>C. G. Estabrook:
>> Nonsense. Chomsky was being consistent on an elementary principle of free
>> speech (as he said at the time, "I thought these matters had been decided
>> in the Enlightenment..."), which some invent tortuous rationales for
>> setting aside (if from the best motives). --CGE
>
>I don't know why he said that, other than carelessness or
>ignorance. In most liberal polities, freedom of speech is
>never absolutely granted; for instance, it is generally defeated
>by property and privacy rights and considerations of public
>safety and State security, to say nothing of the ownership of
>most of the media by members of the bourgeoisie or bourgeois
>institutions, which effectively deprived the majority of the
>people of means of expression. The boundaries of freedom of
>speech have been matters of constant ambiguity and conflict
>within liberal politics, even of the most fundamentalist
>variety. Nothing was settled by the Enlightenment.
***** "There is no such thing as free speech": an interview with Stanley Fish
...Before I got into the First Amendment or free speech business I was for many years and still am a teacher of English Renaissance poetry and prose, especially that of John Milton. Milton's contribution to the history of the discussion of free speech and censorship is of course the Areopagitica, published in 1643, a vigorous and eloquent protest against a licencing law passed by the parliament.
Much of the Areopagitica is a celebration of toleration in matters of expression, for reasons that have now become more familiar to us: the more information the better able are we to choose wisely; the more information the better are we able to exercise our intellects so that they become more refined and perceptive. Another part of Milton's argument is that when something is suppressed it does not go away. It just takes on a romantic underground life and flourishes rather than being brought to the light of day where it might be refuted. All of these are today familiar arguments and components of free speech rhetoric.
There is one part, however, of Milton's Areopagitica that is rarely noticed in such discussions and when noticed is noticed with some embarrassment. About three quarters of the way through the tract Milton says, "Now you understand of course", and the tone in his prose suggests that he assumes that most of his readers have always understood this, "that when I speak of toleration and free expression I don't mean Catholics. Them we extirpate".1 Milton's admirers, especially those who have linked him to John Stuart Mill as one of the cornerstones of the free speech tradition, have difficulty with this passage and attempt to explain it away by saying that Milton, because of the limitation of his own historical period, was not able to see what we are able to see. The idea is that our conception of free speech is more capacious, more truly free, than this because we do not have an exclusion up our sleeves, ready to be sprung.
But the difference between Milton and us is a difference in what we would exclude from the zone of "free speech", not a difference between exclusion and inclusion. When Milton names Catholic discourse as the exception to his toleration he does so because in his view Catholic speech is subversive of everything speech, in general, is supposed to do -- keep the conversation going, continue the search for Truth. In short, if speech is really to be free in the sense that he desires, Catholics cannot be allowed freely to produce it. This might seem paradoxical, but in fact it is Milton's recognition of a general condition: free speech is what's left over when you have determined which forms of speech cannot be permitted to flourish. The "free speech zone" emerges against the background of what has been excluded. Everyone begins by assuming what shouldn't be said; otherwise there would be no point to saying anything....
1. John Milton, Prose Writings (London: Dent Dutton, 1974), 182.
<http://www.lamp.ac.uk/ahr/archive/Issue-February-1998/fish.html> *****
Yoshie