In discussions of Western Civilization and the distinctive contribution of America to it, many commentators have concentrated on democracy. Although there were many democracies before us, dating back to Athenian democracy and experiments in the Netherlands and Switzerland, the American democracy, founded on the ringing words of the Declaration of Independence and the success of our Constitutional tradition, has become the reference point for the democratization of most of the developed world, and a good part of the less developed world.

Freedom is a much vaguer and at the same time richer concept. It encompasses personal freedoms. Although many personal freedoms are mentioned in the Bill of Rights, the list of personal freedoms ranges far more widely, from those emphasized by the ACLU to the NRA, and to advocates of both sides of the abortion debate. Freedom also encompasses group freedom, or the right to independence of many peoples who feel they have been unjustly placed by history into a national category to which they do not comfortably belong. Freedom in this sense also refers to the freedom of a country from interference in its affairs by another country. Thus, many Iraqis have felt after the American invasion that regardless of the achievements of the Americans in removing a tyrant, they have in the process lost their national independence. They are, in other words, no longer "free", in spite of having a chance under the new regime greater individual freedom that Saddam Hussein had given them.

The interplay between freedom and democracy was made clear to me some years ago when I created the Comparative Survey of Freedom. (Created in 1972 in Seattle, the Survey was later published for several years as an annual book under the aegis of Freedom House. Since 1989 Freedom House has continued the Survey under somewhat different guidelines.) It was conceived as a survey of freedom in terms of political rights and civil liberties. The Survey has been understood, at least since 1989 as a survey of democracy. However, this understanding tends to downplay the importance of independence, as well as that of individual as opposed to collective rights. (For example, Milton Friedman and libertarians see "majority rights" as incompatible with many freedom in many respects.

While considering the Survey I also became aware that there was much more to a society than the extent of its democracy or its freedoms. Many of the most creative societies in history suffered from a lack of what we would call democracy, as well as from the lack of many freedoms, although surely not all. We often consider Ancient Greek civilization to be one of the earliest examples of democracy. Yet even if we restrict our gaze to the life of free men, much of the time the creative Greeks enjoyed little if any democracy. Aristotle, for example, produced his studies under the government as much of the Macedonian kings as Athenian democrats. In the modern world, we look back to Elizabethan England, not democratic and in many ways hardly free. Much later, Eighteenth century France was the center of the civilized world, a position it tended to lose as the world democratized. Vienna under the Habsburgs was a center of cultural development but by no means of democratic development. In Asia, Singapore is often thought of as a leader in Southeast Asia, but not a leader in democracy or freedom.

The only conclusion one can draw is that there is at least another dimension of societal goodness, one that we have labeled "the good society". We will be concerned in many cases with the ways in which democracy and freedom can interfere with "goodness", at least as some would define the term. To say this, is to succumb perhaps to European criticisms of the United States, for they see in the United States a society in which the barbarism of the majority have been allowed free sway through the operation of extreme individualism, sometimes expressed through democratic forms and sometimes expressed in opposition to such forms.

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