Seminars

In the contemporary USA, the freedom of speech is typically understood as a constitutional value: a liberty “guaranteed” by the First Amendment that empowers citizens to uphold democracy and the rule of law. Yet this Constitution- centric definition conceals as much as it clarifies since, over the past four centuries, many Americans have defined and defended free speech in non-constitutionalist terms. For the Puritan settlers who arrived in New England in the 1620s, free speech was closely connected with the freedom of conscience. It meant saying what was on one’s mind: always with God’s help, and often in defiance of civil authority. Even amid the enthusiasm for constitutionalism and civil liberties that effervesced among the British colonists starting in the early eighteenth century, Black and Indigenous intellectuals continued to defend free speech in terms of conscience, not law. These marginalized thinkers were victims, not beneficiaries of Anglo-American constitutionalism; their liberty to speak out against the imperial hegemon could not plausibly be derived from Britain’s “ancient” constitution or, later, the USA’s written version. Amid the nineteenth- and twentieth-century “legalization” of free speech in the domain of constitutional law, disenfranchised Americans continued to conceptualize their freedom to speak in non-legalistic ways, deriving it from conscience, or Divine inspiration, or human agency itself—what Frederick Douglass called “moral power.”