Rethinking Freedom: Why Freedom Has Lost Its Meaning and What Can Be Done to Save It

This book examines the use and abuse of the term 'freedom'. Based on interviews with people concerning the nature of freedom, the author compares what the people he talked with said about freedom with what writers and thinkers such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Herbert Marcuse, and Iris Murdoch have to say about freedom. He concludes that the 'political' is not the answer, and that most of the people interviewed for the book and those like them would be better served by learning the political and social skills necessary to carve out small spaces of freedom in a rationalized world.

C. Fred Alford is Professor of Government at University of Maryland, College Park, USA.