Speech Imperialization? Situating American Parrhesia in an Isegoria World
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Speech Imperialization? Situating American Parrhesia in an Isegoria World Harrison Michael Rosenthal1 Accepted: 10 November 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract This article explores the ideological origins of the American free-speech tradition. It analyzes the two principal categorizations of free speech in classical antiquity: isegoria, the right to voice one’s opinion, and parrhesia, the license to say what one pleases often through provocative discourse, thus grounding modern free-speech epistemology and jurisprudential philosophy in a sociohistorical context. Part 1 reviews the First Amendment corpus juris. A progression of incrementally absolute judicial holdings promotes parrhesia, highlighting democratic utility over individual self-actualization; thus, Americans no longer view freedom of speech as an end ipso facto. While Athenian democracy recognized the need for provocative speech, certain institutional and social constraints, such as dokimasia, established standards of truth and accountability. Part 2 frames the historical developments of isegoria and parrhesia for modern analysis. The author begins by discussing isegoria’s principal aims, namely, promoting individual self-actualization and effective democratic governance. The European free-speech tradition, which views the individual as the locus of power, favors the former. The American tradition, which ‘depersonizes’ civil liberties such that the collective becomes the locus of control, favors the latter. Part 3 identifies the colonial developments in Anglo-American history that account for present-day U.S. free-speech permissiveness. It shows that the American preference for parrhesia-based absolutism was born from British imperialism and censorship. Part 4 suggests a need to reexamine free speech-understandings in the context of new-media proliferation and digital content regulation. The dominance of U.S.based social media companies injects the American speech tradition into cultures with disparate free-speech philosophies and practices. Keywords Parrhesia · Isegoria · Dokimasia · Free speech · First Amendment jurisprudence · Marketplace of ideas
* Harrison Michael Rosenthal [email protected]; [email protected] 1
William Allen White School of Journalism and Mass Communications, The University of Kansas, Stauffer‑Flint Hall, 1435 Jayhawk Boulevard, Lawrence, KS 66045, USA
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1 Introduction “More speech, not enforced silence” [1, p. 377]. This axiom has become the polestar for First Amendment jurisprudence and American free speech philosophy. In the ninety-three years since Louis Dembitz Brandeis penned these indelible words, they have come to embody the American volksgeist and the tumult of what twentiethcentury rhetorician Kenneth Burke memorably called “the Scramble, the Wrangle of the Market Place, the flurries and flare-ups of the Human Barnyard, the Give and Take, the wavering line of pressure and counterpressure, the Logomachy, the onus of ownership, the Wars of Nerves, the War” [2, p. 2
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