Everyone has a different idea of freedom. Some want to be free to do what they want, any old time. For others, it’s about being free from the overbearing state. I think that’s the point. Freedom is different for everyone – to define someone else’s freedom is to trap them in your idea of who they should be.
Another way of looking at it is that we don’t know what we’ve got until it’s gone. When the first cases of Covid-19 appeared in China three years ago, nobody could have dreamed that a few months later our government would make illegal what we had assumed were untouchable freedoms – to socialise, to work and worship outside the home; even to hug.
My new book, Emergency State: How We Lost Our Freedoms in the Pandemic and Why It Matters asks the not-so-simple question: how on earth did it happen? I consider the first two extraordinary years of the pandemic through more than 100 laws which imposed lockdowns, gathering restrictions, self-isolation rules, mandatory face coverings, hotel quarantine and more. How was it that only eight of 109 laws were debated in parliament before they came into force at the moment Matt Hancock signed them? Why did so many officials and politicians break the laws they set for everyone else? Our freedoms are hard-earned – if we don’t face up to what happened during the pandemic, the next emergency could be much worse.
Here, I have chosen a mixture of books that show us what freedom is and others that tell more frightening stories of freedom being taken away.
1. The Chosen by Chaim Potok
Freedom of religion was one of the first rights to be protected by law, probably because for thousands of years we have fought and killed because of it. Potok beautifully describes the personal anguish of growing up, learning that others are different from you and trying to respect that difference while still holding fast to your values. Reuven and Danny, modern and ultra-Orthodox Jews respectively, are from different sides of the religious track – teenagers who follow the same religion but may as well be from different planets. Through their friendship they navigate their personal journeys through family, tradition and, ultimately, truth.
2. Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
The immigrant tale has often been intertwined with the story of freedom. Humans have a tendency to “other” the immigrant. The challenge for large societies is to find common ground – a broad enough idea of freedom to include everyone. As the Old Testament says: treat the stranger well as we were all, once, strangers in a strange land. Adichie tells the story of Ifemelu. As she moves from Nigeria to the US to study, Ifemelu experiences dislocation and racism, discovering that she has suddenly become a “Black person”. She becomes a successful blogger about race, and then returns to Nigeria where she is now “Americanah”, another kind of other. I also recommend Adichie’s recent Reith lecture on freedom of speech.
3. I Am Malala: The Story of the Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban by Malala Yousafzai
My 12-year-old is reading the teen edition of this book at school. He asked me last night what a suicide bomber was. The best books help us experience the world through somebody else’s eyes – and few have experienced as much as Yousafzai has in her short life. The youngest ever winner of the Nobel prize, she fought for female education and was shot in the head by the Taliban as a result. Freedom is somewhat subjective, but the point of human rights is that there are some non-negotiables – the right to education is one of them. Malala is an inspiration.
4. The Soft Vengeance of a Freedom Fighter by Albie Sachs
Albie Sachs is a lawyer and anti-apartheid activist who lost an arm and an eye when his car was blown up in 1988. He had been in enforced exile in Mozambique, but ultimately returned to his country, South Africa, after the release of Nelson Mandela. Mandela appointed him as a founding member of the South Africa constitutional court. This and Sachs’ other books beautifully interweave his personal story with that of South Africa, where he was ultimately responsible for a series of legal judgments that served as a model for international constitutional courts.
5. Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez
This book by feminist campaigner and author Criado Perez shows how freedom is often restricted in hidden ways. How can women be equal in society when it is quite literally built for men? From the size of a smartphone to the design of medication, the book exposes the gender bias built into the most basic elements of our lives. It is only by uncovering injustices that we can hope to repair them.
6. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
Who is John Galt? If you want to understand different ideas of freedom, and particularly “muscular individualism”, you can do a lot worse than read Rand’s bombastic and messy opus. There is no danger of Rand concealing her political philosophy – it is woven into the fabric of the book and in the brash symbolism of its characters: socialism and collectivism bad; individualism and free expression of talent good. You may not agree with the destination, but the ride is worth taking.
7. East West Street by Philippe Sands
After the second world war and the horrors of the Holocaust, the world experienced a too-brief moment of clarity. If we want to avoid the inevitable self-destruction of our species through hatred and war, we must reorganise our societies around the principles of human rights. Sands achieves the almost-impossible by making the development of the legal concepts of crimes against humanity and genocide read like a propulsive thriller. He achieves this by interweaving the story of the murder of his own family during the Holocaust with that of the Nuremberg trials, when the living leaders of the Nazi regime were prosecuted immediately after the war.
8. Maus by Art Spiegelman
Nothing better illustrates the importance of freedom than the story of it being gradually but inexorably ripped away. Spiegelman’s two-part masterpiece literally illustrates the story of his father’s experience in the Holocaust, from his beginnings in a comfortable and assimilated Polish Jewish family through the Auschwitz murder camp and ultimately to the US, where he lives a broken existence haunted by the suicide of his wife, Art’s mother. The book uses the metaphor of Jews as mice, Nazis as cats. It is audacious and compelling, but never simplistic or melodramatic. To appreciate freedom, we must understand that no society is immune. They were just like us.
9. A Theory of Justice by John Rawls
Not quite a poolside page-turner, but Harvard professor John Rawls’s book offers, as much as any other work of 20th-century philosophy, a blueprint for a society where freedom can be enjoyed by most people, most of the time. It was probably the book that led me to human rights law, along with Rawls’s great inspiration, Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Rawls’s grand project is designing a society where liberty and equality can be achieved – and he came closer than many.
10. The Snail and the Whale by Julia Donaldson, illustrated by Axel Scheffler
Some books make you feel freedom. I challenge anyone to read Julia Donaldson’s wonderful book aloud to a child without being, at some point, transported along with the “tiny snail with the itchy foot” who hitches a ride with a humpback whale. “She gazed at the sky, the sea, the land. The waves and the caves and the golden sand. She gazed, amazed by it all. And she said to the whale, “I feel so small.” It may make us feel small, but sometimes we need to appreciate the vast freedom our world can offer us.
• Adam Wagner is a barrister and the author of Emergency State: How We Lost Our Freedoms in the Pandemic and Why It Matters, published by Vintage. To help the Guardian and Observer, order your copy from guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
