Books published by WW Norton & Co

America's passion for "liberty," writes Alexander Meiklejohn, has blinded her to the real meaning of "freedom." It is freedom, not liberty, that lies at the heart of democracy, and we may be in danger of losing both. Our fetish of independence has permitted us to condone slavery, the betrayal of Indians and Blacks, and "the humiliation of the spirit of women . . . the crowning insult which a society has offered to the personalities of its own members." In this challenging essay, sensitively and scrupulously argued, one of America's most original social philosophers sums up the fallacies that have confused our purpose and recalls us to the methods of inquiry that led Socrates and Jesus to their supreme insights, "Know yourself" and "Love your neighbor."

This new series of Norton books, devoted to informed discussion of contemporary music, draws principally upon articles first published in Perspectives of New Music, which Richard Kostelanetz has described as "among the most consistently interesting magazines in America." The Perspectives books will comprise a repository of the clearest thinking and most serious writing about twentieth-century music, forming an essential addition to the libraries of both professionals and amateurs concerned with understanding recent developments.

The book arose out of the authors' experiences in a project which was itself unique: The Cornell-Tompkins Committee for Free and Fair Elections in Fayette County, Tennessee. The project entailed six to eight weeks of living in Fayette County by forty-five volunteers, mostly students from Cornell University, in the summer of 1964. The project was financed entirely, to an amount exceeding fifteen thousand dollars, by the contributions of students, faculty, and townspeople in and around Cornell University, and by contributions from more distant places solicited by those involved at Cornell.Of the many things learned from the Cornell project, one of the most important was how responsive a community can become when confronted with a concrete civil rights program, one with which it can identify, one small enough to be feasible and intelligible, but still compelling in terms of the needs involved.The authors believe that many thousands of Americans can find no good answer to the questions "What can I do." not because they are unwilling to do much, nor because there is little to be done, but because they lack the knowledge of what is needed where, and how and with whom one can go about responding to such needs. The book therefore undertakes, step by step, to describe and explain the development of the project at Cornell and its workings during the summer in Tennessee, and reasons that similar steps can be taken by others, with appropriate variations. It concludes with a detailed appendix listing civil rights projects and organizations desperately in need of help, whether in terms of money or volunteers or both.

"Why do we spend time reading and discussing books which tell of events which never in fact occurred?" The question is elementary - and yet, as David Daiches suggests in this provocative study, it is the elementary questions that are never answered. Although literary criticism today is more concerned with technique than with the basic question of value, the question of value underlies all the others. Professor Daiches therefore directs this book to the search for the basic function and purpose of imaginative prose and poetry.A Study of Literature is not, however, an obscure book of literary theory; it contains abundant and pungent examples and critical analyses - of prose fiction, of modern writing, and of the nature of poetry. "It's main purpose," as Professor Daiches says, "is to help the reader of works of imaginative literature to see what he is reading, to understand just what it is that he gets from different kinds of reading, and to discriminate between those different kinds."