Free speech was hardly invented by the First Amendment. In ancient democratic Athens, isegoria signified each (free, male) citizen's "equal right of speech" in the public sphere. The Greeks had another, related but contrasting term, parrhesia, which signified "frankness of speech," or not holding anything back. Meanwhile, the Romans praised libertas, or "liberty of speaking," which citizens in a republic required in order to come together and deliberate about public policy. But these ideals were not always upheld. Indeed, the philosopher Socrates was put to death for his relentless exercise of parrhesia. His frank speech irritated the powerful so much that it cost him his life. The Romans, for their part, categorized some speech as licentia, or "license," because it went too far, violating social norms. When the Roman republic fell, replaced by autocracy and empire, free speech collapsed with it. The trials and tribulations of free speech in the ancient world made it, ironically, the subject of a great deal of speech. Philosophers theorized it, historians historized it, professional rhetoricians lamented attacks on it, and satirists asserted their own freedom of expression by making coded jokes about its suppression. In this course, we sample the literature of free speech in ancient Greece and Rome, trace its fate in the Middle Ages, when the expression of heretical ideas could lead to death, and read classic texts from its resurgence in the Renaissance and after, such as Milton's Areopagitica. In the last part of the course, we look at how the troubled history of free speech informs the modern era, from John Stuart Mills's On Liberty, to gradually expanding interpretations of the First Amendment, to the contemporary debates that continue to consume us even now.
Satisfies CPPE and CPGC.