the two clashing meaning of free speech

The Two Clashing Meanings of 'Free Speech'

Today’s campus controversies reflect a battle between two distinct conceptions of the term—what the Greeks called isegoria and parrhesia.

Little distinguishes democracy in America more sharply from Europe than the primacy—and permissiveness—of our commitment to free speech. Yet ongoing controversies at American universities suggest that free speech is becoming a partisan issue. While conservative students defend the importance of inviting controversial speakers to campus and giving offense, many self-identified liberals are engaged in increasingly disruptive, even violent, efforts to shut them down. Free speech for some, they argue, serves only to silence and exclude others. Denying hateful or historically “privileged” voices a platform is thus necessary to make equality effective, so that the marginalized and vulnerable can finally speak up—and be heard.

The reason that appeals to the First Amendment cannot decide these campus controversies is because there is a more fundamental conflict between two, very different concepts of free speech at stake. The conflict between what the ancient Greeks called isegoria , on the one hand, and parrhesia , on the other, is as old as democracy itself. Today, both terms are often translated as “freedom of speech,” but their meanings were and are importantly distinct. In ancient Athens, isegoria described the equal right of citizens to participate in public debate in the democratic assembly; parrhesia , the license to say what one pleased, how and when one pleased, and to whom.

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When it comes to private universities, businesses, or social media, the would-be censors are our fellow-citizens, not the state. Private entities like Facebook or Twitter, not to mention Yale or Middlebury, have broad rights to regulate and exclude the speech of their members. Likewise, online mobs are made up of outraged individuals exercising their own right to speak freely. To invoke the First Amendment in such cases is not a knock-down argument, it’s a non sequitur .

John Stuart Mill argued that the chief threat to free speech in democracies was not the state, but the “social tyranny” of one’s fellow citizens. And yet today, the civil libertarians who style themselves as Mill’s inheritors have for the most part failed to refute, or even address, the arguments about free speech and equality that their opponents are making .

The two ancient concepts of free speech came to shape our modern liberal democratic notions in fascinating and forgotten ways. But more importantly, understanding that there is not one, but two concepts of freedom of speech, and that these are often in tension if not outright conflict, helps explain the frustrating shape of contemporary debates, both in the U.S. and in Europe—and why it so often feels as though we are talking past each other when it comes to the things that matter most.

Of the two ancient concepts of free speech, isegoria is the older. The term dates back to the fifth century BCE, although historians disagree as to when the democratic practice of permitting any citizen who wanted to address the assembly actually began. Despite the common translation “freedom of speech,” the Greek literally means something more like “equal speech in public.” The verb agoreuein , from which it derives, shares a root with the word agora or marketplace—that is, a public place where people, including philosophers like Socrates, would gather together and talk.

In the democracy of Athens, this idea of addressing an informal gathering in the agora carried over into the more formal setting of the ekklesia or political assembly. The herald would ask, “Who will address the assemblymen?” and then the volunteer would ascend the bema , or speaker’s platform. In theory, isegoria meant that any Athenian citizen in good standing had the right to participate in debate and try to persuade his fellow citizens. In practice, the number of participants was fairly small, limited to the practiced rhetoricians and elder statesmen seated near the front. (Disqualifying offenses included prostitution and taking bribes.)

Although Athens was not the only democracy in the ancient world, from the beginning the Athenian principle of isegoria was seen as something special. The historian Herodotus even described the form of government at Athens not as demokratia , but as isegoria itself . According to the fourth-century orator and patriot Demosthenes, the Athenian constitution was based on speeches ( politeia en logois ) and its citizens had chosen isegoria as a way of life. But for its critics, this was a bug, as well as a feature. One critic, the so-called ‘Old Oligarch,’ complained that even slaves and foreigners enjoyed isegoria at Athens, hence one could not beat them as one might elsewhere.

Critics like the Old Oligarch may have been exaggerating for comic effect, but they also had a point: as its etymology suggests, isegoria was fundamentally about equality, not freedom. As such, it would become the hallmark of Athenian democracy, which distinguished itself from the other Greek city-states not because it excluded slaves and women from citizenship (as did every society in the history of humankind until quite recently), but rather because it included the poor . Athens even took positive steps to render this equality of public speech effective by introducing pay for the poorest citizens to attend the assembly and to serve as jurors in the courts.

As a form of free speech then, isegoria was essentially political. Its competitor, parrhesia , was more expansive. Here again, the common English translation “freedom of speech” can be deceptive. The Greek means something like “all saying” and comes closer to the idea of speaking freely or “frankly.” Parrhesia thus implied openness, honesty, and the courage to tell the truth, even when it meant causing offense. The practitioner of parrhesia (or parrhesiastes ) was, quite literally, a “say-it-all.”

Parrhesia could have a political aspect. Demosthenes and other orators stressed the duty of those exercising isegoria in the assembly to speak their minds. But the concept applied more often outside of the ekklesia in more and less informal settings. In the theater, parrhesiastic playwrights like Aristophanes offended all and sundry by skewering their fellow citizens, including Socrates, by name. But the paradigmatic parrhesiastes in the ancient world were the Philosophers, self-styled “lovers of wisdom” like Socrates himself who would confront their fellow citizens in the agora and tell them whatever hard truths they least liked to hear. Among these was Diogenes the Cynic , who famously lived in a barrel, masturbated in public, and told Alexander the Great to get out of his light—all, so he said, to reveal the truth to his fellow Greeks about the arbitrariness of their customs.

The danger intrinsic in parrhesia ’s offensiveness to the powers-that-be—be they monarchs like Alexander or the democratic majority—fascinated Michel Foucault, who made it the subject of a series of lectures at Berkeley (home of the original campus Free Speech Movement) in the 1980s. Foucault noticed that the practice of parrhesia necessarily entailed an asymmetry of power, hence a “contract” between the audience (whether one or many), who pledged to tolerate any offense, and the speaker, who agreed to tell them the truth and risk the consequences.

If isegoria was fundamentally about equality, then, parrhesia was about liberty in the sense of license —not a right, but rather an unstable privilege enjoyed at the pleasure of the powerful. In Athenian democracy, that usually meant the majority of one’s fellow citizens, who were known to shout down or even drag speakers they disliked (including Plato’s brother, Glaucon) off the bema . This ancient version of “no-platforming” speakers who offended popular sensibilities could have deadly consequences—as the trial and death of Socrates, Plato’s friend and teacher, attests.

Noting the lack of success that Plato’s loved ones enjoyed with both isegoria and parrhesia during his lifetime may help explain why the father of Western philosophy didn’t set great store by either concept in his works. Plato no doubt would have noticed that, despite their differences, neither concept relied upon the most famous and distinctively Greek understanding of speech as logos —that is, reason or logical argument. Plato’s student, Aristotle, would identify logos as the capacity that made human beings essentially political animals in the first place. And yet neither isegoria nor parrhesia identified the reasoned speech and arguments of logos as uniquely deserving of equal liberty or license. Which seems to have been Plato’s point—how was it that a democratic city that prided itself on free speech, in all of its forms, put to death the one Athenian ruled by logos for speaking it?

Unsurprisingly perhaps, parrhesia survived the demise of Athenian democracy more easily than isegoria . As Greek democratic institutions were crushed by the Macedonian empire, then the Roman, parrhesia persisted as a rhetorical trope. A thousand years after the fall of Rome, Renaissance humanists would revive parrhesia as the distinctive virtue of the counselor speaking to a powerful prince in need of frank advice. While often couched in apologetics, this parrhesia retained its capacity to shock. The hard truths presented by Machiavelli and Hobbes to their would-be sovereigns would inspire generations of “libertine” thinkers to come.

Still, there was another adaptation of the parrhesiastic tradition of speaking truth to power available to early modern Europeans. The early Christians took a page from Diogenes’s book in spreading the “good news” of the Gospel throughout the Greco-Roman world—news that may not have sounded all that great to the Roman authorities. Many of the Christians who styled themselves as “Protestants” after the Reformation thought that a return to an authentically parrhesiastic and deliberately offensive form of evangelism was necessary to restore the Church to the purity of “primitive” Christianity. The early Quakers, for example, were known to interrupt Anglican services by shouting down the minister and to go naked in public “for a sign.”

Isegoria , too, had its early modern inheritors. But in the absence of democratic institutions like the Athenian ekklesia , it necessarily took a different form. The 1689 English Bill of Rights secured “the freedom of speech and debates in Parliament,” and so applied to members of Parliament only, and only when they were present in the chamber. For the many who lacked access to formal political participation, the idea of isegoria as an equal right of public speech belonging to all citizens would eventually migrate from the concrete public forum to the virtual public sphere.

For philosophers like Spinoza and Immanuel Kant, “free speech” meant primarily the intellectual freedom to participate in the public exchange of arguments. In 1784, five years before the French Revolution, Kant would insist that “the freedom to make public use of one’s reason” was the fundamental and equal right of any human being or citizen. Similarly, when Mill wrote On Liberty less than a century later, he did not defend the freedom of speech as such, but rather the individual “freedom of thought and discussion” in the collective pursuit of truth. While the equal liberty of isegoria remained essential for these thinkers, they shifted focus from actual speech —that is, the physical act of addressing others and participating in debate—to the mental exercise of reason and the exchange of ideas and arguments, very often in print. And so, over the course of two millennia, the Enlightenment finally united isegoria and logos in an idealized concept of free speech as freedom only for reasoned speech and rational deliberation that would have made Plato proud.

This logo-centric Enlightenment ideal remains central to the European understanding of free speech today. Efforts in Europe to criminalize hate speech owe an obvious debt to Kant, who described the freedom of (reasoned) speech in public as “the most harmless” of all. The same could never be said of ancient or early modern parrhesia , which was always threatening to speakers and listeners alike. Indeed, it was the obvious harm caused by their parrhesiastic evangelism to their neighbors’ religious sensibilities that led so many evangelical Protestants to flee prosecution (or persecution, as they saw it) in Europe for the greater liberty—or license—of the New World. American exceptionalism can thus be traced all the way back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: while America got the evangelicals and libertines, Europe kept the philosophers.

Debates about free speech on American campuses today suggest that the rival concepts of isegoria and parrhesia are alive and well. When student protesters claim that they are silencing certain voices—via no-platforming, social pressure, or outright censorship—in the name of free speech itself, it may be tempting to dismiss them as insincere, or at best confused. As I witnessed at an event at Kenyon College in September, when confronted with such arguments the response from gray-bearded free-speech fundamentalists like myself is to continue to preach to the converted about the First Amendment, but with an undercurrent of solidaristic despair about “kids these days” and their failure to understand the fundamentals of liberal democracy.

No wonder the “kids” are unpersuaded. While trigger warnings, safe spaces, and no-platforming grab headlines, poll after poll suggests that a more subtle, shift in mores is afoot. To a generation convinced that hateful speech is itself a form of violence or “silencing,” pleading the First Amendment is to miss the point. Most of these students do not see themselves as standing against free speech at all. What they care about is the equal right to speech, and equal access to a public forum in which the historically marginalized and excluded can be heard and count equally with the privileged. This is a claim to isegoria , and once one recognizes it as such, much else becomes clear—including the contrasting appeal to parrhesia by their opponents, who sometimes seem determined to reduce “free speech” to a license to offend.

Recognizing the ancient ideas at work in these modern arguments puts those of us committed to America’s parrhesiastic tradition of speaking truth to power in a better position to defend it. It suggests that to defeat the modern proponents of isegoria— and remind the modern parrhesiastes what they are fighting for—one must go beyond the First Amendment to the other, orienting principle of American democracy behind it, namely equality . After all, the genius of the First Amendment lies in bringing isegoria and parrhesia together, by securing the equal right and liberty of citizens not simply to “exercise their reason” but to speak their minds. It does so because the alternative is to allow the powers-that-happen-to-be to grant that liberty as a license to some individuals while denying it to others.

In contexts where the Constitution does not apply, like a private university, this opposition to arbitrariness is a matter of culture, not law, but it is no less pressing and important for that. As the evangelicals, protesters, and provocateurs who founded America’s parrhesiastic tradition knew well: When the rights of all become the privilege of a few, neither liberty nor equality can last.

Dr Teresa Bejan writes about the two clashing meanings of Free Speech

Teresa M. Bejan

Dr Teresa Bejan writes about the two clashing meanings of Free Speech

Teresa Bejan has written an article for The Atlantic (2 December) in which she frames the current debate on university campuses about the right to free speech in terms of two opposing ancient Athenian concepts of Freedom of Speech.

“The conflict between what the ancient Greeks called isegoria , on the one hand, and parrhesia , on the other, is as old as democracy itself,” she writes. “Today, both terms are often translated as 'freedom of speech,' but their meanings were and are importantly distinct. In ancient Athens, isegoria described the equal right of citizens to participate in public debate in the democratic assembly; parrhesia , the license to say what one pleased, how and when one pleased, and to whom.”

She goes on to say that these two ancient concepts of free speech “came to shape our modern liberal democratic notions in fascinating and forgotten ways. But more importantly, understanding that there is not one, but two concepts of freedom of speech, and that these are often in tension if not outright conflict, helps explain the frustrating shape of contemporary debates, both in the U.S. and in Europe—and why it so often feels as though we are talking past each other when it comes to the things that matter most.”

The full article can be read here: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/12/two-concepts-of-freedom-of-speech/546791/

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Amalgamated Contemplation

A plethora of jumbled thoughts.

The Two Clashing Meanings of ‘Free Speech’ | The Atlantic

Source: The Two Clashing Meanings of ‘Free Speech’ | The Atlantic , by Teresa M. Bejan

there is a more fundamental conflict between two, very different concepts of free speech at stake. The conflict between what the ancient Greeks called isegoria , on the one hand, and parrhesia , on the other, is as old as democracy itself. Today, both terms are often translated as “freedom of speech,” but their meanings were and are importantly distinct. In ancient Athens, isegoria described the equal right of citizens to participate in public debate in the democratic assembly; parrhesia , the license to say what one pleased, how and when one pleased, and to whom. … isegoria was fundamentally about equality, not freedom. … Its competitor, parrhesia , was more expansive. … The practitioner of parrhesia (or parrhesiastes ) was, quite literally, a “say-it-all.” … If isegoria was fundamentally about equality, then, parrhesia was about liberty in the sense of license —not a right, but rather an unstable privilege enjoyed at the pleasure of the powerful.

the genius of the First Amendment lies in bringing isegoria and parrhesia together, by securing the equal right and liberty of citizens not simply to “exercise their reason” but to speak their minds. It does so because the alternative is to allow the powers-that-happen-to-be to grant that liberty as a license to some individuals while denying it to others.

When the rights of all become the privilege of a few, neither liberty nor equality can last.

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The Two Clashing Meanings of 'Free Speech'

Today's campus controversies reflect a battle between two distinct conceptions of the term—what the Greeks called isegoria and parrhesia.

People | Professor Teresa Bejan

Professor Teresa Bejan

BA, MPhil, PhD

Teresa M. Bejan is Professor of Political Theory and a Fellow of Oriel College at the University of Oxford. She arrived in Oxford from the University of Toronto in 2015.

In 2021, Prof Bejan was awarded the Philip Leverhulme Prize in Politics, which celebrates early career researchers who have already achieved international recognition and with exceptional future promise.

Other awards include the Britain and Ireland Association for Political Thought’s Early Career Prize (2020), a Leverhulme Research Fellowship (2018), the Balzan-Skinner Fellowship in Modern Intellectual History at Cambridge (2016), the American Political Science Association’s Leo Strauss Award for the best doctoral dissertation in political philosophy (2015), and a Mellon Research Fellowship in the Columbia Society of Fellows in the Humanities (2013-2014). In the 2020-2021 academic year she was on leave from Oxford as the Fulbright Visiting Chair in Constitutional and Political Theory at McGill University.

Research Interests

Professor Bejan’s research brings historical perspectives to bear on questions in contemporary political theory. She has written extensively on themes of free speech, civility, tolerance and equality in historical contexts ranging from ancient Athens to 20th-century analytic political philosophy.

Her first book, Mere Civility: Disagreement and the Limits of Toleration (2017), examined contemporary calls for civility in light of 17th-century debates about religious toleration. It defended an ideal of ‘mere civility’ consistent with American free speech fundamentalism derived from Roger Williams, the founder of Rhode Island. Her second book, tentatively entitled First Among Equals , explores the fascinating but forgotten history of equality before modern egalitarianism, due out in 2023 from Harvard University Press. Her next major research project will be the Clarendon edition of John Locke’s Letters on Toleration .

She has also published peer-reviewed articles in American Journal of Political Science , Journal of Politics , British Journal of Political Science , Political Theory , History of Political Thought , and more. Her Special Forum on “The Historical Rawls” for Modern Intellectual History (co-edited with Sophie Smith and Annette Zimmermann) was published in 2021.

Alongside her academic work, Prof Bejan writes regularly for popular venues, including The New York Times , The Atlantic , and The Washington Post . In 2018, she gave a TED Talk, ‘Is Civility a Sham?,’ which has received over 1.7 million views.

Selected Publications

Mere Civility: Disagreement and the Limits of Toleration (Harvard University Press 2017, paperback 2019)

First Among Equals (under contract with Harvard University Press)

Locke and Liberalism: An Introduction (under contract with Penguin UK)

“The Historical Rawls,” Special issue for the journal Modern Intellectual History (2021), co-edited with Sophie Smith and Annette Zimmermann.

The Political Thought of John Locke Revisited , in preparation for Oxford University Press, co-edited with Felix Waldmann.

“Hobbes and Hats,” American Political Science Review (online first, Jan 2023), https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055422001356 .

“Hobbes Against Hate Speech,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy (online first, Feb 2022), https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09608788.2022.2027340 .

“No Respecter of Persons,” contribution to symposium on “Social Inclusion and the Ethics of Citation” for The Journal of Biblical Literature (2021) 140: 831-836, https://doi.org/10.15699/jbl.1404.2021.11 .

“What was the Point of Equality?,” American Journal of Political Science (online first, Oct 2021), https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ajps.12667 .

“Rawls’s Teaching and the ‘Tradition’ of Political Philosophy,” Modern Intellectual History (2021) 18: 1058-1079, https://doi.org/10.1017/S1479244320000505 .

“The Historical Rawls,” with Sophie Smith and Annette Zimmermann, Modern Intellectual History (2021) 18: 899-905, https://doi.org/10.1017/S1479244320000438 .

“In Search of an Established Church,” Roger Williams University Law Review 26 (2021): 284-335, https://docs.rwu.edu/rwu_LR/vol26/iss2/3 .

“Free Expression or Equal Speech?” Social Philosophy & Policy 37 (2020): 153-169, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0265052521000091 .

“Two Concepts of Freedom (of Speech),” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 163 (2019), 95-107, https://www.amphilsoc.org/sites/default/files/2020-03/attachments/Bejan.pdf .

“Reconsidering Tolerance: Insights from Political Theory and Three Experiments,” co-authored with Calvert W. Jones. British Journal of Political Science (online first November 2019), https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007123419000279 .

“‘Since all the World is Mad, Why should not I be so?’ Equality, Hierarchy, and Ambition in the Thought of Mary Astell.” Political Theory (online first May 2019), https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0090591719852040 .

“John Locke on Toleration, (In)civility, and the Quest for Concord,” History of Political Thought 37 (2016), 556-587.

“Difference without Disagreement: Re-thinking Hobbes on ‘Independency’ and Toleration,” Review of Politics 78 (2016), 1-25.

“Evangelical Toleration,” The Journal of Politics 77 (2015), 1103-1114.

“‘The Bond of Civility’: Roger Williams on Toleration and its Limits,” History of European Ideas 37 (2011), 409-420.

“Teaching the Leviathan: Thomas Hobbes on Education,” Oxford Review of Education 36:5 (2010), 607-626.

Reprinted in the collection, Ideas of Education: Political and Philosophical Perspectives from Plato to the Nineteenth Century, edited by C. Brooke and E. Frazer (Routledge, 2013).
Reprinted in the Norton Critical Edition of Hobbes’s Leviathan (2nd edition), ed. D.C. Johnston (Norton, 2020).

“On the Historical Emergence of Basic Equality,” in How Can We Be Equals, eds. G. Floris and N. Kirby (Oxford University Press, forthcoming).

“Roger Williams,” with Matthew Young, in The Princeton Anthology of American Political Thought, eds. N. Buccola, S. McWilliams, and R. Montas (Princeton University Press, forthcoming).

“Civility” in Women of Ideas, edited by Suki Finn (Oxford University Press, 2021), 157-168.

“What’s the Use? Rainer Forst on the History of Toleration,” in Toleration, Power, and the Right to Justification: Rainer Forst in Dialogue, ed. David Owen (Manchester University Press, 2020).

“First Impressions: Hobbes on Religion, Education, and the Metaphor of Imprinting,” invited chapter for Hobbes on Politics and Religion, edited by Robin Douglass and Laurens van Apeldoorn (Oxford University Press, 2018).

“‘When the Word of the Lord Runs Freely’: Roger Williams and Evangelical Toleration,” invited chapter for The Lively Experiment: The Story of Religious Toleration in America, from Roger Williams to the Present, edited by Christopher Beneke and Christopher Grenda (Rowman and Littlefield, 2015).

“The Difficult Work of Liberal Civility,” co-authored with Bryan Garsten, invited chapter for Civility, Legality, and the Limits of Justice, edited by Austin Sarat (Cambridge University Press, 2014).

“The Problem with Problematic,” The Atlantic (Oct 2021), https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/10/problem-with-word-problematic/620289/ .

“Divided We Stand,” New Statesman (Nov 2020), https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2020/11/what-us-democracy-can-learn-ancient-greek-philosophy .

“What Quakers Can Teach Us about the Politics of Pronouns,” The New York Times (16 Nov. 2019), https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/16/opinion/sunday/pronouns-quakers.html .

“Can’t We All Just Disagree?” Australia Broadcast Corporation: Religion & Ethics (Aug. 2019). https://www.abc.net.au/religion/teresa-bejan-mere-civility-as-the-basis-of-a-tolerant-society/11373126 .

“Is Civility a Sham?” TED Talk (Nov. 2018), with over 1.7 million views. https://www.ted.com/talks/teresa_bejan_is_civility_a_sham .

“The Two Clashing Meanings of Free Speech,” The Atlantic (2 Dec. 2017). https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/12/two-concepts-of-freedom-of-speech/546791/ .

Translated and reprinted as ‘“Free Speech” et la liberte d’expression,’ in Books no. 100 (Sep 2019). https://www.books.fr/free-speech-liberte-expression/ .
Reprinted in The Norton Reader (15th edition), eds. M. Goldthwaite et al. (Norton, 2020).

“You don’t have to be nice to political opponents. But you do have to talk to them,” The Washington Post (8 March 2017). https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2017/03/08/you-dont-have-to-be-nice-to-political-opponents-but-you-do-have-to-talk-to-them/ .

Chris Navin

I am what i am. it is what it is. and yet…, the two clashing meanings of free speech-whence liberalism.

‘Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.’

-1st amendment to the Constitution.

Teresa Bejan’s ‘ The Two Clashing Meanings Of ‘Free Speech ‘ piece at the Atlantic:

‘Recognizing the ancient ideas at work in these modern arguments puts those of us committed to America’s parrhesiastic tradition of speaking truth to power in a better position to defend it. It suggests that to defeat the modern proponents of isegoria—and remind the modern parrhesiastes what they are fighting for—one must go beyond the First Amendment to the other, orienting principle of American democracy behind it, namely equality. After all, the genius of the First Amendment lies in bringing isegoria and parrhesia together, by securing the equal right and liberty of citizens not simply to “exercise their reason” but to speak their minds. It does so because the alternative is to allow the powers-that-happen-to-be to grant that liberty as a license to some individuals while denying it to others.’

Further exploration in the video below…:

My brief summary (let me know what I may have gotten wrong) : Bejan appeals to two ancient and somewhat conflicting Greek concepts in order to define two types of ‘free speech.’

Isegoria : More associated with reason, argument, and debate. You may feel, believe and think certain things to be true, but you’re a member/citizen of a Republic and you’ve got to martial your arguments and follow the rules (not all people may be members/citizens either, depending on the rules). Many Enlightenment figures (Locke, Kant, Spinoza) appealed to reason more through isegoria according to Bejan (given the tricky course they had to navigate with the existing authority of the time). Think first, speak later. Parrhesia : More associated with open, honest and frank discussion, and with much less concern as to consequences: ‘Say-it-all’ Socrates was voted to death by the People after all, despite his reasoning prowess. She brings up Diogenes (the lantern guy), who flaunted convention, tooks serious risks and even masturbated publicly. She brings up all the racy stuff even Quakers and various other sects said against each other in the early days of our Republic.

So, why create this particular framework, and why is it necessary to ‘go around’ the 1st amendment upon it in pursuit of Equality?: Perhaps one of Bejan’s aims is to resuscitate an American liberalism which would allow old-school liberals to appeal to young activists and a lot of young people influenced by activists, obliquely routing all back to the Constitution. Only through becoming aware of their own assumptions can liberals better address the ‘hate-speech’ concept (with no Constitutional basis) which has taken root in our universities, for example.

Bejan relies on some data and some anecdotal evidence from her own teaching experience to justify a potential shift in public sentiment, requiring of her approach. Such evidence might line-up with elements of libertarian/conservative critiques of liberalism, too, which tend to focus on liberals lacking a sufficiently profound moral framework to justify why liberals should make and enforce laws, and run our institutions, especially when those institutions are judged by outcomes, not intentions, bound as they are within a Constitutional framework.

So far, I’m not sure I’m persuaded by Bejan’s reasoning, for why not just stick to teaching, promoting and discussing the Constitution? Has Bejan really punched a hole back to the Greeks, or has she fashioned a tool-at-hand to grasp certain products of Enlightenment modernity to address more crises of modernity?

***In the video Bejan mentions, in non-Burkean, non-conservative fashion, our founding documents, the French Revolutionaries, and the U.N. charter as examples of rights-based thinking. Of course, beyond debates about liberalism, there’s quite a lot of dispute about where our rights might come from in the first place (from God, from a Deity, from Nature, from Nature’s Laws, from past Laws and Charters, from knowledge gained through the Natural Sciences, from the latest Social Science, from coalitions of like-minded people, from majorities/pluralities of people, from top-down lists of rights and ideological platforms etc.)

Any thoughts and comments are welcome.

Found here .

‘ I keep hearing about a supposed “hate speech” exception to the First Amendment, or statements such as, “This isn’t free speech, it’s hate speech,” or “When does free speech stop and hate speech begin?” But there is no hate speech exception to the First Amendment. Hateful ideas (whatever exactly that might mean) are just as protected under the First Amendment as other ideas. ‘

Yes, a modern Marxist: Brendan O’Neill At Spiked: ‘ Why We Must Fight For Free Speech For People We Loathe: ‘

‘A true devotee of freedom of speech says, ‘Let everyone speak, because it is important that all sides are heard and that the public has the right to use their moral muscles and decide who they trust and who they don’t’. The new, partial campaigners for friends’ speech effectively say, ‘Let my friend speak. She is interesting. She will tell the public what they need to hear.’ These are profoundly different positions, the former built on liberty and humanism, the latter motored by a desire to protect oneself, and oneself alone, from censorship. The former is free speech; the latter ‘me speech.’

“First, if any opinion is compelled to silence, that opinion may, for aught we can certainly know, be true. To deny this is to assume our own infallibility.’ ‘Secondly, though the silenced opinion be an error, it may, and very commonly does, contain a portion of truth; and since the general or prevailing opinion on any subject is rarely or never the whole truth, it is only by the collision of adverse opinions that the remainder of the truth has any chance of being supplied. ‘ ‘Thirdly, even if the received opinion be not only true, but the whole truth; unless it is suffered to be, and actually is, vigorously and earnestly contested, it will, by most of those who receive it, be held in the manner of a prejudice, with little comprehension or feeling of its rational grounds. ‘ And not only this, but, fourthly, the meaning of the doctrine itself will be in danger of being lost, or enfeebled, and deprived of its vital effect on the character and conduct: the dogma becoming a mere formal profession, inefficacious for good, but cumbering the ground, and preventing the growth of any real and heartfelt conviction, from reason or personal experience.”

-John Stuart Mill ‘ On Liberty: Chapter II-Of The Liberty Of Thought And Discussion’

On this site, see : A Few Thoughts On Isaiah Berlin’s “Two Concepts Of Liberty”…

Repost-Classical Liberalism Via Friesian.Com-‘Exchange with Tomaz Castello Branco on John Gray’

How might this relate to the Heglian/post-Marxist project via ‘The End Of History’: Update And Repost- From YouTube: Leo Strauss On The Meno-More On The Fact/Value Distinction?’

A Modern Liberal, somewhat Aristotelian and classical?: From The Harvard Educational Review-A Review Of Martha Nussbaum’s ‘Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education.’… Repost: Martha Nussbaum Channels Roger Williams In The New Republic: The First Founder

Samuel Huntington was quite humble, and often wise, about what political philosophy could do: From Prospect: Eric Kaufmann On ‘The Meaning Of Huntington’

From The NY Times Book Review-Thomas Nagel On John Gray’s New ‘Silence Of Animals’ … From Darwinian Conservatism: ‘The Evolution of Mind and Mathematics: Dehaene Versus Plantinga and Nagel’ …

From Edward Feser: ‘Nagel And His Critics Part IV’

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2 thoughts on “ The Two Clashing Meanings Of Free Speech-Whence Liberalism? ”

Seems that what is needed most is a heavy dose of Elizabeth Warren? What do you think?

She does wonders…

Two Concepts of Freedom (of Speech) 1

Of the many challenges facing democracy in America today, few perplex the public mind like the freedom of speech. Until recently, however, few freedoms seemed more obvious and ours. Let all else descend into the maelstrom of partisanship and polarization—Republicans and Democrats could at least agree to adjudicate their differences through the free (if not always fair) exchange of insults, as well as ideas. Yet ongoing controversies at American universities suggest that now free speech, too, is a partisan issue. While conservative students and their supporters invite controversial speakers to campus and assert their rights to offend their peers, self-identified liberals have engaged in increasingly disruptive, even violent, efforts to shut them down.2 For those who remember the original campus Free Speech Movement of the 1960s, this spectacular shift from Left to Right is a source of some confusion and chagrin.3 Many civil libertarians have suggested that what kids these days really...

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Teresa M Bejan

The classical liberal doctrine of free expression asserts the priority of speech as an extension of the freedom of thought. Yet its critics argue that freedom of expression, itself, demands the suppression of the so-called "silencing speech" of racists, sexists, and so on, as a threat to the equal expressive rights of others. This essay argues that the claim to free expression must be distinguished from claims to equal speech. The former asserts an equal right to express one's thoughts without interference; the latter the right to address others, and to receive a hearing and consideration from them, in turn. I explore the theory of equal speech in light of the ancient Athenian practice of isegoria and argue that the equality demanded is not distributive but relational: an equal speaker's voice should be counted as "on a par" with others. This ideal better captures critics' concerns about silencing speech than do their appeals to free expression. Insofar as epistemic and status-harms provide grounds for the suppression and exclusion of some speech and speakers, the ideal of equal speech is more closely connected with the freedom of association than of thought. Noticing this draws attention to the continuing-and potentially problematic-importance of exclusion in constituting effective sites of equal speech today.

Barry Stocker

Nutfeesa Mushtaq

Kyriakos Demetriou

This paper provides a critical survey of recent approaches to Athenian democracy. Typically, modern interpretations start from the assumption that Athenian democracy can be a useful resource for rethinking contemporary political issues. To be useful presupposes that it is well understood. Thus the results of new methods of historical-philological source criticism are brought forward to assist in the reconstruction of the ideology and cultural discourse that underpinned the working of Athenian democracy. What is highly problematic in this effort, the author concludes, is that by stressing the time-bound actualities of Athenian political experience, the historicist approach is eventually unsuited to produce paradigms worthy of emulation.

Revista Antesteria , Maria Gisella Giannone

This paper aims to provide an in-depth examination of the manifold usages of parrhēsia, " outspokenness " , in Isocrates' works and the role of this notion in his political thought. The analysis of the occurrences of the term parrhēsia and its cognate verb parrhēsiazomai reveals that we can identify three different meanings of the concept of outspokenness in the Isocratean corpus: a positive sense, the awareness of its drawbacks, that leads at times to temporary hesitation in speaking frankly, and a negative meaning, which appears to be innovative. It is thus possible to suggest that the Athenian orator carries out a sort of splitting of the notion itself into a positive parrhēsia and a negative parrhēsia which are opposed to and incompatible with one another. This dichotomy bears witness to the crucial role that Isocrates' use of parrhēsia played not only within his own corpus, but also, more broadly, in the development of the notion of speaking frankly in Greek political thought.

jill gentile

This essay explores the mostly unexamined analogy of psychoanalytic free association to democratic free speech. The author turns back to a time when free speech was a matter of considerable discussion: the classical period of the Athenian constitution and its experiment with parrhesia. Ordinarily translated into English as " free speech, " parrhesia is startlingly relevant to psychoanalysis. The Athenian stage—in particular, Hip-polytus (Euripides, 5th century BCE)—illustrates this point. Euripides's tragic tale anticipates Freud's inquiries, exploring the fundamental link between free speech and female embodiment. The author suggests that psychoanalysis should claim its own conception of a polis as a mediated and ethical space between private and public spheres, between body and mind, and between speaking and listening communities.

Corbin Golding

This investigation examines the competitive nature of heckling in the Ancient Athenian Assembly and courts. Rather than being a cherished aspect of free speech, I argue that thorubos was a demonstration of daring meant to shame speakers and exhibit both wit and manliness to one's peers. The Athenian democracy attempted to curb heckling through legislation in the fourth century, similar to its attempts to control other agonal activities, but by hesitating to trample on free speech in general these were ultimately failures.

Daniela Cammack

This paper was presented at the UC Berkeley Rhetoric Colloquium on March 3, 2017. I later turned it into two articles: "Deliberation and Discussion in Classical Athens" (Journal of Political Philosophy, online pub. 2020) and "Deliberation in Ancient Greek Assemblies" (Classical Philology 2020). However, since this paper has been cited in a few places, I archive it here. Classical Athenian democracy is often described as deliberative, implying that discussion by the dêmos played an important political role. But of the three Greek verbs associated with deliberation, only one, bouleuomai, denoted an action performed by the dêmos, and in mass political contexts it suggested not discussion but internal decision-making communicated by voting. While speech was crucial to democratic politics, it was oratorical rather than dialogical and performed by rhêtores, ‘orators’ or ‘politicians’, who by the very act of speaking were conceived as casting themselves outside the deliberating dêmos. With respect to public speech, classical Athenian democracy had more in common with modern democratic politics than is usually recognized. This similarity makes it more, not less, useful as a model today.

Ivan Jordovic

Freedom of Speech and Information in Global Perspective

Janne Virkkunen

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Explainer: what is free speech?

Associate Professor in Political Science and International Relations, The University of Western Australia

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Who can say what to whom in Australia? In this six-part series, we look at the complex idea of freedom of speech, who gets to exercise it and whether it is being curtailed in public debate.

The term “free speech” is not ideal. The “free” part skews in favour of those who oppose regulation and the “speech” part puts the focus on the spoken word, even though the discussion embraces wider communication including art, writing, films, plays, flag burning and advertising.

It might, therefore, be better to drop the term “free speech” to highlight that the debate is really about whether or not we should regulate the communication of ideas, thoughts and beliefs.

This analysis, however, is not the place to rewrite the terms of reference. So I will use the term free speech with the caveat that “free” does not mean a lack of regulation, and “speech” covers a variety of activities.

Justifying free speech

It is not enough to say “three cheers for speech!”, because if we don’t know why speech is important we don’t know if it is worth protecting.

John Stuart Mill thought that freedom of thought and discussion (he doesn’t use the term “free speech”) is valuable because it brings us closer to the truth, which in turn promotes utility. Alexander Meiklejohn suggests speech is important because it allows for democratic self-government. And Thomas Scanlon and C. Edwin Baker argue that free expression is justified because it promotes autonomy.

These are the three heavyweight contenders in the debate about why speech is important.

The important thing to notice about all of them is that the justification offered in favour of speech also allows for some limitations. If expression is justified because it promotes truth, we have no grounds for defending it when truth is undermined. Speech that damages democratic processes will find itself unprotected by the self-government thesis. And if the autonomy argument is compelling we will not want to protect speech that undermines this goal.

The heated debate about “political correctness” (a term I dislike), or PC, demonstrates this nicely. The usual claim is that PC stifles free speech. This accusation is difficult to quantify. PC might, for example, limit the speech of white men but enhance that of minorities; I would need more data before reaching a conclusion.

But the complaint itself tells us something about the complex nature of speech. Why complain at all? The usual answer is that communication is being muted by PC. This seems to be an argument that we should oppose PC in the name of free speech itself. To make this claim we need to show why speech is important (enter justification here). Once we offer a justification we again have an argument for why speech can be limited.

Perhaps combining the three justifications discussed above will allow for lots of unregulated speech. This doesn’t seem to work because the three accounts often clash. Justifying speech because it promotes truth, for example, seems to allow silencing many a politician (oh joy!) and hence interfering with political speech.

These difficulties suggest that any persuasive argument about speech (as opposed to saying “three cheers”) has to embrace the fact that speech can, and indeed should, be limited. An even more confronting conclusion is that giving reasons for why speech is important makes us reveal underlying values that seem to be even more fundamental than speech itself.

Which speech deserves special protection?

Having (hopefully) established that speech is not unconditionally good, the next task is to determine what the appropriate limits should be.

This will depend in large part on why speech is justified in the first place. The autonomy account will offer different protections than the truth/utility account which in turn will differ from the self-government justification.

Mill, for example, tells us that truth is best promoted by allowing a great deal of communication. But he is willing to shut down speech if it leads to unacceptable harm. This argument faces difficulties, one being harmful speech might lead us towards truth.

His justification for speech seems to clash with his reason for limiting speech. Mill was a pretty smart guy, but even he struggled to provide a coherent and consistent position on free speech.

The thing to keep in mind is that the justifications we use to defend speech will always prioritise some forms of communication over others, and this will be our guide to picking out speech most in need of protection. This again suggests that speech is not valuable in and of itself.

Should some speech acts be punished?

What should we do with speech that is not protected by our favoured justification? The answer depends on balancing the speech act in question against other values.

If the speech is not causing harm we might want to leave it alone. Others might think that harmless but grossly offensive speech should be punished. If speech reveals wartime secrets to the enemy we might want to put the person in prison.

Engaging in hate speech in Europe can quite possibly lead to the same outcome. Libel will incur civil rather than criminal charges. And Mill suggests that in many instances the appropriate punishment for speech is “social disapprobation” rather than legal penalty.

The reason why the argument over free speech has not been put to bed long ago is that people bring different sets of values to the discussion. The debate does not takes place in a vacuum and arguments have to be assessed against social norms, values and institutions. Speech is a social phenomenon because it requires speakers and listeners to engage with one another. The “problem” of free speech does not exist for the person stranded on a deserted island.

Even people with the same values can disagree on the facts of the matter. They might accept Mill’s argument that speech can be limited if it causes harm but disagree over whether hate speech, for example, is captured by the harm principle.

The topic quickly becomes devilishly difficult. The one thing I can say with confidence is that it is unlikely a one-size-fits-all principle will help us navigate the treacherous waters of free speech.

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– An Open Forum for Classics

Two Concepts of Free Speech, from Classical Athens to Today’s Campus

James Kierstead

As the Oxford political theorist Teresa Bejan reminded us a few years ago now in The Atlantic , the Greeks had two concepts of free speech . The first, isēgoriā (ἰσηγορία) could more literally be translated ‘equality of public speech’, whereas the second, parrhēsiā (παρρησία), is more directly focussed on the license to say whatever you want: the prefix comes from pās (πᾶς), ‘all’ or ‘everything’, so that parrhēsiā is,at root, the freedom to say anything.

Bejan argued that we risk misunderstanding today’s deplatformers and anti-free-speech campaigners unless we realize that they’re more concerned about isēgoriā than parrhēsiā. “What they care about,” writes Bejan, “is the equal right to speech, and equal access to a public forum in which the historically marginalized and excluded can be heard and count equally with the privileged.” Bejan thinks that a convincing defence of parrhēsiā on college campuses can and should be mounted, but only if we reconnect with the egalitarianism that she thinks undergirds both isēgoriā and parrhēsiā .

I’m basically in agreement with Bejan on this – that “the alternative” to defending expressive liberty “is to allow the powers-that-happen-to-be to grant that liberty as a license to some individuals while denying it to others.” But I also think there’s more that we can get out of the Classical Greeks’ two concepts of free speech, especially if we go back to the world they emerged from and examine the ways in which they were used and the spaces they were associated with. Once we do that, we should be in a position to develop a more nuanced conception of which types of speech norms should be encouraged or defended in different contexts. Isēgoriā , I will argue, does have its claims in certain spaces, and it does make sense to encourage it in the seminar room in particular. But it’s parrhēsiā that we will ultimately need to defend if we want to keep free speech alive, within the academy and in society as a whole.

Even before Athens’ Classical democracy was up and running, parrhēsiā and isēgoriā had emerged from slightly different contexts. Parrhēsiā was particularly associated with a tradition of satirical poetry written in iambs and often aimed at tyrants , the sole rulers who came to power in a clutch of city-states across the Greek world in the 6 th century BC. Isēgoriā , by contrast, had long been associated with formal political bodies such as assemblies and councils, and with the ability of every man who qualified for them to have his say on the affairs of the polis (πόλις, city-state) on an equal basis with his peers.

These historical differences carried on into the Classical period, with the two values always being associated with slightly different spaces and institutions. According to his student Plato, Socrates expressed puzzlement about why the Athenians only listened to experts when it came to things like ship-building, but were willing to listen to any man – including poor and low-born men such as shoe-makers and carpenters – when it came to making decisions about the direction of the city-state. Demosthenes stresses that it’s in the Athenians’ own interest to listen to everyone who wants to offer advice, because that will mean they have a variety of proposals to choose from. Both of these passages show the importance that the ideal of equal public speech – isēgoriā – had in the Assembly, the most important decision-making body in democratic Athens.

P arrhēsiā , for its part, was more likely to be found as part of ordinary social life: the philosopher and orator Isocrates, for instance, describes it as having an important part to play in education, since it allows the sort of honest feedback from acquaintances which can help a man improve himself. Unlike isēgoriā , parrhēsiā didn’t really flourish in the formal political institutions that ran the democratic city-state; but it did flourish in the theatre, especially the comic theatre.

That the comic theatre was a place where parrhēsiā thrived is something we hear from the ancient sources themselves. Isocrates complains (almost certainly inaccurately) that, even though Athens is a democracy, there is no parrhēsiā except “here in the assembly – for the most moronic and narcissistic people – and in the theatre for producers of comedy.” The legal speech-writer Lysias describes the defendant in one case as doing things that are too shameful to mention – “although you hear of them from the comic poets every year” ( Fragment 53 ). And in the ideal city of Plato’s Laws , comedy is regulated in order to keep kakēgoriā (‘bad public speech’) under control.

Nobody who’s seen or read the plays of Aristophanes will be surprised at this association between comedy and unhindered, sometimes even offensive, free speech. His eleven surviving plays – the only complete examples we have of the hard-hitting, no-holds-barred genre of ‘Old Comedy’ – are brimming with obscenities, both scatological and sexual. Actors wore an exaggerated paunch and an outsized phallus as part of their costumes, and acted out defecation and sexual acts on stage. Characters shifted from mock-tragic at one moment to broadly orgiastic the next, creating an effect that probably has its closest modern analogy in fast-moving, nothing-is-off-limits cartoons like South Park or Family Guy . And the plots can be similarly outlandish – a farmer who’s had enough of the Peloponnesian War drawing up his own private peace-treaty with Sparta ( Acharnians ); women bringing the war to an end through a coordinated sex-strike ( Lysistrata ); a man flying to the abode of the gods on a giant dung beetle ( Peace ).

Aristophanes’ plays were also bracingly political – here the modern analogy would be something like John Oliver’s or Bill Maher’s shows, though Aristophanes can be even more hard-hitting (and considerably more offensive). In a few passages where he seems to address his audience directly, Aristophanes appears to defend himself, claiming that what he was doing was helpful to the democracy he lived in. We don’t know exactly what the Athenians thought about that; but they didn’t seem to have any trouble with bawdy satire having a prominent place in their public culture. The Festival of Dionysus was, after all, a major civic and religious event, and a centrepiece of the Athenian festival calendar.

Why was this sort of unhindered free speech seen as salutary in democratic Athenian society? Perhaps because parrhēsiā , as a character in Euripides’ Suppliants implies , allowed the weaker members of society to have their say, permitting them to push back and hold their own against wealthier and more powerful citizens, if only every now and then. But parrhēsiā didn’t just help people lower down on the social hierarchy speak up against their supposed betters. It also allowed intellectuals to speak up against the reigning orthodoxies of the day. Socrates in Plato’s dialogue Gorgias , for example, encourages one of his interlocutors to speak frankly , adding that he is “clearly saying things now which others think, but don’t want to say out loud.” And Aristotle describes the “great-souled man” as “ a frank speaker ” ( parrhēsiastēs ), since “hiding things is characteristic of people who are afraid, and who care less for the truth than for opinion.”

These, then, were the Greeks’ two concepts of free speech, and what came to seem their natural habitats: isēgoriā , or equality of public speech, which was associated with formal political institutions and democratic deliberation; and parrhēsiā , the license to say anything, even (or especially) if it went against the current, which had its stronghold in the ribald comic theatre of playwrights like Aristophanes. Nobody would argue that the Athenians lived up to these ideals perfectly, and there are ongoing scholarly controversies about what the effective limits of free speech were in Athens – which was, we should bear in mind, a more traditional and religious society than our own. But my argument here isn’t that democratic Athens was a free-speech utopia that we should emulate in every respect. Rather, it’s that the Greeks’ two concepts of free speech can help us think about the contemporary debate about free speech in universities.

In some ways, this shouldn’t seem very radical, because isēgoriā , at least, is an ideal that would find a ready home in modern discourses about free speech, at least within the academy. One of the principles most often held up by recent theorists of liberal democracy is deliberation, in the somewhat technical sense of genuinely reasoned and open discussion. In one of the most well-known versions of this ideal, Jürgen Habermas’ “ideal speech situation,” the best sort of discussion is imagined as one in which everyone is able to propose or question any idea whatsoever, without feeling intimidated or coerced by anyone else. The idea that everyone should be equally able to have a say – isēgoriā , in other words – is obviously central.

And deliberative ideals of this sort are clearly something which have a place on college campuses, especially in classes and seminars. In these contexts we might well want to try to make sure everyone taking part in a discussion has a roughly equal chance to have a say. Most academic seminars, in any case, run on a series of implicit norms that the vast majority of participants are happy to go along with. These include waiting your turn to speak; not engaging in ad hominem attacks; and trying to express criticisms politely.

These kind of seminar norms aren’t a bad thing at all. Indeed, they clearly embody isēgoriā and related deliberative values in their concern for equality and for reasoned discourse. But these values can’t be the only ones informing the way we have conversations on campuses; still less can they be the only norms we have for speech outside of universities (not least because, though we academics are sometimes liable to forget it, not every conversation is a seminar). We also need to honour the unrestricted license to express ourselves, even in a way which rubs some people up the wrong way – which the Greeks called parrhēsiā. And, in fact, it’s parrhēsiā that has to be our bedrock free speech value, both on campus and off, if we’re going to preserve everyone’s right to have their say.

Why? Because even though sometimes everyone will be in agreement that something someone said was disrespectful, that won’t always be the case. People often disagree about whether something was impolite or not; and it can be easy to perceive or present something someone has said as disrespectful even when what has really bothered you isn’t the way they’ve expressed themselves but the content of what they’ve said. In other words, claims about respect, politeness, and so on, are easily weaponized against legitimate expression; and they’re especially easily weaponized in environments like contemporary universities, where an enormous political imbalance of academic and administrative staff effectively gives one side free rein to decide what counts as offensive and what doesn’t.

I sēgoriā and its modern descendants provide us with some excellent ideals to aspire to, but, short of a few minimal and practical measures such as banning direct personal abuse, it’ll never be possible to do away completely with complaints about people being disrespectful and impolite. These kinds of claims emerge virtually inevitably from conflict, and conflict is itself an inevitable feature of doing things together with other humans, who have an irritating tendency to look at the world in different ways – and to want to express these different perspectives.

We might still want to encourage the narrower set of values associated with isēgoriā in our classes and seminars. Personally, I believe we should. But the ease with which claims about disrespect can be employed to shut others up means that they shouldn’t form the basis of disciplinary procedures; instead, we should have formal rules that defend a much more generous notion of free expression.

In a previous attempt to formulate this idea, I suggested that universities should look to encourage civility as a soft norm , but also protect free speech via hard rules (for example, against scholars being sacked for ordinary political expression). Teresa Bejan is right that both of the Ancient Greek ideals we have looked at here are, at bottom, bound up with a commitment towards free and equal speech. Not all concepts of free speech are created equal, though, and the Greeks’ two concepts of free speech are different in significant ways. Ultimately, it’s the broader, more general claims of unrestricted free speech that we will have to defend if we want to have a hope of halting the gradual erosion of our expressive freedoms in our universities and beyond.

James Kierstead is Senior Lecturer in Classics at Victoria University of Wellington and the moderator of Heterodox Classics, a Heterodox Academy community.

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Two Concepts of Freedom of Speech

Kathleen M. Sullivan
November 2010
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By holding that corporations may make independent expenditures from their general treasuries advocating the election or defeat of political candidates, Citizens United v. FEC unleashed a torrent of popular criticism, a pointed attack by the President in the State of the Union address, a flurry of proposed corrective legislation in Congress, and various calls to overturn the decision by constitutional amendment. Political uproar over a 5—4 Supreme Court decision upholding a controversial free speech right is not new; the Court’s two 5—4 decisions upholding a right to engage in symbolic flag burning, for example, elicited widespread public condemnation and efforts in Congress to overturn the Court by statute and by constitutional amendment. But Citizens United surely marks the first time a controversial victory for free speech rights emanated from a majority of Justices conventionally viewed as conservative, over the dissent of four Justices conventionally viewed as liberal, with virtually all political criticism arising from the political left.

Does Citizens United mark a reversal in the political valence of free speech? Have liberals grown weary of First Amendment values they once celebrated? Have conservatives flip-flopped and now become free speech devotees? This Comment argues that support for First Amendment values in fact cuts across conventional political allegiances, and that both sides in Citizens United are committed to free speech, but to two very different visions of free speech. Where the two visions align, lopsided victories for free speech claims are still possible. For example, last Term in United States v. Stevens , the Court voted 8—1 to invalidate the criminal conviction of a purveyor of dogfight videos, reasoning that a federal criminal ban on depictions of animal cruelty was overbroad. But where the two visions diverge, divisions like that in Citizens United become sharp.

In the first vision, discussed in Part I, free speech rights serve an overarching interest in political equality. Free speech as equality embraces first an antidiscrimination principle: in upholding the speech rights of anarchists, syndicalists, communists, civil rights marchers, Maoist flag burners, and other marginal, dissident, or unorthodox speakers, the Court protects members of ideological minorities who are likely to be the target of the majority’s animus or selective indifference. A vision of free speech as serving an interest in political equality also endorses a kind of affirmative action for marginal speech in the form of access to government subsidies without speech-restrictive strings attached. By invalidating conditions on speakers’ use of public land, facilities, and funds, a long line of speech cases in the free-speech-as-equality tradition ensures public subvention of speech expressing “the poorly financed causes of little people.” On the equality-based view of free speech, it follows that the well-financed causes of big people (or big corporations) do not merit special judicial protection from political regulation. And because, in this view, the value of equality is prior to the value of speech, politically disadvantaged speech prevails over regulation but regulation promoting political equality prevails over speech.

The second vision of free speech, by contrast, sees free speech as serving the interest of political liberty. On this view, discussed in Part II, the First Amendment is a negative check on government tyranny, and treats with skepticism all government efforts at speech suppression that might skew the private ordering of ideas. And on this view, members of the public are trusted to make their own individual evaluations of speech, and government is forbidden to intervene for paternalistic or redistributive reasons. Government intervention might be warranted to correct certain allocative inefficiencies in the way that speech transactions take place, but otherwise, ideas are best left to a freely competitive ideological market.

The outcome of Citizens United is best explained as representing a triumph of the libertarian over the egalitarian vision of free speech. Justice Kennedy’s opinion for the Court, joined by Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Scalia, Thomas, and Alito, articulates a robust vision of free speech as serving political liberty; the dissenting opinion by Justice Stevens, joined by Justices Ginsburg, Breyer, and Sotomayor, sets forth in depth the countervailing egalitarian view. Neither vision, however, entirely eclipses the other in Citizens United ; each of the principal opinions pays lip service to the other by invoking the other’s theory in its own cause. And, as Part III illustrates, neither side appears to have fully thought through how its position in Citizens United fits with the broader views its members have expressed about First Amendment rights in other contexts, causing seeming inconsistencies with positions taken in other First Amendment cases last Term. The upshot is that each vision retains vitality for use in other First Amendment contexts.

The tension between these two competing visions – of free speech as serving equality and of free speech as serving liberty – is illuminated by analysis of four possible political reforms that might be considered in the aftermath of the Citizens United decision: first, invalidating limits on political contributions directly to candidates; second, allowing independent electoral expenditures by nonprofit but not for-profit corporations; third, increasing disclosure and disclaimer requirements for corporations making expenditures in connection with political campaigns; and fourth, conditioning receipt of various government benefits to corporations on their limiting political campaign expenditures. The first seems initially attractive to libertarians but not egalitarians; the second to egalitarians but not libertarians; the third to both libertarians and egalitarians; and the fourth to libertarians but not egalitarians. As addressed in Part IV, however, a closer look at each alternative reveals significant complexities.

The best view of freedom of speech would combine the free-speech-as-liberty perspective with the egalitarian view’s skepticism toward speech-restrictive conditions on government benefits. Under such a capacious approach, the first and third reforms are preferable to the second and fourth, and any new regulation of political money in the wake of Citizens United should abandon source and amount limits or increase disclosure requirements, not distinguish among political speakers or make speech restrictions a price of government largesse.

First Amendment: Speech

November 19, 2010

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Chapter 6: The Right to Freedom of Speech

The free communication of thoughts and opinions is one of the invaluable rights of man; and every citizen may freely speak, write and print on any subject, being responsible for the abuse of that liberty.

Free speech is our most fundamental—and our most contested—right. It is an essential freedom because it is how we protect all of our other rights and liberties. If we could not speak openly about the policies and actions of government, then we would have no effective way to participate in the democratic process or protest when we believed governmental behavior threatened our security or our freedom. Although Americans agree that free speech is central to democratic government, we disagree sharply about what we mean by speech and about where the right begins and ends. Speech clearly includes words, but does it also include conduct or symbols? Certainly, we have the right to criticize the government, but can we also advocate its overthrow? Does the right to free speech allow us to incite hate or use foul language in public?

The framers of the Bill of Rights understood the importance of free expression and protected it under the First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law. . . abridging the freedom of speech.” Both English history and their own colonial past had taught them to value this right, but their definition of free speech was much more limited than ours. Less than a decade after the amendment’s ratification, Congress passed the Sedition Act of 1798, making it a crime to criticize the government. Many citizens believed government could forbid speech that threatened public order, as witnessed by numerous early nineteenth-century laws restricting speech against slavery. During the Civil War, thousands of antiwar protestors were arrested on the theory that the First Amendment did not protect disloyal speech. Labor unrest in the 1800s and 1890s brought similar restraints on the right of politically unpopular groups, such as socialists, to criticize government’s failure to protect working people from the ills of industrialization and economic depression.

Freedom of speech did not become a subject of important court cases until the twentieth century when the Supreme Court announced one of the most famous principles in constitutional law, the clear and present danger test. The test was straightforward: government could not restrict speech unless it posed a known, immediate threat to public safety. The standard sought to balance the need for order with the right to speak freely. At its heart was the question of proximity, or closeness, and degree. If speech brought about an action that was dangerous under the immediate circumstances, such as falsely yelling “fire” in a crowded theater, then it did not enjoy First Amendment protection. With this case, Schenck v. United States (1919), the Court began a decades-long process of seeking the right balance between free speech and public safety.

The balance, at first, was almost always on the side of order and security. Another case decided in 1919, Debs v. United States , illustrates how restrictive the test could be. Eugene Debs was a labor leader from Indiana who had run for President four times as the candidate of the Socialist Party of America, once polling more than one million votes. At a June 1918 rally in Chicago, while U.S. troops were fighting in World War I, he told the working-class crowd, “You need to know you are fit for something better than slavery and cannon fodder.”

The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic . . . The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent. It is a question of proximity and degree.

He was sentenced under an existing federal statute to twenty years in prison for inciting disloyalty and obstruction of military recruitment, which the Supreme Court upheld.

For the next five decades, the Court wrestled with the right balance between speech and order. Much of what defined freedom of speech emerged from challenges to the government’s ability to regulate or punish political protest. Each case brought a new set of circumstances that allowed the justices an opportunity to modify or extend the clear and present danger test. Many decisions recognized the abstract right of individuals to speak freely, but each one hedged this right in important ways. Always in the background were conditions that pointed to disorder, dissension, and danger—the Great Depression, World War II, and the Cold War, among them—so the justices were cautious in expanding a right that would expose America to greater threats. These cases, however, gradually introduced a new perspective on the value of free speech in a democracy, namely, the belief that truth is best reached by the free trade in ideas.

The belief that society is best served by a marketplace of ideas open to all opinions, no matter how radical, ultimately prevailed. In 1927, the Court had endorsed what came to be called the bad tendency test: if officials believed speech was likely to lead to a bad result, such as urging people to commit a violent act, it was not protected under the First Amendment even if no violence occurred. By 1969, however, similar facts produced a different outcome. Ku Klux Klan members in Ohio invited a television station to film their rally. Waving firearms, they shouted racist and anti-Semitic slurs and threatened to march on Congress before their leader was arrested and later convicted under a state law banning speech that had a tendency to incite violence. The Supreme Court overturned his conviction in Brandenburg v. Ohio and established the rule still in effect today: the First Amendment protects the right to advocate the use of force or violence, but it does not safeguard speech likely to incite or produce an immediate unlawful act. The Brandenburg test has allowed Nazis to march, Klan members to hold rallies, and other extremist groups to promote views far outside the mainstream of public opinion. With few exceptions—fighting words and obscenity, for example—government today cannot regulate the content of speech.

Even as society was coming to accept a wide range of political ideas, opposition to an unpopular war raised other questions about the limits and forms of free speech. By the mid- to late 1960s, the Vietnam War divided Americans. Although many citizens supported the use of U.S. troops to stop communism in Asia, a growing minority, including many draft-age young people, took to the streets to oppose the war. The protestors did not limit their efforts to antiwar speeches; they also wore shirts with obscene slogans, burned draft cards, and desecrated American flags. Using these symbols to protest, they argued, was a form of free speech. Soon, the Supreme Court faced the question squarely in a case involving a youthful protestor from the nation’s heartland: is symbolic speech—messages using symbols or signs, not words—protected by the First Amendment?

The first large-scale American demonstration against the Vietnam War occurred in November 1965 when more than 25,000 protestors converged on the nation’s capital. Fifty Iowans made the long bus ride, and on the way home they decided to make their opposition known locally by wearing black armbands to work and school. One member of the peace contingent was Lorena Tinker, the wife of a Des Moines Methodist minister and mother of five children. Mary Beth Tinker, a thirteen-year-old eighth grader, followed her mother’s suggestion and became one of a handful of local public school students who wore this symbol of protest to school. This act placed her in the middle of a national controversy about student rights and freedom of expression.

In many ways, Mary Beth was a normal eighth grader. She was a good student who enjoyed singing, spending time with her friends, and taking part in church activities. What made her different was a commitment to social justice, a passion encouraged by her parents, both of whom were known for their activism. Her parents wanted their children to share their moral and social values, and Mary Beth responded eagerly to their invitation to participate with them. By the time she became a teenager, she already had attended her first protest, accompanying her father to a rally about fair housing.

Mary Beth Tinker, her brother, John, and a handful of Des Moines students planned their demonstration for December 16, 1965. The students’ aim was not to protest the war but to mourn its casualties, Vietnamese and American, and to show support for proposed peace talks. School officials, however, promised to suspend anyone who came to school wearing the armbands, and the school principal suspended Mary Beth and sent her home. She was one of five students suspended that day for wearing the offending cloth. Significantly, the school ban applied only to armbands, in other words, to students who opposed the Vietnam War; a number of students that day wore an array of other symbols, including the Iron Cross, a Nazi medal.

When the school board upheld the suspensions, the Tinkers persuaded the Iowa Civil Liberties Union to take the case to federal court. Two lower federal courts agreed with the school’s action, rebuffing the argument that the policy violated the First Amendment guarantee of free speech. The Supreme Court decided otherwise. In its 7-to-2 decision, announced in February 1969, the justices held that the wearing of armbands is a symbolic act akin to “pure speech” and protected by the right to free expression. The protesting students posed no threat to the order required for effective instruction, nor did the wearing of armbands interfere with the school’s educational mission. In this instance, the balance between order and liberty was weighted on the side of the First Amendment. Students and teachers, the Court concluded, do not “shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.”

Symbolic speech has been the focus of some of our greatest constitutional drama. Words may be powerful and provocative, but symbols are often more inflammatory because they are visual and evoke an emotional response. We live in an age when we use pictures and symbols to convey important messages, whether in politics or the marketplace. For these reasons, the Supreme Court’s recognition of symbolic speech as a right protected by the First Amendment has been a significant development. Twenty-five years after Mary Beth Tinker put on her armband in remembrance of the war dead, Life magazine featured a handful of civil liberties cases to celebrate the bicentennial of the Bill of Rights. Mary Beth’s case was included, even though the rights of students remained, and still are, more limited than those of adult citizens. But her actions as an eighth grader expanded our conception of constitutionally protected speech to include the symbols we use to express our convictions.

Restriction of free thought and free speech is the most dangerous of all subversions. It is the one un-American act that could most easily defeat us.

More than most other recent decisions, cases involving symbolic speech have revealed how contentious the right of free speech remains in our society. In 1989, the Supreme Court ruled that the First Amendment protected individuals who burned the American flag in protest. This decision was highly controversial, and it has resulted in numerous attempts to amend the Constitution to protect the flag and, in effect, limit speech in this circumstance. The outcome of this effort is uncertain, but the debate raises important questions: What role does this right play in our democracy? How does it contribute to our liberty as Americans?

The right to speak freely, without restraint, is essential to democratic government because it helps us develop better laws and policies through challenge, rebuttal, and debate. When we all have the ability to speak in the public forum, offensive opinions can be combated with an opposing argument, a more inclusive approach, a more effective idea. We tolerate offensive speech and protect the right to speak even for people who would deny it to us because we believe that exposing their thoughts and opinions to open debate will result in the discovery of truth. This principle is an old one in Western thought. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’s dissent in Abrams v. United States , a 1919 case suppressing free speech, is a classic statement of this view: “The best test of truth is the power of thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which [the public’s] wishes safely can be carried out.”

Governmental actions to deny differing points of view, even distasteful or unpopular opinions, rob us of the range of ideas that might serve the interests of society more effectively. In a case decided almost a decade before Tinker v. Des Moines , the Supreme Court found this rationale especially applicable to the classroom. “The Nation’s future,” the justices wrote, “depends upon leaders trained through wide exposure to that robust exchange of ideas which discovers truth out of a multitude of tongues.” As a nation, we are willing to live with the often bitter conflict over ideas because we believe it will lead to truth and to improved lives for all citizens. We recognize that freedom of speech is the first freedom of democracy, as the English poet John Milton argued during his own seventeenth-century struggle to gain this right: “Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.” The ability to speak freely allows us to pursue truth, to challenge falsehoods, to correct mistakes—all are necessary for a healthy society.

Free speech also reflects a commitment to individual freedom and autonomy, the right to decide for ourselves and to pursue our own destiny. Throughout our history, we have been so committed to individual choice that many foreign observers believe it is our most characteristic trait. We see it reflected daily in everything from advertising slogans—“Have It Your Way”— to fashion statements, but fail to recognize how closely freedom is tied to the right to speak freely. Free speech guarantees us an individual voice, no matter how far removed our opinions and beliefs are from mainstream society. With this voice we are free to contribute as individuals to the marketplace of ideas or a marketplace of goods, as well as to decide how and under what circumstances we will join with others to decide social and governmental policies.

A commitment to free speech, of course, will not resolve all conflict, not if our history is any guide. The debate is most contentious during times of war or other moments when national security is at stake. Even then—perhaps especially then—we will continue to fight over words and symbols because they express our deepest hopes and our most worrisome fears. This contest over what speech is acceptable and what is not has been a constant theme of our past. Rarely do these struggles produce a neat consensus. More often, intemperate rhetoric and bitter division have been their legacy, and this angry clamor is one of the basic noises of our history. What makes the struggle to protect free speech worthwhile is its ability to serve as a lever for change. When we practice our right to speak openly, we are defining the contours of our democracy. It is messy work, but through it, we keep the Constitution alive and, with it, our dreams of a just society.

“Free Trade in Ideas”

Jacob Abrams was a Russian immigrant and anarchist convicted of violating the Sedition Act of 1918, which made it a crime to advocate anything that would impede the war effort during World War I. In 1917 Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., had written the Court’s opinion in Schenck v. United States , upholding similar convictions because Congress had a right to regulate speech that posed a “clear and present danger” to public safety. But by the time Abrams’s appeal reached the Court in 1919, Holmes had modified his views. Disturbed by anti-radical hysteria, he dissented from the majority’s decision upholding Abrams’s conviction in Abrams v. United States . His eloquent discussion of the connection between freedom of speech and the search for truth soon became the standard used by the Supreme Court to judge free speech cases until Brandenberg v. Ohio in 1972. The First Amendment, Holmes reasoned, protected the expression of all opinions “unless they so imminently threaten immediate interference with the lawful and pressing purposes of the law that an immediate check is required to save the country.”

But as against dangers peculiar to war, as against others, the principle of the right to free speech is always the same. It is only the present danger of immediate evil or an intent to bring it about that warrants Congress in setting a limit to the expression of opinion where private rights are not concerned. Congress certainly cannot forbid all effort to change the mind of the country. Now nobody can suppose that the surreptitious publishing of a silly leaflet by an unknown man, without more, would present any immediate danger that its opinions would hinder the success of the government arms or have any appreciable tendency to do so . . .

Persecution for the expression of opinions seems to me perfectly logical. If you have no doubt of your premises or your power and want a certain result with all your heart you naturally express your wishes in law and sweep away all opposition. To allow opposition by speech seems to indicate that you think the speech impotent, as when a man says that he has squared the circle, or that you do not care whole heartedly for the result, or that you doubt either your power or your premises. But when men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas—that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out. That at any rate is the theory of our Constitution. It is an experiment, as all life is an experiment. Every year if not every day we have to wager our salvation upon some prophecy based upon imperfect knowledge. While that experiment is part of our system I think that we should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe and believe to be fraught with death, unless they so imminently threaten immediate interference with the lawful and pressing purposes of the law that an immediate check is required to save the country . . . Only the emergency that makes it immediately dangerous to leave the correction of evil counsels to time warrants making any exception to the sweeping command, “Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech.” Of course I am speaking only of expressions of opinion and exhortations, which were all that were uttered here, but I regret that I cannot put into more impressive words my belief that in their conviction upon this indictment the defendants were deprived of their rights under the Constitution of the United States.

“Malicious Words” versus “Free Communication”

In response to fears about imminent wars with France in 1798, the Federalist-controlled Congress passed a series of four acts known collectively as the Alien and Sedition Acts. Section 2 of the Sedition Act made it a crime to make defamatory statements about the government or President. (Sedition is an action inciting resistance to lawful authority and tending to lead to the overthrow of the government.) The act was designed to suppress political opposition. Its passage by Congress reveals how limited the definition of the right of free speech was for some Americans only a few years after the ratification of the First Amendment.

Sec. 2 . . . That if any person shall write, print, utter, or publish, or shall cause or procure to be written, printed, uttered or published, or shall knowingly and willingly assist or aid in writing, printing, uttering or publishing any false, scandalous and malicious writing or writings against the government of the United States, or either house of the Congress of the United States, or the President of the United States, with intent to defame the said government, or either house of the said Congress, or the said President, or to bring them, or either of them, into contempt or disrepute; or to excite against them, or either or any of them, the hatred of the good people of the United States, or to stir up sedition within the United States, or to excite any unlawful combinations therein, for opposing or resisting any law of the United Sates, or any act of the President of the United States, done in pursuance of any such law, or of the powers in him vested by the constitution of the United States, or to resist, oppose, or defeat any such law or act, or to aid, encourage or abet any hostile designs of any foreign nation against the United States, their people or government, then such person, being thereof convicted before any court of the United States having jurisdiction thereof, shall be punished by a fine not exceeding two thousand dollars, and by imprisonment not exceeding two years.

James Madison, congressman from Virginia, and Thomas Jefferson, the sitting Vice President, secretly drafted resolutions protesting the Sedition Act as unconstitutional. The Virginia and Kentucky legislatures passed these resolutions in 1798. Both resolutions especially pointed to the act’s violation of First Amendment protections, as seen in the Virginia Resolution here.

Resolved, . . . That the General Assembly doth particularly protest against the palpable and alarming infractions of the Constitution in the two late cases of the “Alien and Sedition Acts” passed at the last session of Congress; the first of which exercises a power no where delegated to the federal government, and which by uniting legislative and judicial powers to those of executive, subverts the general principles of free government; as well as the particular organization, and positive provisions of the federal constitution; and the other of which acts, exercises in like manner, a power not delegated by the constitution, but on the contrary, expressly and positively forbidden by one of the amendments thereto; a power, which more than any other, ought to produce universal alarm, because it is levelled against that right of freely examining public characters and measures, and of free communication among the people thereon, which has ever been justly deemed, the only effectual guardian of every other right.

That this state having by its Convention, which ratified the federal Constitution, expressly declared, that among other essential rights, “the Liberty of Conscience and of the Press cannot be cancelled, abridged, restrained, or modified by any authority of the United States,” and from its extreme anxiety to guard these rights from every possible attack of sophistry or ambition, having with other states, recommended an amendment for that purpose, which amendment was, in due time, annexed to the Constitution; it would mark a reproachable inconsistency, and criminal degeneracy, if an indifference were now shewn, to the most palpable violation of one of the Rights, thus declared and secured; and to the establishment of a precedent which may be fatal to the other.

The Sedition Act expired in 1801 but not until a number of the Federalists’ opponents, including Congressman Matthew Lyon of Vermont, had been convicted of violating the law. Today, historians consider the Sedition Act to have been a gross misuse of government power. In 1798, the Kentucky Resolutions focused on the rights of states to determine the limits of free speech.

Resolved, that it is true as a general principle, and is also expressly declared by one of the amendments to the Constitution, that “the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people;” and that no power over the freedom of religion, freedom of speech, or freedom of the press being delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, all lawful powers respecting the same did of right remain, and were reserved to the States or the people: that thus was manifested their determination to retain to themselves the right of judging how far the licentiousness of speech and of the press may be abridged without lessening their useful freedom, and how far those abuses which cannot be separated from their use should be tolerated, rather than the use be destroyed.

Related Resources

Timeline: First Amendment - Freedom of Speech
Video: A Conversation on the Constitution with Justices Stephen Breyer, Anthony Kennedy and Sandra Day O'Connor: Freedom of Speech

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Freedom of Speech

By: History.com Editors

Updated: July 27, 2023 | Original: December 4, 2017

A demonstration against restrictions on the sale of alcohol in the united states of America.Illustration showing a demonstration against restrictions on the sale of alcohol in the united states of America 1875. (Photo by: Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

Freedom of speech—the right to express opinions without government restraint—is a democratic ideal that dates back to ancient Greece. In the United States, the First Amendment guarantees free speech, though the United States, like all modern democracies, places limits on this freedom. In a series of landmark cases, the U.S. Supreme Court over the years has helped to define what types of speech are—and aren’t—protected under U.S. law.

The ancient Greeks pioneered free speech as a democratic principle. The ancient Greek word “parrhesia” means “free speech,” or “to speak candidly.” The term first appeared in Greek literature around the end of the fifth century B.C.

During the classical period, parrhesia became a fundamental part of the democracy of Athens. Leaders, philosophers, playwrights and everyday Athenians were free to openly discuss politics and religion and to criticize the government in some settings.

First Amendment

In the United States, the First Amendment protects freedom of speech.

The First Amendment was adopted on December 15, 1791 as part of the Bill of Rights—the first ten amendments to the United States Constitution . The Bill of Rights provides constitutional protection for certain individual liberties, including freedoms of speech, assembly and worship.

The First Amendment doesn’t specify what exactly is meant by freedom of speech. Defining what types of speech should and shouldn’t be protected by law has fallen largely to the courts.

In general, the First Amendment guarantees the right to express ideas and information. On a basic level, it means that people can express an opinion (even an unpopular or unsavory one) without fear of government censorship.

It protects all forms of communication, from speeches to art and other media.

Flag Burning

While freedom of speech pertains mostly to the spoken or written word, it also protects some forms of symbolic speech. Symbolic speech is an action that expresses an idea.

Flag burning is an example of symbolic speech that is protected under the First Amendment. Gregory Lee Johnson, a youth communist, burned a flag during the 1984 Republican National Convention in Dallas, Texas to protest the Reagan administration.

The U.S. Supreme Court , in 1990, reversed a Texas court’s conviction that Johnson broke the law by desecrating the flag. Texas v. Johnson invalidated statutes in Texas and 47 other states prohibiting flag burning.

When Isn’t Speech Protected?

Not all speech is protected under the First Amendment.

Forms of speech that aren’t protected include:

Obscene material such as child pornography
Plagiarism of copyrighted material
Defamation (libel and slander)
True threats

Speech inciting illegal actions or soliciting others to commit crimes aren’t protected under the First Amendment, either.

The Supreme Court decided a series of cases in 1919 that helped to define the limitations of free speech. Congress passed the Espionage Act of 1917, shortly after the United States entered into World War I . The law prohibited interference in military operations or recruitment.

Socialist Party activist Charles Schenck was arrested under the Espionage Act after he distributed fliers urging young men to dodge the draft. The Supreme Court upheld his conviction by creating the “clear and present danger” standard, explaining when the government is allowed to limit free speech. In this case, they viewed draft resistant as dangerous to national security.

American labor leader and Socialist Party activist Eugene Debs also was arrested under the Espionage Act after giving a speech in 1918 encouraging others not to join the military. Debs argued that he was exercising his right to free speech and that the Espionage Act of 1917 was unconstitutional. In Debs v. United States the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the Espionage Act.

Freedom of Expression

The Supreme Court has interpreted artistic freedom broadly as a form of free speech.

In most cases, freedom of expression may be restricted only if it will cause direct and imminent harm. Shouting “fire!” in a crowded theater and causing a stampede would be an example of direct and imminent harm.

In deciding cases involving artistic freedom of expression the Supreme Court leans on a principle called “content neutrality.” Content neutrality means the government can’t censor or restrict expression just because some segment of the population finds the content offensive.

Free Speech in Schools

In 1965, students at a public high school in Des Moines, Iowa , organized a silent protest against the Vietnam War by wearing black armbands to protest the fighting. The students were suspended from school. The principal argued that the armbands were a distraction and could possibly lead to danger for the students.

The Supreme Court didn’t bite—they ruled in favor of the students’ right to wear the armbands as a form of free speech in Tinker v. Des Moines Independent School District . The case set the standard for free speech in schools. However, First Amendment rights typically don’t apply in private schools.

What does free speech mean?; United States Courts . Tinker v. Des Moines; United States Courts . Freedom of expression in the arts and entertainment; ACLU .

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Two Concepts of Freedom of Speech
The Two Clashing Meanings of 'Free Speech'. Today's campus controversies reflect a battle between two distinct conceptions of the term—what the Greeks called isegoria and parrhesia. Socrates ...
Dr Teresa Bejan writes about the two clashing meanings of Free Speech
Photo by Edwin Andrade on Unsplash. Teresa Bejan has written an article for The Atlantic (2 December) in which she frames the current debate on university campuses about the right to free speech in terms of two opposing ancient Athenian concepts of Freedom of Speech. "The conflict between what the ancient Greeks called isegoria, on the one ...
PDF Two Concepts of Freedom (of Speech)
underlying our contemporary controversies over free speech is a more fundamental conflict between two very different concepts of the freedom of speech, both as old as democracy itself: what the Greeks called isegoria, on the one hand, and parrhesia, on the other. While both are translated routinely as "freedom of speech" today, their mean -
The Two Clashing Meanings of 'Free Speech'
Source: The Two Clashing Meanings of 'Free Speech' | The Atlantic, by Teresa M. Bejan. there is a more fundamental conflict between two, very different concepts of free speech at stake. The conflict between what the ancient Greeks called isegoria, on the one hand, and parrhesia, on the other, is as old as democracy itself.
The Two Clashing Meanings of 'Free Speech'
The conflict between what the ancient Greeks called isegoria, on the one hand, and parrhesia, on the other, is as old as democracy itself. Today, both terms are often translated as "freedom of speech," but their meanings were and are importantly distinct. In ancient Athens, isegoria described the equal right of citizens to participate in ...
The Two Clashing Meanings of 'Free Speech'
The Two Clashing Meanings of 'Free Speech'. Teresa Bejan, The Atlantic December 6, 2017. AP Photo/Josh Edelson. Today's campus controversies reflect a battle between two distinct conceptions of the term—what the Greeks called isegoria and parrhesia. Read Full Article ». Related Topics: Higher Education, College, Free Speech, Campus. Comment. 0.
Professor Teresa Bejan
She has written extensively on themes of free speech, civility, tolerance and equality in historical contexts ranging from ancient Athens to 20th-century analytic political philosophy. ... "Two Concepts of Freedom (of Speech)," Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 163 (2019), 95-107, ... "The Two Clashing Meanings of Free ...
The Two Clashing Meanings Of Free Speech-Whence Liberalism?
'Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.' -1st amendment to the Constitution. Teresa Bejan's 'The Two Clashing…
(PDF) Two Concepts of Freedom (of Speech) 1
Two Concepts of Freedom (of Speech) 1. Of the many challenges facing democracy in America today, few perplex the public mind like the freedom of speech. Until recently, however, few freedoms seemed more obvious and ours. Let all else descend into the maelstrom of partisanship and polarization—Republicans and Democrats could at least agree to ...
Explainer: what is free speech?
Speech is a social phenomenon because it requires speakers and listeners to engage with one another. The "problem" of free speech does not exist for the person stranded on a deserted island ...
Two Concepts of Free Speech, from Classical Athens to Today ...
James Kierstead. As the Oxford political theorist Teresa Bejan reminded us a few years ago now in The Atlantic, the Greeks had two concepts of free speech.The first, isēgoriā (ἰσηγορία) could more literally be translated 'equality of public speech', whereas the second, parrhēsiā (παρρησία), is more directly focussed on the license to say whatever you want: the prefix ...
Two Concepts of Freedom of Speech
In Two Concepts of Freedom of Speech, Professor Kathleen Sullivan observes that Citizens United tracks the philosophical divide between competing conceptions of free speech. The "free-speech-as-equality" camp reads the First Amendment to allow speech regulations that promote political equality, while the "free-speech-as-liberty" camp views the Amendment as a negative constraint on any ...
The Two Clashing Meanings of 'Free Speech'
The Two Clashing Meanings of 'Free Speech' Referral Lists: BI in Context [Old MOOS Additional References] ... (The Free Press) and Franklin Foer (The Atlantic) reflect on the meaning of the war in Gaza and world response to it, to prospects for the survival of liberal democracy worldwide. The two, they agree, are linked.
The Ongoing Challenge to Define Free Speech
Yet 227 years after the first 10 amendments to the U.S. Constitution were ratified in 1791 as the Bill of Rights, debate continues about the meaning of freedom of speech and its First Amendment companion, freedom of the press. This issue of Human Rights explores contemporary issues, controversies, and court rulings about freedom of speech and ...
The Two Clashing Meanings of 'Free Speech' : r/philosophy
The Two Clashing Meanings of 'Free Speech'. I totally disagree with the conclusion. The argument the author is making is that one type is better than the other. That "speaking truth to power" is exactly the same as "causing insult" and that the equal right to speak is less important. This argument is clearly in the end when they fail to claim ...
Chapter 6: The Right to Freedom of Speech
Two lower federal courts agreed with the school's action, rebuffing the argument that the policy violated the First Amendment guarantee of free speech. The Supreme Court decided otherwise. In its 7-to-2 decision, announced in February 1969, the justices held that the wearing of armbands is a symbolic act akin to "pure speech" and ...
Freedom of Speech
Freedom of speech—the right to express opinions without government restraint—is a democratic ideal that dates back to ancient Greece. In the United States, the First Amendment guarantees free ...
Full article: Free Speech and Ideology: Society, Politics, Law
Free speech remains a crucial question at the heart of every democracy. In Western countries, citizens ranging from progressive fringes to "constitutional conservatives" defend it as frequently as staunchly. In this paper, I discuss the tensions and contradictions of some formulations of free speech. Among other, I draw on two authors ...
When Diversity and Inclusion Clash with Free Speech—and Why they Don't
This piece was originally published by the Center for Higher Education Leadership. Drawing on work by PEN America, Jonathan Friedman discusses three cases where the principles of diversity, inclusion, and free speech have come into conflict. These include incidents involving hateful speech on campus, bias response systems, and inclusive ...
Com 200 midterm 2 Flashcards
The two clashing meanings of 'Free Speech' by Teresa Bejan Today's campus controversies reflect a battle between two distinct conceptions of the term -isegoria and Parrhesia -different versions of free speech -isegoria is the equal right of citizens to participate in public debate in the democratic assembly -parrhesia is the license to say what ...
The two clashing meanings of "free speech" • According to the author
The two clashing words isegoria and parrhesia have controversies because there is a fundamental conflict between the two. Explanation: The words isegoria and parrhesia are as old as the democracy itself. The two clashing words share the modern liberal democratic fascinating and forgotten ways.
The Two Clashing Meanings of " Free Speech" by Teresa M. Bejan
In Teresa M. Bejan's analysis of "Free Speech," she highlights the two clashing interpretations of the concept.. The first emphasizes unbridled expression without censorship, often linked to Enlightenment values of individual autonomy.The second perspective, rooted in civic republican ideals, prioritizes constructive, respectful dialogue that fosters a flourishing community.
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A row has erupted between a vineyard and local villagers after it was given permission to hold wine tastings near the parish church's graveyard. Ashford Borough Council granted an alcohol ...
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29. Hosted by Katrin Bennhold. Featuring Mara Hvistendahl. Produced by Rikki Novetsky and Mooj Zadie. With Rachelle Bonja. Edited by Lisa Chow and Alexandra Leigh Young. Original music by Marion ...

The Two Clashing Meanings of 'Free Speech'

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Dr Teresa Bejan writes about the two clashing meanings of Free Speech

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