What do you think?
Rate this book
Freedom: Virtue and the First Amendment
Berns, Walter Fred
264 pages, Hardcover
First published June 1, 1969
26 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
February 2, 2017
This book rambled a lot and I don't agree with the basic message. Walter Berns thinks that libertarians about free speech have gone too far. They think that freedom is an absolute value. In the name of the freedom, they protect the most repugnant kinds of speech, including racist speech, or people trying to spread their faith by proclaiming it by loudspeaker on a residential street. But, Berns thinks that our concern with freedom needs to be balanced by our concern with virtue. The political problem for him is not one of protecting the individual's freedoms against government. The problem for him is a properly educated citizenry that knows how to differentiate between demagogues, tyrants, and bad ideologies and good leaders/ideas. So, Berns seems to be sympathetic to forms of censorship.
I don't agree with this as I don't trust the government to pick certain ideas that they find dangerous and then exclude them. Government should be committed to enforcing a process--i.e. open discussion that allows people to have their say, and over time people will sort out the wrong views from the good ones.
I don't agree with this as I don't trust the government to pick certain ideas that they find dangerous and then exclude them. Government should be committed to enforcing a process--i.e. open discussion that allows people to have their say, and over time people will sort out the wrong views from the good ones.
December 11, 2020
This book is a critique of the Supreme Court's judicial decisions on free speech cases. Berns argues that libertarianism is wrong. Civic virtue and civic education should be an aim of politics and law. Of course, Berns is ideologically conservative, on which I do not want to comment, since I believe it is ok for everyone to have his or her own standpoint. The problem is only its writing style. This book was written in the 1950s when academic writing style was different from today. I agree with another commentator's idea that Berns often rambles, sometimes even turning this book into a highly ideological polemic against libertarian doctrines. More than half of the length is used to review and criticise the Supreme court's judgements.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews