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The new book by Jiří Přibáň contains his thematically organized essays, published over the last decade. One of the essays gives its title to the whole collection. A bet on freedom can be understood as putting at stake everything we care about, including our lives. When betting, one can never take everything into consideration in advance, and despite plans and strategies, it is subject to randomness.

This randomness and its function in modern society are also discussed in the book. Paradoxically, the more modern man becomes aware of this basic social experience, the more he tries to set fixed points in society that he marks as permanent and unchanging values. Přibáň criticizes moral fundamentalism, which ignites a passion resulting in political violence and social destruction. Yet he rejects moral relativism or cynicism and contrasts moral absolutism with the possibility of living an ethical life, which is something that puts our existence at stake, but at the same time gives it meaning. He sees ethics as a defense against any kind of absolutism or totalitarianism to which moralists tempt us.

The author revisits the Czech authors who have deeply influenced his thinking and writing, i.e., Kundera, Bělohradský, Havel, Pithart, and Gruša. In other essays he discusses European developments in the last decade up to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, as well as more general topics, including how contemporary society envisions politics and the individual constitutional and political institutions.

The concluding sections deal with the relationship between ethics and morality and law and politics. Přibáň critically analyses the rise of moral fundamentalism in various contemporary political and ideological movements and stresses the importance of freedoms in our pluralistic world, where irreconcilable values are constantly being re-evaluated. He indirectly draws on Čapek’s pragmatism in wanting to replace the imaginary factories for the absolute with ecological and renewable resources of humanity. As the author says in the concluding essay, he is willing to bet not only his freedom but also his own life on this ethical task. In his opinion, such a bet is, after all, our only earthly certainty.