Review
Author: Lea Ypi
Reviewed by: Sam Chauncey
Issue: September 2023
Free is a curiously hard book to review, for it asks questions of the reader which are complex and difficult. The author, Lea Ypi is a professor of political theory in the London School of Economics. She was born in Albania when it was under the Soviet empire and then saw Albania change with the fall of the Berlin wall. The first half of the book is about her life, her family and her country under the rule of the Peoples Socialist Republic in Albania and the second half is about her life, her family and her country under an attempt at democracy and, later, in civil war. Ypi is "protected" in these periods by caring parents and, most significantly in her thinking, by her grandmother Nini. Often, as I read the book, I found myself asking the questions "Am I free?" "What is freedom?". I have two former students who now are back in their homeland, China, and know both the U.S. and their country well - and we talk about who is really free. We now face in this country a growing political movement which seems to have a definition of freedom that is quite different than the one I think I have lived with in the first 88 years of my life! Ypi has been very successful in presenting the questions she thought about in each stage of her life. I think it is fair to say she could "think freely" (as opposed to "acting freely) and she had good tutors in Nini and her parents. She seems to have been intellectually very curious as a youngster and as well as in later periods in her life. We talk a lot today about "democracy" and we have no common definition about what that means. Ypi takes us into what may be a more important world of questioning, what freedom really is to each person. I don't think it "gives away" anything if I quote the last paragraph of the book: My world is as far from freedom as the one my parents tried to escape. Both fall far short of that ideal. But their failures took distinctive forms, and without being able to understand them, we will remain divided. I wrote my story to explain, to reconcile, and to continue the struggle. This book has certainly caused me to struggle in trying to answer the question: "Am I free?"