perspective, preserving freedom has little to do with making government accountable to the people. Democratically elected majorities, conservatives point out, pose just as much, or even more of a threat to personal security and individual right—especially the right to property—as rapacious kings or greedy elites. This means that freedom can best be preserved by institutions that curb the power of those majorities, or simply by shrinking the sphere of government as much as possible.

This particular way of thinking about freedom was pioneered in the late 18th century by the defenders of the Old Regime. From the 1770s onward, as revolutionaries on both sides of the Atlantic rebelled in the name of liberty, a flood of pamphlets, treatises and newspaper articles appeared with titles such as Some Observations On Liberty , Civil Liberty Asserted or On the Liberty of the Citizen . Their authors vehemently denied that the Atlantic Revolutions would bring greater freedom. As, for instance, the Scottish philosopher Adam Ferguson—a staunch opponent of the American Revolution—explained, liberty consisted in the “security of our rights.” And from that perspective, the American colonists already were free, even though they lacked control over the way in which they were governed. As British subjects, they enjoyed “more security than was ever before enjoyed by any people.” This meant that the colonists’ liberty was best preserved by maintaining the status quo; their attempts to govern themselves could only end in anarchy and mob rule.

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In the course of the 19th century this view became widespread among European elites, who continued to vehemently oppose the advent of democracy. Benjamin Constant, one of Europe’s most celebrated political thinkers, rejected the example of the French revolutionaries, arguing that they had confused liberty with “participation in collective power.” Instead, freedom-lovers should look to the British constitution, where hierarchies were firmly entrenched. Here, Constant claimed, freedom, understood as “peaceful enjoyment and private independence,” was perfectly secure—even though less than five percent of British adults could vote. The Hungarian politician Józseph Eötvös, among many others, agreed. Writing in the wake of the brutally suppressed revolutions that rose against several European monarchies in 1848, he complained that the insurgents, battling for manhood suffrage, had confused liberty with “the principle of the people’s supremacy.” But such confusion could only lead to democratic despotism. True liberty—defined by Eötvös as respect for “well-earned rights”—could best be achieved by limiting state power as much as possible, not by democratization.

In the U.S., conservatives were likewise eager to claim that they, and they alone, were the true defenders of freedom. In the 1790s, some of the more extreme Federalists tried to counter the democratic gains of the preceding decade in the name of liberty. In the view of the staunch Federalist Noah Webster, for instance, it was a mistake to think that “to obtain liberty, and establish a free government, nothing was necessary but to get rid of kings, nobles, and priests.” To preserve true freedom—which Webster defined as the peaceful enjoyment of one’s life and property—popular power instead needed to be curbed, preferably by reserving the Senate for the wealthy. Yet such views were slower to gain traction in the United States than in Europe. To Webster’s dismay, overall, his contemporaries believed that freedom could best be preserved by extending democracy rather than by restricting popular control over government.

But by the end of the 19th century, conservative attempts to reclaim the concept of freedom did catch on. The abolition of slavery, rapid industrialization and mass migration from Europe expanded the agricultural and industrial working classes exponentially, as well as giving them greater political agency. This fueled increasing anxiety about popular government among American elites, who now began to claim that “mass democracy” posed a major threat to liberty, notably the right to property. Francis Parkman, scion of a powerful Boston family, was just one of a growing number of statesmen who raised doubts about the wisdom of universal suffrage, as “the masses of the nation … want equality more than they want liberty.”

William Graham Sumner, an influential Yale professor, likewise spoke for many when he warned of the advent of a new, democratic kind of despotism—a danger that could best be avoided by restricting the sphere of government as much as possible. “ Laissez faire ,” or, in blunt English, “mind your own business,” Sumner concluded, was “the doctrine of liberty.”

Being alert to this history can help us to understand why, today, people can use the same word—“freedom”—to mean two very different things. When conservative politicians like Rand Paul and advocacy groups FreedomWorks or the Federalist Society talk about their love of liberty, they usually mean something very different from civil rights activists like John Lewis—and from the revolutionaries, abolitionists and feminists in whose footsteps Lewis walked. Instead, they are channeling 19th century conservatives like Francis Parkman and William Graham Sumner, who believed that freedom is about protecting property rights—if need be, by obstructing democracy. Hundreds of years later, those two competing views of freedom remain largely unreconcilable.

Annelien de Dijn is the author of Freedom: An Unruly History , available now from Harvard University Press.

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Essay on Freedom

Students are often asked to write an essay on Freedom in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Freedom

Understanding freedom.

Freedom is a fundamental human right. It is the power to act, speak, or think without restraint. Freedom allows us to make choices and express ourselves.

The Importance of Freedom

Freedom with responsibility.

However, freedom comes with responsibility. We must respect others’ rights and freedoms. Misuse of freedom can lead to chaos and conflict. Therefore, it’s crucial to use freedom wisely.

Also check:

250 Words Essay on Freedom

The dialectics of freedom.

Freedom can be broadly categorized into two types: positive and negative. Negative freedom refers to the absence of external constraints, allowing individuals to act according to their will. In contrast, positive freedom is the ability to act in one’s best interest, which often requires societal support and resources. The dialectics of these two types of freedom form the crux of many political and philosophical debates.

Freedom and Responsibility

Freedom is inextricably linked with responsibility. Every choice made in freedom has consequences, and individuals must bear the responsibility for their actions. This interplay between freedom and responsibility is a key aspect of ethical and moral judgments.

Freedom in the Modern World

In the modern world, freedom is often associated with democratic rights and civil liberties. However, the rise of digital technology poses new challenges. Questions about data privacy, surveillance, and censorship have sparked debates about the boundaries of freedom in the digital age.

In conclusion, freedom is a complex and multifaceted concept. It’s a fundamental human right, yet its interpretation and application vary widely across different societies and contexts. Understanding the nuances of freedom helps us navigate the ethical and moral dilemmas of our time.

500 Words Essay on Freedom

Freedom, a concept deeply ingrained in human consciousness, is often perceived as the absence of restrictions and the ability to exercise one’s rights and powers at will. It is a fundamental right and the cornerstone of modern democratic societies. However, the concept of freedom is multifaceted, and its interpretation varies across different socio-cultural and political contexts.

The Philosophical Perspective

Philosophically, freedom is more than just the absence of constraints; it is about the ability to act according to one’s true nature and fulfill one’s potential. This perspective, known as positive freedom, contrasts with negative freedom, which focuses on the absence of external interference. The tension between these two interpretations of freedom has been a central theme in political philosophy.

Freedom and Democracy

In the realm of politics, freedom is the bedrock of democracy. It ensures the right to express one’s opinions, to choose one’s leaders, and to live without fear of oppression. However, freedom in a democratic society is not absolute. It is balanced with the responsibility to respect the freedom and rights of others. This balance is often a source of conflict and debate, as societies grapple with the question of where to draw the line between individual freedom and collective responsibility.

Freedom and Human Rights

Freedom is also closely linked to human rights. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations, recognizes freedom as a basic human right. It encompasses not only political and civil liberties but also economic, social, and cultural rights. However, the realization of these rights remains a challenge in many parts of the world, where freedom is curtailed by oppressive regimes, social inequalities, and cultural norms.

The Paradox of Freedom

Conclusion: the future of freedom.

In conclusion, freedom is a complex and multifaceted concept. It is a fundamental human right, a cornerstone of democracy, and a philosophical concept that has been debated for centuries. As we move forward into the future, the quest for freedom continues. It is our responsibility to ensure that freedom, in all its forms, is respected and protected. The challenge lies not only in ensuring our own freedom but also in upholding the freedom of others, thereby contributing to a just and equitable world.

That’s it! I hope the essay helped you.

Happy studying!

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Essay Samples on Freedom

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How Has Freedom Changed Over Time: A Dynamic Journey

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We hear a lot of people talking about “Freedom and Equality”...but do we really know the real meaning? Freedom and Equality are two fundamental values in a society and they have helped to construct the society known today. Without them, the nation would discriminate unfairly...

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Best topics on Freedom

1. Why Is Freedom of Religion Important

2. What Is the Meaning of Freedom: the Price We Pay

3. What Does Freedom Mean to Me: a Privilege and a Responsibility

4. How Has Freedom Changed Over Time: A Dynamic Journey

5. Balance Between Freedom And Equality

6. Considering Religious Beliefs And Freedom Of Expression

7. Differences between the Patterson’s, Foner’s, and King’s interpretations of Freedom

8. Literary Analysis and Review of Annie Dillard’s “Living Like Weasels”

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Essay on Freedom

Introduction to Freedom

‘The Paradox of Freedom: Responsibility and the Limits of Liberty’

Freedom, an intrinsic aspect of human existence, is the cornerstone of societal progress and individual fulfillment. Defined as the ability to act, think, and express oneself without constraint or coercion, freedom encapsulates humanity’s aspiration for autonomy and self-determination. Pursuing freedom has shaped revolutions, influenced ideologies, and ignited social movements throughout history. In this essay, we delve into the multifaceted dimensions of freedom, exploring its historical significance, theoretical frameworks, contemporary challenges, and future implications. By unraveling the complexities of freedom, we aim to understand its enduring importance in shaping the course of human civilization.

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Historical Perspectives on Freedom

The historical perspectives illustrate the evolution of freedom as a concept and its profound influence on shaping political, social, and cultural landscapes throughout human history.

1. Ancient Philosophical Views

• Aristotle: Freedom is the capacity for self-realization within moral virtue and rationality constraints.
• Plato: Emphasized the soul’s liberation from the bondage of material desires through knowledge and philosophical contemplation.

2. Medieval Period

• Magna Carta (1215): Established the idea that even the king is subject to legal constraints, laying the groundwork for limited monarchy and the rule of law.
• Renaissance Humanism: Celebrated the individual’s autonomy, creativity, and pursuit of knowledge as essential components of freedom.

3. Enlightenment Era

• John Locke Argued for natural rights, including the right to life, liberty, and property, which formed the basis of liberal democracy.
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The “social contract” concept emphasized the need for a collective agreement to preserve individual freedom and equality.
• American Revolution (1775-1783): Fought for independence from British colonial rule, establishing democratic principles and the Bill of Rights.

4. Industrial Revolution

• Emergence of labor movements: Advocated for workers’ rights and protections against exploitation, addressing economic dimensions of freedom.
• Suffragette Movement: Fought for women’s suffrage, expanding the scope of political freedom to include gender equality.

5. Modern Civil Rights Movements

• The US Civil Rights Movement: Fought against discrimination and racial segregation, resulting in legal changes and improvements to civil rights.
• Decolonization movements: Across Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean, fought against colonial oppression, asserting the right to self-governance and independence.

6. Post-Cold War Era

• The collapse of the Soviet Union: Encouraged conversations on the pervasiveness of freedom and democracy and symbolized the triumph of liberal democracy against authoritarianism.
• Globalization: Facilitated the spread of ideas, information, and cultural exchange, reshaping perceptions of freedom in an interconnected world.

Theoretical Frameworks of Freedom

A comparative analysis of different perspectives on freedom

Dimensions of Freedom

1. Political Freedom

• Freedom of Speech and Expression is the liberty to voice one’s thoughts, convictions, and concepts without restrictions or persecution.
• Right to Participate in Governance : The opportunity for citizens to engage in political processes, including voting, running for office, and advocating for policy change.
• Protection of Civil Liberties : Measures to prevent the government from violating fundamental freedoms, including the press, assembly, and religion.

2. Economic Freedom

• Free Market Principles : The liberty of people and companies to participate in the economy with the least amount of interference from the government, encompassing free commerce, competition , and property rights.
• Access to Resources and Opportunities : Granting everyone equal access to resources so they can achieve their financial objectives and obtain jobs, education, healthcare, and other services.
• Labor Rights and Economic Mobility : Protections for workers’ rights, including fair wages, safe working conditions, and the ability to change jobs or start businesses freely.

3. Social Freedom

• Freedom of Association : The right of individuals to form groups, organizations, and communities based on shared interests, beliefs, or identities.
• Cultural and Religious Freedoms : The ability of individuals to practice their cultural traditions and religious beliefs without persecution or discrimination.
• Equality and Inclusivity : Ensuring that all members of society have equal rights and opportunities regardless of race, gender, sexuality, or socioeconomic status.

4. Personal Freedom

• Autonomy and Self-Determination are the ability of individuals to make choices about their own lives, including personal relationships, lifestyle, and values, without undue influence or coercion.
• Privacy Rights : Protection against unwarranted intrusion into personal matters, including surveillance, data collection, and breaches of confidentiality.
• Freedom of Thought and Conscience : The liberty to hold and express beliefs, ideas, and convictions without fear of persecution or discrimination.

5. Environmental Freedom

• Right to a Clean Environment : Ensuring people live in a sustainable, healthy environment free from pollution, environmental risks, and degradation.
• Access to Natural Resources : Guarantee equitable access to essential resources such as clean water , air, and land for present and future generations.
• Environmental Justice : Addressing environmental inequalities and ensuring marginalized communities have equal protection and participation in environmental decision-making.

Challenges to Freedom

• Authoritarian Regimes and Repression : Governments and political regimes prioritizing control and authority over individual liberties significantly threaten freedom. These regimes often employ censorship, surveillance, and suppression of dissent to maintain power and silence opposition.
• Socio-Economic Inequalities : Economic disparities can limit individuals’ freedom by restricting their access to resources, opportunities, and necessities. Socio-economic inequalities, such as poverty, lack of education, and unequal distribution of wealth, can exacerbate social injustices and hinder upward mobility.
• Technological Advancements and Privacy Concerns : Rapid technological advancements have introduced new challenges to freedom, particularly regarding privacy rights and data protection. Surveillance technologies, data mining, and algorithmic profiling can infringe upon individuals’ privacy and autonomy, raising concerns about surveillance capitalism and digital authoritarianism.
• Restrictions on Freedom of Expression : Censorship, both by governments and private entities, can limit freedom of expression and impede the free flow of information. Laws and regulations restricting speech, press freedom, and online communication platforms can stifle dissent, suppress minority voices, and undermine democratic principles.
• Erosion of Democratic Institutions : The basis of freedom and democracy can be threatened by assaults on democratic institutions, such as the independence of the judiciary, the rule of law, and election integrity. Authoritarian tendencies, populist movements, and political polarization can weaken democratic norms and institutions, eroding civil liberties and human rights .
• Globalization and Corporate Power : The growing power of multinational firms and international financial organizations may threaten democratic government and national sovereignty. Corporate interests may prioritize profit over social and environmental concerns, leading to exploitation, environmental degradation , and labor abuses that restrict individuals’ freedoms.
• Social and Cultural Norms : Traditional social and cultural norms, including gender roles, religious beliefs, and cultural practices, can limit individuals’ freedom by imposing conformity and restricting autonomy. Discrimination, prejudice, and social stigma against marginalized groups can perpetuate inequality and limit their rights and freedoms.
• Security Threats and National Security Measures : Security measures that violate civil liberties and human rights may be implemented because of national security concerns about terrorism, extremism, and geopolitical conflicts. Authorities may justify surveillance, mass data collection, and emergency powers in the name of security, but if not properly regulated, they can undermine fundamental freedoms and democratic principles.

Freedom in the Digital Age

• Access to Information : The digital age has democratized access to information, allowing individuals worldwide to access vast knowledge and resources. This increased access to information enhances freedom of expression and empowers individuals to make informed decisions.
• Freedom of Expression Online : Digital platforms allow individuals to express themselves freely, share ideas, and engage in public discourse. Social media, blogging platforms, and online forums have become powerful tools for political activism, citizen journalism, and social movements, amplifying previously marginalized or silenced voices.
• Challenges to Privacy : The digital age also challenges privacy rights as governments and corporations collect, store, and analyze individuals’ data. Surveillance technologies, data breaches, and algorithmic profiling can infringe upon individuals’ privacy and autonomy, raising concerns about surveillance capitalism and digital surveillance.
• Online Censorship and Content Regulation : Governments and online platforms increasingly regulate and censor content, raising concerns about freedom of expression online. Content moderation policies, hate speech laws, and government censorship can limit individuals’ ability to express themselves freely and access diverse viewpoints.
• Digital Inequality : The digital divide exacerbates inequalities in access to technology and information, limiting individuals’ freedom to participate fully in the digital age. Socio-economic disparities in access to high-speed internet, digital devices, and digital literacy skills can further marginalize already disadvantaged groups.
• Cybersecurity Threats : Cybersecurity threats, including hacking, cybercrime, and state-sponsored cyberattacks, threaten individuals’ digital freedoms and online safety. Concerns about data breaches, identity theft, and online harassment can deter individuals from exercising their freedoms online.
• Surveillance and Government Intrusion : Government monitoring programs and large-scale data collection projects raise concerns over invasions of privacy and civil liberties. The technology used for surveillance, such as location monitoring and facial recognition, can allow for previously unheard-of government interference in people’s lives, weakening their sense of liberty and autonomy.
• Digital Rights and Regulation : The digital age calls for robust legal frameworks and regulations to protect digital rights and freedoms. Policies governing data privacy, online speech, and surveillance practices are essential to safeguarding individuals’ rights in the digital realm.

Cultural Perspectives on Freedom

1. Western Individualism : In Western cultures, people often associate freedom with individual autonomy and personal choice. The emphasis is on people’s freedom to follow their objectives and aspirations and be free from excessive interference from the government or other parties.

Example: In countries like the United States and many European nations, people consider freedom of speech and expression a fundamental right, allowing individuals to voice their opinions and challenge authority without fear of reprisal.

2. Eastern Collectivism : In contrast to Western individualism, many Eastern cultures prioritize collective harmony and social cohesion over individual freedoms. Many people often view freedom within the context of communal obligations and responsibilities rather than individual rights.

Example: In countries like Japan, where societal norms emphasize conformity and group consensus, individuals may prioritize the collective good over personal freedoms, such as expressing dissenting opinions in public settings.

3. Religious Perspectives : Religious beliefs and traditions often shape cultural perspectives on freedom. In some religious cultures, people may perceive freedom as the ability to live by religious teachings and moral values, while in others, it may involve the freedom to practice diverse religious beliefs without persecution.

Example: In countries with a strong Islamic influence, such as Saudi Arabia, strict interpretations of religious law constrain freedom, dictating societal norms and restricting behaviors deemed contrary to religious principles.

4. Indigenous Perspectives : Indigenous cultures often have unique perspectives on freedom rooted in their spiritual connections to the land and community. People may understand freedom as the autonomy of indigenous peoples to govern their affairs and preserve their cultural heritage.

Example: Indigenous communities in countries like Canada and Australia have advocated for land rights and self-determination to protect their cultural freedoms and ensure the survival of their traditional ways of life.

4. Postcolonial Perspectives : In postcolonial societies, historical struggles for independence and decolonization may influence cultural perspectives on freedom. Many people often view freedom as reclaiming cultural identity and asserting national sovereignty.

Example: In countries like India and Kenya, which gained independence from colonial rule in the mid-20th century, people celebrate freedom as the culmination of a long and arduous struggle for self-rule and cultural liberation.

Freedom and Responsibility

• Interdependence of Freedom and Responsibility : Freedom and responsibility are intertwined concepts that necessitate a delicate balance. While freedom grants individuals the liberty to act according to their own will, it also entails accountability for the consequences of their actions. Responsible freedom exercise acknowledges the impact of one’s choices on oneself and others.
• Social Contract Theory : Social contract theorists like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Locke, and Thomas Hobbes maintained that people willingly give up some freedoms to the government in return for the government defending their rights and liberties. In this social contract, citizens have the freedom to pursue their interests and the responsibility to abide by society’s laws and norms.
• Limits to Freedom : Ethical, legal, and moral boundaries often constrain absolute freedom. Freedom must not infringe upon the rights and freedoms of others or harm society as a whole. Therefore, responsible freedom involves recognizing and respecting one’s actions’ limits.
• Personal Agency and Autonomy : Responsible freedom requires individuals to exercise agency and autonomy in making choices that align with their values and principles. It entails owning one’s decisions and accepting the positive or negative consequences.
• Ethical Considerations : Ethical principles guide responsible behavior in the exercise of freedom. Individuals are called upon to consider the ethical implications of their actions and strive to adhere to moral values such as fairness, integrity , and compassion.
• Promotion of Common Good : Responsible freedom entails a commitment to the common good and the well-being of society. Individuals are responsible for contributing positively to their communities’ welfare and upholding justice, equality, and solidarity principles.
• Democratic Participation : In democratic countries, responsible freedom entails taking an active role in the community and the political process. Citizens can voice their thoughts, support reforms, and participate in decision-making. Still, they are responsible for engaging in constructive dialogue, respecting diverse perspectives, and upholding democratic values.
• Environmental Stewardship : Responsible freedom extends to the stewardship of the environment and natural resources. Individuals are responsible for preserving and protecting the environment for future generations, minimizing ecological harm, and promoting sustainable practices.
• Education and Empowerment : Empowering individuals with knowledge, skills, and resources is essential for exercising responsible freedom. Education is crucial in cultivating critical thinking, ethical reasoning, and civic awareness, enabling individuals to make informed choices and fulfill their responsibilities as active members of society.

Cultivating Freedom in Life

• Self-awareness : Start by understanding yourself—your values, beliefs, desires, and fears. Self-awareness lays the foundation for making conscious choices that align with your authentic self.
• Define Your Priorities : Make a list of your top priorities in life . Determine your objectives, desires, and areas of desire for independence, whether in your relationships, profession, personal development, or artistic expression.
• Embrace Growth Mindset : Develop a growth attitude that welcomes obstacles and views failures as chances for improvement. Cultivate resilience and adaptability to overcome obstacles on your journey towards greater freedom.
• Set Boundaries : Set up sensible boundaries in your commitments and relationships. Learn to say no to things that don’t align with your values or bring you joy, and prioritize activities and relationships that nurture your sense of freedom and well-being.
• Practice Mindfulness : Develop techniques like yoga, meditation, or journaling to develop inner serenity and present-moment awareness. Mindfulness helps you detach from negative thoughts and external pressures, allowing you to experience greater mental and emotional freedom.
• Take Ownership of Your Choices : Recognize that you can choose how you respond to life’s circumstances. Take ownership of your decisions and their consequences, and refrain from blaming external factors for your circumstances.
• Seek Knowledge and Understanding : Educate yourself about the world around you and seek to understand different perspectives and experiences. Knowledge is empowering and broadens your understanding of the complexities of freedom in society.
• Challenge Limiting Beliefs : Determine and confront your limiting beliefs to help you completely embrace your freedom. Replace negative self-talk with empowering affirmations and beliefs that support your growth and liberation.
• Cultivate Gratitude : Cultivate gratitude for the freedoms you already enjoy—the freedom to express yourself, pursue your passions, or make choices that align with your values. Gratitude fosters a sense of abundance and contentment, enhancing your overall sense of freedom and fulfillment.
• Connect with Like-minded Individuals : Surround yourself with people who share your ideals and goals for freedom and who will support and encourage you. Build a community of friends, mentors, and allies who inspire and uplift you on your journey toward greater liberation.
• Take Action : Finally, act intentionally to cultivate freedom in all areas of your life. Whether you advocate for social justice, pursue your passions, or embrace new experiences, take proactive steps to honor your inherent freedom and autonomy.

The Limits of Freedom

• Harm Principle : Freedom may be limited when it harms others. Actions that infringe upon the rights, safety, or well-being of others may justify restrictions on individual freedoms to prevent damage and maintain social order.
• Legal and Moral Constraints : Legal and moral frameworks establish boundaries on freedom to uphold justice, fairness, and the common good. Laws and ethical principles define acceptable behaviors and limit freedoms to prevent exploitation, discrimination, and injustice.
• Social Contracts : Social contracts and agreements that govern communal living constrain freedom. Individuals voluntarily relinquish certain freedoms to live harmoniously within society and abide by shared norms, values, and rules that promote cooperation and mutual respect.
• Public Safety and Security : Authorities may curtail freedom in the interest of public safety and security. Measures such as surveillance, law enforcement, and emergency powers may restrict individual liberties to protect against threats such as crime, terrorism, and public health crises.
• Protecting Vulnerable Populations : Society may restrict freedom to safeguard vulnerable groups, including children, the elderly, and those with disabilities. Restrictions on certain freedoms, such as parental rights or access to sensitive information, aim to safeguard the well-being and rights of those unable to exercise autonomy fully.
• Cultural and Religious Values : Cultural norms and beliefs may limit individual freedoms to preserve tradition, uphold moral standards, and maintain social cohesion. Practices that deviate from cultural or religious norms may face social stigma or legal repercussions, restricting individual autonomy.
• Environmental Considerations : Restricting freedom to preserve the environment and natural resources could be essential for the benefit of present and future generations. Regulations and policies limit activities that degrade ecosystems, contribute to climate change, or harm biodiversity to ensure environmental sustainability and preserve the planet’s health.
• Economic Inequality : Economic disparities can limit individual freedoms by restricting access to resources, opportunities, and necessities. Socio-economic inequality undermines equality of opportunity and hinders individuals’ ability to exercise their freedoms and pursue their aspirations fully.

Case Studies: Fights Fought for Freedom

1. american civil rights movement (1950s-1960s).

• Background: African Americans faced systemic racial discrimination, segregation, and disenfranchisement in the United States.
• Key Figures: Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, Malcolm X.
• Strategies: Nonviolent protests, boycotts, sit-ins, and marches aimed at challenging segregation laws and demanding equal rights and opportunities.
• Achievements: The 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act forbade discriminatory practices and segregation while defending the right to vote for African Americans.
• Impact: Catalyzed significant social and legal changes, inspiring movements for equality worldwide and laying the groundwork for future civil rights struggles.

2. Indian Independence Movement (1915-1947)

• Background: India was under British colonial rule, facing exploitation, economic hardship, and political suppression.
• Key Figures: Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Subhas Chandra Bose.
• Strategies: Nonviolent resistance, civil disobedience, and mass mobilization campaigns aimed at achieving independence from British rule.
• Achievements: On August 15, 1947, British India peacefully divided into Pakistan and India, and the nation achieved freedom from British colonial rule.
• Impact: Inspired anti-colonial movements worldwide, influenced civil rights and liberation struggles in other countries, and laid the foundation for democratic governance in independent India.

3. South African Anti-Apartheid Movement (1948-1994)

• Background: In South Africa, institutionalized racial segregation, known as apartheid, characterized the enforcement of discrimination and oppression against non-white South Africans.
• Key Figures: Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu, Steve Biko.
• Strategies: Nonviolent protests, boycotts, strikes, and international advocacy campaigns aimed at ending apartheid and achieving racial equality and justice.
• Achievements: Abolition of apartheid laws, releasing political prisoners, and establishing a democratic, multiracial government through the first fully democratic elections in 1994.
• Impact: Transformed South African society, symbolizing the triumph of justice over oppression, and inspired global movements against racism, apartheid, and injustice.

4. Women’s Suffrage Movement (19th-20th centuries)

• Background: Women were denied the right to vote and faced legal, social, and economic inequalities in many countries worldwide.
• Key Figures: Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Emmeline Pankhurst.
• Strategies: Suffragists employed various tactics, including lobbying, marches, hunger strikes, and civil disobedience, to demand voting rights and gender equality.
• Achievements: Gradual extension of suffrage rights to women in various countries, culminating in landmark victories such as the 19th Amendment in the United States (1920) and the Representation of the People Act in the United Kingdom (1918, for women over 30; 1928, for women over 21).
• Impact: Expanded political participation and representation for women, advanced gender equality , and laid the groundwork for subsequent feminist movements and global struggles for women’s rights.

In the grand stage of human existence, freedom takes the spotlight as the protagonist and plot twist. From the ancient philosophers pondering its essence to modern-day activists fighting for its preservation, freedom dances through the epochs, weaving its way into the very fabric of society. As we end our journey, let us never forget that freedom is more than simply a term. It is the rhythm of humanity’s hopes and dreams. So, let’s cherish it like a cherished friend, nurture it like a delicate bloom, and defend it like a mighty fortress. In the whimsical theater of life, freedom’s encore promises boundless possibilities, where every soul finds its stage and script.

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Table of contents

Use our free Readability checker

It is hard to find an assignment duller than writing an essay. A freedom essay was my last task that I had performed thanks to lots of online sources and examples given on the Internet. How did I cope with it? I can share my plan of actions with you and I hope it will help to save your time and efforts. When I was a child there was a movie called “Braveheart”. Maybe you haven’t heard of it but people around me adored that cool epic war film with Mel Gibson . There was an episode when during horrible tortures Mel screamed “Freedom!” I thought that he had gone out of his mind. What was the point of being free and fighting for rights when you wouldn’t have a chance to live? When I got the task I decided to watch the whole movie and finally understood that our freedom really matters. That’s why firstly I started to look for the definition of the word “freedom”. I think that the primary thing is to find out what your topic means because if you don’t understand the meaning of the “freedom” concept, you’d hardly succeed. So, freedom is a state of mind, it is a right to make a choice, to be yourself. It depends on many things - the epoch and the culture. I’ve chosen several definitions of the word “freedom”– the philosophical, the psychological and the juridical. I considered my essay just a story. It simplifies the task. I imagined that I had to tell a story, that my assignment wasn’t retelling the collected information. It should be a story on the topic “Freedom”.  

Don’t Forget About Boring Rules Which Steal Your Freedom

I wondered why a student hates academic writing. When I had written my first essay I realized why people hate coping with it. My personal experience showed that I didn’t like to write essays because of the following reasons:

• It’s hard to concentrate on the topic when you don’t like or even don’t understand it. Firstly, my tutor didn’t allow me to choose the theme to discuss and I had to squeeze ideas from nowhere.
• Tutors ask to write about the things THEY want. That’s a horrible mistake because a person has no chance to choose and get creative. There is no freedom.
• I tried to get an “A” instead of writing something really qualitative and interesting.
• The topic wasn’t catchy and I wanted to get rid of it as soon as possible.
• I wanted to post my pictures on Instagram more than to deal with the paper.
• I HAD to follow someone’s rules. Format, style, number of pages and words and a great number of other things irritate greatly.

I decided to find the right method of approach. I think that when a person takes a task as something pleasant, not just a duty, it will be much easier to cope with it.

Helpful Tips on Writing a Successful Freedom Essay

I decided to work out my rules which would help to write freely and not fear the task. Here they are! Think that it’s not an essay - just a blog story on freedom. I feel good when posting something. I share my ideas and get rid of the pressure. People love blog stories about freedom. So, imagine that you just develop your website.  

• Love what you do. Writing about freedom may be funny and bring much pleasure. Find the idea and highlight it the way you want.
• Your opinion matters much. You are not to agree with everyone. Rebel and be original. If something about the topic “freedom” surprises you, it can surprise everyone.
• Don’t limit yourself. I never depend on one source and don’t stick to one point. First, I investigate the topic and read the FAQ which concerns my essay to get different points of view. I never force myself to write at least something. I take a rest when I need it and write what I love because that’s MY essay.
• Quote and respect somebody’s idea. And be sure that you know how to quote a quote . Tutors appreciate when students sound logical and clever. Quotes are not always good. It’s better to get ideas and rewrite them by adding your own opinion. “When I do something I do it for my country and don’t wait for the appraisal.” Sounds familiar? Yes! I just rewrote the idea taken from Kennedy’s speech. That’s how freedom quotes should be paraphrased.
• Start with theme essay outline . Continue writing the body and then write the intro and the conclusion. I write the body of my freedom essay, investigate and improve it. I see the strongest point and present it in the intro and highlight it in my freedom essay conclusion. Once I tried to begin with the introduction soon found out that my essay had stronger ideas and, as a result, I had to delete it and write the new one.
• Your writing is your freedom - enjoy it. I don’t like to measure myself. If I have something to say right now, I write it. It can be a single sentence or a paragraph. Later I insert it into my essay. I don’t always have time to finish the paper at once. I can write it for many days. One day I feel great and creative and the other day I feel terrible and don’t touch the keyboard. Inspiration is essential.
• Don’t deal with taboo issues. Clichés and too complicated language spoil the paper. One more thing to remember is avoiding plagiarism. Once a friend of mine had copied a passage from the work and his paper was banned. I am unique, you are unique, and the freedom essay must be unique as well.
• Learn the topic properly. It’s important to find the topic captivating for the society and for you. Freedom is not a limited topic and there are a number of variations.

Below are some topics offered by our creative title generator for essay :

• Freedom of conscience
• Freedom of worship
• Freedom in choosing
• Freedom of action
• Freedom of speech
• Freedom of assembly
• Free people.

Now you can see that freedom can be different. Freedom is a part of the human life and you can describe it in different ways.

Freedom of Speech Essay Sample

It’s not easy to write a freedom of speech essay because freedom of speech doesn’t exist. Freedom is an illusion and our politicians try to serve freedom as a main course. People pay much attention to each word being afraid that social networks will ban their “freedom” paper. Every online website must keep within laws that our government creates. Why do people speak of freedom of the press and other freedom issues?

First of all, it’s necessary to find out what the word “freedom” means. According to the thesaurus, freedom is the power or right to act, think, and speak the way one wants. Its synonym is the word “liberty” that deals with “independence” and “sovereignty”. Freedom of speech is the ability to express ideas, beliefs, complaints, and grudges freely. The government mustn’t punish people who said something wrong or present information without supporting it with facts. Do we really have such freedom? The problem is that freedom of speech doesn’t exist alone and cannot be limitless. If you lie, you deprive a person of the right to live normally. If you publish the harsh truth, you can harm someone innocent and spoil somebody’s freedom. Do you really think that you read and hear 100% verified news on TV, radio, social networks, and printed sources? There is always someone behind it. The team of editors corrects everything they don’t like; they can even refuse to publish the announcement at all. There are only a few bloggers who share the truth and don’t decorate it with beautiful words and nice pictures. Still, some countries try to make everything possible to let people speak without limitations and strict censorship. The first country that provided people with the freedom of speech was Ancient Greece. Everybody could express themselves and say both positive and negative issues about policy, country, and other people. The United States of America introduced the First Amendment that declared the right of Americans to discuss things openly. Though, not all types of speech freedom are protected by the law. It’s forbidden to humiliate somebody, post defamation, threat somebody, publish works that are absolutely not unique and spread the material that contains child pornography or other similar issues. Provocative publications or those which aim us to make somebody violate a law belong to the category of unprotected speeches. Freedom of speech is a part of democracy. Unfortunately, not all democratic countries let their citizens express their thoughts the way they want and need. As long as there are such countries we cannot speak about the notion of absolute freedom of speech.

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