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PROCEEDINGS OF THE AMERICAN PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY VOL. 163, NO. 2, JUNE 2019
Two Concepts of Freedom (of Speech)
1
TERESA M. BEJAN
Associate Professor of Political Theory
Fellow of Oriel College
University of Oxford
C C
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—Republi-
cans 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-identied liberals have engaged in
increasingly disruptive, even violent, efforts to shut them down.
2
For those who remember the original campus Free Speech Move-
ment 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 need is a remedial civics lesson. Surely
the absolutism of the First Amendment’s second clause—“Congress
shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech”—is unambiguous
enough?
While the appeal of a retreat to the ostensibly neutral ground of the
First Amendment is obvious, it is also entirely inadequate. As “the kids”
are quick to point out, the cases we care about are very often those in
which the Constitution does not apply. Social media mobs calling for
individuals to be condemned, censured, or red are themselves
comprised of individuals exercising their constitutional rights to speak
freely. Moreover, private entities like Facebook or Twitter—or colleges
like Yale or Middlebury—have the right to regulate and even exclude
1 Read 27 April 2018 as part of the Democracy Today: Ancient Lessons, Modern Chal-
lenges symposium. The paper builds on “The Two Clashing Meanings of ‘Free Speech’” by
Teresa M. Bejan, as rst published in The Atlantic (2017).
2 Beinart, “Violent Attack.”
3 Cox, “Berkeley Gave Birth.”
96 .
members on the basis of their speech as they see t. Pleading the First
Amendment in such cases is not a knock-down argument: it is a non
sequitur.
4
Here, one might be tempted to invoke that patron saint of secular
liberalism, John Stuart Mill, who warned in On Liberty (1859) that the
greatest threat to the “freedom of thought and discussion” in democra-
cies was not the state, but the “social tyranny” of one’s fellow citizens.
5
Still, neither side of the current controversy would disagree. Indeed,
many on the Left supportive of “no platforming”—that is, of denying
any person or group holding objectionable views a public platform—
insist that they are not anti–free speech at all. Rather, they—like Mill
himself—are worried about the harms posed by hateful or “assaultive”
speech to vulnerable groups and individuals, as well as the deleterious
effects a hostile environment might have on their speech.
6
On this view,
denying hateful or historically privileged voices a platform is necessary
to make the equal right to free speech effective, so that the most
marginalized and precarious members of society can nally speak up—
and be heard.
In making their case, these students and their supporters are putting
into practice the theories developed by feminist philosophers and crit-
ical race theorists in the 1990s. These were inspired, in turn, by the
theory of speech acts pioneered by J. L. Austin, the father of ordinary
language philosophy. In How to Do Things with Words (1962), Austin
argued that in addition to the “locutionary,” or semantic meaning of an
utterance, and the “illocutionary,” or socially valid intentions of the
speaker, one must also consider its “perlocutionary” force—that is, the
action it performs in the world, intended or not.
7
For feminists like
Catharine MacKinnon, an exemplary instance of the perlocutionary
effects of “doing things with words” was the sexism perpetuated by
pornography. “Words and images,” she argued, “are how people are
placed in hierarchies, how social stratication is made to seem inevi-
table and right, [and] how feelings of inferiority and superiority are
engendered.”
8
Other scholars have since extended this analysis to hate speech.
They argue that racist statements, for example, serve to rank others as
4 See Post, “First Amendment Right.” Of course, the situation is different at public
universities, which are covered by the First Amendment.
5 Mill, “On Liberty,” 8. Here, Mill was following closely Alexis de Tocqueville’s obser-
vation in the rst volume of Democracy in America (1835): “I know of no country in which
there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America” (I. 7).
6 See Waldron, Harm in Hate Speech; and Waldron, “Brave Spaces.” For the idea of
“assaultive” speech, see Matsuda, Words that Wound.
7 Austin, Things with Words.
8 MacKinnon, Only Words, 31.
( ) 97
inferior, thus “xing facts” about their relative position in the social
hierarchy and legitimizing unequal treatment.
9
This unequal treatment
also has epistemic consequences, creating a society wherein some indi-
viduals are more equal than others in their ability to speak and be
listened to.
10
Thus, as Rae Langton and others argue, if the perlocu-
tionary force of racist and sexist speech not only degrades and demeans,
but silences others, surely one is justied in silencing such “silencing”
speech—and in the name of free speech itself.
11
Here, one might be tempted to respond by paraphrasing Isaiah
Berlin in “Two Concepts of Liberty” (1958): “Liberty is liberty, not
equality or fairness . . . if I lose my freedom [of speech] in order to
lessen inequality, an absolute loss of liberty occurs.”
12
But that would
be too quick. Because, for all of our talk about free speech today, it is
very rarely clear what we are talking about. Is it the right of every
person, regardless of place, race, or creed, to have an equal voice or say
in public debate? Or is it the license to offend claimed by the unpop-
ular—self-styled prophets and pornographers alike? Does it belong
only to words, or to deeds as well? If the latter, is it (as MacKinnon and
others suggest) because speech acts—or because some subset of verbal
and non-verbal actions constitute external expressions of the intellect,
thus qualifying as the sacrosanct things we call ideas?
13
In America, these questions have been debated mainly by constitu-
tional lawyers, not philosophers. But the current conicts on campus
and beyond suggest that something deeper is at stake than the legal
adjudication of competing claims to the same individual right. For as
Berlin himself might have recognized, and as I will argue in this essay,
underlying our contemporary controversies over free speech is a more
fundamental conict 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-
ings 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.
14
9 Maitra and McGowan, “Introduction and Overview”; and Waldron, Harm in Hate Speech.
10 The touchstone here is Fricker, Epistemic Injustice.
11 See Langton, “Hate Speech”; and Langton, “Beyond Belief.”
12 Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts.”
13 Chemerinsky and Gillman, Free Speech, 13.
14 For good overviews of the distinction, see Momigliano, “Freedom of Speech”; Saxon-
house, Free Speech and Democracy; and the collected essays in Sluiter and Rosen, Free Speech
in Classical Antiquity.
98 .
These ancient ideas came to shape our modern understanding of
what we call “freedom of speech” in fascinating and forgotten ways. In
what follows, I shall outline the origins of these two concepts in the
theory and practice of Athenian democracy before returning to the
challenges facing American democracy today. Recognizing that there
are two very different concepts of free speech in play, and that these are
very often in tension if not outright conict, can help explain the frus-
trating shape of contemporary debates—and why it often feels as
though modern Americans are talking past each other when we talk
about the things that matter most.
A H
Famously, the First Amendment as we know and love it today was not
the product of the Founding. Rather, it is the creation of a series of
inuential Supreme Court decisions in the 20th century, and the justices
and jurists behind them. While Oliver Wendell Holmes’s debt to Mill in
his dissent in Abrams vs. The United States (1919)—and its inuential
defense of “free trade in ideas [as] the best test of truth”—is well
known, the extent to which he, Louis Brandeis, and Alexander Meikle-
john drew on ancient Athens in their jurisprudence is less so.
15
For
Brandeis especially, his fascination with Athens informed the convic-
tion that freedom of speech was the sine qua non of democracy itself.
(Brandeis was evidently in the habit of recommending Alfred Zimmern’s
The Greek Commonwealth to family and friends).
16
Still, despite their self-conscious emulation of the ancient Athe-
nians, neither Mill nor his American inheritors seem to have noticed
that there were two very different concepts in play.
17
Of the two,
isegoria is the older. The term dates back to the fth century BCE,
although modern historians disagree as to when the democratic prac-
tice of permitting any citizen who wished to address the democratic
assembly actually began.
18
Despite its common English translation as
“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
15 Werhan, “Classical Athenian Ancestry.”
16 See Strum, Louis D. Brandeis. Brandeis was also known to paraphrase Euripides and
Pericles’s Funeral Oration in his opinions. For Meiklejohn, see Saxonhouse, Free Speech and
Democracy, 310.
17 For Mill and Athenian democracy, see Urbinati, Mill on Democracy.
18 Lewis, “Isegoria at Athens.”
( ) 99
place where people, including philosophers like Socrates, would gather
together and talk.
19
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 assembly. The herald would ask, “Who will address the
assemblymen?” and 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.
20
Athens was not the only democracy in the ancient world.
21
Still,
from the beginning the Athenian principle of isegoria was seen as some-
thing special. The historian Herodotus even described the form of
government at Athens itself not as demokratia, but isegoria.
22
According
to the fourth-century orator and patriot Demosthenes, the Athenian
constitution was based on speeches (politeia en logois), its citizens
having chosen isegoria as a way of life.
23
For its critics, this was a bug,
as well as a feature. One, the so-called “Old Oligarch,” complained
that even slaves and foreigners enjoyed isegoria at Athens, which meant
that one could not freely beat them as one might elsewhere.
24
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 democracy in Athens, which distinguished itself from
the other Greek poleis or city-states not by excluding slaves and women
from citizenship (as did every society in the history of humankind until
very recently), but rather by including the poor. Even the thetes—
working Athenians who could not afford armor and so rowed in the
eet—were counted as political equals with an equal voice in the
ekklesia. 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 serve as jurors in the courts.
25
19 See “Ισηγορία.”
20 Lewis, “Isegoria at Athens,”134. Demosthenes noted that “the majority of assem-
blymen [ekklesiastai] do not avail yourselves of your right to speak.” Demosthenes, “Against
Androtion,” 22.30.
21 Cartledge, Democracy.
22 Herodotus, History, v.78.
23 Demosthenes, “On False Embassy,” 19.184.
24 Pseudo-Xenophon, “Constitution of Athenians.”
25 Cartledge, Democracy, 87.
100 .
While isegoria was essentially political, its competitor, parrhesia,
was more expansive. Here again, the common English translation
“freedom of speech” is deceptive. The Greek means something more
like “all saying” (pan + rhesis) and comes closer to the idea of speaking
freely or frankly, as in the French franc-parler.
26
Parrhesia thus implied
openness, honesty, and the courage to tell the truth, even if it meant
causing offense.
27
The practitioner of parrhesia (the parrhesiastes) was,
quite literally, a “say-it-all.”
Like isegoria, parrhesia was seen as characteristically Athenian by
its critics and defenders alike. For Euripedes, the parrhesia enjoyed by
citizens at Athens marked the key distinction between the life of a
citizen and that of a slave.
28
But when Plato noted that there was more
parrhesia in Athens than anywhere else in Greece, it was not a compli-
ment.
29
In The Republic, when Socrates describes democracy as “a city
full of freedom [eleutheria] and parrhesia,” it is so anarchic that even
animals wander aimlessly in the streets.
30
In his Areopagiticus—which
later inspired John Milton’s famous defense of a free(-ish) press,
Areopagitica (1644)—Isocrates lamented that his fellow Athenians
“looked upon insolence as democracy, lawlessness as liberty, parrhesia
as equality [isonomia] and license to do what they pleased as happi-
ness.”
31
Still others were more optimistic about parrhesia’s political
benets. Demosthenes and other orators stressed the duty of those
exercising isegoria in the assembly to speak their minds, too, in
persuading their fellow citizens.
32
Unlike isegoria, however, parrhesia was equally at home outside of
the ekklesia, in more and less informal settings. In the theater, play-
wrights like Aristophanes offended all and sundry by skewering their
fellow citizens, including Socrates, by name.
33
But the paradigmatic
parrhesiastai in the ancient world were the philosophers, self-styled
“lovers of wisdom” like Socrates who would accost their fellow citi-
zens in the agora and tell them whatever hard truths they least liked to
hear. Most notorious of these was Diogenes the Cynic, known among
other things for living in a barrel, masturbating in public, and telling
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.
26 See “Παρρησία”; and “Parrhesia, n.”
27 Balot, Courage in Democratic Polis, ch. 3.
28 E.g., Euripides, Hippolytus, 420–23; and Euripides, Suppliant Women, 437.
29 Plato, Gorgias, 461e.
30 Plato, Republic, 557b.
31 Isocrates, “Areopagiticus,” 7.20.
32 Werhan, Classical Athenian Ancestry, 318.
33 Aristophanes, “The Clouds.”
( ) 101
The danger intrinsic to parrhesia in its offensiveness to the powers-
that-be—be they monarchs like Alexander or the democratic majority—
fascinated Michel Foucault, who shortly before his death in the early
1980s made it the subject of a series of lectures given at Berkeley, home
of the original campus Free Speech Movement.
34
Foucault argued that
the practice of parrhesia necessarily entailed inequality through an
asymmetry of power, hence a “contract” between the audience (whether
one or many), who pledged to tolerate the offense, and the speaker,
who agreed to tell them the truth and risk the consequences.
35
Whereas isegoria was fundamentally about equality, then parrhesia
was about liberty—but liberty in the sense of license, not as a right but
an unstable privilege that the weak enjoyed at the pleasure of the
powerful. In Athens, 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.
36
For the
ancient origins of the modern “no platforming” movement, look no
further! And just as today, the consequences for speakers who offended
popular sensibilities could be violent—or deadly, as the trial and death
of Plato’s friend and teacher, Socrates, attests.
The idea that Socrates was the original martyr for free speech has
long been a liberal commonplace. Mill insisted in On Liberty that
“Mankind can hardly be too often reminded, that there was once a
man named Socrates, between whom and the legal authorities and
public opinion of his time, there took place a memorable collision.”
37
As we have seen, however, Socrates’s star pupil, Plato, had nothing
good to say about either isegoria or parrhesia in his works. The lack of
success that Plato’s loved ones enjoyed with both practices during his
lifetime may explain why. The father of Western philosophy no doubt
noticed that, despite their differences, neither concept relied upon that
most famous and distinctively Greek understanding of speech as
logos—that is, as reason or logical argument. As such, no less an
authority than Plato’s friend and student Aristotle would identify logos
as the capacity that made human beings “political” animals in the rst
place.
38
Yet neither isegoria nor parrhesia identied the reasoned speech
and argument of logos as particularly deserving of equal liberty or
license. Which seems to have been Plato’s point. How was it that a
34 Entitled “Discourse and Truth: The Problematization of Parrhesia,” these lectures
were later edited and published as Foucault, Fearless Speech.
35 Foucault, Fearless Speech, 32–33.
36 Xenophon, Memorabilia, III, 6.1. Readers will also remember Glaucon as Socrates’s
chief interlocutor in The Republic.
37 Mill, “On Liberty,” 27. See also Saxonhouse, Free Speech and Democracy, 326.
38 Aristotle, Politics, 1253a.
102 .
democratic city that prided itself on free speech, in all of its forms,
voted to put to death the one Athenian ruled by logos for speaking it?
39
E M L
What became of these two, characteristically Athenian, concepts once
the democratic institutions that gave rise to them disappeared? Unsur-
prisingly perhaps, parrhesia survived the demise of democracy in
Athens more easily than did isegoria. As Greek democratic institutions
were crushed rst by the Macedonian Empire, then the Roman,
parrhesia persisted as a rhetorical trope of licentia or licentious
speech.
40
A thousand years after the fall of Rome, Renaissance human-
ists would revive parrhesia as the distinctive virtue of the counselor
speaking to a powerful prince in need of frank advice.
41
While often
couched in apologetics, parrhesia retained its capacity to shock. The
hard truths presented by Machiavelli and Hobbes to their would-be
sovereigns would inspire generations of “libertines” to come.
Still, there was another adaptation of the parrhesiastic tradition of
speaking truth to power available to early modern Europeans. Almost
1,500 years earlier, the rst Christians had taken a page from Diogenes
the Cynic’s book in spreading the “good news” of the Gospel
throughout the Greco-Roman world—news that understandably did
not sound that great to the Roman authorities. Many Christians who
styled themselves as “Protestants” after the Reformation thus believed
that a return to the authentically parrhesiastic and offensive evangelism
practiced by their forebears was necessary to restore the Church to the
purity of “primitive” Christianity.
42
Exasperated observers like the
humanist Erasmus turned, in turn, to the ancient Athenians for inspira-
tion—but not as models of free speech.
In his 1525 treatise, Lingua (or “The Tongue”), Erasmus bemoaned
the epidemic of incivility caused by Martin Luther and his followers
and praised the wisdom of Solon for restraining licentious tongues
through laws banning insults and speaking ill of the dead. (The institu-
tion of isegoria goes unmentioned.
43
) But the rising tide of Protestant
parrhesiastai would not be stopped. The early Quakers, for example,
39 Plato’s Gorgias includes the following characteristically ironic comment from
Socrates to Polus: “It would indeed be a hard fate for you, my excellent friend, if having come
to Athens, where there is more freedom of speech [parrhesia] than anywhere in Greece, you
should be the one person there who could not enjoy it” (461e).
40 See Colclough, Freedom of Speech, 27.
41 Paul, “Counsel and Command.”
42 Bejan, Mere Civility, ch. 1.
43 Bejan, Mere Civility, 43–44. See also Wallace, “Athenian Laws.”
( ) 103
were known to interrupt Anglican services by banging pots and pans
and shout down the minister, as well as going naked in public “for a
sign.”
44
A young William Penn cited the early Cynics, along with over
60 other ancient authorities, as inspiration.
45
(One imagines Diogenes
blushing . . . with pride.)
Isegoria, too, had its early modern inheritors. Still, 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.
46
For the many who lacked access to formal political participation, the
idea of isegoria as an equal right of public speech belonging to all citi-
zens eventually migrated from the (concrete) public forum to the
(virtual) public sphere of philosophic and political debate.
47
For early Enlightenment philosophers like Spinoza, it was the
thought—not voice—that counted. Freedom of speech (libertas dicendi)
was a necessary consequence of (and concession to) the freedom of
thought and philosophy (libertas philosophandi), which meant
primarily that wise and moderate rulers should grant citizens a limited
freedom to teach and debate their conclusions.
48
Similarly, in “What is
Enlightenment?” (1784), written ve years before the French Revolu-
tion, Immanuel Kant insisted that the “freedom to make public use of
one’s reason,” rather than free speech, was the fundamental and equal
right of human beings and citizens.
49
Even in On Liberty, no less a
liberal than Mill defended the individual “freedom of thought and
discussion” in the collective pursuit of truth, not the freedom of speech
as such.
Thus while the equal liberty (or individual right) of isegoria
remained essential for these thinkers, their focus had shifted denitively
away from actual speech—that is, the physical act of using words to
address others and participate in debate—to the mental exercise of
rational thought, facilitated by the exchange of ideas and arguments,
very often in print.And so, over the course of two millennia, one sees
that the Enlightenment nally achieved what Plato could only dream:
the reconciliation of isegoria and logos once and for all. This
44 Bejan, Mere Civility, 70–71.
45 Penn, No Cross, 78–79.
46 “Act Declaring Rights.”
47 Habermas, Structural Transformation.
48 Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, ch. 20 (“Where it is shown that in a free state
everyone is allowed to think what they wish and to say what they think”).
49 Kant, “What Is Enlightenment?,” 55. In German: “Freiheit . . . von seiner Vernunft in
allen Stücken öffentlichen Gebrauch zu machen.”
104 .
logocentric ideal of free speech as an equal right to public reason and
rational deliberation remains alive and well in Europe to this day.
Perhaps European efforts to criminalize hate speech also owe a clear
debt to Kant, who insisted that the freedom of (reasoned) speech in
public should be “the most harmless [unschädlichste]” of all.
50
Of course, the same could never be said of parrhesia. Whether
ancient or early modern, the practice of speaking truth to power proved
threatening to speakers and listeners alike. It was the obvious harmful-
ness of their parrhesia to the body of Christ or corpus Christianum—
and their neighbors’ religious sensibilities—that led so many evangelical
Protestants to ee prosecution (or as they saw it, persecution) in Europe
for the greater liberty—and license—of the New World. The Quaker
leader George Fox articulated the parrhesiastic principle that would
inform the practice of evangelical liberty in colonies like Pennsylvania
and Rhode Island thereafter: “Let them speak their minds. . . . And let
him be Jew, or Papist, or Turk, or Heathen, or Protestant, or what
soever, or such as worship sun or moon or sticks and stones, let them
have . . . free liberty to speak forth his mind and judgment.”
51
One is tempted to trace American exceptionalism about free speech
all the way back to the 17th and 18th centuries. While America got the
evangelicals and libertines, Europe kept the philosophers.
52
F F
When today’s 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
confused, at best. Most civil libertarians have responded by continuing
to preach to the converted about the First Amendment, only this time
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
and safe spaces grab headlines, poll after poll suggests that there is a
subtler, seismic shift in mores afoot.
53
To a generation raised on femi-
nist readings of Austin and convinced that hateful speech is itself a
form of violence or “silencing,” to plead the First Amendment is to beg
the question and miss the point. What they care about is the equal right
50 Kant, “What Is Enlightenment?,” 55.
51 Quoted in Gilpin, Millenarian Piety, 55.
52 See Bejan, Mere Civility, 167–74.
53 Recent polls by Pew and Brookings show that a plurality of millennials believe that
hateful or offensive speech should be limited. See Wike and Simmons, “Global Support”; and
Villasenor, “Views among College Students.”
( ) 105
to speech, and equal access to a public forum in which the historically
marginalized and excluded can be recognized and heard on equal
footing with the privileged. This is a claim to isegoria, and once one
recognizes it as such, much else becomes clear—including the competing
appeals to parrhesia by conservatives, some of whom appear increas-
ingly determined to reduce free speech to the license to offend.
Recognizing the ancient ideas at work in these modern arguments
also puts those of us committed to America’s peculiar parrhesiastic
tradition in a better position to defend it. To challenge the modern
proponents of isegoria—and to save parrhesia from its current
supporters—one must go beyond the freedom of speech to that other,
orienting principle of American democracy: equality. For the genius of
the First Amendment lies in bringing isegoria and parrhesia together, by
securing the equal right of citizens not simply to “exercise their reason”
but to speak their minds. It does so not because all citizens are equally
rational or good, or because all things that are sayable are worth
saying. No, it does so because the alternative will always be to empower
the powers-that-happen-to-be to grant that liberty as a license to
some—and to deny it to others, in turn.
In contexts where the Constitution does not apply, like a private
university or an online forum, this opposition to the insidious inequality
of arbitrary power will be a matter of culture, not law.
54
Still, with all
due respect to the constitutional lawyers, it is no less pressing and
important for that. As the evangelical prophets and provocateurs who
pioneered America’s own parrhesiastic tradition knew well: when the
rights of all become the privilege of a few, neither liberty nor equality
can last.
R
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