A range of events in recent years – from the shootings at the office of Charlie Hebdo in Paris, through impassioned arguments over no platforming in universities, to emerging debates surrounding the #metoo campaign – have once again brought centre stage enduring questions surrounding ‘freedom of speech’ in contemporary Europe and America: when and how can speech be ‘free’? With what consequences? And why and how does this come to matter differently to people in particular social and historical contexts? Free speech has long been a topic that has attracted extensive and sustained theoretical attention, definition and critical discussion in the fields of legal studies, philosophy and political science. Yet our understanding of how people relate to free speech in their everyday lives in concrete historical and geographic contexts remained paradoxically scant. This project asked how, in various locations, the everyday life of ‘free speech’ becomes entwined with actors’ intimate understandings of responsibility, courage, truthfulness, measure and excess. What effects do the practicalities and exigencies of different legal and institutional frameworks, new and old modes of communication and political action, have on lived commitments to free speech – be they exhibited loudly, becoming clear foci of attention and dispute, or on the contrary lived and embodied quietly, in the nitty gritty of everyday practice?
To this crucial set of questions, anthropology, with its fine-grained ethnographic method and comparative heritage, is poised to make a substantive contribution. Building on these starting points, this project asked what free speech means in Europe through sustained ethnographic accounts of how these values are actually lived on the ground by practitioners, professionals and laypersons in times of crisis and political transformation: from the legal management of public speech in France after Charlie Hebdo, to newsmaking in troubled times in Ukraine; from disputes surrounding the memorialisation of fascism in Italy, to free speech as therapy in a UK mental health care setting. Beyond Europe, the project has acted as a hub for broader conversations amongst anthropologists, legal scholars, historians and philosophers around the topic of freedom of speech.
The project's participants have developed many detailed arguments and conclusions about the specific contexts they have worked in, reflected in a range of publications. Furthermore the project as a whole has led to a broader overall conclusion: the binary way in which public debates about freedom of speech are most often framed is limiting our ability to understand the diversity of people's engagements with speech freedoms. Public debates over freedom of speech tend to gravitate around a binary contrast between two poles: on the one hand freedom of speech as an individual, asocial or even antisocial right; on the other hand, constraints on speech as an adjustment of individuals to collectives (social responsibility, cultural sensitivity, etc.). In line with classic liberal political philosophy, arguments are thus cast either as calls for more freedom for individuals against collective censorship, or as calls for more careful and responsible uses of speech against individual selfishness or thoughtlessness. In practice however, the project has found that people's engagements with freedom of speech are far more varied than this framing allows for. Free speech can be experienced and sought as a matter of personal probity, as a duty in relation to others, as the effect of a commitment to a higher truth or to the wellbeing of a particular community, or as a matter of embodied skill and ethical self-formation. While classic liberal political philosophy is sometimes involved in making these arguments, they are just as often inspired and informed by other sources: religious, therapeutic or poetic. In all of these cases, the freedom of speech in question is already relational, social and cultural, and can be self-limiting in important ways.
As a result, the project concludes that many public disputes over freedom of speech would be better understood and might be partly resolved, if they were recast, not as a constantly repeated struggle between individual freedom and sociocultural constraint, but rather as tensions between different sociocultural visions of freedom of speech.
