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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
There is no such thing as free, unconstrained speech. Laws and constitutions may protect us from the state when we speak our minds. But the state is just one possible constraint. Glenn Loury, one of America’s most outspoken and important intellectuals, provides a provocative and dazzling analysis of the powerful social forces that can prevent speakers from voicing unpopular views in public forums.
Every society, Loury notes, has norms to enforce. That can be a good thing: There ought to be social sanctions for, say, compulsive liars. When, however, a society shows a low degree of tolerance for speech about matters of political importance, self-censorship proliferates and public discourse and policy suffer. The answer, Loury argues, is for as many of us as possible to be braver and more human – to take a risk and unapologetically “live within the truth”.
Loury first presented these ideas in the 1990s in a celebrated and prophetic essay about “political correctness.” In Self-Censorship he expands and updates the account, deploying his analytical powers and psychological acuity to diagnose our current political climate. The result illuminates prevailing social dynamics with the same brilliant and startling effect that made the paper an instant classic thirty years ago.
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Seitenzahl: 106
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025
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CONTENTS
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Foreword
Preamble
Self-Censorship in Public Discourse: A Theory of Political Correctness and Related Phenomena
1 Putting the Political Correctness Debate into Perspective
2 Strategic Behavior in the Forum
3 There Is No (Entirely) Free Speech
4 Examples of Censored Public Discourse
5 Implications for the Character and Effectiveness of Public Debate
6 Forbidden Facts
7 Conclusion
Acknowledgment
Notes
Afterword: Self-Censorship in a Time of War
References
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Foreword
Preamble
Begin Reading
Afterword: Self-Censorship in a Time of War
References
End User License Agreement
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Self-Censorship
Glenn C. Loury
polity
Copyright © Glenn C. Loury 2025
The right of Glenn C. Loury to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2025 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press111 River StreetHoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-6741-6
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2024951854
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website:politybooks.com
Foreword
Back in the late 1980s, when I first drafted the lecture that would eventually become my essay “Self-Censorship in Public Discourse: A Theory of Political Correctness and Related Phenomena,” it seemed to me that debates about political correctness were only the latest iteration of an ancient dilemma, which is this: to speak in public about fraught political issues can be a risky business. What one ought to say, who one ought to say it to, how one ought to say it, or whether one ought to say anything at all – these have been understood to be pivotal philosophical problems since the time of Plato’s Apology. The debate is certainly even older than that. This was the problem I wanted to address. One could, I thought, substitute the modern public sphere – the university campus, the television talk show, the newspaper op-ed page, and so on – for the agora of ancient Athens without altering the basic contours of this problem.
I was teaching at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government at the time. My impetus for the essay, in the first instance, was the emergence on college campuses of the formal and tacit speech codes that came to be called “political correctness.” However, my inspiration was not limited to domestic affairs. Upheavals in the former Soviet Union and East Germany, in Czechoslovakia, and in other states that were freeing themselves from repressive and dysfunctional communist governments provided a global context for my ruminations. I read stories of neighbors turning in neighbors to the authorities for thought crimes. I saw reports of widespread silence among people of conscience in the face of gross public injustices. All of these led me to wonder how those governments had managed not merely to enforce regimes of legal censorship but to induce regimens of tacit self-censorship that stifled the critical discourse of entire populations.
Citizens in those nations had good reason to fear the state’s reprisal, of course. After all, unemployment, imprisonment, and torture weren’t unheard of. But I came to think that the problem of self-censorship is much more subtle than that, entailing as it does not only the iron fist of state repression but also the velvet glove of social cooptation. It seemed to me that it was not just fear of government action that kept people quiet. Rather, what lay at the root of things was the inescapability of drawing an inference ad hominem – against the person. This, I came to think, was true both abroad, in the communist nations, and, more subtly, at home in the United States, where an individual’s right to self-expression without state interference is supposed to be guaranteed by the constitution.
Even here, I thought, there is no such thing as genuinely “free” speech. Speakers who voice opinions that deviate fundamentally from an audience’s beliefs could become subjects of costly personal attack, and there is an inexorable logic to such attacks. For, by knowing that a speaker is willing to be heard saying certain things, an audience can be led, through a process of rational inference, to draw negative conclusions about that speaker’s motives, loyalties, and character. Listeners may be tempted, consciously or not, to villainize the person rather than to respond to that person’s ideas. They may be led to brand their target a “racist,” an “extremist,” a “misogynist,” a “traitor,” or some other disreputable social type, concluding that the speaker’s views must be disavowed and his presence disdained.
In such an atmosphere, the individual’s fear-inspired suppression of his own true beliefs is understandable. But I am at pains to insist that this self-censorship comes with some insidious effects. Challenges to a faltering status quo get shut out of the public discussion. Urgent moral deliberations get reduced to tiresome exercises in expressive etiquette. In the late 1980s, as the political correctness debates raged across college campuses, I watched with dismay while my colleagues, students, and friends – fearing reprisal for talking in ways that violated new and sometimes radical social norms – succumbed to the lure of a quiet conformity. Those who should have known better, I thought, were stifling themselves.
I began to think more deeply about the problem. Several questions occurred to me. What kinds of informal public censure does unpopular speech elicit, and why? How do people counteract the inclination to self-censor? Does this rhetorical reticence distort our public conversation and, if so, how? Do institutions such as the university and the media play a special role in either fostering or countering these adverse effects? The essay I finally published in 1994 tried to address such questions.
I am an economist, not a political theorist, historian, or philosopher, so it may seem strange that I was attracted to an issue that, on its face, has so little to do with things like resource allocation and market inefficiencies. And, true enough, those mathematical models I had drilled into me as a student at Northwestern and MIT a half-century ago are of very little help when trying to understand the sociolinguistics of public speech. But I am not only an economist. As a public intellectual of decidedly conservative leanings – and an African American one, no less! – I have experienced the pressure to conform to the language and thought native to the progressive academic and media circles in which I was traveling. I have even succumbed to those pressures on occasion. When I didn’t, I found myself receiving admonishments, criticisms, condemnations, and outright insults – as a just recompense for being a Black academic who, by favoring a conservative policy or by opposing a liberal one, disappointed some widely held expectations from my “type.” I have always had a personal stake in the study of this issue.
Yet rereading “Self-Censorship in Public Discourse” with thirty years’ hindsight, I don’t think I can call it a “conservative” or a “liberal” piece of writing, even though I doubt it would have occurred to a contemporary liberal to write it. I wasn’t making a partisan argument. Rather I was trying to lay bare the underlying conditions that cause a juridical prohibition on censorship to become a social impossibility. And that is a subject about which economics has something to say.
The US government may not punish you for expressing yourself as you see fit, but truly free speech – speech that comes at no cost to the speaker – simply does not exist. This is but one version of a first principle any economics undergraduate will recognize: “There’s no free lunch.” Under ever present conditions of scarcity, every benefit necessarily comes at some cost – whether that be a production cost (someone, somewhere paid for your sandwich) or an opportunity cost (you could have been doing something else instead of eating it). An analogous truism applies to the public speaker, it occurred to me. This is especially so if what the speaker has to say is broadly unpopular and, in consequence, the social cost of having said it is quite high.
Each of us learns this lesson, whether in an economics class or in the world at large. And as I began to test my thesis – there is no such thing as truly free speech – against a variety of examples, both observed and invented, it became clear to me that the penalties levied on acts of unpopular speech most often occur against a background of social conformity. That is, unpopular speech acts are departures from an established convention of expression and opinion. Such deviations come with negative consequences, which could be as modest as an eyeroll or as weighty as sudden unemployment. The question arises as to just how such an equilibrium of conformity sustains itself. That is, how does political correctness, a mode of restrained speech, become self-enforcing? When it does, how do speakers who wish to avoid the penalties incurred by unpopular speech nevertheless communicate their views to receptive audiences? And, when there are diverse audiences, how do the various listeners infer whether a given speaker is “one of us,” and thus to be trusted, or “one of them,” and thus someone to be viewed with suspicion?
To appreciate the subtlety and sensitivity of these questions, I consulted some works in the social sciences that proved to be of invaluable assistance. I was especially inspired by the preeminent thinkers Erving Goffman, Albert O. Hirschman, and Thomas C. Schelling. Their work, firmly rooted in rigorous social science, is also rendered in exquisitely precise prose that can be understood by a general readership. This essay endeavors to emulate their artistry in this regard.
It should be clear to any reader of “Self-Censorship in Public Discourse” that, as a general matter, I took political correctness to be an undesirable form of repression and coercion. I still hold that view, in the main, for all the same reasons. Nowadays political correctness is seen to be a cultural artifact of the late twentieth century. The term is almost always placed between scare quotes. Yet the sociolinguistic conditions I was analyzing then are no less prevalent now – and their consequences can be even more dire.
