Already in my teens, I became aware of the need for LGBTQ+ rights. I read whatever I could find on the topic, and when I wrote my first book it was titled Sexual Orientation: A Human Right. However, I noticed that many fellow activists advocated bans on speech hostile to LGBTQ+ people. I became skeptical about governments punishing individuals who express evil ideas. Still, I hope you will benefit from my list of books that take various sides in free speech debates and focus not only on LGBTQ+ people. After all, what’s the point of free speech if not to hear about a problem from diverse viewpoints?
I found this book to be one of the best introductions to the endless dilemmas surrounding free speech. In the first half of the twentieth century, anxieties about free speech in the United States were triggered mostly on the left, with government attempts to stifle socialists and communists culminating in Senator Joseph McCarthy’s witch hunts, damaging and even destroying thousands of lives and careers.
Philippa Strum shows how, after the 1950s, this completely changed. The government’s increasing focus on far-right speech became an issue of burning importance when residents of a small Illinois town, home to Holocaust survivors, tried to block a Nazi march–and the courts said “No” in the name of free speech.
In the Chicago suburb of Skokie, one out of every six Jewish citizens in the late 1970s was a survivor--or was directly related to a survivor--of the Holocaust. These victims of terror had resettled in America expecting to lead peaceful lives free from persecution. But their safe haven was shattered when a neo-Nazi group announced its intention to parade there in 1977. Philippa Strum's dramatic retelling of the events in Skokie (and in the courts) shows why the case ignited such enormous controversy and challenged our understanding of and commitment to First Amendment values.
My Democracybook was the summation of my views to that date (2018) on the strengths and weaknesses of democracy as a political system, in both its ancient and its modern forms. I’d been an activist and advocate of democracy since my undergraduate days (at Oxford, in the late 1960s – interesting times!). As I was writing the book the world of democracy suddenly took unexpected, and to me undesirable turns, not least in the United States and my own U.K. An entire issue of an English-language Italian political-philosophy journal was devoted to the book in 2019, and in 2021 a Companionto the reception of Athenian democracy in subsequent epochs was dedicated to me.
Kurt, a Swiss-German scholar who spent much of his career in Germany and the United States (Brown University), is an old and beloved friend of mine but I would have chosen this book even if he had not been. Its origins go far back, to the author’s Habilitationsschrift (Free University, Berlin, 1979), but it was completely updated for its English reincarnation. Its seven chapters take the story of Greek freedom, both internal and external, both political and cultural, from its origins in the 8th century BCE down to the Roman conquest and occupation of Greece in the 2nd century.
Kurt Raaflaub asks the essential question: when, why, and under what circumstances did the concept of freedom originate? To find out Raaflaub analyzes ancient Greek texts from Homer to Thucydides in their social and political contexts.
I am a retired federal constitutional law professor, the former Fredric C. Tausend Professor of Constitutional Law at Seattle University Law School. Moreover, I am the coauthor of more than ten books, most of them focusing on First Amendment free speech topics. Often, I wrote at the intersection of popular culture and free speech rights. My booklist reflects my passion for books about the history, purposes, and practices of freedom of speech, particularly as it is exercised in the United States.
I have read dozens of books on a variety of free speech topics–everything from political dissent to hate speech to pornography. But I have never found a single book on the entire history of free speech over the ages of Western civilization.
I love the way that this work portrayed the most significant free speech struggles from ancient Greece and Rome, through the Enlightenment, and beyond to today’s social media controversies. More often than not, histories are boring and pedantic, but this history kept me involved and interested right up to the last page.
A global history of free speech, from the ancient world to today.
Hailed as the "first freedom," free speech is the bedrock of democracy. But it is a challenging principle, subject to erosion in times of upheaval. Today, in democracies and authoritarian states around the world, it is on the retreat. In Free Speech, Jacob Mchangama traces the riveting legal, political, and cultural history of this idea. Through captivating stories of free speech's many defenders - from the ancient Athenian orator Demosthenes and the ninth-century freethinker al-Razi, to Mary Wollstonecraft, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela and modern-day digital activists - Mchangama…
As an author who, in my ‘other’ life, has studied psychology and social work, I love to write about the impact of change on individuals and communities – what do my characters grieve, what relationships become important to them, what are the roles or goals that motivate them now and what do they need to do to survive, both individually and in their new society. And I love to be able to write about a place – a location – that I know well, hence the Sunshine Coast Hinterland as a setting for The Rise. I hope you enjoy the books that I’ve recommended as much as I have!
This is one of those books I thought about long after I’d finished reading. Through human greed and global warming, the resulting decimation of the planet means food and water are rationed for survival…but so are words. Noa, the leader of the community, believes that words and how they were used, led to the downfall of humanity so allows people to only use a list of specific words. Except for the wordsmiths, who are allowed to know them all.
As an author whose life is all about words, this was a really interesting book to read – what does it do to a society when ideas, thoughts, creativity are stifled by lack of words? And when everything is rationed – water, food, words, enjoyment – what does that do to a community?
Fahrenheit 451 meets The Giver in an award winning dystopian story about the dangers of censorship and how far we will go in the pursuit of freedom.
What if you were only allowed to speak 500 words?
The city of Ark is the last safe place on Earth: the polar ice caps have melted and flooded everything, leaving few survivors. To make sure humans do not make the same mistakes, Ark's leader John Noa decrees everyone in Ark must speak List, a language of only 500 words. Language is to blame for mankind's destruction, John Noa says, as politicians and…
My Democracybook was the summation of my views to that date (2018) on the strengths and weaknesses of democracy as a political system, in both its ancient and its modern forms. I’d been an activist and advocate of democracy since my undergraduate days (at Oxford, in the late 1960s – interesting times!). As I was writing the book the world of democracy suddenly took unexpected, and to me undesirable turns, not least in the United States and my own U.K. An entire issue of an English-language Italian political-philosophy journal was devoted to the book in 2019, and in 2021 a Companionto the reception of Athenian democracy in subsequent epochs was dedicated to me.
I have collaborated with Bettany over many years—in her scholarly documentary filmmaking, including programmes on Socrates of Athens (469-399). Socrates never wrote or published in written form a word of his philosophy, yet through his immediate and succeeding disciples (above all Plato and Aristotle) has been hugely influential. But was he a democrat, as his fellow Athenians understood that term? In 399 a jury of 501 of his peers, chosen randomly by lot, delivered their resounding—negative—verdict, and condemned him to death by hemlock poison for being undemocratically irreligious and for teaching his pupils undemocratic values. Plato violently disagreed, and the debate over Socrates has continued ever since. Since it can be made to appear that he was convicted by an illiberal jury on grounds of his use of (democratic) freedom of speech, his condemnation has often been used as a stick to beat the ‘tyranny of…
We think the way we do because Socrates thought the way he did; in his unwavering commitment to truth and in the example of his own life, he set the standard for all subsequent Western philosophy. And yet, for twenty-five centuries, he has remained an enigma: a man who left no written legacy and about whom everything we know is hearsay, gleaned from the writings of Plato, Xenophon and Aristophanes. Now Bettany Hughes gives us an unprecedented, brilliantly vivid portrait of Socrates and of his homeland, Athens in its Golden Age.
His life spanned “seventy of the busiest, most wonderful…
I was asked to review this book and possibly provide
an endorsement. After reading it, there was no way I couldn’t endorse it.
It is
a bracing read with such difficult stories. But hearing these stories is
necessary for any change to take place. For American Christians, especially
American Evangelicals, the abuse of women has been hidden.
It is time for a
reckoning, and Sarah’s book is a necessary start. Her empathetic writing helps
bring readers along, and this book should be required of anyone entering into
ministry.
Journalist Sarah Stankorb outlines how access to the internet-its networks, freedom of expression, and resources for deeply researching and reporting on powerful church figures-allowed women to begin dismantling the false authority of evangelical communities that had long demanded their submission. A generation of American Christian girls was taught submitting to men is God's will. They were taught not to question the men in their families or their pastors. They were told to remain sexually pure and trained to feel shame if a man was tempted. Some of these girls were abused and assaulted. Some made to shrink…
The year I spent in Palestine from 2011 to 2012 was the first time in my life that I encountered racism firsthand. Growing up in America, I was aware of my country’s racist history and I knew that my country’s history was indelibly marked by prejudice. But in Palestine I witnessed racism in action. It reminded me of segregation in the American South. Every aspect of daily life in Israel and in the territories it occupied is segregated: buses, roads, lines waiting to pass through checkpoints. After I witnessed a Palestinian man being refused entry into an Israeli tourist site simply because he was Palestinian, I knew this was a book I had to write.
Steven Salaita’s ordeal of being hired and then fired from a tenured position at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign in 2014 was among the first and most consequential instances of the suppression of pro-Palestinian speech in the North American university system.
It marked the beginning of a wave of censorship that persists to this day, in which academics are placed under extreme pressure to avoid saying anything that might challenge the status quo on Israel and Palestine. In this book, Salaita tells the story of how university bureaucrats who succumbed to the demands of Israel advocates and withdrew a job offer that he had already accepted.
While telling of how he was caught in the crossfire of a battle for Palestinian liberation, Salaita offers powerful reflections on the meaning of academic freedom and the role of the university.
In 2014, renowned professor Steven Salaita had his appointment to a tenured professorship revoked by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in response to his tweets criticizing the Israeli government's assault on Gaza. Salaita's firing generated a huge public outcry, with thousands petitioning for his reinstatement and more than five thousand scholars pledging to boycott UIUC. His case raises important questions about academic freedom, free speech on campus and the movement for justice in Palestine. In Uncivil Rites, Salaita reflects upon the controversy.
I am a social and legal historian of late 19th and early 20th Century Latin America, and the majority of my work is about the emergence of the middle class. I first got interested in researching dueling because I had the idea that the duel probably played a role in creating and enforcing a social dividing line between the upper elite and the middle class. But once I got immersed in the historical documents I realized how wrong my initial hypothesis had been, how little dueling had to do with social class, and how much it was about maintaining—or sometimes gaming for advantage—the norms of decorum in politics and the press.
Covers some of the same ground as Joanne Freeman, regarding dueling, reputation, politics, and the press in the antebellum U.S.A. But what I really like about this book is how it makes those historical issues relatable to our contemporary era by drawing parallels and connections between the politicized press of the 19th century and present-day debates about free speech in social media. If modern Twitter warriors had lived in the 1800s, they would have needed to know how to handle a sword.
This book argues that dueling should be looked at as a fundamental part of the history of journalism. By examining the nineteenth century Code Duello, the accepted standards under which a duel could be conducted, the author examines the causes of combative responses between journalists. Each chapter examines an aspect of this relationship from the nineteenth century until the present, including the connections between the ritualized aggression of the nineteenth century and the feuding among blog journalists today. A comprehensive bibliography as well as an overview of accepted practices under the Code of Honor as faced by nineteenth century journalists…
I am a retired federal constitutional law professor, the former Fredric C. Tausend Professor of Constitutional Law at Seattle University Law School. Moreover, I am the coauthor of more than ten books, most of them focusing on First Amendment free speech topics. Often, I wrote at the intersection of popular culture and free speech rights. My booklist reflects my passion for books about the history, purposes, and practices of freedom of speech, particularly as it is exercised in the United States.
Freedom of speech means many things to many people, but often the advocates of free speech have not thought very clearly or deeply about the purposes for protecting speech and the reasons for the American free speech system.
Of all of the books on free speech theory that I have read, I appreciate Fred Schauer’s book the most. It is truly a classic about the philosophical foundations of freedom of speech. Do not be intimidated by the idea of free speech theory: Schauer’s book can be understood by any serious nonfiction reader, and I highly recommend it for its powerful reasoning and beautiful prose.
Already in my teens, I became aware of the need for LGBTQ+ rights. I read whatever I could find on the topic, and when I wrote my first book it was titled Sexual Orientation: A Human Right. However, I noticed that many fellow activists advocated bans on speech hostile to LGBTQ+ people. I became skeptical about governments punishing individuals who express evil ideas. Still, I hope you will benefit from my list of books that take various sides in free speech debates and focus not only on LGBTQ+ people. After all, what’s the point of free speech if not to hear about a problem from diverse viewpoints?
Waldron’s proposals for punishing individual speakers are unpersuasive, but I admire his effort to translate difficult historical and legal material into everyday language. Many writers try to challenge American First Amendment principles by questioning the very foundations of Western parliamentary democracy.
Waldron does the opposite. He articulates his challenge by arguing that speech restrictions are faithful to the letter and spirit of a democratic constitution. I disagree–at least with the way Waldron makes his case–but he does make his case clearly, and with this book, he has influenced a generation of disciples.
Every liberal democracy has laws or codes against hate speech-except the United States. For constitutionalists, regulation of hate speech violates the First Amendment and damages a free society. Against this absolutist view, Jeremy Waldron argues powerfully that hate speech should be regulated as part of our commitment to human dignity and to inclusion and respect for members of vulnerable minorities.
Causing offense-by depicting a religious leader as a terrorist in a newspaper cartoon, for example-is not the same as launching a libelous attack on a group's dignity, according to Waldron, and it lies outside the reach of law. But defamation…
