Freedom of Speech: The History of an Idea (Aperçus: Histories Texts Cultures) - Hardcover

This intriguing history, a compilation of essays, traces freedom of speech via a number of thinkers, movements, and radical events. Elizabeth Powers offers both an introduction and conclusion that serve to question what the freedom of speech is doing in modern society and, furthermore, how the history of the idea itself, with its different incarnations, influences how we perceive this freedom worldwide ,but specifically in the West.... Freedom of Speech: The History of an Idea succeeds in providing a way to renew our understanding of the ideas that preceded the institutionalization of freedom of speech and dealing with those in a modern West. * The Eighteenth-Century Intelligencer *

The essays in this volume portray the public debates concerning freedom of speech in the 18th century in France and Britain as well as Austria, Denmark, Russia, and Spain and its American territories. The economic integration of Europe and its offshoots over the past three centuries into a distinctive cultural product, "the West," has given rise to a triumphant universalist narrative that masks these disparate national contributions to freedom of speech and other liberal rights.