A People’s History of Free Speech
On the Greek origins of the First Amendment, and what we lose when we lose the inclination to speak truth to power.
“Why Liberalism” is a series by Persuasion in collaboration with the Institute for Humane Studies. The installments so far include:
Emily Chamlee-Wright on the fallacies of the postliberal right.
Joseph Heath on how the tactics of the illiberal left short-circuit classic liberal arguments.
Jonathan Rauch on why the “end of history” thesis still holds up, and why liberals desperately need to rediscover their nerve.
Tyler Syck on why equality is not the bogeyman right-wing critics of liberalism make it out to be.
William Galston on why the Declaration of Independence remains a deeply relevant and canonical liberal text.
Today, we are delighted to feature Teresa M. Bejan on why the American model of free speech is not, as is often assumed, simply a by-product of Lockean liberalism. She traces an alternative history from Ancient Greece through the Quakers to the First Amendment, arguing for the enduring urgency of parrhesia—frankly saying to others what they may not want to hear.
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There is a well-established tendency in American politics to declare whatever problem we happen to be facing at the moment to be an “unprecedented” one. We do this, I think, to signal that the problem is serious and requires our urgent attention. But many, if not most, of our problems are, in fact, entirely precedented—and precedented problems, while serious, offer us the hope at least of learning from the past.
Consider the increasingly fraught questions in the United States and other liberal democracies about free speech and its place in societies that aspire to be both tolerant and free. In one recent empirical study, a team of political scientists based in California announced what they described as a “major realignment of political tolerance” in the United States. By comparing data collected from 1950 to 2020, they found that a once clear and remarkably stable consensus around First Amendment principles of free speech had fractured: specifically, Americans’ willingness to tolerate speech they regard as hateful or otherwise offensive to others’ social identities has radically decreased. But while these scholars found a reduction in tolerance across the board (regardless of respondents’ age, education, or political affiliation), they also found the starkest decline among cohorts that had, historically, demonstrated the highest levels of tolerance for speech—namely, young and highly educated people who identify politically as liberals. Indeed: “In a stunning reversal, liberals are now consistently less tolerant than conservatives” of a wide range of speech about race, gender, and religious groups. They are also “somewhat less tolerant than conservatives of left-wing speech that offends dominant groups.”
Compare these findings with a second study published earlier this year by an international team of psychologists. By comparing data from 2000 and 2020, they found a precipitous drop across all demographics in internet respondents’ willingness to disagree with others’ opinions openly, as well as their willingness to “express [their] opinions publicly, regardless of what others say.” The authors cite their findings as evidence of a collapse globally in what they call “the need for uniqueness,” or individuals’ desire to stand out. The findings are consistent with previous polling in the United States finding that a strong majority of Americans across the political spectrum feel the need to self-censor when it comes to expressing their political views, both in public and online.
The paradox, of course, is that both trends—towards (1) decreasing tolerance for speech regarded as morally or politically objectionable on the one hand, and (2) increasing unwillingness to speak one’s mind, on the other—have coincided with the greatest modern revolution in communications technology since the invention of the printing press. As the writer Ian Leslie has observed, the internet (and particularly social media) have removed the considerable practical and socioeconomic barriers that have, historically, barred most people from speaking publicly. It is now possible for “anyone and everyone to speak their mind in public.” But many, if not most, choose not to. The result, as Leslie points out, has not been the golden age of free expression once predicted by internet utopians, but rather a growing culture of intolerance towards objectionable speech, and a politics increasingly obsessed with orthodoxy and policing speech across the political spectrum.
Centrist commentators concerned about these trends often frame them as reflecting a disturbing rise of illiberalism in American politics, particularly on the left. But it strikes me that there is something odd about this diagnosis, both rhetorically and genealogically. Firstly, a charge of “illiberalism” is unlikely to persuade people on the progressive left and conservative right, for whom “liberal” is an increasingly dirty word. Secondly, this diagnosis presumes that there is a readily recognizable and agreed upon political ideology called “liberalism,” in which support for a maximally tolerant approach to free speech must occupy a special place.
Yet what we today call liberalism is, at best, a very varied phenomenon with many different and competing intellectual strands. The idea that there is an identifiable “liberal tradition” dedicated to personal liberty—one that can be traced, say, from John Locke’s 17th century theory of natural rights, to the “free-thinking” 18th century philosophers of Enlightenment like Immanuel Kant, and finally culminating in the ethics of individuality defended by John Stuart Mill in his 19th century classic On Liberty—is now widely agreed by scholars to be an invention of the 20th century and the ideological battles of the Cold War. Indeed, like most great intellectual traditions, “liberalism” was largely a creation of its enemies, conservative and Marxist scholars keen to attribute the problems of the present to the intellectual errors of the past.
Certainly, none of the canonical liberals mentioned above endorsed anything like the expansive understanding of free speech familiar from 20th century First Amendment jurisprudence in the United States, which has found consistently that hateful and extremist speech—whether in the form of racist abuse, pornography, or burning the flag—is constitutionally protected. Freedom of speech was never included among the individual rights for which Locke showed particular concern. Indeed, in the 1660s he appears to have endorsed a religious insult statute for the colony of Carolina that looks very much like a modern hate speech law.1 And when he did, finally, endorse press freedom in an unpublished memorandum of the 1690s, Locke called only for the “liberty to print whatever [a man] would speak, and to be answerable for the one just as he is for the other if he transgresses the law.” This necessarily excluded quite a lot of speech—including blasphemy and seditious libel—that modern Americans take for granted as protected.
As for Kant and other philosophers of Enlightenment: what mattered for them was not free speech, as such, but freedom of rational thought. Kant’s 1784 essay “What is Enlightenment?” called specifically for the “freedom to make public use of one’s reason.” Likewise, for Mill, it was “the freedom of thought and discussion” in the collective pursuit of truth that demanded protection. Mill viewed “the liberty of expressing and publishing opinions” as so “practically inseparable” from free thought, that any harms caused thereby ought to be tolerated, lest one interrupt this engine of progress. Still, as a utilitarian, Mill saw this tolerance as entirely conditional. It did not need to be extended, for instance, to the “backward” people or civilizations he viewed as incapable of moral improvement without the tutelary supervision of the British Empire.
What can we conclude from this? Firstly, that “the liberal tradition” (such as it is) was hardly univocal with respect to what kind of speech ought to be free, how free, and for what reasons. And secondly, that the extraordinarily permissive (though in my opinion, substantially correct) approach to speech adopted by American liberals in the 20th century—which centers on the First Amendment and is defined by a commitment to tolerating forms of speech regarded as objectionable, even abhorrent—really is exceptional in ways requiring explanation.
This American approach to speech is often criticized as “absolutist,” but I think this characterization is misleading. There are, after all, plenty of legal limits on speech, even in the United States, for instance with respect to fraud, slander, and libel. The American approach is, in my view, better and more fairly characterized as a “free speech fundamentalist” one. By this, I mean that it insists that there is something special about speech—as both the spoken and the written word—that makes its protection uniquely and profoundly significant for creating the kind of society that the Founders envisioned: one that is tolerant, self-governing, and free.
But this re-characterization simply leaves us with more questions. To start: Where did this free speech fundamentalism come from, if not the liberal tradition? And how did it come to characterize the American approach to speech, in contrast with the more restrictive approaches taken in other liberal democracies? In the rest of this essay, I propose to address these questions historically, before circling back around to the problem with which we started: namely, whether America’s free speech fundamentalism is, indeed, under threat today, and what we might miss about it when it’s gone.
One of the first things one notices when approaching this history is that past thinkers tended to distinguish between at least two very different conceptions of “free speech” that are worth teasing apart. Both can be traced back to ancient Greece, and the Golden Age of classical Athens. The first form of free speech, what the Greeks called isegoria, translates to something like “equal speech” or “equal public address.” As such, isegoria was closely associated with Athenian democracy and the right of every adult male citizen in good standing to address the popular assembly, and to receive a hearing from his co-citizens in turn. (As I have argued elsewhere, this ancient ideal of “equal speech” speaks directly to concerns about voice and epistemic dignity at the heart of contemporary identity politics.)
By contrast, the second ancient form of free speech could be practiced not only within democratic institutions like the assembly, but also non-political ones like the Athenian agora or marketplace, the place where philosophers like Socrates would sit and talk. The Greeks called this second, more expansive sense of free speech parrhesia. This term is a combination of the Greek prefix pan-, meaning all or every, and the noun rhesis meaning speech (also the root of the modern English “rhetoric”). Thus in Greek the word parrhesia means something like “all-saying,” and the parrhesiastes or person who practices parrhesia was, literally, a “say-it-all.” Parrhesiastic speech was thus “free” in the sense of being spoken freely or frankly, without fear or favor, and saying whatever happened to be on one’s mind—even or especially when it was something the audience might not want to hear.
In ancient sources, the democratic citizens of Athens were praised for their practice of parrhesia, or free speaking, as a sign of their status as free men. (And I do mean men—parrhesia was not a freedom enjoyed by Athenian women, who were praised instead for their silence and almost total absence from the public sphere.) Still, the paradigmatic free-speakers or parrhesiastai of the ancient world were philosophers, like Socrates, who took it upon themselves to interrogate their fellow citizens in the marketplace, revealing their most deeply cherished beliefs to be false, foolish, or incoherent. And of these parrhesiastic philosophers, those most famous for saying precisely what their audiences least liked to hear were members of a school known to their enemies as “Cynics”—in Greek meaning, literally, the “the dog-like ones.” This group included not only men but women, and its members made a point of offending against contemporary Greek conventions in order to reveal their ultimate contingency. The founder of Cynicism, Diogenes, was known for (among other things) living in a barrel and masturbating in public, as well as telling Alexander the Great, who was standing over him in the sunshine, “Get out of my light.”
Diogenes’s example illustrates what Michel Foucault saw as the essential element of parrhesia as a form not only of free, but also “fearless” speech—namely, its inherent riskiness and danger as speaking truth to power, whether the powers-that-happened-to-be were emperors like Alexander or the democratic majority. Either way, the practice of parrhesia relied upon two corresponding virtues. Firstly, it required courage on the part of the free-speaker or parrhesiastes, who resolved to speak his or her mind regardless of the risks, and then to accept the consequences. And secondly, it required tolerance on the part of the audience, which must permit the parrhesiastes to speak freely, however objectionable or offensive they might find what she had to say. A successful practice of parrhesia thus required “tolerance” in the traditional sense of putting up with or suffering something of which one disapproves, not the modern sense of “accepting” or “celebrating” difference. One might imagine that the Cynics’ audience found little to celebrate about the things they said—or did—in public.
This ancient understanding of free speech as parrhesia, or speaking freely whatever the risks, looks very different from the democratic emphasis on “equal speech” or the exercise of public reason we find in other, often European liberal traditions. Indeed, it looks rather more like the “free speech fundamentalism” characteristic of 20th century American jurisprudence. Still, in recognizing the latter as a commitment to parrhesia, we are still left with an important question: namely, how did this ancient Greek idea find its way to the United States, let alone become enshrined in the First Amendment to be rediscovered by modern American liberals?
It wasn’t (pace Justice Brandeis) directly from the Greeks themselves, but from another group of parrhesiastai who settled closer to home. The chief inheritors of Greek parrhesia—in its fullest and most offensive sense—were not philosophers or court-counselors, but the followers of an apocalyptic Jewish prophet named Jesus, born and executed on the fringes of the Roman Empire. It was thus the early Christians, in their commitment to evangelism or preaching the “good news” of Christ’s coming throughout the Greco-Roman world, who first took up the mantle of parrhesia. And like the Cynics, these free and fearless speakers not only welcomed women, but also practiced forms of poverty and communal living that were highly offensive to their Roman contemporaries.
If we fast forward in time to the 16th and 17th centuries, one can see that Protestant reformers like Martin Luther—so-called because of their determination to protest against the corruptions of the Catholic Church—were determined to revive the evangelical message of early Christianity by taking advantage of the latest advancements in communications technology (i.e. the printing press) and speaking truth to power. Luther began his parrhesiastic campaign by identifying the Pope as the Antichrist, then proceeded in increasingly scatological directions from there. What followed (as I have shown elsewhere) was well over a century of bloody conflict over whether—and how much—the secular governments of Europe should tolerate the parrhesia of warring Christians.
But there was one Protestant sect that, more than any other, put the parrhesiastic spirit of primitive Christianity at the heart of their own spiritual practices, and then brought it to the British colonies of North America: the Quakers. Much like the terms “Cynic” and “Protestant,” the “Quaker” label started out as an insult intended to ridicule the fits and spasms to which the earliest Quakers were prone whenever the spirit moved. This can often come as a surprise to modern audiences familiar with today’s more stoic Society of Friends. But in addition to going around England preaching (literally) without a license, the early Quakers were notorious for interrupting others’ church services by banging pots and pans and shouting down the minister. In one memorable example, a Quaker man is reported to have removed his pants and prostrated himself on the communion table.
The Quakers saw this enthusiastic evangelism as an expression of the liberty of conscience which (in their view) issued directly in a corresponding demand for “universal liberty” with respect to speech. As formulated by the movement’s founder, George Fox, this Quaker commitment to free speech was both principled and parrhesiastic: “Let them speak their minds,” he wrote in 1661, “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 liberty where every one may bring forth his strength, and have free liberty to speak forth his mind and judgment.” Fittingly, a young William Penn—an early convert and later founder of Pennsylvania—would credit the Cynics directly as inspiration before being thrown into a London prison for starting a riot.
Much like their Greek predecessors, one of the most offensive aspects of Quaker parrhesia from the point of view of their opponents was the centrality of women’s voices in the movement. Not only were Quaker women known to preach publicly; they were notorious for going naked in public as a sign of their spiritual nakedness in Christ. Alongside the many men named John celebrated today as making up the liberal tradition, it’s worth remembering a remarkable woman called Mary Fisher who, following her conversion in 1651, became the most prolific Quaker missionary of the 17th century. A former housemaid from Yorkshire, Fisher began her mission by bringing the Quakers’ parrhesiastic protest to the University of Cambridge, where she became the first Quaker women to be publicly flogged. From England she traveled to Barbados, then to Boston, winning a few converts—and many enemies—along the way. After surviving weeks of imprisonment and attempted starvation by her fellow Protestants in Massachusetts Bay, Fisher set out for the Ottoman Empire, declaring her intention to convert the Sultan himself. Unbelievably, she managed to locate him on the battlefield and secure an audience—after which, for once, she was not flogged or thrown in prison but allowed to leave for Constantinople as an honored guest. Like many English Quakers, Fisher subsequently emigrated to the colonies to escape persecution for her faith. She died in 1698 in South Carolina as a respected member of the Society of Friends.
Mary Fisher’s life and works offer an apt illustration of how a parrhesiastic tradition lost to Europe came to define the public understanding of free speech in what would become the United States. Indeed, as I have argued elsewhere, it was the comparative volume of enthusiastic evangelicals fleeing Europe for the colonies (and in the case of Pennsylvania and Rhode Island founding colonies of their own) that ultimately established an American commitment to parrhesia first as a religious, then as a political practice. Evidence of this evangelical legacy can, I suggest, be found in the very structure of the First Amendment. Although free speech was often celebrated by 20th century American liberals as the “first freedom,” if you look at the text itself, speech comes second or third, depending on how you count. For:
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.
Notice how the Framers moved from religion to politics over the course of the amendment, putting disestablishment first, free exercise second, and only then free speech, as in some sense an implication of the two.
The history recounted here suggests that Protestant parrhesia—and not something called “liberalism”—both was and is the source of the distinctive American commitment to free speech fundamentalism. This suggests, in turn, that our changing attitudes towards free speech today reflect a growing discomfort with parrhesia in particular, and a fear that free and fearless speech might cause more harm than good.
Of course, one might object that American parrhesia is in fact alive and well. Take, for example, the flood of deliberately offensive trolling and the slaughtering of sacred cows that characterizes so much of our public speech online, and increasingly in mainstream national politics. Although Lutherans of my acquaintance detest the analogy, it seems to me that the current Republican presidential candidate has a flair for parrhesia-via-social media that rivals Luther’s mastery of the printing press. As for the political left: surely the fluorescence of disruptive public protests both on and off campus—against the war in Gaza, for example, or climate change—suggests that American parrhesia is not, perhaps, so embattled after all?
Still, to me, these examples represent a striking—and deeply worrying—departure from the historical tradition of parrhesia surveyed above. Specifically, our modern say-it-alls appear to be practicing “free speech” in a way that lacks the courage that Foucault saw as essential—a courage reflected in the willingness of the would-be parrhesiastes to say the things that her audience least liked to hear, and to face the consequences in turn. By contrast, these thoroughly modern forms of free speech—from online (or presidential) trolling to on-campus protests—seem to be addressed to a like-minded and approving audience first and foremost. Opponents might well disapprove and be offended; still, the point of speaking remains primarily to please the people on one’s own side—by “owning the libs,” perhaps, or calling someone a “Zionist” or “fascist.” Indeed, our speech seems to become more offensive and extreme in response to audience capture, with speakers seeking constantly to outdo themselves by telling their audiences what they most want to hear about their opponents, then reaping the social and financial rewards.
Here, we encounter another striking departure from the parrhesiastic tradition described above, in which the point of speaking freely—as well as fearlessly—was ultimately persuasion. Specifically: Cynics like Diogenes and Quakers like Mary Fisher spoke their minds because they wanted to convince other people to change their own. But what passes for “free speech” today strikes me as singularly unconcerned with persuading anyone. We speak our minds not to change the minds of our opponents, but to tell our friends—and enemies—which side we’re on. And so unlike Fisher and Diogenes, we content ourselves with preaching to the converted, or worse yet talking to ourselves.
One might wonder, still, so what? If Americans have lost our taste—and tolerance—for parrhesia as practiced by ancient philosophers and early modern evangelicals, surely that’s a good thing! Or at least, any price we pay for purging our public sphere of offensive speech—and especially of hateful, sexist, or extremist language—will be well worth the cost.
But the cost may be steeper than we think. Specifically: a person who is unwilling to tolerate the speech (and speakers) he or she finds morally abhorrent risks becoming intolerant more generally. Human beings are, after all, creatures shaped by habit, and the habit of intolerance is a hard one to break. Practiced regularly towards others, it tends not only to spill over to previously unobjectionable behaviors, but even towards ourselves. You see this tendency in the findings of the second study mentioned at the start of this essay, about respondents’ growing discomfort with speaking up in cases where they disagreed, or with voicing their political opinions at all for fear of becoming disagreeable. This discomfort is a sign of intolerance turned inward, resulting in the constant and familiar fear of saying or thinking the wrong thing as defined by the ever-shifting orthodoxies of one’s side.
And the risks run deeper still. By losing tolerance for parrhesia or speaking freely in general, we not only lose our own ability to speak freely; we also rob ourselves of an essential opportunity to really learn about ourselves. Because among the many things that happen when we speak our minds is that we begin to learn what we actually think—and then to reflect on whether or not we should believe it.
Speaking from my own experience as a “free speech fundamentalist” active on a college campus 20 years ago, getting used to speaking my mind was an essential first step not simply towards changing other people’s minds, but also (perhaps more successfully) my own on any number of important topics. My fear is that in the midst of our contemporary drive to turn every political problem on both the left and right today into a question of policing speech—that is, of deciding who gets to say what, when, and how—we risk forgetting that changing one’s own mind is also an essential part of being human. If and when that happens, we will have ceased to do our thinking for ourselves.
This essay is adapted from a lecture given at Carnegie Mellon University on September 19, 2024.
Teresa M. Bejan is a professor of political theory and fellow of Oriel College at the University of Oxford.
The “Why Liberalism” series is a project of Persuasion in partnership with the Institute for Humane Studies (IHS). IHS is a non-profit organization that promotes a freer, more humane, and open society by connecting and supporting talented graduate students, scholars, and other intellectuals who are advancing the principles and practice of freedom. For additional information and details, media, programmatic, and funding opportunities, visit TheIHS.org.
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“No man shall use any reproachful, reviling, or abusive language against any religion of any church or profession; that being the certain way of disturbing the peace, and of hindering the conversion of any to the truth, by them in quarrels and animosities, to the hatred of the professors and that profession which otherwise they might be brought to assent to.”
This was a great read, thank you!
It got me curious about the epistemic functions of isegoria and parrhesia - have the originators of these ideas argued for the benefits of collective deliberation to convergence on truth? I.e something along the lines of the wisdom of crowds? Or was free speech seen more as an inherent right rather than a mechanism to enhance epistemic utility?
A very fine essay, thanks.