Enduring Interest Flagg Taylor

Today we bring you the final episode in our series on speech and censorship. We wrap up a series by bringing back guests from previous episodes to discuss the broader themes and dilemmas that have persisted over the course of the series.  In this conversation we discuss if and how making distinctions among different kinds of speech might improve our ability to navigate the dilemmas around free speech. We discuss the recent phenomenon of campus protests and this extent to which this sort of activity should be protected in higher education. And we wonder if the idea of self-restraint is gone forever or how it might make a comeback. We’re excited to have three guests back with us to bring the series to a close: Alex Duff, Yuval Levin and Jonathan Rauch.  

Alex Duff was with us before to discuss Herbert Marcuse’s “Repressive Tolerance.” is the author of Heidegger and Politics: The Ontology of Radical Discontent. He teaches at the University of North Texas where he is Assistant Professor of Political Science and Director of the Constitutionalism and Democracy Forum  

Yuval Levin discussed essays by Walter Berns and Irving Kristol on obscenity and censorship. He is the director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). He’s the founder and editor of National Affairs and author of the forthcoming book American Covenant.  

Jonathan Rauch launched our series with a discussion of his book Kindly Inquisitors. He is Senior Fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution and his most recent book is The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth.

This month we continue our series on speech and censorship by discussing an extraordinary book published in 1996, The Repeal of Reticence: America’s Cultural and Legal Struggles Over Free Speech, Obscenity, Sexual Liberation, and Modern Art. It’s terrific book of political, social, cultural history and analysis. It covers an amazingly broad range of topics, from 19th century literary sensibilities to early 20th century Supreme Court obscenity jurisprudence to the midcentury New York public intellectual scene. Its author, Rochelle Gurstein, sketches two broad, cultural movements: the party of reticence and the party of exposure. Our conversation is devoted to elucidating the discourse around privacy and obscenity in a variety of contexts. We take up invasive journalism, sexual education, and literary realism. We try to understand why the party of exposure seemed to gain victory after victory as the decades passed. Gurstein articulates what the party of reticence understands about human life that partisans of exposure often miss. At the conclusion of our conversation, Gurstein reflects on her mentor, the great Christopher Lasch.

This month we continue our series on speech and censorship by discussing a famous critique of free speech from the left. My guest and I dig into Herbert Marcuse’s famous essay and try to make sense of its critique of tolerance and free speech. We discuss Marcuse’s background and role as a leading thinker of the New Left. We also analyze Marcuse’s goal of liberation or autonomy, his understanding of the relationship between speech and action, his use of the term totalitarian, and his understanding of the duty of the intellectual.

Our guest is Professor Alexander Duff. Alex is a scholar of the history of political philosophy, focusing on the ontology and psychology of statecraft and politics. He was trained at the University of Notre Dame, where he earned his Ph.D. from the department of Political Science and was educated in the humanities and history at Carleton University, Ottawa. He is the author of Heidegger and Politics: The Ontology of Radical Discontent (Cambridge University Press) and numerous articles on classical, Renaissance, modern, and contemporary political philosophy which have appeared in the American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, Political Review Quarterly, the Review of Metaphysics, the Heidegger- Jahrbuch, and other scholarly and popular publications. His work has been translated into Estonian and Farsi.

He teaches at the University of North Texas where he is Assistant Professor of Political Science and Director of the Constitutionalism and Democracy Forum. He has held fellowships from the Tocqueville Program for Inquiry into Religion and American Public Life at the University of Notre Dame and from the Program for the Study of the Western Heritage at Boston College and has delivered lectures at many colleges and universities, including Oxford, Harvard, Yale, the University of Notre Dame, Boston College, the University of Texas: Austin, and Louisiana State University. He lives in Little Elm, Texas.

This month we continue our series of episodes on speech and censorship. We discuss James Madison’s “Report of 1800,” a document in which Madison discusses the controversies around the Alien and Sedition Acts. Madison’s report contains fascinating reflections on the nature of speech in a republic and why the Sedition Acts in particular are inconsistent with free government. His ideas have some surprising resonances with some of our contemporary debates about free speech.

Our guest is Michael Zuckert, Nancy Reeves Dreux Professor Emeritus in the Department of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame. He is currently a visiting professor at Arizona State University’s School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership. Michael’s most recent book is A Nation So Conceived: Abraham Lincoln and the Paradox of Democratic Sovereignty.

Outline of the episode:
Historical context re: Alien & Sedition Acts @ 1:02
What did the Sedition Act say? @ 4:12
Why did people think the Sedition Act was constitutional? @ 6:05
Similarity of Founding era press situation and present-day press @ 11:45
Why did Madison feel compelled to write the Report? @15:00
Free speech and republican government @ 17:00
The general case for press freedom and political speech @ 25:00
On opinion, conjecture, and truth @ 27:30
Lincoln’s “House Divided” speech @ 32:30
Madison’s on the kind of political speech we need most @ 35:30
Madison on the problem of disinformation @ 37:30
Murthy v. Missouri (5th Circuit case) @51:00
Michael Zuckert’s National Affairs essay on speech @ 54:40

Follow us on Twitter: @theEIpod. We are sponsored by the Zephyr Institute.

This month our topic is a recent essay by Jenna Silber Storey and Benjamin Storey called “Political Speech in Divided Times,” first published in National Affairs in Fall of 2022. The essay is a reflection on the particular character of political speech and its authors make use of the work of the contemporary French political philosopher named Pierre Manent. The books by Manent most relevant to this essay are The Metamorphosis of the City and Beyond Radical Secularism.

We are pleased to have one of the authors join us for this conversation, Jenna Silber Storey. Jenna and I discuss what makes political speech distinctive and how and why our capacity for this kind of speech seems to have been lost. We discuss Manent’s articulation of the character of political speech and also his attempt to actually engaged in this enterprise using the example of Muslim immigration in his home country of France. We end by trying to untangle the differences between political speech and ideological speech.

Jenna Silber Storey is a senior fellow in the Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies department at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where she concentrates on political philosophy, civil society, classical schools, and higher education. Dr. Storey is concurrently a research fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas at Austin, and a Tocqueville scholar at Furman University.

Dr. Storey is the coauthor, with her husband, Benjamin Storey, of Why We Are Restless: On the Modern Quest for Contentment (Princeton University Press, 2021). Together, the Storeys are working on another book titled The Art of Choosing: How Liberal Education Should Prepare You for Life.

Dr. Storey’s work has been published in media outlets such as the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, National Affairs, the Boston Globe, National Review, the New Atlantis, the Claremont Review of Books, and First Things.

With our December episode we continue our series on speech and censorship. We take up two essays which make the case for a particular kind of censorship: Walter Berns’s “Pornography v. Democracy: The Case for Censorship” and Irving Kristol’s “Pornography, Obscenity and the Case for Censorship.” Berns’s essay was published in The Public Interest in the winter of 1971 and Kristol’s in The New York Times Magazine in March 1971.

Our guest is Yuval Levin, who’s the director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he also holds the Beth and Ravenel Curry Chair in Public Policy. The founder and editor of National Affairs, he is also a senior editor at The New Atlantis, a contributing editor at National Review, and a contributing opinion writer at The New York Times.

Dr. Levin publishes essays and articles in numerous publications, including The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, and Commentary. He is the author of several books on political theory and public policy, most recently A Time to Build: From Family and Community to Congress and the Campus, How Recommitting to Our Institutions Can Revive the American Dream.

We discuss how Berns and Kristol define obscenity and why they each think a healthy society must make a distinction between the obscene and the non-obscene. Levin shows how Berns explores the distinction between the public and the private and why the capacity for shame is central to his thinking. We look at how both authors draw on the idea that democracy, perhaps more that any other form of government, demands a kind of moral formation that requires censorship and whether liberal democracy can be an exception to this idea. Berns concludes his essay with a defense of obscenity and its use by the great authors so we spend some time grappling with the necessity of transgression and how that might affect the case for censorship.