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.

Here at Enduring Interest we are in the midst of exploring books and essays that address the question of speech and censorship. Forthcoming episodes will discuss authors including Walter Berns, Irving Kristol, Herbert Marcuse, James Madison, and Pierre Manent. However, this month we’re pausing on that theme to discuss a newly published book by the great French thinker and writer Raymond Aron. On April 4, 1978 Aron brought his academic career to close with a final lecture at the College de France. It has been translated into English and brought out by Princeton University Press with the title of Liberty and Equality. It is a short but penetrating lecture which provides much needed precision and clarity on the question of liberty or liberties.

My guest is Daniel J. Mahoney, an expert on Aron’s thought. He has been a guest on this show before—he was here last time to discuss Aron’s classic book The Opium of the Intellectuals. Dan is Professor of Political Science Emeritus at Assumption University. His latest books include The Statesman as Thinker, Recovering Politics, Civilization and the Soul, and The Other Solzhenitsyn: Telling the Truth about a Misunderstood Writer and Thinker. He’s the co-editor of the indispensable volume The Solzhenitsyn Reader: New and Essential Writings. His first book, The Liberal Political Science of Raymond Aron, was published in 1992.

John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty has been a consistent and prominent reference point in the ongoing debates about free speech. In this episode we discuss an elegant and powerful critique of Mill by the twentieth century political theorist Willmoore Kendall. His essay “The ‘Open Society’ and Its Fallacies” was published in the American Political Science Review in December of 1960. Our conversation covers various aspects of Kendall’s critique. Kendall claims that Mill’s argument for freedom rests on a false conception of the nature of society and human nature itself. We explore Kendall’s understanding of Mill’s thoroughgoing radicalism. “Mill,” Kendall writes, “is in full rebellion against both religion and philosophy, and so in full rebellion also against the traditional society that embodies them.” We also take up the phenomenon of what Kendall calls the “dispersal of opinion.” He contends that any society which guides itself according to Mill’s prescriptions will “descend ineluctably into ever deepening differences of opinion, into progressive breakdown of those common premises upon which alone a society can its affairs by discussion.”   Our guest is James Stoner. Professor Stoner is the Hermann Moyse, Jr., Professor and Director of the Eric Voegelin Institute in the Department of Political Science at Louisiana State University, where he has taught since 1988.  He is the author of Common-Law Liberty (Kansas, 2003) and Common Law and Liberal Theory (Kansas, 1992), and co-editor of Free Speech and Intellectual Diversity in Higher Education with Paul Carrese and Carol McNamara—just published in September of 2023. He also contributed a chapter to this volume called “Was John Stuart Mill Right About Free Speech?” which will be of interest to anyone who listens to our conversation here.

Enduring Interest is very pleased to launch our series on speech and censorship with this conversation on Jonathan Rauch’s Kindly Inquisitors, first published in 1993 and reissued in 2013 with a new afterword. We discuss Jonathan’s conception of “liberal science,” or the liberal intellectual system’s approach to sorting truth from falsehood. He suggests this is arguably liberalism’s greatest achievement yet seems always under attack from a variety of quarters. We discuss the fundamentalist and humanitarian threats to free speech, focusing most of our attention on the latter. Can speech cause harm? If yes, why should one not limit it? We compare and contrast the threats to free speech as Jonathan saw them back in 1993 with the situation today. We conclude with Jonathan’s recommendations for books and essays that make the case for free speech. Jonathan Rauch is Senior Fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution, a think-tank based in Washington, D.C. He’s the author of eight books and many, many articles on public policy, culture and government. He’s also a contributing writer at The Atlantic and a recipient of the National Magazine Award. His most recent book is The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth.

To lead into the next season of Enduring Interest, we're re-releasing our first two seasons, covering totalitarianism and ideology and liberal education.  We'll be back on September 8 with a new season covering free speech and censorship. This episode concludes our series on liberal education. We have three of our previous guests in the series back to discuss some common themes in the work of Leo Strauss, Michael Oakeshott and Hannah Arendt. We have Michael and Catherine Zuckert, Rita Koganzon, and Elizabeth Corey all returning to the podcast for the discussion. Topics include the place of reverence and tradition in liberal education, the authority of the teacher, and the purpose or purposes of liberal education. See our previous episodes for the bios of these guests.