You Can't Always Say What You Want: The Paradox of Free Speech

by Dennis Baron

The freedom to think what you want and to say what you think has always generated a pushback of regulation and censorship. This raises the thorny to what extent does free speech actually endanger speech protection? This book examines today's calls for speech legislation and places it into historical perspective, using fascinating examples from the past 200 years, to explain the historical context of laws regulating speech. Over time, the freedom to speak has grown, the ways in which we communicate have evolved due to technology, and our ideas about speech protection have been challenged as a result. Now more than ever, we are living in a free speech powerful speakers weaponize their rights in order to silence those less-powerful speakers who oppose them. By understanding how this situation has developed, we can stand up to these threats to the freedom of speech.

Genres: Politics, Nonfiction

303 pages, Kindle Edition

Published February 28, 2023

About the author

Dennis Baron is professor of English and linguistics at the University of Illinois and has written books on the technologies of communication; language policy and reform; language legislation and minority language rights; gender issues in language; and the history and present state of the English language. He's the author of the blog "the Web of Language". He's regularly quoted in the news and appears frequently on radio and t.v. discussing the English language and the digital revolution.

Reviews

[Meike · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm currently waiting for my final thesis in law to be graded - I wrote about freedom of speech and European platform regulation in the Digital Services Act, and this might strongly influence my opinion on this book. Baron is a professor of linguistics, and his approach to law is not systematic, but rather confined to relating court decisions, and only American ones - he starts out by listing the laws that apply to free speech in the US, and fully omits international law statutes, which is of course a sad manifestation of a cliche about America. Needless to say that international law regimes will grow more and more important in the digital age. Instead, Barron constantly refers to the right to bear arms which comes right after the first amendment in the US constitution, but has historically very different roots than free speech, different implications, different limitations - this is just a nonsensical approach to the topic at hand.

Make no mistake: It's very worthwhile to discuss the limitations of free speech, especially as the term, somewhat ironically, has become a weapon to silence others. Hate speech, insults, threats, disseminating rumors to hurt business or political rivals, instigating violence, obscenity, disinformation campaigns - the laws we have and how they are interpreted is a reflection of a society during a point in time, and the rules we give ourselves are a declaration of who we are. But this is not a phenomenon that can be tackled purely from a linguistic standpoint, as legal language is a functional language informed by the whole law regime, by history, politics and practice.

This book is just too anecdotal and shallow.

[Kara Babcock · Rating 4 out of 5]

The idea of free speech sounds great on paper, and it’s one of those nebulous concepts that most people, if you asked them if it sounded like a good idea, would generally affirm. But that hasn’t always been the case until very recently—more recently, in fact, than one might think. Dennis Baron explores this in You Can't Always Say What You Want: The Paradox of Free Speech along with a robust look at free-speech debates, legal precedents, and issues in the context of American history and civil rights. I received an eARC from NetGalley and Cambridge University Press, and I was excited to dive into this because the topic feels so timely and important given the current political climate.

Baron’s perspective is an interesting one: he is not a lawyer or law professor but rather a linguistics professor. Still, he knows his stuff. He has researched and written about free speech, and he has weighed in on court cases. You Can’t Always Say What You Want takes a historical but not quite chronological look at how the legal and social idea of freedom of speech has evolved in the United States. From the First versus Second Amendments to obscenity to what makes speech a threat, Baron guides us through the many quagmires that await anyone attempting to pin down what free speech actually means.

Prior to reading this book I was not, and am still not, a free-speech absolutist. Probably the best way to summarize my position is to say that I believe speech should have commensurate consequence. I think most free-speech absolutists are earnest but mistaken—that is, I don’t think there is a position of free-speech absolutism that is consistent with a stable, functioning liberal democracy. Beyond that, many who claim to believe in absolute free speech do so from a position of rhetorical dishonesty—invoking freedom of speech when, in actuality, they want to suppress the speech of their political and ideological opponents. In this way, free-speech absolutism becomes a form of camouflage.

Baron takes aim at both aspects of free-speech absolutism in this book. I spent a good deal of time reading it trying to infer his personal politics—when I first saw this title offered on NetGalley, I briefly worried it would be about cancel culture, etc., before I read the description and realized it was far more interesting than that. I get the sense that Baron and I agree on a lot of points, and where we might be in disagreement, it’s largely because (a) he knows more about this than I do and (b) he’s being a lot more diplomatic than I might. Baron is no fan of current interpretation of the Second Amendment, yet he also has criticism for liberal attempts to curtail free speech in the name of preventing, say, hate speech. Nevertheless, I suspect that conservative readers will see Baron as a woke ideologue, which says a lot more about how far right most American conservatives have been pulled in the past decade than it does about Baron’s alignment.

My main takeaway from this book is that very few of us really have a coherent concept of what we mean by free speech. The value of You Can’t Always Say What You Want is its grounding in primary source material. For the most part, this is not a polemic by Baron but a very well-researched tour through the United States Constitution, Supreme Court rulings, and other evidence. Baron explains how popular ideas of free speech depart from the actual text of the First Amendment. He helps us understand that amendment (and the Second Amendment) in historical context, as well as how the courts’ interpretations of the Constitution have changed over the years in things like obscenity trials and charges of sedition. Additionally, Baron emphasizes the ultimate futility of trying to codify free speech in something so brief as the First Amendment: language is imprecise, and the Founding Fathers themselves debated exactly how to phrase the amendment.

My main criticism of this book is that Baron’s writing is not always engaging. He repeats himself, both within and across chapters. In particular he really harps on the idea that freedom to bear arms suppresses freedom of speech for some groups—and hey, I don’t disagree, but the way this theme recurs throughout the book felt redundant rather than emphatic. He quotes at length from the primary sources I just extolled. Though still reasonably accessible for an academic work, I think the layperson will need to take their time walking through this one.

It’s worth it though. Our society’s idea of freedom of speech has always and will always evolve as our society evolves. At the moment, it feels like we are moving somewhat backwards, and that scares me. But this book didn’t scare me. It reassured me in the way that any knowledge reassures me—I went into this book with a certain idea of free speech, trusting Baron to challenge me. He did that, and while my position hasn’t changed dramatically, I feel much more informed about the topic, and I can recognize now where my thinking previously lacked depth or foundation. The debate about free speech is far from over, but I personally feel like I understand it better as a result of reading this book.

Originally posted on Kara.Reviews, where you can easily browse all my reviews and subscribe to my newsletter.

[Joseph Sobanski · Rating 4 out of 5]

I saw You Can't Always Say What You Want: The Paradox of Free Speech by Dennis Baron in the new material section of my local library and I figured I would give it a chance. And I was pleasantly surprised, Baron breaks down how the American Supreme Court has considered several types of speech (such as obscene speech, political speech, threats and more) in regards to the 1st Amendment over time. I think this is a very important, and often disregarded, topic of discussion concerning the 1st Amendment, namely how it has been interpreted by the founders and how this interpretation has changed through American history. Dennis Baron tries to impress upon the reader that the 1st Amendment (as well as all the others) is under constant judicial interpretation, changing to fit local context and needs. This book does a good job at questioning the notion of any absolutist interpretation of the 1st Amendment, which has never actually existed in American history anyway.

My only real criticism of this book lies in the inclusion of discussions concerning the 2nd Amendment. I realize the author was personally involved in gun control legislation as a linguistics expert, but the inclusion of discussions of the 2nd Amendment felt forced into this text. Baron makes a case that brandishing firearms is a type of hecklers veto, and warns that the 2nd may be a source of possible infringements on the 1st Amendment. This felt more like an editorial interjection though as opposed to a detailed argument, in an otherwise educational book about how free speech has been interpreted by the Supreme Court through US history. I would gladly read a more in depth discussion about tensions between the 1st and 2nd Amendment from Baron, but perhaps it would be better suited as its own separate project.

All in all, I believe Americans should be better educated about the history of their rights, which are so often brandished in political discussions without full knowledge of what those rights actual entail. Dennis Brown's You Can't Always Say What You Want: The Paradox of Free Speech helps provide some background for the 1st Amendment, concern what has historically been cover or not covered, and should be required reading for any free speech absolutist out there.

[K · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fine, thorough, and dry. The chapter on free speech and foreign language America's War on Language was the highlight for me.


p. 17 "It turns out that law, like every other form of language, is never absolute, never wholly unambiguous, never completely transparent or explicit. Like all forms of language, laws require reinterpretation. ... Complicating this is the fact that there are many ways to read a law - strictly, loosely, pragmatically, ideologically. They do not all produce the same results, and no single approach, or combination of approaches, is required."

p. 149 ... some places in the US burned books during WWI - anything in German

p. 153 In 1923 Illinois declares their state language "American" to "punish England for failing to grant independence to Ireland or to establish a Jewish state in the Middle East." Finally revoked in 1969

p. 178 "Tellingly, today the official language issue pits competing ideological views of America against each other: either the United States is a nation of natives and immigrants, both forced and voluntary, who are finally free to pursue their individual differences and dreams while celebrating their union under a common political system. Or it is a melting pot, a crucible were cultures fuse under pressure to form a common and uniform mass. Competing language policies reflect this division: government either supports a person's right to choose whether to keep their native language, discard it for English, or become bilingual; or it forces nonanglophones to abandon their native tongues in favor of English only, encouraging a select few to acquire a limited knowledge of a culturally prized, economically advantageous or politically strategic foreign language later on, in school."

[Judith White · Rating 5 out of 5]

A wonderfully readable summary of the Supreme Court decisions that define protected and unprotected speech under the 1st Amendment. Interesting. Both broader and more limited than one would imagine. I highly recommend.