It used to be thought foolish or even rude to say democracy would one day be the universal form of human government. Historical inevitability, after all, was for Marxists.

If nothing else, the worldwide embrace of liberal principles over the last decade and a half will do much to establish freedom as an absolute human value, as much as love, or truth, or justice: that democracy and dictatorship, individualism and collectivism, are not simply competing models of social choice, but the light and darkness of the human mind.

What I want to discuss here is whether these developments of the waning 20th century are matters of happy accident, as easily lost as won, or whether they are carried along by ineluctable historical currents.

It is the absolute control of information at the centre, as the philosopher Leszek Kolakowski has emphasized, that is the heart of totalitarian order. The physical apparatus of terror, the military and the secret police, are simply backup systems, to be used only in the event of a break in the seal.

So long as people cannot comunicate with one another except through the state, they can be kept isolated, fearful, and powerless, without need of thuggery or indeed even of censorship. Failing a complete monopoly of information, no amount of coercion can sustain the state for long, for it must rely on a degree of acceptance from the population to function, even if such acceptance is born only of psychological exhaustion.

DISCOVERY UNSTOPPABLE

The historical inevitability of freedom is that the acquisition of some information can lead in only one direction: to more information. Once the Promethean fire was stolen, once the idea that man could know took hold, the process of discovery was unstoppable. Knowledge breeds knowledge. The more man knew, the better could he make the tools to know more: the printing press, the telephone, the camera, the motor car, radio, television, computers, fax, camcorders, a gathering cascade of inventions.

One could well object that this could simply lead to even more sophisticated means of controlling information at the centre, and for a time that was true. The early stages of the information revolution, just as the early stages of the industrial revolution, favored the mass scale. The story of our own age is of the end of the mass era: mass media, mass production, mass marketing, mass politics. Mass man is a vanishing breed. Man the individual is replacing him.

The early industrial economy of unskilled labor performing simple repetitive tasks to make standardized products for mass markets is giving way to flexible work assignments in small production runs for specialized markets: what the magazine Marxism Today calls ''post-Fordism.'' At Volvo's new plant in Uddevalla, Sweden, the assembly line, emblem of the mass age, has been abandoned altogether. A largely self-managing team of seven to 10 workers add components to a rotating frame. They build four cars a shift, expanding the cycle of repetition from one or two minutes to two to three hours.

Something like this is happening in the information industries. There are three things to understand about this.

1. The various media of communication - text, graphics, sound, video - are all blending into one: as digital computer data, a stream of ones and zeros.

2. The hardware for sending, receiving and interpreting these data - telephone, teletext, television, fax, laser printers, camcorders, and the computers themselves - are already so reduced in size and price as to to be available to almost everyone. The new CD-ROM storage discs can each hold 500,000 printed pages of information: a small library.

3. Everyone in turn will be connected to everyone else, whether through fibre optic cables, cellular or satellite connections, all part of the same all-enveloping digital flow.

The import of this is not just the rise of the individual as a consumer of information, but the individual as information producer. It is possible with laser printing to produce magazine runs with each copy customized for the individual subscriber; desk-top publishing at the same time makes every individual a potential magazine producer. Fibre optics likewise allows a virtually infinite number of television channels: certainly as many as there are citizens. Just point your camcorder, and dump it into the flow.

The spread of information consumption makes censorship impossible, but the spread of production makes the information monopoly impossible, which is the critical point.