Every student knows that ancient Athens was the alpha and omega of classical democracy. All laws were passed by popular vote.

More to the point, the majority held absolute power over citizens individually, an authority exercised to the fullest when the assembly, that most hallowed body, decided to teach Socrates a lesson about opening his mouth too often by serving him a cup of hemlock.

"Democracy has its dark sides," argues Newsweek International editor Fareed Zakaria in "The Future of Freedom." He makes his case unexpectedly compelling by examining political debacles from the fate of the French Revolution to the state of special-interest legislation in America today.

Claiming that "there can be such a thing as too much democracy," Zakaria courageously, if ultimately unconvincingly, challenges our tendency to place so much faith in the vox populi. He questions the wisdom of favoring the rule of the majority rather than the protection of liberty in domestic and foreign policy.

Zakaria does not trace our heritage to ancient Athens but rather, provocatively, places the beginnings of our rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in 4th century Constantinople. By moving the capital of his empire from Rome to Byzantium, Constantine quite literally separated church from state, depriving either of absolute influence over the populace. Each could provide a check on the other, as happened a mere 50 years later when the Bishop of Milan punished the Emperor Theodosius for a particularly nasty act of genocide by refusing him Holy Communion.

While that hardly marked the end of politically motivated mass murder by either church or state, the escalating struggle between clergy and royalty made initial wiggle room for human rights. Moreover, neither power, besieged by the other, could ever again expect complete stability. Further fragmentation of authority - as the Roman Empire disintegrated into regional monarchies and Catholicism suffered the Protestant Reformation - brought greater liberty in the form of bargaining power for nobles and landed gentry. In England, kings were contractually restrained by Magna Carta. Government became a negotiation: rule by collaboration.

Zakaria takes this detour through world history to show that "liberty led to democracy and not the other way around." That point is important, for it allows Americans to prioritize the reforms they should encourage in their foreign policy if they're effectively to guide other nations toward liberal democracy.

Traditionally, American foreign policy has emphasized elections over constitutions, resulting in governments that are a sad parody of the United States. In the case of Russia under democratically elected Boris Yeltsin, for instance, unruly governors were summarily fired, and the chief justice was deprived of his pay for striking down a presidential decree. Certainly, there were threats to the autonomy of President Yeltsin's fledgling government: He once famously climbed atop a tank advancing on the parliament building. Yet you don't get a free country by electing a despot.

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