Addressing reporters at the Baghdad airport last month, Deputy Secretary of State Paul Wolfowitz declared: "I'm here to understand what is needed to complete the transition to a government and society of, by and for the Iraqi people." He was echoing remarks posted on April 10 on the CNN Web site: "Our goal in Iraq is a democratic Iraq that truly respects the wishes of the people of Iraq." Though in his online comments he insisted that Iraqis should "pick their leaders freely," he added: "Our only criterion is that [the chosen leader] not be a Baathist killer."

The contradiction is not subtle. Obviously, the Iraqis aren't picking their leaders freely if the Americans have a veto power in the event the winner happens to be a Baathist killer. Is the Bush administration being insincere? Many have accused it of this, and worse. But, in fairness, Mr. Wolfowitz was expressing a conundrum that has always existed at the heart of democracy. The election of a Baathist dictator would, in one sense, be a democratic result: The people would have spoken. But it would surely be a Pyrrhic victory for democracy.

This conundrum is not simply the stuff of political theorizing. Many millions of people will be affected, in Iraq and elsewhere, by the way the world thinks about the problem. After all, now that the great socialist experiments have been discredited, democracy is the sole solution trotted out by politicians and academics alike, the answer for each and every nation, First World, Third World and anything in between. Now is democracy's moment. Thus, while the right and the left disagree passionately-even viciously-over American policy in Iraq, one listens in vain for a voice questioning whether democracy is indeed the right path for Iraq. And what do we do if a popular vote in Iraq does indeed produce a Baathist dictator, or a Shiite leader pledging a fundamentalist government? Do we continue to argue for free elections?

In The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad, Fareed Zakaria has a lot to say on this question. His book arrived in April-perfect timing, except that at that particular moment, the public was fixated on the ins and outs of battalion strength and the combat capabilities of the M-1 Abrams tank. Now that most of the fighting is over and the enormity and difficulty of the task ahead has begun to sink in, when we hear Mr. Zakaria say that "theory often bangs into reality," the words truly resonate. The book should begin to make its worth felt, both with policy types in Washington and with serious-minded general readers.

The Future of Freedom is an interesting mix of history and political philosophy. The superb first chapter, itself worth the price of admission, traces the history of human liberty from the literal separation of church and state brought about by Constantine's move from Rome to Byzantium in A.D. 324, to the peculiar geography of Europe that prevented uniform state conquest, to the various, often violent, counterbalances of power-like that between feudal lords and kings, or Catholics and Protestants, or, later, the English Parliament and English monarchy-that allowed liberty to form in the cracks. It's a story so convoluted and unlikely that it leaves a reader with a sense of bewildered wonder that the broad freedoms of Western society exist at all. Of course, any good cheer at our fortune is tempered immediately by what this story says about just how difficult it will be for states like Iraq that are now poised to attempt the transition to democracy-and for what it says about the dangers still confronting Western democracies.

It's not by chance that in a book about democracy, Mr. Zakaria begins by talking about the history of liberty. Democracy and liberty, though sometimes used interchangeably in political discussions, are imperfectly related, and it is liberty that is Mr. Zakaria's true subject. Indeed, his central contribution is to distinguish between the two concepts-which is to distinguish between process and substance.

Many people get tripped up on this point. Allan Bloom, in The Closing of the American Mind, identified a similar confusion. He was struck by the parade of tolerant students through his classes; tolerance seemed to be the preeminent American value. But as a value, tolerance (which is also more process than substance) always raises the question: tolerance of what? The dilemma became sharp, Bloom noted, in introductory anthropology classes, when students had to stretch their tolerance to embrace primitive societies whose defining feature is an implacable xenophobia.

So it is with democracy. To say that people should have the vote doesn't answer what it is they should vote for. Mr. Zakaria's point is that when we speak of democracy, what we mean is not just-or even primarily-the suffrage of the people. Rather, we mean other things: the rule of law, an independent judiciary, protection of minority and individual rights, separation of powers, autonomous civic organizations, a free market, a written constitution and more. His preferred term for this sort of system of government is constitutional liberalism.

The opportunity to vote does not guarantee democracy, and may even be counterproductive. What a state needs is to develop the institutions and habits that will enable democracy to take hold. If the vote were enough, places like Ghana, Tanzania and Kenya would be well on their way. Mr. Zakaria notes that in the 1950's and 60's, intellectuals and scholars embraced the new rulers in these states, who were holding elections and saying all the right things about the people's power-and then these fledgling democracies degenerated into disastrous dictatorships. Meanwhile, certain East Asian and Latin American regimes were criticized as reactionary. Mr. Zakaria chides, "It should surely puzzle these scholars and intellectuals that the best-consolidated democracies in Latin America and East Asia-Chile, South Korea, and Taiwan-were for a long while ruled by military juntas."

Mr. Zakaria is not necessarily advocating military juntas, but he is making the case that getting a democracy to take hold is exceedingly difficult, and that it requires stability and restraint, not to mention a sufficient gross domestic product. He warns of the dangers of zealotry in populism, while pointing out the beneficial effects of such elements of a stable society as an educated ruling class and tradition-bound civic organizations.

The danger of zealous populism leads him back to the West at the end of the book, where he identifies disturbing trends in the world's mature democracies. In passages reminiscent of Philip K. Howard's The Death of Common Sense (1995), he writes about the referendum revolution in California, and other instances of turning away from traditional authority in favor of popular voting to determine political questions. What appears unobjectionable on its face begins to sound, in his telling, very troublesome. Some of the structural elements that historically have been important to liberty's flourishing are now being altered in potentially devastating ways.

Mr. Zakaria is making an essentially anti-populist argument, and he's brave to make it. He won't escape the charge of elitism. It's easy enough to say that only vested interests of some sort could be against a vote. It will be suggested that Mr. Zakaria has an ax to grind. The irony is that the sting in that charge owes quite a lot to the destructive fetishism surrounding the idea of democracy-exactly what Mr. Zakaria is doing his best to expose.

So how should the United States proceed, now that Saddam Hussein has been deposed? The early talk of six months for an Iraqi government, or some sort of vote, has become talk of one to two years. After reading The Future of Freedom , one favors a slow transition. The economy must be on its feet, and it's important that voting not become an unthinking airing of ethnic and religious divisions. The verdict? Something like five years of coalition control-anguishing thought-before the process of democracy is put to the test.

A former editor of Foreign Affairs magazine and current editor of Newsweek International, Mr. Zakaria has appeared on numerous public-policy television and radio shows since the beginning of the war. He appears to be pulling his punches, speaking in the seductive tones of self-determination and democracy, talking of a relatively short transition period. It's not hard to guess why: For the most part, the public has not had the benefit of reading his book, and it's tough to fight democracy's moment-especially in the space of a sound bite.

Jonathan Tweedy, a lawyer who worked for the Federal Court of Appeals, writes about politics and law.

An incoming instant message from my niece appears on my screen. I hit the respond button, and we exchange exclamations. This relatively new America Online technology, so quickly becoming young people's preferred method of communication, doesn't exactly lend itself to whole sentences, and I find myself feeling nostalgic for the more, well, literary technology of e-mail. I type that I have been reading Neil Postman, a guy who has done more thinking than most about the question of what's lost every time a new technology enters our lives. My last question to her is whether she thinks that we might ever write to each other again, as in ink on paper, envelopes, stamps and all that. It's not likely. We are just no longer letter-writing people, plain and simple.

A professor of culture and communication at New York University, Mr. Postman has been thinking about the effects of technology on our culture for several decades now. This has not made him sanguine. In fact, he believes (like Aldous Huxley) that our society is in a race between disaster and education. He has devoted his career to explaining the disaster (Literacy debased! Participatory democracy steamrolled!) and to aiding the cause of education. His latest book, Building a Bridge to the 18th Century , is his most ambitious attempt yet to help America survive the future.

Mr. Postman is best known for his near-apocalyptic view of the role that television plays in our lives. In Amusing Ourselves to Death (1986), he attacked the "enemy with a smiling face" that has brought spiritual devastation to America. In Technopoly (1991), Mr. Postman took aim at the computer, which, he claims, is a solution to a nonexistent problem–and a threat, as well, to individual autonomy.

In these and other works, Mr. Postman addressed the disaster side of the Huxleyan equation; elsewhere he devotes himself to the education side. The underlying theme of The End of Education (1995), for example, is that the best hope for preserving the promise of a democratic society in the post-industrial age is education that teaches skepticism. Central to this mission must be the strong and precise use of language. Mr. Postman wants to defeat the propaganda of commercial advertising and puncture hypocrisy by pushing on soft language until it collapses; he wants to teach children to do the same.

In Building a Bridge to the 18th Century , the impending disaster familiar to Postman readers is set in stark relief by comparison with the beguiling charms of the 18th century. Mr. Postman argues that our society should be regrounded in the ideas and principles of the Enlightenment.

The chapter headings in the new book–"Education," "Language," "Technology," "Children," "Information"–read like a best-hits of his past work. Somehow, however, there is a comfort in the repetition, as though Mr. Postman were a preacher intoning the same phrases over and over again. We readers are incorrigible sinners who nevertheless relish the satisfaction of listening every Sunday to hellfire and brimstone.

But there's more in the new book than the repetition of earlier themes. Mr. Postman, a self-confessed "enemy of this century," has clearly found new depths of inspiration by going back and comparing, point by point, our contemporary world with the 18th century. He treats us to Thomas Paine's beautiful prose and points out that Paine, an autodidact, was able to sway an entire population through the strength of his writing. What does it say about Paine's culture, and what does it say about ours, that, as Mr. Postman implies, Paine wrote better than any of the current faculty at N.Y.U. (and could no doubt be better understood by the public)?

Mr. Postman keeps up a barrage of ideas, notions, provocations. He tells us what God's death means for our survival; why, with respect to religion, Albert Einstein and John Stuart Mill had the right approach; why progress is an idea whose time has passed but must come again; how Einstein and his fellow physicists beat the deconstructionists to the punch on understanding the social construction of language; why newspapers are more essential than ever; how the book is necessary for the maintenance of civilized values; why children appear both in 14th-century painting andon20th-century TV as small adults, and why this should concern us; when the quest for fame started. And on and on. If not a feast, it's certainly quite a buffet.

Unfortunately, a glibness occasionally creeps into his arguments. Are Socrates, John the Baptist, Jesus, Muhammad and Moses really all examples of what can happen to someone who challenges the "narrative" of a culture? A certain grandiosity mixed with a busyness of style undermines his strength. On the first (short) page of the introduction, he refers to Gertrude Stein, Marshall McLuhan, Kierkegaard, Bill Gates and George Santayana. He's likely to illustrate a point by listing five poets, say, who had the same idea; one would suffice. And yet a writer with this many ideas bouncing around his head is soon forgiven.

To be Postmanian for a moment, what's the message of his medium? With this book especially, Mr. Postman would seem to be wandering deep into the territory of moral exposition, though within the compass of social science. At one point, when he's writing about the Romantic poets and Shelley's essay "In Defense of Poetry," Mr. Postman suggests that the Holocaust could be traced to a lack of poetry in German society or, more precisely, a lack of the love that is most powerfully engendered by poetry. "It is," he argues, "poetic imagination, not scientific accomplishment, that is the engine of moral progress." But what of Mr. Postman himself? Is this his poetic imagination at work? Shouldn't Mr. Postman really be a Romantic poet?

The answer is that Mr. Postman, though he has much in common with Romantic malcontents like the Southern agrarians or G.K. Chesterton, is true to the age in which he lives. The message of the medium is that we live in the post-industrial age, and in our time our moral thinkers sometimes hold positions like chair of media ecology in the Department of Culture and Communication at N.Y.U. One can be sure that Mr. Postman appreciates the irony: Only a society as "advanced" as ours could have produced a scholar like himself–and yet he has spent his career attacking the culture that created him.

He is at any rate uncomfortable with the name of his discipline. He insists that social scientists are deceptively named because there is no science in what they do. They are storytellers; and the great ones, like Freud, Max Weber, William James, B.F. Skinner, Lewis Mumford and McLuhan, are among the greatest storytellers of our era. And as stories demand a poetic imagination, we can understand better how Mr. Postman views his work. In Building a Bridge to the 18th Century , he has written a story well worth reading.