What if it doesn't always pay off to defend freedom? What if the defense of freedom leads to a perfidious justification of oppression and domination? And what if a fatalistic attitude is not only reasonable but the only conceivable prerequisite for true freedom? Wouldn't that be a strange thought? Against-Freedom is based on a trivial yet surprisingly rare observation: the great thinkers of freedom (such as Descartes, Kant, Hegel, and Freud) were also defenders of providence. Against-Freedom discusses, in a reconstruction of the history of modern rationalist philosophy (and its prehistory with Martin Luther), the extent to which the confrontation with fate, and thus fatalism, serves as an ideological critique against the dominant ideologies of choice and freedom.