Americans are no longer so sure as they once were about what is meant by “the free world.” As Alexander Solzhenitsyn reminded us when he came in out of the cold, however, the distinction between free and unfree is not entirely obscured. Though he does not like everything he sees in the democratic nations, he immediately experienced the differences in the quality of freedom. There are discernible differences that make it possible to speak of “free,” “partially free,” and “not free” nations. Every nation is’ in fact marked by a “mix” of civil and political liberties granted, threatened, or withheld from its citizens. The obvious pitfall for the serious analyst of freedom is to weave complex criteria into a simplistic scheme by which one country is pronounced “free” and another “not free.” The determination of who is and who is not free is more complicated than that. A serious survey of freedom is a matter of weighing each nation against the scales of freedom in other nations. When it comes to human freedom] no nation has finally “arrived.” “Comparative” is the key word.