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being those that focus on the general emotional and intellectual well-being of individual citizens.
One could raise the point that freedom-of-speech literature is already so well populated by philosophers and legal scholars that there is not any reason to add another discipline such as sociology to the theoretical mix. In response, there are at least six reasons for sociological considerations. First, freedom of speech and its limits are an ongoing discourse. If sociology can make a contribution to the discussion, then the contribution should be welcome. Second, there seems to be a limitation in the philosophical arguments in support of freedom of speech––philosophers tend to speak in absolutes, and there is not any society that has ever accepted absolutes in freedom of speech. Even in ancient Athens, where debate and philosophy flourished, Socrates was executed for polluting the minds of the young with dangerous thoughts. Third, within the existing framework for analysing and advocating freedom of expression as between instrumental and constitutive justifications, sociological arguments provide a basis for recasting the more philosophical constitutive justification for free speech into the more results-oriented instrumental justification. Fourth, advocates for freedom of expression have typically spoken in terms of individual rights. However, beyond the individual, there exists society with its own rights and expectations. One of the greatest contributions of French sociologist Emile Durkheim was his ongoing dialogue with other social theorists who he believed failed to recognise that society was something other than a collection of individuals. In Durkheim’s metaphor, individuals, as compared to society, were akin to organs within the human body; vital components but essentially different from the human organism. Durkheim further envisaged that all of the other social disciplines, such as philosophy and law, would form a pyramid of knowledge with sociology at the apex taking in and synthesising all of the other disciplines. While philosophers and legal scholars would likely take exception to this rather lofty view of sociology, it is arguably undisputed that sociological theory can make an important contribution in explaining human conduct. Fifth, sociology provides a theoretical foundation for the seemingly eccentric