Turbulent Freedom: The Competition of Ideas

Michael J. Glennon is worried about the future of free speech in the United States of America.

“I'm concerned that Americans are losing faith in something that's essential to democracy,” said Glennon, a Professor of Constitutional and International Law at Fletcher. “Many Americans today don't seem to realize that freedom of speech and democracy go hand in hand.”

In his new book, Free Speech and Turbulent Freedom: The Dangerous Allure of Censorship in the Digital Era, Glennon explains the reasons for freedom of speech in contemporary society and defends it as the right on which all others depend. 

The book’s title refers to an observation of Ralph Waldo Emerson, the transcendentalist philosopher. In 1844, Emerson wrote that Europeans looked with terror at America’s “turbulent freedom.” Opposing factions in America were caught up in competing, absolutist visions of social justice, Glennon explains.

He describes a parallel between Emerson’s era and today: the dangerous belief that any of us has unique access to ultimate truth, which, he argues, leads to the suppression of opposing ideas and inevitably to violence. 

Glennon sees large social media platforms as the “digital public square.” Within it, the platforms look to international human rights norms to maximize efficiency and justify censorship. In this landscape, Glennon argues, “hazy international limits will replace” the protections allowed by free speech unless the courts intervene. The companies’ entanglement with government censors, he writes, argues against continuing to treat them as private actors able to apply their own content standards.

Rather than silencing targeted speech, Glennon says that censorship drives it underground, making it harder to engage with and refute. Silenced speakers become perceived as “martyrs,” strengthening extremist thought as an alluring forbidden fruit.

“The alternative,” Glennon writes in Turbulent Freedom, “is a reinvigorated marketplace of ideas.”  

Glennon argues that an open, independent marketplace of ideas ensures the “decentralization of power” over political discourse. According to Glennon, censorship inevitably benefits the powerful, even when censors paint themselves as supporting the weak. He points to comments by American civil rights leader John Lewis, who said the movement against Jim Crow laws would be “a bird without wings” in the absence of free expression. 

Advocates for free speech do not expect that the open competition of ideas will always produce truth, Glennon says. Instead, Glennon writes, freedom of thought and expression — and a “recognition that others forge their own provisional truths”— is safer than the alternative of censorship, which always triggers a destabilizing social backlash. The better route, he argues, is the road of “humility, pluralism, and free speech.”

Free Speech and Turbulent Freedom is Michael Glennon’s tenth book. It was released by Oxford University Press in January 2024.

A panel discussion about the book, featuring experts and practitioners of free speech law, can be found here.