The Price of Freedom

What is the price of freedom? Every society, at every time, is called to deal with it to translate principles and values ​​into behaviors and institutions. Freedom starts in the heart of man, but it has often been trampled on, ignored, mutilated. To defend and affirm it, struggles, trials, sometimes even blood have been needed. Precisely for this reason, no one should take it for granted. Today we confuse it with arbitrariness, with self-affirmation at the expense of the common good, with the law of the strongest.
And yet, in our culture we find the antibodies to go against the current.

We discuss it in this issue with Agnese Pini, writer and director of the Quotidiano Nazionale, but also granddaughter of a victim of the Nazi-Fascist massacre of San Terenzo Monti, which occurred in 1944. In her testimony, the opportunity to reflect on the horror of war that can transform any man into a victim or executioner.
Always the gaze on the past guides the analysis of the historian Gianni Oliva who – at the beginning of 2025, the eightieth Anniversary of the Liberation – relaunches the importance of awareness in the defense of freedom.
Finally, the philosopher Silvano Petrosino brings everything back to the dimension of desire, with a fundamental question: "Do we really want to be free? And for whom, for what do we want to be free?"

Edited by the editorial staff
NP January 2025