Free Expression, History of

Conceptualizing the Notion

Several different approaches to the history of freedom of expression are common. The oldest and best established is a liberal approach, sometimes called the “Whig theory of history.” This theory begins with the premise that power, including the power of government, is always hostile to individual liberty. In the Whig theory, history is the story of the continual advance of liberty. This viewpoint is rooted in liberal political philosophy, which holds that liberty advances because people are free by nature, and “ideas want to be free” as well.

One variant of the liberal approach was put forward by the 1956 book Four Theories of the Press by Siebert, Peterson, and Schramm. It identifies a “libertarian” theory of the press, which has confidence in the rationality of free individuals and proposes that minimal government interference will be the best policy for a media system. It contrasts the libertarian theory with the “authoritarian” theory on the right and the “Soviet communist” theory on the left, which both call for massive oversight and leadership of the media system. The Four Theories model is somewhat different from the “Whig” model, though, in that it sees the rise of the mass media requiring a modification of “libertarian” theory into a fourth theory, the “social responsibility theory,” which distinguishes between the freedom of expression of persons and the freedom of the media, and concludes that the latter is derived from and justified only to serve the former.

On the opposite end of the political spectrum there is a series of critical—as opposed to liberal—approaches to the question of freedom of expression. These approaches dispute a key point shared by liberal theories: that the realm of ideas and expression is relatively autonomous from the realm of material wealth and power. The classic expression of this position comes from German social scientists Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who declare in the German Ideology that the ruling ideas [Page 634]of any age are the ideas of the ruling class, who own the mental as well as material means of production. A similar position is taken by feminist critics and some proponents of critical race theory, who understand public discourse as a “zero-sum” game, in which more speech for some means less speech for others. From a critical perspective, the history of freedom of expression can be understood only as a feature of a larger history of political struggle among groups identified by race, class, and gender.

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