ABSTRACT
Fifty years of psychological research have conrmed the obvious:Freedom and autonomy are essential to human well-being. Unless people can exert signicant control over the events in their lives, they are diminished; indeed, they are candidates for clinical depression (Seligman 1975). At the level of entire societies, there is evidence that democratic political organization, including the protection of civil liberties, has a bigger effect on life satisfaction than does material afuence-at least among those whose material circumstances meet subsistence needs.
