I can say, in retrospect, that I commenced work on this book some twenty years ago, though I little realized that at the time. I had undertaken to write a book on power, an enterprise I was unable to pursue very far. Having narrowly escaped being sucked into that morass, and having seen better men flounder for years striving to write on freedom, I had resolved to eschew both topics thereafter. One part of the power project did mature, however, namely, a paper published in the Australasian Journal of Philosophy in 1967 entitled “Freedom and Persuasion.” A little later I met W.J. Weinstein, who had also recently written a piece on freedom, and we agreed to collaborate on a paper entitled “Being Free to Act and Being a Free Man” (Mind 80, [1971]: 194–211). Students familiar with that paper will recognize sections of it which, with Bill Weinstein's permission (granted so many years ago that he has probably forgotten it), I have adapted for use in Chapter 7 of this book, on freedom of action. The enterprise took off from there, and the papers listed below mark the various stages in its growth. One crucial stage was the writing of “Freedom, Autonomy, and the Concept of a Person,” which owed a great deal to long conversations in the early 1970s in Canberra and in London with Richard Peters, whose profound influence on my philosophical development began with our collaboration in the 1950s on Social Principles and the Democratic State.