"Freedom has no history"
About this Quote
“Freedom has no history” is the kind of clean provocation writers love because it sounds like a paradox and behaves like a dare. Cohen isn’t denying that emancipations, revolutions, civil rights campaigns, and decolonization struggles happened. He’s needling a different target: the way “freedom” gets treated as a stable, inheritable object with a neat origin story, like a national heirloom you can polish and display.
The intent is to strip the word of its comforting pedigree. If freedom has “no history,” it can’t be secured by nostalgia or guaranteed by precedent. It’s not something you point to in the past to prove you deserve it in the present. That’s the subtext: people routinely outsource freedom to mythology - founding documents, heroic ancestors, a golden age - then act shocked when today’s institutions don’t automatically reproduce yesterday’s ideals.
The line also smuggles in a harder claim: freedom isn’t a cumulative achievement so much as a recurring practice. It exists only when it’s exercised, protected, and renegotiated; once it fossilizes into ceremony, it turns into something else - “order,” “tradition,” “security” - words that often arrive with enforcement attached. In that sense, history is exactly what freedom refuses: a settled narrative with winners, lessons, and closure.
Context matters because Cohen, as a contemporary writer, is speaking into a culture that weaponizes “freedom” as branding. The phrase punctures that marketing. It suggests freedom isn’t a certificate of identity; it’s a live wire. And live wires don’t belong in museums.
The intent is to strip the word of its comforting pedigree. If freedom has “no history,” it can’t be secured by nostalgia or guaranteed by precedent. It’s not something you point to in the past to prove you deserve it in the present. That’s the subtext: people routinely outsource freedom to mythology - founding documents, heroic ancestors, a golden age - then act shocked when today’s institutions don’t automatically reproduce yesterday’s ideals.
The line also smuggles in a harder claim: freedom isn’t a cumulative achievement so much as a recurring practice. It exists only when it’s exercised, protected, and renegotiated; once it fossilizes into ceremony, it turns into something else - “order,” “tradition,” “security” - words that often arrive with enforcement attached. In that sense, history is exactly what freedom refuses: a settled narrative with winners, lessons, and closure.
Context matters because Cohen, as a contemporary writer, is speaking into a culture that weaponizes “freedom” as branding. The phrase punctures that marketing. It suggests freedom isn’t a certificate of identity; it’s a live wire. And live wires don’t belong in museums.
Quote Details
| Topic | Freedom |
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