Freedom of Speech and Society: A Social Approach to Freedom of Ex ...

Introduction

While highly valued in democratic societies, freedom of speech has never been an unfettered right. Speech is regulated through a large body of laws which cover a spectrum including defamation, privacy, pornography, political campaign contribution limits, broadcasting license regulations, and many others. This book evolved from an effort to reconcile some of the philosophical arguments that have been made for freedom of speech with the numerous and changing real-world restrictions on speech. While political and legal philosophers have crafted a corpus of rich literature in support of free speech, the acceptance of restrictions on speech indicates that other factors are influencing speech limits contrary to the broad and seemingly unrestricted arguments advanced by legal theorists. This text represents an attempt to introduce established social theory to the free speech debate with the hope that sociology might help to explain freedom of expression as it actually exists. Although it is necessary to introduce a limited amount of sociological terminology in this discussion, to maintain linguistic harmony with existing literature, discussion and comparisons of freedom of expression will be within the parameters or confines generally recognised by modern free speech theorists––constitutive and instrumental justifications, with the instrumental arguments for free speech being those that are results oriented and the constitutive theories