Catching up, a bit

I have fallen behind in my posting. Overload is the only way to describe the past couple of months, not least because of health issues involving my husband. We persevere.

Another bit of overload was preparation for my talk at the New York Public Library, which actually went swimmingly. It took place at 1:30 of a Thursday afternoon, and there was a very large crowd. My aim was to demonstrate how current anxieties regarding speech have their origins in the 18th century. For instance, people worried back then not only about offending the feelings of what were considered the "disadvantaged," but there was also the tendency to categorize non-Europeans as large ethnic or racial groups, thus effacing the differences among individuals. This tendency, I would suggest, is part of the "universalizing" narrative of the Enlightenment, whereby we are all "humans," rather than individuals affected by history, tradition, custom, convention, etc. In fact, it is all those historical and traditional traces that one must jettison in order to be "enlightened."

Thus, even some of the most "advanced" thinkers of the Enlightenment, those men Jonathan Israel (a contributor to my book) has referred to as belonging to the "radical Enlightenment," had reservations about "public opinion." They argued for the freedom to publish and to voice their own opinions, of course, which they believed would lead to the discovery of what they called "truth." Truth, however, is not the standard of modern liberal societies, where the free flow of information and opinion drives material progress.

It is not their fault that they could not foresee the advent of a garrulous public square. Among the philosophes, I believe it was only Rousseau who saw this coming. He was very uncomfortable with dissent and disagreement. His solution was to suggest that we all give up our opinions to a "General Will," which we arrive at by avoiding the opinions of others and listening instead to "the voice of duty."

You can imagine that the subject of my talk could have been somewhat arcane for a non-academic crowd, but I livened it up with a remarkable visual presentation. The Mac has its own version of Power Point, which offers some really wonderful effects. I don't think a single person fell asleep.

Birth of "the modern liberal state"

The phrase in quotes above is from the very end of Rory Muir's review (in the July 1 Times Literary Supplement) of several new publications (re)evaluating military strategy of the Napoleonic era. In his summation of the five books under review, he mentions the "diversity" of those who fought against Napoleon: the rank-and-file British soldiers under Wellington; the peasants and ordinary people, especially in Spain, who took to the hills to resist the French; the Austrian Joseph Radetzky and his polyglot army; and Clausewitz and the Prussian officer corps. Thus, the portrait here of a Cameron piper urging on the Highland Line at the Battle of Waterloo. And, Muir writes, "it was this very diversity that was at stake in a struggle to preserve local traditions and differences in the face of an intrusive modernizing government that was intervening to an unprecedented extent in areas of life and belief that had hitherto been private."

In the end, the battle was won -- Waterloo -- but the war was lost. As Muir writes, the battle was won only by copying Napoleon's methods: "Income tax, conscription and the gendarmerie became permanent fixtures of European life. The modern liberal state was here to stay."
At a glance, I can't quite see what income taxes, conscription, and the gendarmerie have to do with the "liberal state," which for most us probably rests principally on the rights and freedoms guaranteed by law. It is true, however, that modern law is "universal" and, indeed, in its application is by its very nature contemptuous of local traditions. For instance, all men (make that "humans") are "equal." The insistence on equality means that all of us must be reduced to the same common denominator, without allowance for local sentiments, traditions, and the like.

But our so-called liberal values and rights are not "universal." I agree with the postmodernists in this respect. Those values and rights have been historically achieved, the outcome of centuries of attempts by peoples all over western Europe to carve out different realms of freedom for themselves: to own businesses, to make a profit, to worship as they chose, to exchange cultural and scientific information, to pay less in taxes, to hold the powerful accountable. And it was the intercourse among all these different peoples that gradually produced, by the beginning of the 19th century, a very similar way of life among the elites and well-to-do of these different cultures and the belief among them that their way of life was "natural." And, so, though they were products of different cultures, they all ended up producing legal systems that protected this way of life.

Clearly, there is something about "Western" institutions that is attractive, especially to people from nations inimical to individual rights, but one should not think that there is anything "natural" about these institutions. As I point out in the introduction to my new book on the history of freedom of speech, our values seem natural to us, because they are "our" values. And because they are "ours," a legacy from previous generations, they should be cherished like any precious object that we inherit from our forefathers and foremothers.

When I was doing research for my introduction, I came across an interesting quote from the utilitarian Jeremy Bentham. His response to the doctrine of natural rights was that it was, "from beginning to end so much flat assertion." Islam, after all, also claims universality for its doctrines, and its adherents believe these are self-evident. For instance, the women above probably believe it is natural to be fully covered at all times, even in 104 degree heat. Or maybe 120 in Afghanistan. But Islam and other world religions are also powerful traditional and institutional entities. The current "return of religion" does not necessarily indicate revanchism, as some claim; rather, it affirms the power of institutions and traditions, not just religious, but also social, political, cultural, and so on.

Thus, the modern liberal state and the values it enshrines are not merely an abstract construct, but, in a multicultural world, represent an authentic cultural product, one that is the work of generations. Knowledge of how this product was created -- and imparting that knowledge is the aim of my book -- will also help us to preserve it.

Freedom of Speech: The History of an Idea

Well, that is the official title of the book, and the publication date, according to Amazon, is September 16. No wonder I am sitting at home in this warm weather proofreading. If I say so myself, this is a great volume; I assembled a really excellent group of contributors. I am giving a talk in August at the New York Public Library on the subject, trying to tie together current anxieties concerning speech -- particularly the vexed issue of "hate speech" -- with similar anxieties among 18th-century thinkers, including the most "advanced" thinkers of the time, the philosophes. As I read proofs I keep encountering various nuggets that could have come right from the mouths of contemporary public intellectuals. Herewith some examples, with various rationales for denying the right of freedom of speech to ordinary folks:

"Enlightened monarch" Frederick the Great (below), responding to Baron d'Holbach's System of Nature (1770), argued that Holbach was wrong to want to enlighten all the people and give them freedoms and rights, which instead should be only the privilege of the educated. Frederick disagreed with Holbach that errors in thinking would be erased by a gradual advance of reason. Superstition and credulity were in any case proper to ordinary folk and helped to maintain the "moral and social order," by which we may infer he really meant the power of monarchs like himself.

I love the picture above of Holbach, one of the granddaddies of the French Revolution. (Too bad he died in January of 1789: I wondered what he would have said about its excesses.) He asserted that "the truth" should be accessible to all. But whose truth? And did one have the freedom to make mistakes? Not at all: there needed to be legislation to prevent the arts, for instance, from harming the morals of citizens and also to direct the taste of artists so that they would produce more useful works. Writers, after all, according to Holbach, must always keep in mind "what they owe to virtue, to morals, and to their fellow citizens" (Ethocratie ou le gouvernement fondé sur la morale, 1776).

The anxiety about the "feelings" of others is present in a writing by Herder. He asks who will be hurt if "blasphemous, voluptuous, and scandalous writings" are allowed. Certainly not the thinking man, but, rather, society's marginalized: "the vain milksop, the weak woman, the inexperienced youth, the innocent child." And it is the role of the state to protect these: "The state is the Mother of all its children; it must see to the health, strength, and purity of all."

Rousseau was not only an advocate of censorship (close down the theaters!) but of the suppression of public opinion and open dissent. Among the philosophes, I would venture to say that, pre-French Revolution, he was one of the few who seemed to discern the rise of democracy and of widespread difference of opinion. He did not celebrate such diversity, however; the so-called General Will would not emerge from the discussions of citizens, but from a popular assembly in which the members did not have communication among themselves. In his extremely popular novel Julie, or the New Héloise (1761), the communication between Julie and her lover, Saint Preux, is one that avoids words. As Saint Preux recalls: "How many things were said without opening the lips! How many sentiments were transmitted without the cold agency of speech!"

Such distrust of speech was common among philosophes, who feared the disagreements that speech caused. The desire for unanimity seems to be an accompaniment to the belief that something like "truth" can be discerned. As Benjamin Constant later wrote, "Truth is not just good to know; it is good to search for." It was the search that was important. And search involves error. As I write in the conclusion to this volume, despite all we owe to the philosophes for first articulating the arguments about rights, they were anchored in past intellectual traditions that valorized the pursuit of truth and, ultimately, agreement.

Truth, however, is not the standard of liberal democracies, which function not by imposing a few grand ideas handed down from on high, but by encouraging a marketplace of diverse, competing, rapidly changing, and unrestrained opinions. The marketplace of ideas was already a fact on the ground, before freedom of speech was legislated in the U.S. and France in the late 18th century, in the veritable tide of scientific and technical knowledge that traveled freely across Europe. The unfettered proliferation of theories and opinions, even of crackpot ideas -- and there were certainly many -- unleashed individual risk-taking, ingenuity, invention, and the historically unprecedented wealth that created "the West."

Picture credit: Coach Ben;

Freedom of speech: its history

Well, it must be summer, because I have become lazy about posting. Here in Manhattan we are in "Hochsommer." I went out early this morning for a bike ride along the Hudson, trying to beat the heat. A nice river breeze. It's funny how the beginning of summer makes me think I have time to accomplish many things. One thing I have to do this summer is to give a talk, on August 4, on the history of freedom of speech at the New York Public Library. What I hope to get across in my talk is that the discomforts we are now experiencing in connection with speech -- especially the issue of "hate speech" -- were already present in the 18th century. Despite the claim that is attributed to Voltaire -- "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it" -- I can't think of a single philosophe who imagined that freedom of speech should apply to ordinary citizens.

Thus, Condorcet was not saying anything controversial when, in 1776, he defined public opinion as "that of the stupidest and most miserable section of the population." Condorcet was one of the godfathers of the French Revolution. And though freedom of opinion and the communication of ideas were included in the National Assembly's Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (articles 10 and 11), Condorcet became a victim of the revolution, dying in prison in 1794 after having been a fugitive from the revolutionary authorities.

Rousseau's "general will" is a problematic concept, but one thing it is not is majority opinion. In fact, Rousseau was against debate and dissent, which indicated "the ascendence of private interests and the decline of the state" (The Social Contract, 1762). In the general will citizens should surrender their private interests and opinions, a surrender that happens in silence. The general will, he wrote, can only emerge from a popular assembly, "provided its members do not have any communication among themselves."

Most philosophes thought the government, with their assistance, should guide the public's minds. In their demands for "progress," the philosophes failed to see the emergence of a society of individuals who would be free to pursue their own self-interest, regardless of the claims of truth, and in the process produce the plethora of competing claims and viewpoints that characterize the public square today -- all the while managing to live together amidst the clash of conflicting opinions, without the society descending into the Hobbesian chaos so many philosophes feared.

Ordinary people in the West, where notions of individual freedom are something like second nature, manage to live amid competing opinions, even if many opinions offend their sensibilities. It is one of the prices we pay for living in a society in which we can go about our own business without the meddling of authorities. Unfortunately, too much "enlightened" opinion today would like things to be more orderly. Like the 18th-century philosophes, our 21st century commentariat is uncomfortable when ordinary citizens have different priorities. Thus, the commentariat's claim, like Condorcet in the 18th century, that the public is "stupid."

Picture credit: BLU

Freedom of Speech

The volume on freedom of speech is about ready to be submitted to the publisher. There has been tons of work, in getting the manuscript ready for submission, so I have not been able to post. The image above, by the Austrian painter Maulbertsch, will probably be on the cover of the published volume. It exemplifies the rowdiness of the Viennese stage in the 18th century, which was a forum for social and political commentary. Thus, the threat posed by free speech to the powers that be. Of course, the powers that be in the 21st century are also alarmed by the speech of the masses. A recent episode concerns the protests over the proposed Islamic cultural center at Ground Zero. The American protesters have been routinely characterized as "intolerant," "divisive," "xenophobic," and so on, words that likewise reflect 18th-century debates and anxieties concerning speech. Rousseau, for instance, in his novel Julie, thought that true communication was best achieved through silence! Herder worried about the harm that could result from unconstrained speech. Men like Voltaire were certain that unlimited freedom of expression could harm the masses.

As much as we owe to 18th-century thinkers, we should not forget that they were indebted to intellectual traditions that valorized the pursuit of truth and, ultimately, agreement. Truth, however, is not the standard of liberal democracies, which function not by imposing a few grand ideas handed down from on high, but by encouraging a marketplace of diverse, competing, unrestrained opinions -- as portrayed in the Maulbertsch painting. Lest we forget it, the pursuit of truth in the past also involved the assiduous refutation of error. It has been trial and error, however, not dogma, in whatever form, that created the West. Freedom of speech, if we are serious about it, must also allow for unpopular, even "wrong," opinions.

Picture credit: Städtische Kunstsammlungen Augsburg

Freedom of Speech

I am encountering trouble with my conclusion to the free speech volume. I write a couple of what seems to be pretty good pages; then, there is a wall. Let me put down a few things, which may help me move forward.

I start out by making the claim that freedom of speech, before it was a legal right, was an essential part of the West's material progress. It was in the 17th and 18th centuries that the philosophes sought to crack the monopoly on "the word" held by church and crown by demanding the right to discuss the findings of the new "natural science."

The prohibitions were strongest in the outlying parts of Europe. For instance, Peter the Great forbade everyone in the Russian realm, excluding religious teachers, from writing behind locked doors. In Spain, the Inquisition was still in effect. The French crown also presided over a variety of prohibitions and regulations. Nevertheless, the tide of scientific and technical knowledge that began to sweep Europe could not be held back. Even Peter the Great wanted to "modernize."

The new knowledge, however, also freed people from their ties to authority and tradition and eroded the power of kings. Thus, there arose a body of doctrine concerning the rights of individuals, which now finds expression in the liberal constitutions of the West.

It is the combination of the two -- a body of shared values embodied in legal instruments and a standard of living that is historically unprecedented -- that has created what can be called a "cultural product."

It seems to me that this cultural product, including freedom of speech, is in crisis today. A defense of freedom of speech and indeed of other civil rights -- is challenged in the non-Western world and even within the West itself. The West now stands accused, like European monarchs of old, of monopolistic behavior in the matter of rights.

In presiding over this volume on the history of freedom of speech in the 18th century, I have made the argument that, in a "multicultural world," the West's rights, as stated above, are a specific cultural product. Thus, the volume does not take a position on the rightness or wrongness of freedom of speech as it currently exists in the West, nor does it plead for limiting or expanding the right in the interest of social comity or truth, respectively. Instead, I readily acknowledge the postmodernist view of cultural relativism.

The problem seems to be that the West has considered its rights "universal," i.e., applicable to all people at all times and in all places. But, as Jeremy Benthem said of natural rights, the doctrine was "from beginning to end so much flat assertion." It is this presumption of universality that has drawn the animus of critics. Islam, after all, also claims universality for its doctrines, and many of its adherents believe these are self-evident. But Islam, like other "world" religions, are also powerful traditional, institutional entities.

Since the 17th century the West's "thinking class" has had a problematic relationship to religion. The image to the left expresses what many philosophes thought in the 17th and 18th centuries and also reveals how their thinking has filtered down to popular culture. This rejection is also part of the "cultural product" I am describing. Thus, Europe and America increasingly seek to expunge the presence of religion from the public square. For instance, schools in traditional Catholic regions -- Poland, Bavaria -- are now being forced to remove religious symbols from the classrooms. But religion is part of the cultural inheritance of the West, and if Europe will not take its religious inheritance seriously, why would the new populations, be they Muslim or otherwise, be respectful of Europe's secular values?

More later.

Picture credits: ECHR blog; Memo; Louay Safi; Shorty Carranza; Sodahead

Freedom of Speech

Well, I am back to the free speech volume, officially entitled "Freedom of Speech: The History of an Idea," writing the conclusion. If anyone has bothered to read long-ago posts, you will know that the volume was inspired by the Mohammed cartoons controversy several years ago. At that time, as chair of the Seminar on 18th-Century European Culture at Columbia, I organized a series of talks on the historical origins of free speech, since it struck me that no one was defending this freedom on what seemed to me a self-evident basis: namely, because it is OUR freedom. It's like defending your children, no matter how bad they are. Haven't we all seen a TV news reports of some horrible crime by a hoodlum, and the mother, trotted out for the camera, swears up and down that he is a good boy who could not have done what he is accused of? If only our university professors would defend Western "values" with such vigor. Against all the postmodernists who say that all cultures are equivalent, I counter: "Maybe, but this is the culture that I live in. If it's between me and them, then I want us to win." What also struck me at the time of the cartoons controversy was that postmodernists had such an easy time poking holes in the argument that rights were "universal."

In a sense I would say they are universal, applicable to all peoples at all times, since I believe that most people would prefer to have rights. Look at the Iranian protesters. As they have discovered, however, and despite all the U.N. proclamations, rights don't grow on trees. The rights we enjoy in the West have been historically achieved. But we have forgotten that centuries-long process and succumbed to the belief that there is something inevitable about rights. Thus the series I organized, and the book to be published, which contains essays by different scholars on aspects of the debates concerning speech in the 18th century.

It may be that all great civilizations imagine that their values are universal. Certainly Islam does. So, too, do the Chinese. But both of those civilizations have histories that they draw on to sustain their challenge to universality. Only in the West do we imagine that our history is evil, for instance, the Crusades: I mean, weren't Europeans only trying to reclaim a part of the world that had been Christian until the Muslim armies conquered it? Instead, we like to imagine that there are abstract universal truths. No doubt this belief has much to do with the fact that the scientific revolution began in the West, and science is ahistorical.

But there are precedents in the West itself for a belief in universal values. One element was the Roman empire, which at its height ruled a vast multi-cultured realm on which it stamped the name of Rome. Though Rome was generally content to leave its subjects to their own gods, provided they paid their taxes, there were rewards to Roman citizenship for its far-flung citizens. Certainly the elite classes of the empire, especially those in its outposts, were drawn to Rome's universality. The other element was Christianity. Though few Christian thinkers entertained the notion that men's earthly conditions could be made equal, all men were regarded as equal in the eyes of the Creator. In addition, Rome itself, whether the center of imperial or Christian power, was dependent for its administration and culture on a class of men who saw themselves as inheritors of a unified intellectual and spiritual legacy.

One should not underestimate the impress of this universalist vision on the intellectual life of early modern Europe, especially on the radical philosophes who were products of the institutions created by the earlier empire. As with the ancients, these men were cosmopolitans, "citizens of the world." Thus, their defense of freedom of speech did not appeal to facts on the ground, namely, native traditions or native history. Instead, they rejected this legacy and projected their universalist vision onto the future. For these modern cosmopolitans, history and tradition were reservoirs of bad practices that had to be overcome in the name of progress.

If we are to defend our rights against those who would impose other systems (communism; sharia), it's time to turn away from Kant and return to Herder, to history and culture.

Picture credit: Liberating Wings

Freedom of Speech

Caroline Fourest (pictured below) is a French feminist and journalist, who calls herself an "anti-racist." She has clashed publicly with Tariq Ramadan, a Muslim intellectual who has advocated integration of Muslims into European society. Fourest, however, accuses him of "double discourse," meaning that he says one thing before a secular French public and another before Muslims in a restricted forum. She objects, among other things, to his advocacy of separate swimming facilities for men and women. According to the lecture "The Muslim Women" by Ramadan, girls should not risk revealing their bodies to men, which would thus prohibit women from the freedom of participating in sports.

Such a small concession might not seem to foretell the end of Western freedoms, but it is one of those things that, for Fourest, represent the opening wedge to more radical demands for inclusion of Muslim law within French secular society. In her most recent book, The Last Utopia: Threats Against Universalism, she writes that the "perspective of a world in which all human beings are free and equal, without difference," is coming to an end. She blames this demise on the "philosophical and political formulation" underlying multiculturalism, which she considers a new form of racism. As she writes: "History has proven sufficiently that 'difference-ism' -- the doctrine that regards the Other as so different that he must be treated differently and by different criteria -- unavoidably leads to inequality." In the name of "toleration," the West puts up with behavior that goes against its "fundamental values."

"Never before," she writes, "did the republican French model, whose origin is the Revolution, stand before such a dissolution. More an more intellectuals want to acclimatize multiculturalism and 'open up' laicism." Thus, the French law banning religious symbols (including female head covering) in public schools is criticized as "intolerant" of difference.

Fourest was a journalist working for Charlie Hebdo, a left-wing satirical weekly, at the time of the Mohammed cartoons controversy. It published the twelve offending Danish cartoons and added a few more of is own, for which it was condemned by French president Jacques Chirac for "inflaming passions." Chirac went on to say: "Anything that can hurt the convictions of someone else, in particular religious convictions, should be avoided."

Obviously France is not the U.S.A., but it is worth noting that no major U.S. paper published the cartoons either.

Charlie Hebdo was sued by French Islamic organizations in 2007, who claimed that the cartoons linked terrorism and Islam. At the time, Charlie Hebdo's publisher made Fourest's point: "It's racist to imagine that they [Muslims] can't take a joke." The publisher was acquitted.

I am on the side of Fourest and Charlie Hebdo, but I would add a distinction -- and this is the subject of the book I am editing, on the historical origins of the right of freedom of speech. Fourest argues on the basis of what she calls "universalism." Universalism is an idea, certainly a noble one, but Fourest and most intellectuals who advocate it ignore the tremendous historical work that has made this idea second nature to us in the West. It is very much a Western "cultural product," the result of generations of our forefathers fighting for liberty and the rights of individuals. God may have wanted us to be free, but freedom is something people have to fight for, indeed in every generation. The protesters in Iran are learning this. Universal declarations, such as the 1948 U.N. Resolution on Human Rights, are not worth the piece of paper they are printed on. Third World dictators have been able to use that document for their own non-rights purposes.

The problem with the universal values of equality that Fourest advocates, based on the abstract notion that people are "equal," is that Islam is also a universalist system: everyone should be a Muslim. Moreover, Islam has a rather long historical tradition to which it appeals in advocating its universalism. It spread rapidly in its early decades by forcing everyone to convert, and this success has given its leading adherents a triumphalist mentality. Indeed, as V.S. Naipaul has written, in the non-Arabic Muslim countries (Iran, Pakistan, Indonesia, Malaysia) there has been a continuing attempt to eradicate vestiges of the pre-Muslim societies. In other words, "history" for Iran begins with Islam, not with the Persian dynasty. Talk about universalism.

It would no doubt sound ethnocentric to an intellectual like Fourest to claim that the secular values of France are "French" values that, having been historically achieved, are worth preserving. Such a defense, however, is as reasonable as a defense by non-Frenchmen in France of values that are the products of their own historical, national, or religious traditions. The question would then come down to: which values should reign in France? French values or the values of immigrants? Unfortunately, multiculturalism has become such a powerful ideology that most intellectuals are afraid to buck it.

The Prehistory of Freedom of Speech

There is a part of human existence that necessarily remains individual and independent, and by right beyond all political jurisdiction. Sovereignty exists only in a limited and relative way.

This quote from the writings of Benjamin Constant (1767-1830) has been on my mind the past few days. I have been diverted from my work on 18th-century aesthetics to tackle another 18th-century issue, namely, the historical background that gave rise to the legalization of freedom of speech in the West. A few years back, at the time of the controversy concerning the Mohammed caricatures, I sponsored a series of talks in connection with the Columbia University Seminar on 18th-Century European Culture. It struck me at that time -- this was back in 2006 -- that people in the West who spoke in terms of the "universal" right of freedom of speech were constantly being battered by the multiculturalists in the name of relative values. Clearly, for its defenders freedom of speech had become "naturalized," become such a part of their self-understanding, regarded as inalienable, along with other democratic rights, that they were at a loss when confronted with the contention that Islam had an equal right not to be discussed, much less insulted, even in the heart of Europe itself.

What seemed required -- since even legal scholars, including First Amendment specialists were ignoring it -- was a renewed understanding of the historical background that preceded the institutionalization of the right of freedom of speech. In other words, the right emerged from specific historical, national, and even traditional sources, and it was the purpose of the talks I sponsored to portray the 18th-century discussion in various lands of Europe.

These papers will now be published in a volume that I have edited and for which I also wrote the introduction. One reason Benjamin Constant is on my mind (and what is currently diverting me from 18th-century aesthetics) is that I also have to write a conclusion to the volume, in which I try to bring together the historical portion with what is going on in the world today. The issue remains not whether rights, like that of freedom of speech, are "universal." The explicit attitude of the volume is that civil rights are a specific cultural product, namely, that of western Europe and its offshoots, and that the idea of human rights became "universalized" because of the great reach of Europe since the 18th century. In a sense I accept the argument of the multiculturalists. The question I pose in the conclusion, however, is whether this "cultural product" can grow in other soils and climates.

For, you see, I really do think the Western "cultural product" is a superior one, based on the very simple observation that people across the world would like to have our freedoms and rights. Multiculturalists play into the hands of the dictators of the world. Thus, my quote from Constant at the top of the post. (The portrait of him here is from the period when he was squiring Madame de Staël around Europe, including to Weimar, where he met with Goethe.) While Constant's arguments for freedom of speech largely advanced Enlightenment arguments for this freedom -- instruction, progress, transparency of government -- his distinctive contribution to political thought lay in the connection he posited between freedom of the press and opinion and the protection of individuals from the overreach of government. He crucially argued -- unlike most of the philosophes -- that it was not the role of government to regulate morals or to mold public virtue through education or to "improve" or "enlighten" citizens. Constant's major writings appeared after our Founding documents were written, but clearly they had the same opinion. And thus, the Bill of Rights was written in order to protect citizens from the power of government.

There remains a big difference between the Right and the Left on this issue. The Left, of course, is in favor of the rights of individuals, but it believes the government has an important role in securing these rights. The Right, reflecting the historical origins of our freedoms, understands that rights that are given by the government can also be taken away by the government. In other words, the desire for freedom may be a universal one, as it were planted in the hearts of humans, but the legal right is something that has to be fought for by citizens and vigilantly maintained. More to come, especially on the differences between the contemporary Right and the Left.

Picture credits: Caroline Fourest (May 25, 2010); Civitas 99; samizdata.net