Four Fragments on Politics

...Now it is fashionable in certain circles to deprecate this understanding of democracy as more formal than real...

...To prevent or suppress these and other "intolerable" things, societies impose a variety of moral and legal sanctions...

...It is surely an act of moral arrogance—for it is to claim objective truth for one's subjective judgment while denying that claim to others—to profess that one knows better than the people what the people want, or ought to want, on the ground that the people have been conditioned (manipulated...

...with money he may be able to travel but in the face of a prohibitive law not free to do so...

...labor gains the right of collective bargaining, an improvement in wages and working conditions, even an edge into managerial prerogatives...

...579 DAVID SPITZ They accept it as given by the order of things...

...Here is the vital rub...

...This too is a senseless question, for there are degrees of unity and many kinds of diversity, some perhaps that are destructive of any kind of unity—I am thinking here of what is commonly defined as criminal conduct, e.g., theft and rape and murder...

...for, it is often believed, what is, is fated or a matter of God's will, and there is salvation only in heaven...

...To know whether a government merits dis575 DAVID SPITZ missal, we need to know what ineffectual or evil things it has done, or what worthy things it has failed to do...

...Historically, men have generally identified democracy with the notion that the people shall rule—either directly or through representatives chosen and removable by them...

...To do what you want may be to do what is good...

...And we can know this, we can say that a particular state is more or less democratic, only because of the principle, not in spite of it...

...What a society is, is never what it was fully intended to be, or even what people may take it to be...

...There is little correspondence between a man's dreams and his capacities, between his estimate of himself and that held of him by others, and consequently between his expectations and his rewards...

...The people of Ghana did not thereby become free men and women...

...Hence freedom in the real world is never a totality...

...they are not identical...

...578 FOUR FRAGMENTS ON POLITICS Without the power of money, a man may be free to travel but unable to do so...

...From which it follows that liberty and equality are always in tension...

...In democratic states both the fact and the desirability of limited attainments are institutionalized into a pragmatic principle: the principle of peaceful and continuing partial revolution...

...Subjectively, men may not feel the burdens of external restraints...

...Of Freedom IN DISCUSSIONS OF FREEDOM certain elementary distinctions continue to be blunted or ignored...

...But what is peculiar or distinctive to man is in part what is peculiar or distinctive to all men...

...For these and other reasons, freedom is perhaps the most paradoxical and protean of political terms and the most persistently difficult of all political problems...

...Ghana became a free nation when it threw off the fetters of Great Britain...

...577 DAVID SPITZ So I end where I began: that what is crucial to the principle of democracy is not the practices of particular states, nor the triumph of particular views, but the presence of a constitutionally sanctioned opposition...

...This quality, whatever it might be, must exist in all men...

...instead, it provides a goal toward which men should strive to move that reality as well as a standard by which that reality is to be judged...

...What it overlooks, further, is the difficulty of attributing specific grievances to the character of a regime...

...or the U.S.S.R., for example, is not a matter of how many freedoms exist in the one as compared to the other but a matter of which freedoms are enjoyed in the one or denied in the other...

...it is what sets him apart from other beings or things...

...The ways in which people organize and exercise this twofold choice of selection and dismissal vary considerably from one democratic state to another...

...He is in pursuit of his self, but he does not know what that self is and is consequently unlikely to recognize it should it appear...

...result...

...Now the essence of a man is that which is peculiar or distinctive to him...

...Such knowledge can only be forthcoming if the channels of political criticism are unrestrained...

...Yet sensitive men aware of these things have more often than not either themselves refused to go to the barricades or found themselves unable to mobilize the masses in support of such an enterprise...

...Thus power lends effectiveness to choice but does not itself constitute the freedom to choose...

...Without the power of knowledge, a man may be free to choose among consumer goods or styles of life but unable to choose wisely...

...Democracy does not stipulate that all opposition parties must some day win, or even that substantial support be given to them...

...The issue is never, freedom or slavery...

...but the claim is a specious one because they mean by responsibility an accounting not to the people but to what they believe to be a "higher" wisdom, which invariably turns out to be a quality of judgment mysteriously incorporated only in themselves...

...it is a way of determining who shall govern, and in determining who shall govern it determines too, though broadly, the policies that the government shall then pursue...

...One is the stagnation attendant on quietude...

...A judgment concerning freedom in the U.S...

...when the ruling class (or classes) is so stupid or ineffectual as no longer to be able to maintain order and impose its will...

...The conflicts that bedevil the self are as nothing compared to those that bedevil a society...

...Freedoms are always specific, and specific freedoms, if they are to be made real, always require concomitant restraints...

...There is an essence prior to and independent of existence...

...Some freedoms are approved and maintained...

...As an ideal, it stipulates what is required for a state to be termed democratic...

...What counts is government by the people...

...Always rulers have been insufficiently responsive to justifiable demands for social change...

...Feeling free is not being free...

...But his needs are insatiable, he often mistakes his needs for his desires, and in any case his actual attainments are always less than 582 FOUR FRAGMENTS ON POLITICS what is required by his needs or his desires...

...and the fact that adults regularly bewail the recurrent manifestations of juvenile delinquency suggests that it is not likely to be accorded governing status in our family life and schools...

...Men whose estimate of themselves and of their ideas exceeds that held by others often tend to impute stupidity or malevolence to their detractors, or to the system which has produced and now sustains them...

...the fragmentation of revolutionary movements and their often ineffective leadership...

...If freedoms of speech, of the press, of political opposition are deemed crucial, then lesser freedoms, no matter how numerous, are insufficient to tip the balance...

...To say, moreover, that a state is democratic only if it yields the "right" results is to say that one is willing to play the game only on condition that he wins...

...Always life has been brutish and in some sense absurd...

...More than that, it invites us to look at those arrangements with a jaundiced eye, to pay due regard to the inequalities that militate against the principle of majority rule and to the vast difference that separates the people who formally participate in elections from those who actually exercise crucial decision-making powers...

...In doing so it institutionalizes what may well be the most extreme and revolutionary of political conceptions: the simple if paradoxical idea that in a democracy the people have a right to fire their boss...

...and in the crudity of his monolithic rage he turns into a weapon of destruction...

...The pressures and pulls, the jostlings among men and groups, the systematic demands and accidental occurrences, the internal maneuverings and external impositions, all contribute to the ever-continuing modification of social structures and processes and modes of behavior...

...In reality, or so it is said, oppositions in the so-called democratic states are not to be taken seriously, for they do not differ significantly, in principles or behavior, from the governing party they allegedly oppose...

...A society that does not recognize and seek to satisfy both passions—the passion for equality, or the sense of the common, and the passion for liberty, or the sense of the different—is a society that can but aggravate this tension...

...then the conflict, which is always with us anyway, as it takes the form of competing ideas and strivings for power, is also needed to remedy existing wrongs and to point the way to progressive change...

...It is always a question of which freedom for whom, under what circumstances, in what measure, and for what time...

...and the knowledge that unanticipated consequences will always plague and probably frustrate the best-laid and well-intentioned plans...

...And for each freedom that is assured, a restraint is required to prevent interference with its exercise by others...

...It provides only that those views, along with others, shall have the opportunity to be heard...

...For there is neither fixed system nor permanent balance...

...While it is hoped (and by some believed) that this will prove to be government for the people, at any given historical moment it may or may not prove to be so...

...Even in the silence of the law men and women are not completely free, for almost always social powers—of the corporation, the labor union, the church, the family, the schools, of other individuals and groups— impose a multitude of restraints...

...However, to speak of society's tyrannies is to presuppose a nature that is frustrated or denied, which implies that we do indeed have a conception of man as distinct from and endangered by society...

...Hence the principle of democracy is not vitiated by the shortcomings of so-called democratic states...

...From the civilized world of moral discourse we thus move into the jungle, where beasts, not men, walk the surface of the earth...

...but always (and necessarily) an actual state is in some respects more and in other respects less democratic than the principle stipulates...

...My freedom to enter a church of my choosing entails a restraint on those who would prevent me from worshipping there...

...This is what is meant by making governments responsible...

...Nor can reason overcome the terrible truth to which Kant, among others, alerted us—that out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made...

...It amounts to little more than a cliche: where a grievance (or set of grievances) can be corrected by peaceful means, it is wrong to call for revolutionary action...

...hence the differences among men—of wisdom or talent or virtue or strength or beauty—are from this standpoint less consequential than what is common to them all...

...If to all these considerations we add: the terrible power of modern governments, against whose advanced technology and sophisticated weaponry revolutionary movements are unlikely to prevail, whatever current advocates of revolution say to the contrary...

...others are disapproved and suppressed...

...It demands only that opposition parties, whatever their persuasion, be free to organize and to appeal for electoral favor...

...Men and societies may espouse the principle of freedom but they distrust and even fear it, for freedom enables men to engage in distasteful or loathsome acts, such as picking one's teeth in public, or wearing inappropriate dress, or giving vent to improper thoughts, or committing theft or murder or rape, or befriending or marrying the "wrong" person...

...to want the "wrong" things...

...But can a society achieve unity through diversity...

...Yet in democratic states it is the central feature of the polity...

...but in all these cases the changes are partial and specific, they do not entail a total reconstruction of the political and social order...

...and such an alternative group of men can only exist if there is a party system, if there is a lawfully recognized—a legitimate—opposition...

...Here we must part from the Greeks, who perceived in harmony an ideal attainable by reason...

...Revolutionaries customarily think and talk in terms of total change, but history is a more mundane procession of trivial spasms and moderate reforms...

...A substantial portion of the citizenry has not been successfully manipulated, whether in democratic or in totalitarian states...

...Finally, it ought never to be forgotten that revolution, even in the name of reason, is always an attack upon reason and that one of the terrible consequences of revolution is the inflammation of the passions, the governance of might rather than of right...

...And they can do so peacefully, without risk of death or major repression...

...For men are not equally wise or good or talented...

...Government by the passions, they believed, made for an unruly life...

...Reason's government of the passions, in contrast, made for that right ordering of capacities and needs that would establish a balanced and harmonious existence...

...A free nation is not necessarily a nation of free men...

...But the passion for equality may never be satisfied, for equality is a multifaceted and paradoxical concept...

...For along with those grievances have come both a real and rising standard of living and (in the democratic states of the Western world) a lessening of political oppression...

...We need, on the one hand, to satisfy the longings of men to be at one with their own kind, whether this be a family or tribe or city or nation...

...Whether those policies are wise or unwise, whether that government is constituted of "right" or "wrong" men, is a matter of the quality of the public opinion that has selected them...

...And what, indeed, are the "right" results and who is to know them...

...for surely the causes that make for revolutions have always been with us...

...Nor can we know what human nature is except as it emerges from and is expressed in and through human society...

...But it is not always the case that such a direct causal relationship can be shown...

...The tension is always there...

...Hence they press not for equality but for liberty, for the right to pursue their differences, for the right to be unequal...

...Second, and still before principle (some might say even before fear), are inertia and docility...

...then we can readily understand the disinclination or inability of most troubled men to resort to revolutionary violence...

...There were, there still are, degrading conditions of labor...

...If by equality is meant equality of opportunity, then restraints against discrimination that render such equality impossible—e.g., disadvantages imposed for reasons of race, religion, sex, education, age, and the like—must be introduced at the several points of origin...

...But this is surely a senseless question, for it presupposes that we know what human nature is, antecedent 581 DAVID SPITZ to and apart from its presence in human society, otherwise we cannot say that social institutions frustrate or promote that nature...

...There is a difference between doing what you want and doing what someone else believes you should want...

...And the appropriate remedy is not the jettisoning but the fulfillment of democracy, not the further manipulation of public opinion but its genuine enlightenment...

...the state becomes the instrument through which they can hope to achieve economic and educational and social reforms...

...What democrats mean by responsibility is a periodic accounting by those temporarily occupying the seats of power to those who put them there and over whom that power is exercised...

...If democracy, like liberty or equality, is an ideal—as it is—then it can never describe a particular reality...

...all who are not with him are against him, all are the enemy...

...Marx's great blunder was to believe that the more industrialized a society was to become, the more prone it would be to revolution— even if, as he said of England and the United States, the revolution might be a peaceful one...

...together with the governing party they are but constituent parts of the Establishment...

...If there is to be more than a specific answer to a specific question—what sorts of diversity are compatible with this or that kind of unity?—it can only be a formula that in some measure reconciles both the demands of individuality and the requirements of community...

...with knowledge he may be able to judge wisely but in the face of limited goods or a stateimposed style of life he may not be free to choose...

...And so we can never go to sleep...

...Why has this been so...

...Self-styled aristocrats often make the claim that they, and their governments, are no less and perhaps more responsible than are the governments of democratic states...

...it may also entail doing what is wrong or harmful...

...This is because the individual is himself a tortured and schizophrenic animal...

...Such an accounting, involving as it does both an attack upon and a defense of the government's uses of the powers delegated to it, reduces even the most powerful of men to the role of deputy, to tenants rather than owners of power...

...He becomes an extension of his gun, and guns know neither tolerance nor decency nor intelligence...

...The rulers cannot be held responsible to the ruled...

...Nor do they wish to be...

...There is no equilibrium, if by equilibrium we mean a system in balance...

...Apart from the authoritarian potential in government by men of right reason—for surely not all reasoning is right—two difficulties at least attend this conception of human nature and human society...

...there is always conflict and tension...

...So he never achieves tranquillity...

...and they will not be moved...

...More, it is to destroy the vital distinction between 576 FOUR FRAGMENTS ON POLITICS dictatorship and democracy, for on these terms a dictator who gives the people what they need (what he thinks they ought to want) even if they say they don't want it, would be more democratic than a so-called democratic government that gives the people what they do want even if a superior few insist they ought not to want it...

...It is never a matter of all or nothing, but always an operating system (even if a confused one) of specific liberties and concomitant restraints...

...Reason may of course help men to order their conflicting desires, even perhaps to arrange them in some sort of hierarchy of values...

...Without such a party system and without the free play of conflicting opinions, elections are a vacuous affair and a people cannot effectively and peacefully fire their boss...

...But the list of grievances, long and legitimate as it is, must not be overdrawn...

...where a grievance (or set of grievances) cannot be corrected by peaceful means, then there is no recourse but to revolution...

...Most men do not think of it as a principle appropriate, say, to the economic and religious realms of human association...

...But men who speak of essences generally mean something other than this...

...We need, on the other hand, to provide the conditions that make it possible for the individual to go his own way, to depart from the established traditions, to live differently from the rest of his folk...

...Each society writes the formula differently...

...But reason neither completely silences nor absolutely commands desires...

...Always men have suffered injustice...

...What is significant about industrial societies is that, by and large, they have provided this bit more...

...freedom even if it leads to a painful result is still freedom...

...Indeed, what would be the purpose in overthrowing democracy when the alternative is a system that would deprive them of the one effective power they have...

...Thus they say that the governing and leading opposition parties are like peas in a pod but that people don't understand this and therefore don't have a real choice...

...In this sense we may say that a society that seeks to achieve unity through diversity is more congenial to the demands of human nature than a society that strives for unity through uniformity...

...I mean by this commotion, of course, not the turbulence engineered by violence, whether spontaneous or directed, but the gentler yet easily visible agitation brought about by the normal activities of constitutionally sanctioned and articulate opposition parties...

...Of Human Nature and Society MOST COMMONLY, TO INQUIRE into the relationship between human nature and human society is to ask, What opportunities or limitations does society place on the development of man's nature...

...There is also a moral deterrent to revolutionary violence: it is not merely inhuman to kill, it is dehumanizing to resort to violence...

...But conflict has its advantages too...

...This leads to a fourth consideration: the effectiveness of partial revolutions, whether evolutionary or sudden...

...One thing more, perhaps, needs to be said...

...No society, consequently, is ever fully free...

...Of Revolutions WHAT I FIND STRANGE IN HISTORY is not that there have been so many revolutions but that there have been so few...

...This is why, despite all the many other things that political theorists have stipulated as essential to a democratic state, it is sufficient to identify it by the presence of the leader of a viable opposition speaking out against governmental policy without having to suffer the risk of punishment or reprisal...

...if indeed men and societies are somewhat deranged, as in some measure they probably are...

...the habit of law-abidingness...

...even parents might have to be denied the liberty to treat their own children differently (better...

...And in a world where repression is so much the order of the day, it is no mean achievement for a political system to leave the adherents of diverse views, whether "right" or "wrong," free to press their positions and remain unmolested as they seek popular support...

...there is only movement and disequilibrium...

...but power is a condition that makes possible the enjoyment of certain freedoms...

...In this respect the essence of a man is the idea of a human nature, which is the idea of the common, of equality...

...A free nation is one that is not subject to alien rule...

...But what is this essence, and how do we know that "it" exists...

...These and other considerations make it abundantly clear that so-called democratic states but approximate the democratic ideal...

...To the degree that they are able to achieve their limited objectives, it becomes unnecessary to overthrow the political system...

...It is passion that determines what men want...

...there would not, in fact, be a Heifetz or an Einstein...

...None writes it in such a way as to resolve the tension for all time, or indeed to resolve it completely for its own time...

...And if it be said that this is formally but not substantially correct, because the masses of the people have been conditioned to think and to desire only what their masters are willing to accept, the response is surely that Orwell's 1984 is still a utopian nightmare rather than a present reality...

...And revolutions themselves, when properly understood, are but a product of and a stage in a slower and more enduring evolutionary process...

...Historically, the answer has been some variant of the following: when there is great economic discontent (Marx) or psychological resentment (Aristotle) among the people...

...Where...

...UNDER WHAT CIRCUMSTANCES, then, is the appeal to revolution valid, or likely to carry conviction...

...Where, to take another and more general example, the grievance is located in the denial of equality, or of vital liberties, or of some conception of justice, then the case for change is conclusive...

...It is no argument against the democratic principle to show that socialist or communist or fascist or vegetarian parties are unable to command a majority...

...583...

...A paradox: freedom, which entails tolerance, is itself often intolerable...

...So crooked men fall into various points along the jagged path that runs from Left to Right, from the adventurous to the prudent, or timid, from those who press for something they call progress to those who seek to conserve the existing order of things, from those who prize diversity to those who value harmony, or even sameness...

...It reminds us (in keeping with a classical tradition) that what counts is not the method---the procedures of democracy—but the results, not how we go about attending to our arrangements but what we do with the arrangements we have...

...Clearly, freedom is one value, equality another, and they are not always compatible...

...Paramount among the reasons for this abstention from revolutionary violence I would put not principle but fear—fear of losing even the little that one may have, fear of failure and of the repressive consequences attendant upon that failure, above all fear of death...

...WHAT DEFINES DEMOCRACY is indeed its method...

...The other is that reason is more readily the servant than the master of the passions...

...Revolution, even the "success" of the revolution, destroys both the revolutionaries and the cause for which the revolution was ostensibly begun...

...A free man is one who is not subject to another's restraints...

...The tension also remains constant because social arrangements and practices are themselves but tentative and imperfect approximations of what they are meant to be...

...Every society esteems and seeks to assure the enjoyment of the "right" freedoms...

...for they were still subject, among other things, to the laws of their new (and in some respects oppressive) government...

...In short, democracy does not guarantee that the "right" views will prevail...

...Only those who believe that reason and experience are calculated to ensure the victory of error can repudiate this principled appeal to the free play of conflicting opinions...

...Apart, further, from the inconvenient fact that such equalities—of opportunity and of condition—may be mutually exclusive, or psychologically impossible to sustain, or socially undesirable, they involve not the fulfillment of liberty but its limitation...

...reason then enters to show men how to achieve their desires...

...The absence of power may render formal freedoms unreal...

...What they want is a bit more, but only of what is immediate and central to their understanding —more money, more leisure—not the distant and incomprehensible ideal of social justice...

...Freedom is not power, nor power freedom...

...when there is ready at hand and actively at work a well-organized, professional cadre of revolutionary leaders to mobilize the masses and lead them in a desired direction (Lenin) . But all this is less a matter of principle than of tactics...

...This proposition—I am tempted to call it perhaps the most important political discovery of the human mind—is not one to which men customarily subscribe...

...But men and women who subscribe to the leading opposition party believe that there are significant differences between their own and the governing party, and in any case they can if they wish—in a democratic polity —elect to support still another opposition party, even one of the extreme Right or extreme Left...

...And however much we may wish to improve the quality of that opinion, what is decisive in democratic politics (because in conformity with the egalitarian principle) is its quantity...

...So 580 FOUR FRAGMENTS ON POLITICS it is with those who must now unleash their own guns against him...

...It corrupts the user by making him a different man than he was before: consumed by passion and convinced of the rightness of his cause, he soon loses the capacity to draw distinctions...

...They mean that which is peculiar or distinctive to this man, that which sets this man apart from other men, that which renders him different, unique, specifically himself...

...rather, those states are deficient precisely because they fail to meet the requirements of the principle...

...And who can say whether the might that prevails is truly in the service of the right cause, or whether that right cause will not itself be corrupted by the new strong men who, rather than the revolutionary idealists, come to power and impose repressive policies of their own...

...Those who would marshal them into battalions consequently encounter resistance...

...but the restraints—and I must emphasize that I speak here of external, not of internal (manipulated) restraints—are nonetheless there...

...But this of course is not so: coercion even in a good cause is still coercion...

...This is not to deny the great element of validity in those terrible indictments of 18th- and 19th-century capitalism drawn by novelists like Dickens and social critics like Marx...

...If men and societies are less than perfect, as they always are...

...Violence corrupts both the user and those against whom it is employed...

...My freedom to utter displeasing ideas entails a restraint on those who would otherwise silence me...

...On its face, this is a telling indictment...

...Those states that are termed democratic, moreover, are everywhere disfigured by social and political arrangements that effectively block popular rule and by a manipulated public opinion that enables their governments to bespeak a rhetoric that is belied by their practices...

...These differences exist not merely between men but also within individual man, and just as they tear man and men apart, they ensure that human societies will always be turbulent, never secure...

...Now, to dismiss a government without suffering the serious consequences of anarchy, we need a group of men ready to step into office at the moment of dismissal...

...Moreover, social arrangements are constantly in process of change...

...But he knows that he is, that he has been, and that he is going somewhere...

...The indictment of democracy thus turns out to be an indictment of the arrangements and policies of particular states, not an indictment of the democratic principle at all...

...For without a political opposition, and the commotion it produces, no state that calls itself democratic deserves the name...

...In these respects, even if they provide a government by the people, which is questionable, they do not provide a government for the people...

...If, for example, it can be demonstrated that babies are starving because of the policies of an autocratic regime, and if it can be established that another regime will in fact reduce or eliminate this starvation, then there is a prima facie case for revolution...

...when there is no real hope or significant possibility of effective change within the system...

...Freedom is not equality...

...Every society fears and excludes some "wrong" freedoms...

...But whether or not this change requires revolution is to be determined by the tactical situation— whether, that is to say, a revolution is in fact likely to succeed and whether the consequences are likely to be less disastrous than the situation it is designed to correct...

...They have not generated revolutionary sentiments because they have, as it were, delivered the goods...

...Men at the bottom of the pyramids of power do not commonly resent their fate...

...If by equality, however, we mean equality of condition, so that men who begin unequally end equally, then restraints must be introduced to impose a uniform level (say) of attainment: a Heifetz or an Einstein will no longer enjoy a greater esteem, a greater position, a greater reward...

...than other parents treat theirs...

...He does not know who he is, where he has been, or where he is going...

...Women gain the suffrage, or the right to abort unwanted children...

...Or, if they are to be moved, it is primarily in the direction of reform, not revolution...

...So men are placid and docile and inert...

...In contemporary India, for example, infant mortality appears the consequence far more of vast population growth and social and economic backwardness than of oppressive government...

...Liberty," said a celebrated writer, "is unattainable until the passion for equality has been satisfied...

...The facts attest to an opposite truth: that the more industrialized a society becomes, the more it draws the teeth from the resentments that make for revolution...

...the slave may sing of his carefree existence even as he tills the fields of his master...

...Men without substantial power in one field, say the economic, may now exercise effective power in another, the political...

...the patriotic citizen may feel free even as he abstains from disobedience to laws...

...There was, there still is, shameful exploitation of men, women, and even children...

...Hence the individual can never be at war with society, only with its tyrannies...

...Even the welfare state is a manifestation of partial rather than of total change...

...it is what entitles him to be called human...

...Paradoxically, moreover, equality of opportunity means that men who begin equally may end unequally—a nonegalitarian (and undesired...

...Since (it is often said) good men, if they are also rational, do not wish to do wrongful or harmful things, it would seem to follow, in Orwellian fashion, that preventing them from doing what they do not really want to do and compelling them to do what they really want to do, that is, what some one wiser than they "knows" they really want to do, which is to do only what is good, is not coercion but liberation...

...Always, therefore, its realization is a matter of degree...

...Here perhaps the ancient wisdom of the Greeks applies: we need both the One and the Many...

...students and blacks erupt and effect educational and social reforms...

...In pursuit of his needs...

...they profess a commitment to liberty, equality, and justice, but they pursue irrational (unwise or immoral) policies...

...Men may feel free even when they are restrained: the poet may proclaim the freedom of his spirit even as he sits within prison walls...

...In fact, they esteem the things that set them apart from each other...

...but what is common to them all, and what entitles such states to be called democratic, is the effective realization in some form of this power of choice...

...Systems of freedom are to be defended or condemned on qualitative, not quantitative grounds...