What if the majority freely votes for tyranny?

For that reason, Zakaria favors the course taken by countries such as Singapore and even China. "On a wide range of issues, from law and order to attitudes regarding Taiwan, Japan and the United States," he writes, "the Beijing regime is less populist, nationalist, aggressive, and intolerant than its people." In the fight for liberal democracy, Zakaria maintains, the populace is its own worst enemy.

There is something distinctly patronizing in this, although scarcely more so than the tone taken by the framers of the United States Constitution, whose distrust of crowds verged on paranoia. The contrast between their intentions and the function of American government in the present day forms the second part of "The Future of Freedom," bringing home the strengths and weaknesses of Zakaria's case.

(The third part of the book, devoted to the decline and fall of Western culture, possesses all of its weaknesses and none of its strengths, merely reminding readers how ill-equipped policy wonks are to deal with the arts.)

The genius of the United States Constitution rests not on the simple matter of granting ordinary citizens voting power, Zakaria points out, but rather on the far more difficult issue of preventing a tyranny of the majority.

The latter has been achieved, according to the author, by placing limitations on democracy. Institutions from the Electoral College to the judiciary - which are, by his reckoning, "distinctly undemocratic" - have produced the miracle of a government that is both just and functional. That precarious balance is undermined in the rush for more democracy: the rise of the voter referendums and the enslavement of legislators to public-opinion polls.

Zakaria is right about the threat such mechanisms pose to good government, but wrong to assume that their alternative, the United States of the framers, was undemocratic. On the contrary, the Constitution - unlike either the Beijing government or Boris Yeltsin - always ultimately respects majority will, but, by playing one whim against another folly, ensures first that our true wishes are perfectly explicit. This is crucial, for were democracy not the prime mover, no degree of parliamentary sophistication would give the document legitimacy.

While Zakaria provides an intelligent study on the compromises necessary to reach liberal democracy, and on the perils of maintaining it, he misses the deepest insight that the framers of the Constitution have to offer: There is no liberty without democracy, for democracy is the essential heart of a free people.

• Jonathon Keats serves on the board of the National Book Critics Circle. He lives in San Francisco.

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