The book is copyright 1976 and the English translation is copyright 1977. The author is Jean-François Revel (1924-2006)
From page 9:
Now, a few items about which this book is not. It is not a book about France or the French Left.
(...)
I tried to devote as many pages to Latin America, South-east Asia or Africa as to that part of the world where I happen to live.
The American edition begins with a "Forward to the American Edition" and the American edition itself starts on page 15.
From page 16:
In 1975, at a time when the Spanish were discussing "after Franco" and theorizing on their country's "passage" to democracy, I spoke with a high official of the dying dictatorship who made this elementary observation: "All our quibbling about the nature of democracy serves only to delay its return. A ten-year-old can understand what democracy is. If you run down a list that includes free elections, universal suffrage, freedom of assembly, free speech and so on, he will realize right away that in any political system those are conditions whose existence or lack of it demonstrates the existence or absence of democracy." To complete the thought of that rightist official, who was fed up with the shilly-shallying in his own circles, I would add the fact that quibbling, as he put it, about the essence of democracy is a way to rejecting democracy just as true of those who call themselves "leftist" as it is of those on the "right." I do not see why the sorry pretexts by which one may try to avoid the light of the sun should be considered reactionary in one case and progressive in the other.
From page 17:
(...) societies where news is censored cannot enjoy the luxury of false objectivity because they do not have the true variety. In free civilizations, false objectivity must be fought by true objectivity, not by some alien bureaucracy. Prejudiced history is eliminated, or at least combated, by serious history, and corrupt journalism can only be defeated by honest journalism, not by a government commission whose first act may be to distribute some secret subsidies. A free press isn't always right and it isn't always honest, any more than a free man is always right and honest. If literature could not have been authorized without first learning how to ban trash, we would still be busy correcting the first set of proofs to come off the printing press. Those who do not understand that freedom has value in itself, though its expression necessarily produces evil as well as good, are poorly suited to the culture of democracy.
I have lingered over this classic example of freedom of the press because it is one of those fundamental tests that separates those to whom democratic culture is congenial from those to whom it is not. The first find it easy to define a free press, while for the second the question is tortuous and complex, because, in their innermost souls, they tend to conclude that only a press that affirms their beliefs to the exclusion of all others can be considered "free." (...)
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