This Prof. will Challenge your Perspective on Free Speech

Professor Deirdre McCloskey complicates the understanding of free speech by associating this freedom with the ancient Greek word for persuasion: rhetoric.

Deirdre McCloskey

Deirdre McCloskey has been a professor of economics, history, English, communications, philosophy and classics, and arts and culture at various points in her career. She is best known for her contributions to the understanding of the economic history of Britain, the quantification of historical inquiry, the rhetoric of economics and human sciences, economic methodology, virtue ethics, feminist economics, heterodox economics, the role of mathematics in economic analysis, and the role of significance testing in economics.

Everybody loves free speech, right? It’s in the first amendment to the U.S. Constitution. But Professor Deirdre McCloskey complicates the understanding of free speech by associating this freedom with the ancient Greek word for persuasion: rhetoric. People tend to recoil at that term, but is being persuaded a bad thing? As humans, we depend on language. We have to persuade one another about things from the Pythagorean Theorem to which brand of soda to purchase. The only alternative to persuasion by speech is persuasion by violence.
As much as people claim to love free speech, though, they often complain about advertising and its efforts to persuade individuals to purchase one brand over another or to choose one political party or candidate over another. They use the word manipulation. But what better way is there to make decisions about what to buy or what to believe except by people trying to charm us?
If persuasion is the only alternative to violence, a society of free choice, free ideas, and free consumption is an advertising society, a rhetorical society. Prof. McCloskey says, “A free society is a speaking, rather than violent, society.”

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http://​www​.bloomberg​.com/​n​e​w​s​/​2​0​13-11… [article]: The Supreme Court case Holder V The Humanitarian Law Project, which said that peaceful speech can be criminalized if it is “coordinated” to support a foreign terrorist organization named by congress, was upheld in its first test.

http://​rea​son​.com/​a​r​c​h​i​v​e​s​/​2​0​1​0​/​12/17… [article/​video]: Reason magazine discusses the importance of free speech. Included is also a video asking prominent figures “What is the biggest threat to free speech?”

https://​www​.aclu​.org/​f​r​e​e​-​s​peech [webpage]: The ACLU resource page for everything free speech.

http://​www​.voanews​.com/​c​o​n​t​e​n​t​/​n​sa-sq… [article/​video]: The NSA attempts to stop a t-​shirt website from printing shirts that satirize their organization.

http://​www​.uscourts​.gov/​e​d​u​c​a​t​i​o​nal-r… [webpage]: A resource page by the SCOTUS that clearly lays out what the right to free speech entails.