This book is aimed at those who are puzzled by the different ways in which the term "freedom" is used and abused. Based on interviews with people concerning the nature of freedom, the author compares what the people he talked with said about freedom with what Jean-Paul Sartre, Herbert Marcuse, and Iris Murdoch have to say about freedom. He concludes that the people he talked with about freedom constitute a "culture on the borderline" whose proponents are better served by learning the political and social skills necessary to carve out small spaces of freedom in a rationalized world.