The Right to Unsettle
A Talk By Alex Gourevitch
In the past few years, we have seen many new constraints imposed on freedom of speech. Some of these express a new hostility to political criticism. But in other cases, they involve a magnification of longer-standing trends. Past decades have seen a growing tendency to classify various kinds of speech as harmful, intimidating or discriminatory. As a consequence, certain kinds of political speech, like protests, get redefined as threatening or civil rights violations. Protests frequently involve hostile, offensive, or uncivil statements and symbolic actions. If we value and want true freedom of speech in this country, then we have to be able to tolerate all kinds of discomfort and unsettlement. This is an issue that no side of the political spectrum has been particularly consistent about, but nonetheless is something about which there could be widespread agreement.
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About the Speaker
Alex Gourevitch
Alex Gourevitch is the author of From Slavery to the Cooperative Commonwealth: Labor and Republican Liberty in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2014). His research spans the history of political and economic thought, theories of freedom, republicanism, and Marxism. His current work develops a defense of the right to strike as a right to resist oppression.