Freedom: Freedom in the Making of Western Culture.

Despite an imposing title, Orlando Patterson's, Freedom in The Making of Western Culture, is developed from a simple thesis: Freedom was generated from the experience of slavery. In it Patterson, a Harvard University professor of sociology, traces the conceptual roots of freedom from antiquity to medieval times.

His quest: to determine how and why the idea of freedom emerged only in Western culture. To find out, the African-American sociologist, whose work won a 1991 National Book Award, examined Greek and Roman slave society. He then assessed slavery during early Christianity and the Middle Ages.

His notion of freedom segments into three elements: Personal, Sovereign and Civic. Personal gives one the sense of being unfettered by another person; sovereign suggests an unrestrained power over others; and civic means the ability to participate in a community's political life. "From the moment of their chordal fusion in classical Greece," he writes, "a tension has always existed among personal, civic and sovereignal freedoms."

Patterson shows his comparative skills by drawing parallels between the free-born Roman plebians and African-Americans. The plebians were a despised, poorly housed, unemployed minority. They had enough political clout to avoid starvation but too little to be involved in the dominant modes of generating wealth. And like African Americans, he contends, they were distracted from the status in society by musical and sporting mass entertainment. The next volume scheduled for publication later this year should be even more rewarding as Patterson looks at freedom in the modern world.