The State

Fareed Zakaria's "The Future of Freedom" is manageable, thoughtful and discusses a significant chunk of the material in our coursepack. Chapter 1 is a brief survey of some of our topics.Zakaria is very smart.He is the editor of Newsweek International and hosts a TV program on current affairs(available on the web).A Newsweek coumnist once told me that he and his colleagues are trained to write prose that can be read in a dentist's office. Zakaria meets this standard even though he deals with weighty subjects.
This book raises a forgotten question:what is the difference between a liberal society and a democratic one. We will consider this question when we consider Locke and RouseauBriefly, a liberal society gives priority to free speech, freedom of the press,and an independent judiciary. A democratic society calls for the rule of the people. As we know the people don't always want free institutions. Plato argued that a domcratic society was one step towards tyranny. During the Cold war someone asked a sampling of Americans to give their opinions on the Bill of Rights in the American Constiution,without telling them its source. The majority thought it was Bolshevik text.
Zakaria argues that one of the tensions between the west and the rest of the world is that in the west we moved from liberal societies to democratic ones, whereas in the rest fo the world is moving towards democracy without first having adopted the above named institutions of liberalism. Alarming he notes that these very institutions are under attack in America.