"The founding fathers understood what we now choose to ignore: democracy is the enemy of personal freedom." To impose order, Russell contends, they understood one of history's great ironies  that the only thing that could make people forsake their own freedom and still believe they were free, was self-rule. Calling into question our assumptions about liberty, democracy and the founding of the US, this book tells how drunkards, prostitutes, "shiftless" slaves and white slackers, criminals and other outsiders shaped society. It is revisionist history at its best. While tensions between settler and Indian, democrat and monarchist, slave and master are familiar historical territory, Russell focuses instead on discontents  those who let themselves be free of society, and made illicit joys not only possible but real. Imagining what life would be like today if people throughout history had only sacrificed themselves for the "good" of the community, he suggests we side with the renegades when the guardians of the social order try to keep them down, and that we take more liberties.