Following the Obama administration’s historic suppression of government whistleblowers, Donald Trump’s repeated attacks on the media, and controversies on college campuses nationwide, Timothy Garton Ash’s Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World is well-timed.
Garton Ash offers a wide-ranging exposition on the right to self-expression and a coherent defense of free speech from an explicitly liberal point of view. Socialist theory and practice has never satisfactorily established the place of free speech in the struggle for social transformation and in a future socialist society — all the more reason to seriously grapple with the challenge posed by Garton Ash’s new book.
Free Speech’s Foundations
Garton Ash’s analysis of free speech has two primary sources: Isaiah Berlin, who proposed that free expression is founded on empathy with and tolerance for multiple and conflicting values, and John Stuart Mill, whose defense of free speech primarily stressed its beneficial consequences instead of its intrinsic value as a right. Neither of these perspectives constitute a solid foundation for a defense of free speech.
Empathy and toleration — two states of mind — are terrible guarantors for freedom. Empathy does not easily translate into institutional arrangements that could support free speech, and tolerance is a precarious substitute for a robust culture of rights. Instead, rights must empower people regardless of rulers’ individual good intentions.
In this spirit, Thomas Paine praised the new French Constitution because it “hath abolished or renounced toleration, and intolerance also, and hath established Universal Right of Conscience.” As he explained, “Toleration is not the opposite of intoleration [intolerance] but is the counterfeit of it. Both are despotisms. The one assumes to itself the right of withholding liberty of conscience, the other of granting it.”
Mill’s On Liberty, in contrast, defends free expression primarily on the grounds that truth will emerge from the so-called free marketplace of ideas, making this supposition the principal argument for free speech. It is clear that the absence of free speech and political freedom stand in the way of the search for the truth. But our marketplace of ideas is oligopolistic and thus not fully free, constrained as it is in a class society. Should free speech, therefore, become less valued?
Rather than relying on the promise of a consequentialist heaven, it can be argued that a right is a good thing in itself, essential to the dignity and self-determination of persons, and necessary for democracy. Rights — including the right to free speech — might help produce the closest approximation to truth and a better society, but, much more important, they are a constituent element of a good society.
Like other conceptions of rights grounded on metaphysical, ahistoric notions like human nature or natural law, Garton Ash’s reliance on empathy and tolerance cannot found a robust right to free expression, safe from erosion by powerful economic or governmental actors.
We need an alternative approach to rights that does not hinge on abstractions. Rosa Luxemburg offers one:
Every right of suffrage, like any other political right, is not to be measured by some sort of abstract scheme of “justice,” or in terms of any other bourgeois-democratic phrases, but by the social and economic relationships for which it is designed.
Luxemburg understands rights as embodiments of concrete social and economic relationships. In liberal capitalist societies, unequal access to power constrains these rights. In a thoroughly democratic socialist society, these constraints would disappear.
