Freedom, we all know the word and have our own perception of what freedom means to us and perhaps also to others. But did you ever wonder how the concept of freedom was perceived and how the meaning of freedom changed over the last 25 centuries in Europe and the United States? For centuries people in the West identified freedom not with being left alone by the state but with the ability to exercise control over the way in which they were governed. They had what might best be described as a democratic conception of liberty. The dominant conception of freedom today is a deliberate and enormous rupture with those ideas. Understanding the long history of thinking about freedom shows how recent our current perspective actually is. In this Science café we explore the history and current state of the concept freedom. Our speaker, Prof. Annelien De Dijn, will explain how the very nature of freedom can be interpreted in different ways by different people at different times. She will do so by providing a historic perspective and explaining the past and current (mis)usage of freedom for ideological, or individual rather than collective, purposes.

Prof. Annelien De Dijn is professor of Modern Political History and chair of the Political History Department at Utrecht University. Her research focuses on the history of political thought in Europe and in the United States from 1700 to the present day. Prof. De Dijn gained her PhD from the KU Leuven (Belgium) and worked as a postdoctoral fellow in the U.S.A. at Columbia University, University of California, Berkeley and the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study. She then moved to The Netherlands and was assistant professor at the University of Amsterdam and in 2018 she became Professor of Modern Political History at Utrecht University.

On the band

Downtime is a trio born from the Jazz in Wageningen jam sessions that loves to fuse different music styles. A jazz standard with a hiphop groove? Or a Drum and bass beat with jazz chords? Anything is possible with Downtime!

Keys: Eric de Zeeuw

Bass: Dani Nooijen

Drums: Thijmen van loon