The Personal Duty and Public Power of Free Expression

While the concept of free expression is most often connected with political activity, its value extends in both public and personal directions. Within a society as a whole, free expression contributes to public discussions and the exchange of ideas that are necessary for progress. 

As Teresa Bejan pointed out in “Two Concepts of Freedom (of Speech)”, the 1919 dissent by Justice Holmes in Abrams vs. The United States pulled from ancient Athens the influential defense of a 'marketplace of ideas’, which brings truth and benefits from free and open exchanges. Such interpretations built upon the original writings of the First Amendment to create our current understanding of our right to free expression, Bejan wrote. 

Michel Foucault tied the Ancient Greek concept of parrhesia to personal integrity in one of his 1983 lectures at UC Berkley. The verbal activity relied on the speaker to recognize their duty to the truth regardless of the danger. This connection suggests that the ability to speak one's mind is a moral quality and a vital component of a self-examined life. 

Free expression and personal identity

The ability to express myself is fundamental to defining and affirming my individual identity. When we have the opportunity to express ourselves, our speech gives us power. This is especially important for me as a queer Latina. My voice and perspective is necessary in conversations about equality, whether the debate centers on due process for immigrants seeking asylum, equal pay, gay marriage or workers’ rights. 

As Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak said, nobody knows or can speak of my conditions better than myself. Expression of ideas, speech or culture then must rely on identity. 

Spivak notes that the struggles of the Indian subaltern – the poor, the masses, the peasants, and further, the women – who make up the majority of the Indian population stem from the erasure of their voices in history, the barriers between them and the elite who set the systemic structure of society to benefit those already at an advantage, and their consciousness and identity becoming lost to even those of the subaltern given the privilege to represent themselves. The root issue: subaltern can hardly be defined further than being ‘an other’, causing a lack of identity for the subaltern to assert. 

This aligns more closely with isegoria, which Bejan defined as the Greek concept meaning equal right of citizens to participate in public debate and the equal right to speech. For those historically excluded, having equal access to a public forum is essential for their identity to be recognized and heard on equal footing with the privileged. Therefore, the modern understanding of the First Amendment, which seeks to secure the equal right of citizens to not only exercise their reason but to speak their minds, effectively brings together the personal liberty of parrhesia and the equality of isegoria to support a robust public and individual identity.

Which leads us into the final question:

Is free expression worth protecting?

Journalism is often described as being ‘the people’s voice’ since it enables the public to hold those in power accountable. In this sense, the ‘people’ are the same groups who make up the ‘subaltern’: the masses, the citizens, the working class, the constituents, the public. 

From a modern perspective, the alternative to securing the equal right to speak is to empower the powers that happen to be to grant that liberty as a license to some and to deny it to others, according to Bejan. This turns expression into an unstable privilege that the people enjoy at the pleasure of our government. A society that entrusts its leaders with the authority to decide who can speak freely is a society on the path to tyranny.

Without this protection, both the individual and society lose the mechanism for honest self-correction and improvement.