Chapter 8 Politics: Justice and Liberty

When we look at other societies, especially those in the distant past, certain political fictions stand out to us: how they attributed to some individuals a God-given right to rule over others (the divine right of kings); how myths of autochthony allowed them to understand themselves as descendants of an original set of citizens sprung from the soil; how they relied on a caste system that sorted people by birth to determine their social role; how they conceived of slavery as divinely sanctioned, morally acceptable, natural, or all of the above; how they assumed gender or race or religion should restrict someone’s political role.

I call these fictions “political” because they pertain not only to how people live together, but more specifically to the question of whose ideas about how to live together count, and to what degree. To say that human beings are social picks out the fact that a normal human life is a life spent with other humans; to say that we are political means something more specific, which is that we live together under a shared idea of how to do so. The set of fictions listed above are attempts to mitigate the fundamental problem of politics, which is that we sometimes have trouble living together, because we have different ideas about how best to do so. One way to handle that problem is to decide that some people’s ideas don’t count, or don’t count as much as others’. I call the ideas I listed “fictions” because, well, it’s obvious that that’s what they are—made-up stories that serve as ad hoc justification for a political arrangement. Or rather, that is obvious to us today. People living under those ideas didn’t tend to see them as fictions, but as reality.

Identifying political fictions in other cultures is easy. In this chapter and the next, I am going to take on the harder task of identifying political fictions in our own culture. When more enlightened future people look back on us, and they say, “These ideas are obviously just stories made up ad hoc to justify some political arrangement,” which ideas will they be referring to? Which of our ideas will they classify alongside autochthony, slavery, the caste system, and the conceit that women and racial minorities were incapable of participating in governance? I believe that future critics of our current political order will identify, as political fictions, what might be called the liberalism triad: freedom of speech, egalitarianism, and the fight for social justice.

These two chapters (8 and 9) will not show that any of those three ideas are false or mistaken or deserving of being discarded. I am not an enlightened future person, but a creature of my own time—and, while I certainly hope that this book will survive long enough to eventually be encountered by enlightened future people, it can only do so by first addressing people who are, like me, in the thrall of the liberal ideas of free speech, egalitarianism, and the fight for social justice. While I won’t repudiate any of those ideas, I will, with the help of the Platonic dialogue the Gorgias, make the case that they are not valid as they stand. Each of the three is an image: a distorted, imperfect, partial reflection of another thing. Instead of trying to eliminate any of these ideas, I will be Socratizing them.

Socrates is famous for having withdrawn from politics in a city where respectable citizens prided themselves on taking part in it. In the Apology he describes himself as having led “a private, not a public, life”¹ and explains that “if I had long ago attempted to take part in politics, I should have died long ago.”² In the Gorgias Callicles criticizes Socrates for this decision, arguing that the pastime of philosophizing is appropriate for the young, but that it is “unmanly” to live one’s whole life “in hiding, whispering in a corner with three or four boys.”³ So both according to Socrates’ own self-understanding, and according to the understanding of others, he lived an unusually apolitical life.

On the other hand, Socrates also describes himself as someone who has spent his life having engaged in politics. Politics is one of Socrates’ three areas of self-professed expertise alongside love and death. He describes himself as God’s gift to the city of Athens, and says, “I believe that I’m one of a few Athenians—so as not to say I’m the only one, but the only one among our contemporaries—to take up the true political craft and practice the true politics.”⁴ Socrates claims to be not only a politician, but the preeminent politician of Athens. How could Socrates be both the most apolitical and the most political man at once?

The answer is that he understood what is usually called politics as a stage on which philosophical disagreement gets dramatized. Those bent on getting and keeping political power make a show of navigating disagreements about how to live together, and of producing agreements about how to live together—but it’s only a show. Philosophy is how you actually navigate such disagreements. Philosophy is the real politics, which means that without ever stepping onto the political stage, Socrates could look at those who had done so, and see that they were mimicking him. That is why the Socratizing move worked so well on Socrates’ politically active interlocutors. It continues to work, 2,500 years later, because when we engage in politics today, we are still imitating Socrates. Socrates can show us that our political ideals are not what they appear to be.

These two chapters on Socratic politics contain three counterintuitive assertions about politics. First, you cannot fight injustice. The conceit that you can is based on symbolically transposing a disagreement about justice into another arena, where it can be fought over as a contest. When people think that they are fighting injustice, they are, instead, imitating refutation. Second, all of our standard answers to the question of what it is for speech to be free—the first amendment, the marketplace of ideas, persuasion, debate—fall short of capturing a coherent sense of freedom. Speech is free if, and only if, it is inquisitive. Finally, with reference to equality, which is the subject of chapter 9, we need to distinguish between what mitigates the feeling of inequality in one or another context—the elimination of discrimination, the absence of large disparities in opportunities or wealth or recognition, the presence of many different kinds of symbolic tokens of respect—from what it actually means for one person to treat another as their equal, which is a matter of whether they can take one another seriously even when they disagree about what is most important.

A glance in the Socratic mirror reveals that our three most cherished political ideals—justice, freedom, and equality—are, in fact, intellectual ideals. They are norms that pertain, in the first instance, to the shared quest for knowledge. Our current practice of politics is riddled with puzzling features that vanish once we restore our ideals to their proper context. Socratic intellectualism promises to set politics straight.

I. Politicization

When, at the age of ten, I became a naturalized US citizen, there was an error on my naturalization papers: my gender was listed as male. My father refused to have the error corrected, because to do so he would have had to mail back the papers, and he was worried about what might happen if the only legal document that established my identity got lost in transit. I didn’t object to this, or see myself as being “misgendered,” at least not in any objectionable sense. And this in spite of the fact that my father often used the male pronoun, “he,” to refer to me (which was, very likely, the cause of the mistake in the first place). In my native language, Hungarian, pronouns aren’t gendered: “he” and “she” are the same word, ő. I learned English at a young enough age that gendered pronouns give me no trouble, but the same is not true of my parents. To this day, they still regularly get “he” and “she” mixed up; no one takes offense. When my parents use the wrong pronoun, this is seen as an innocent mistake—even if they continued to make that mistake, over and over again, for decades.

By contrast, today questions about pronouns—for example, the question of whether you go out of your way to announce your pronouns, or go out of your way to avoid doing so; the question of whether you take care to use an individual’s chosen pronoun, or make a show of not doing so; the question of whether there are additional pronouns available to an individual besides “he” or “she,” and so on—have become proxies for a deeper disagreement. Answers to these questions signify moves in a dispute—about the relationship between gender and biology—whose primary location is not language. The dispute about gender is not conducted as a dispute about gender. Instead, it is transposed onto a variety of battlefields, from pronouns to bathrooms to inclusion criteria for women’s sports.

I call this phenomenon “politicization.” “Politicization” is a commonly used word that is rarely defined, even though the concept it refers to is difficult to understand. We all think we know what it means, but I am not sure that we do, so let me specify exactly how I understand it: politicization is the displacement of a disagreement from the context of argumentation into a zero-sum context where if one party wins, the other loses. It converts a question—which of two positions is correct—into a competition between the interests of two parties.

If someone claims that a given topic—be it the minimum wage, climate change, the Covid pandemic, or college course syllabi—has been “politicized,” they mean that actions and speech on that topic have to be interpreted against the backdrop of some standing conflict. So, for example, the ostentatious inclusion or removal of a text from my syllabus can constitute a way of positioning myself in a culture war: I might be providing assurances to my allies, or I might be provoking my enemies.

When people criticize “polarized” politics, they should, I think, speak instead of politicization. Polarization is not, in and of itself, a bad thing. A philosophy conference featuring views polarized into two camps won’t necessarily be less interesting to attend than one where the views expressed in the talks are more evenly distributed over a range of intermediate positions; and many of us are more interested in watching a movie that “polarizes” people in the sense that you either love it or hate it, than in watching one that everyone thinks is merely OK. Furthermore, thought is by nature polarized, in that every well-formed proposition is either true or false.

Extreme polarization without politicization is fine; politicization is the real problem. Whenever some topic seems “touchy” or “charged,” that is a good sign of politicization; another is if the answers tend to map perfectly onto existing battle lines. For instance, climate change and abortion have become politicized, to the extent that they are arenas within which a battle between the political Right and the political Left is adjudicated. When laws are passed making it more difficult to secure an abortion, that constitutes a “defeat” for the Left, whereas a new climate deal could be a “victory” for them.

When you are not personally invested, and you observe others debating some charged topic, you notice options neither side seems to consider, and possibilities for compromise that both sides have ruled out in advance. You see that the welfare of groups who stand to be harmed or benefited by the resolution of the issue are suddenly of paramount concern to those who showed little concern for those groups earlier. You conclude that the debaters are not really talking about what they claim they are talking about.

It is worth emphasizing that “politicization” should not be understood as synonymous with “politics,” though people sometimes use the word “politics” that way—for example, when we speak of “office politics,” we mean office infighting. Politicians often say, “Let’s keep politics out of this,” using “politics” as shorthand for “what’s politicized”—they mean, let’s temporarily suspend our usual practice of mapping every interaction onto a symbolic battlefield. Nonetheless, the actual practice of politics involves a lot more than fighting; politicization is a pathology of politics. Moreover, politicization—the mapping of a disagreement onto a contest—is not restricted to the political sphere. Far from it. In every marriage there are one or more topics that could be described as “politicized.” In the early stages of my own, laundry was an example: it was a place I could reliably find a fight, if I wanted to pick one. (Ever since we resolved this with an “everyone in the family does their own laundry” policy, I have had to look elsewhere.)

Politicization is a phenomenon all of us encounter, and many of us strongly dislike, but no one was ever so allergic to it as Socrates. The substantive disagreements he is trying to have with people—that he has devoted his life to—are always on the verge of being projected onto a battle of egos. He has a standing fear that his interlocutor will misinterpret him as someone who wants to employ combative, coercive tactics to “win” some battle. He expresses that concern to the esteemed orator Gorgias:

I’m asking questions so that we can conduct an orderly discussion. It’s not you I’m after; it’s to prevent our getting in the habit of second-guessing and snatching each other’s statements away ahead of time. It’s to allow you to work out your assumption in any way you want to.⁵

Socrates draws a contrast between the kind of conversation he wants to have with Gorgias and how arguments usually go:

If they’re disputing some point and one maintains that the other isn’t right or isn’t clear, they get irritated, each thinking the other is speaking out of spite. They become eager to win instead of investigating the subject under discussion. In fact, in the end some have a most shameful parting of the ways, abuse heaped upon them, having given and gotten to hear such things that make even the bystanders upset with themselves for having thought it worthwhile to come to listen to such people.⁶

Disagreement tends to fuel an “eagerness to win,” which manifests itself in the practices Socrates described himself as wanting to avoid: “second-guessing and snatching each other’s statements away ahead of time.” Each person misinterprets or twists the words of the other in such a way as to clear the path toward argumentative victory for himself; eventually this degenerates into shameful, abusive speech. Socrates finds this sort of thing intolerable, and so he wants to make very clear the difference between what he aims to do—“to allow you to work out your assumption in any way you want to”—with the kind of coercive speech that typically characterizes verbal disputes and debates. Socrates explains why he is so worried that Gorgias will allow their conversation to devolve into a battle:

I think you’re now saying things that aren’t very consistent or compatible with what you were first saying about oratory. So, I’m afraid to pursue my examination of you, for fear that you should take me to be speaking with eagerness to win against you, rather than to have our subject become clear.⁷

Socrates understands that people are inclined to interpret counterargument symbolically, as though the opponent were trying to defeat the idea by making its holder lose face. When people feel that they are—or are about to be—attacked, they respond in kind. This is what Socrates calls “eagerness to win.” When each party escalates to ever more coercive language in a preemptive defense against being on the receiving end of the same, conversation becomes politicized. Events in the conversation will start to be viewed symbolically, as standing for wins or losses for either side. Socrates only wants to continue the conversation with Gorgias if Gorgias can take him literally.

We might think: of course Gorgias is going to get a bit miffed or defensive if Socrates starts trying to refute him, but Socrates believes there’s no “of course” about it. The following quote is so emblematic of Socrates that I used it to introduce him to you, in the opening of this book:

For my part, I’d be pleased to continue questioning you if you’re the same kind of person I am, otherwise I would drop it. And what kind of person am I? One of those who would be pleased to be refuted if I say anything untrue, and who would be pleased to refute anyone who says anything untrue; one who, however, wouldn’t be any less pleased to be refuted than to refute. For I count being refuted a greater good, insofar as it is a greater good for oneself to be delivered from the worst thing there is than to deliver someone else from it. I don’t suppose there’s anything quite so bad for a person as having false belief about the things we’re discussing right now. So if you say you’re this kind of person, too, let’s continue the discussion; but if you think we should drop it, let’s be done with it and break it off.⁸

Unlike most people in such a situation, Socrates does not suggest that he and Gorgias each agree to put up with criticism gracefully, to contain any resentment and guard against expressing any irritation they might feel. Instead, Socrates claims that he is not susceptible to the negative responses to refutation, because from his point of view, being refuted—which is to say, sitting on the being persuaded end of persuasion—is pleasant and calls for gratitude. Indeed, later in the Gorgias he claims that refutation is the greatest favor one human being can do another.⁹ What makes Socrates seem unreal to his interlocutors is that he found a way to scrub away the symbolism that everyone else feels compelled to layer on top of any conversation that involves criticism, pushback, or resistance. He is pleased to refute his interlocutors, and no less pleased to be refuted. Socrates doesn’t care that the refuter is conventionally “assigned” the label of winner; Socrates feels free to “count being refuted a greater good” because he has not politicized the conversation.* He sees no conflict of interest between himself and his interlocutor.

This is why Socrates’ suggestion to Gorgias was not that they agree to put up with criticism gracefully, or to contain any resentment over loss, but rather to insist that in refutation, both parties benefit. Socrates is trying to convey the thought that this is not a war, or a competition, or a contest, or a duel, or a race. More generally: it is not the kind of event that has been symbolically organized into a zero-sum structure. Only in a symbolically mediated conflict does the benefit to one party entail the loss to another. Absent such a symbolic arrangement, my interests might fail to coincide with yours in the sense that it is unlikely we’ll both get what we want, but the event of my doing well will nonetheless be conceptually separable from the event of your doing poorly. A head-on conflict of interest—my win is your loss—means that the interaction between the parties has been mediated by symbolism.

Socrates is trying to tell Gorgias: This is not a game, or a contest, or a competition, or a fight. I am trying to interact with you directly. Socrates and his interlocutor are on the hunt for the answer to a question, and, if they clear away a mistaken answer, they have made progress that harms no one, and especially benefits the person from whom it was cleared away. A disagreement is a head-on conflict—if I am right then you are wrong—but it is not a conflict of interest, and thus need not be interpreted in zero-sum terms. A disagreement can be symbolically organized into a zero-sum game, but it needn’t be. Socrates thinks it shouldn’t be, because what we want to work out is not who wins, but who is right. A fight is a conflict of interest, and a disagreement that has been turned into a fight stands at a symbolic remove from the adjudication of the disagreement. When we are working out who wins, we are, at best, pretending to be working out who is right.

Suppose I attack you on the basis of an idea you have, setting up some kind of a duel or contest between us in which one of us will be the winner. Each of us might see ourselves as “fighting injustice,” but we are not, because even if I win, the idea in you may nonetheless remain intact. Suppose I kill you: still others may take up the idea on your behalf. This is exactly what Socrates thinks will happen to philosophy after he is put to death—others will continue to practice it. Socrates understands that his refutational activities have upset his fellow citizens, but he warns them that you cannot kill philosophy by killing Socrates: “You are wrong if you believe that by killing people you will prevent anyone from reproaching you for not living in the right way.”¹⁰

Socrates holds that when you fight with someone, you are pretending to argue with them. Let’s explore that radical claim more carefully.

II. Fighting Is Pretend Arguing

In the Alcibiades and the Euthyphro, Socrates describes hostility, fighting, and war as arising from disagreements over justice and injustice. As evidence for this claim, consider the opening of Homer’s Iliad. Agamemnon has taken Chryseis, daughter of Chryses, as his prize, and her father asks for her back. Having been turned down, Chryses prays to Apollo to punish the Greeks:

Lord of the silver bow, now hear my prayer!

Great guardian of Tenedos and Chryse

and sandy Cilla! Mouse Lord! If I ever

built temples to your liking, ever burned

fat thighs of oxen or of goats for you,

fulfill this prayer for me, and let the Greeks

suffer your arrows to avenge my tears!¹¹

The result of this prayer is that Apollo inflicts a plague on the Greeks, who eventually figure out why they are being plagued, forcing Agamemnon, their leader, to give Chryses back his daughter. You might wonder, looking back at Chryses’ speech: if you are in a position to call in favors from a God, why not, instead of asking him to make the Greeks suffer, just ask for your daughter back directly? The answer is that Chryses is angry, he feels he has been wronged, and he wants vindication. Earlier, he wanted his daughter back; now, he wants to teach the Greeks a lesson. The saga of Chryses and his daughter is the whole Trojan war in miniature: it wasn’t the pragmatic need to retrieve Menelaus’ wife that launched a thousand ships so much as the wounded pride of the men sailing in them. And so Socrates was right to describe war as, in large part, an attempt to prove that one is right—which is to say, to settle a disagreement.

Typically, if you didn’t think that someone was wrong about something, there would be nothing to be fighting over. If you strike or coerce someone in the absence of such a point of contention, you would not see yourself as fighting them, but instead just as using force on them to achieve a goal. When I fight you, I exercise force on you as though I were exercising force on some idea associated with you—I am not just using force on you, but I am using it agonistically, in the context of a contest that aims to “support” or “stand up for” some principle. The disagreement has been displaced from its original home, which was a disagreement over that principle. Instead of actually settling it by argument, we pretend to settle it by way of a zero-sum contest. In a fight, there is always a conflict of interest.

A Socratic definition of fighting would be something like this: fighting is politicized arguing. Whether we politicize the argument by using physical force, or emotional force, or whether we fight more indirectly, by way of proxies—think of how, in an especially acrimonious divorce, the ex-spouses might use their children to get at each other—what unifies all the fighting that we do is that the fight represents an argument we are not having.

But aren’t there cases in which we fight others without fighting “over” any point of disagreement? For example, if there is only room for one of us on the lifeboat, as I push you off it, I might say “No offense, nothing personal,” to signal that there is no real disagreement between us. Or consider a situation where one uses physical force against a child for their own good. If getting you off the lifeboat, or getting the child to stop running into the intersection, required a protracted struggle, I might describe myself as “fighting” you or the child, even though there is no disagreement I am trying to resolve by way of that use of force. Or consider two nonhuman animals wrangling over a piece of meat or a mate—we might say that they are fighting each other.

It is fair to raise these as counterexamples to the principle that those who fight see themselves as settling a dispute; nonetheless, as long as we admit that they are not core cases of fighting, and that they are classified as fighting with reference to those core cases, the principle stands. We call the uses of force in the lifeboat case, or the child protection case, or the animal wrangling case “fighting” to the extent that they bear an outward resemblance to, and therefore remind us of, the fights that are animated by self-righteous anger over disagreement. If it is true that fighting imitates argument, then it makes sense that we are capacious in being willing to apply the term “fight” to what imitates that: “being an image of” is a transitive relation.

Even metaphorical uses of fighting support the analysis I’ve given here. Consider: When we decide to describe ourselves as fighting cancer instead of simply as undergoing treatment with the hope of survival, we employ the metaphor of fighting because it allows us to see ourselves as standing up for something. The feeling that I am upholding a principle gives me energy, motivation, and optimism: I deserve to live! I’m not going to let this cancer take my life away from me! When you decide to “stand up and fight” against an attacker instead of running away from them, you are energized by the thought that they are in the wrong, and you are in the right. You are standing up for yourself, as though you yourself were a principle or idea or concept that you could defend by means of fists or insults. People sometimes describe their political enemies as “questioning my right to exist,” a framing that facilitates the interpretation that in defending myself against those enemies, I am defending a principle: my right to exist.

The problem in each of these cases is that the level of ideas and principles, and the level of fists, swords, scalpels, and insults, are detached from one another.

The glorification of violence is only possible if we imagine some principle is at stake, and that principle is being upheld by means of violence—because blood is being shed, the principle stands to win. The glorification of violence essentially involves politicization. The same is true of the glorification of nonviolence: if you think you are upholding some principle—for example, that violence is wrong—by allowing yourself to be assaulted and not fighting back, then you have politicized the philosophical question, “Is violence ever justified?” by projecting it onto this scene: if you can suffer patiently, your side wins. As Socrates would say, the only way to actually determine whether violence is justified is to ask the question, “Is violence justified?” and inquire freely into the truth of the matter.

A soldier eager to fight Nazis sees warfare as more than the most expeditious means to prevent future tyrannies; he would not, for instance, accept an alternative that involved rewarding Nazis—not even if he were assured it wouldn’t produce perverse incentives. Rather, such a soldier’s goal was, by means of killing Nazis, to defend the principle fascism is wrong. In order for an action to constitute a defense of this principle, the action must entail hurting Nazis, making them suffer, and, above all, ensuring that they experience defeat. When we speak of “fighting for justice” we imagine ourselves not only as preventing future injustices—there are a lot of ways of doing that—but specifically as defeating injustice using violence, or patience, or (in the case of some forms of protest) by calling attention to something. The problem is that is impossible. You cannot defeat or disprove or defend an idea using any kind of force but the force of argument. You might, instrumentally, be able to take steps toward a more just world by exerting physical or emotional force; and you might imagine, as you do so, that you’re fighting injustice. But what you’re really doing is pretending to argue.

Notice that even if you could kill enough people to bring it about that no one held an idea, you haven’t thereby defeated the idea, not any more than you defeat the theory that the sun is at the center of the solar system by killing everyone who believes it to be true. And if the person who sees himself as battling injustice claims that he is not trying to fight ideas, but only trying to stop their spread, consider the hypothetical alternative where you can release a gas that had no effect other than to cause everyone to forget the noxious idea. This action would not carry with it the same passion and glory as the act of inflicting harm on the holders of ideas, precisely because the passion and glory come from the conceit that harms to people represent harms to ideas.

The person who sees himself as fighting injustice is engaged in a symbolic contest, even if he does not want to admit it. The reason he may not want to admit it is that the symbolism is not literally true. Exsanguinating the bodies of people who hold an idea is not a way of getting at the idea itself, and preventing them from being exsanguinated doesn’t preserve the idea. Killing and saving don’t touch ideas: only argument does. An argument is a battle to the death, not between two individuals, but between the idea in one, and the denial of that idea in another. It is like the showdown in a Western—“This town ain’t big enough for the both of us”—except that in the case of the Western, the claim in question is not ever literally true. Two people could fit into just about any room, let alone a whole town; but logical space, big as it is, is not big enough for both an idea and its negation. The demands that only one of the two survive makes sense when located in its natural habitat: argument. Likewise, consider that those who fight—even when what they are fighting is a genuinely outrageous injustice—often adopt tactics as brutal as their opponents’. What will win the fight and what is just are not in any way guaranteed to be the same. But if we transpose the fight to its original home, argument, the corresponding guarantee does in fact obtain. Although you can win a fight by behaving more unjustly than your opponents, you cannot refute someone by saying things that are even more false that what they say.

Everyone understands that you can’t literally fight cancer any more than you can fight a mountain or the color blue, yet many are drawn to speaking as though they really could fight racism or anti-Semitism or fascism or inegalitarianism or any other form of injustice. But notice that although it is imaginable to speak of “defeating” these evil ideas, it isn’t imaginable that they might win. They can’t prove themselves true no matter how many battles anyone wins. But if that’s the case, the same holds for liberalism and justice and so on: one cannot prove them true by fighting. Nor can you fight for your right to exist, because no amount of fighting can bring it about that you have this right. And as Socrates says to Crito just before drinking the hemlock, “To express oneself badly is not only faulty as far as the language goes, but does some harm to the soul.”¹² What you are really doing when you say you are fighting injustice is inflicting harms on people and imagining that those harms somehow transfer to the ideas that are your real enemies. When you say you are fighting injustice, there is something else that you are really trying to do.

There is more to be said about the reality of which “fighting injustice” is the image, but first we need to put liberty, and, in the next chapter, equality, on the table.

III. Freedom of Speech

It is easier to say what freedom of speech isn’t than to say what it is. The first amendment to the US Constitution protects citizens from a certain kind of government interference in their speech; but government censorship is far from the only way speech can be made unfree. When we hear, as we often do these days, of people being silenced or canceled or experiencing “chilling effects” on their speech, the culprit is rarely the government. Our idea of freedom of speech extends beyond what’s specified in the First Amendment to something that has bearing on how we conduct ourselves on social media, in the workplace, and in classrooms, on sidewalks, and even in homes. The great public philosopher John Dewey (1859–1952) made this point, nearly a hundred years ago:

Merely legal guarantees of the civil liberties of free belief, free expression, free assembly are of little avail if in daily life freedom of communication, the give and take of ideas, facts, experiences, is choked by mutual suspicion, by abuse, by fear and hatred. These things destroy the essential condition of the democratic way of living even more effectually than open coercion.¹³

When governments interfere with the free press and the public dissemination of ideas, they place restrictions on what we, as individuals, can talk to each other about, and on what kinds of information can flow into our conversations. It is those conversations that are, first and foremost, the locus of freedom. Dewey’s view is that freedom from government interference is important exactly insofar as it facilitates the free communication between citizens:

I am inclined to believe that the heart and final guarantee of democracy is in free gatherings of neighbors on the street corner to discuss back and forth what is read in uncensored news of the day, and in gatherings of friends in the living rooms of houses and apartments to converse freely with one another. Intolerance, abuse, calling of names because of differences of opinion about religion or politics or business, as well as because of differences of race, color, wealth or degree of culture are treason to the democratic way of life.¹⁴

It is when the topics, values, and commitments that are central to a person’s life become open for discussion and adjudication with others that she can be said to “live together” with those others in a substantive sense. I call that way of living together with other people “free”; Dewey calls it “democratic.” Regardless, we agree that barriers to communication stand in the way of politics, which is to say, of living together under a shared idea. Freedom of speech, in this broader (“democratic”) sense, includes the freedom to communicate with whoever one chooses (freedom of assembly or association) and the freedom to enact the results of one’s communicative exchanges in self-determination (the right to vote).

And yet, for all the emphasis Dewey places on the key role that being able “to converse freely” plays in democratic living, he doesn’t explain what that means. He himself only tells us what free speech isn’t—insulting, abusive, or intolerant—not what it is. Suppose an idea is to travel from my mind to yours, and it must make that journey “freely”: What path should it take?

The standard answer is persuasion: our conversations are “free” when we are open to persuasion, and when our changes of mind are the products of persuasion. In a free society, people engage in persuasion. Persuasion is a form of unilateral cognitive determination: When I make you think what I think, I’ve persuaded you. If I’m trying to persuade you, then I succeed if you end up thinking what I think, and in all other scenarios—you leave unpersuaded, you persuade me—I fail.

But persuasion is not the only kind of unilateral cognitive determination. When someone uses hypnosis, brain surgery, or mind-altering pills to manipulate the thoughts of others, that is unilateral cognitive determination, but it is not persuasion. We should also distinguish someone who operates by persuasion from an expert. When we have collectively recognized a set of people as authoritative, and anything they say as “knowledge”—or, as close to knowledge as we can hope for—then they do not need to persuade us. They can just tell us, because we believe what they say on the strength of their say-so. We describe ourselves as “consulting” experts, which is to say, we trust their testimony. And when experts communicate among themselves, they transfer their knowledge by some accepted process of demonstration or proof. Experts interact with one another not by persuasion but by teaching.

Socrates points out that those engaged in politics speak on too many topics to count as experts in any of them. He also notes that heated political disagreement is a sign that no one is in the position to do any teaching; and that there is no standard proof procedure. If persuasion is not hypnotic mind control and it is not how experts engage with other experts—which is by teaching—or how experts engage with nonexperts—which is by telling—then what is it?

Look at the following passage, in which Gorgias the orator describes how his persuasive powers give him an advantage in medicine over his brother, the doctor:

Many a time I’ve gone with my brother or with other doctors to call on some sick person who refuses to take his medicine or allow the doctor to perform surgery or cauterization on him. And when the doctor failed to persuade him, I succeeded, by means of no other craft than oratory. And I maintain too that if an orator and a doctor came to any city anywhere you like and had to compete in speaking in the assembly or some other gathering over which of them should be appointed doctor, the doctor wouldn’t make any showing at all, but the one who had the ability to speak would be appointed, if he so wished. And if he were to compete with any other craftsman whatever, the orator more than anyone else would persuade them that they should appoint him, for there isn’t anything that the orator couldn’t speak more persuasively about to a gathering than could any other craftsman whatever. That’s how great the accomplishment of this craft is, and the sort of accomplishment it is!¹⁵

Gorgias prides himself on being able to move your mind where he wants it to go, without using any illicit mind-control devices, and without possessing the relevant expertise; he does this by means of “no other craft than oratory,” which is to say, the art of persuasion. But how do you persuade someone of what neither of you knows? You give them the experience of knowing, without the reality. You do this by choosing your message, and your audience, carefully; as an orator, you have an eye for those claims people were antecedently inclined to tell themselves they know, and a knack for inducing in others the illusion of knowledge. A persuader leverages the general human inclination to tell ourselves that we know things that we don’t know. Socrates calls this flattery. He says the orator is skilled at flattery, and therefore, unfree: Someone constrained to flatter his audience is not at liberty to speak the truth. Someone bent on persuasion has to tell people what, in some sense, they want to hear.

Debate might at first appear to be an improvement over persuasion. It offers up a platform to both sides, instead of only to one, acknowledging the reality of the disagreement. But Socrates does not believe in debate, and refuses to participate in it. In the Gorgias, he explains why: debate politicizes argument. At one point, Socrates’ interlocutor, Polus, insists that Socrates has already been refuted, which is to say, “lost” the debate between them, because he adopted an unpopular position:

Don’t you think you’ve been refuted already, Socrates, when you’re saying things the likes of which no human being would maintain? Just ask any one of these people.¹⁶

Socrates objects that Polus is treating their conversation as a debate in which

one side thinks it’s refuting the other when it produces many reputable witnesses on behalf of the arguments it presents, while the person who asserts the opposite produces only one witness, or none at all. This “refutation” is worthless, as far as truth is concerned, for it might happen sometimes that an individual is brought down by the false testimony of many reputable people.¹⁷

Socrates is not willing to “give in” to Polus’ side on the basis of how many votes Polus can wring from the audience. Debate is always a matter of convincing a third party. The third party might be the judge of the debate tournament, the jury in a court case, the members of the Athenian Assembly, the voters in a presidential debate, or the “general public.” Debate maps the project of determining which idea is true onto a contest between the debaters; more specifically, it becomes a contest between the persuasive powers of those debaters.

Adding another persuader doesn’t change the fact that each remains tasked with fostering an illusion of knowledge; the debate format simply adds the twist of allowing persuaders to compete over who is better at that sort of flattery. If the audience of ordinary persuasion asks themselves, “Is this person making me feel like I know something?” the audience of a debate asks themselves, “Which of these people is best at making me feel like I know something?”

Polus thinks that he has refuted Socrates even though Socrates is unpersuaded; Socrates, by contrast, insists, “The truth is never refuted.” In the real kind of arguing Socrates is interested in, the truth can never lose; it is only in the gamified version of refutation in which Polus wants to engage—the version where you win by persuading people—that someone who is saying true things can nevertheless “lose.” Socrates refuses to play this game. Contrasting himself with Gorgias and Polus, Socrates denies that he is in the persuasion business. Elsewhere, he denies that has possesses the art of speaking well, and insists that he has never been anyone’s teacher. In the Gorgias, Socrates suggests that he and Polus ignore the audience and turn toward each other:

Though I’m only one person, I don’t agree with you. You don’t compel me; instead you produce many false witnesses against me and try to banish me from my property, the truth. For my part, if I don’t produce you as a single witness to agree with what I’m saying, then I suppose I’ve achieved nothing worth mentioning concerning the things we’ve been discussing. And I suppose you haven’t either, unless you disregard all these other people and bring me—though I’m only one person—to testify on your side.¹⁸

But how is what Socrates wants to do with Polus—bring him around to testify on Socrates’ side—different from persuasion? How can we define “freedom of speech” in the broadest sense without talking about that very thing: that is, persuasion? To answer this question, we will have to examine the third leg of the liberal triad: equality.

Equality is the subject of the next chapter. Before we get to it, however, I want to briefly consider an objection to the equation, implicit in the discussion above, between freedom and freedom of speech. I have focused my discussion of politics on three liberal values—justice, freedom, and equality—but my discussion of the second was restricted to freedom of speech, albeit in the broad Deweyan sense. If we take all the freedoms relevant to the sharing of ideas about how to live together, including the right to free assembly and the right to vote, isn’t that still only a part of freedom? Aren’t there forms of freedom that have nothing to do with expression and communication? What can we say, for instance, about the right to be left alone, the right to own property, or the right not to be imprisoned without cause?

Recall the distinction at the top of this chapter: to say that human beings are social picks out the fact that a normal human life is a life spent with other people; to say that we are political means something more specific, which is that we live together under a shared idea of how to do so. Politics is the set of solutions that we develop to those difficulties in shared living that spring specifically from differences in our ideas about how best to do so. When these disagreements are managed poorly, then some people coercively impose their way of life on others, or there is unceasing strife; when they are managed well, they are managed freely. A free society is one in which disagreements about how to live together are well managed.

Freedom is not the same thing as the state of being unimpeded by the presence of others—or what could be called “independence.” A man alone on a desert island has complete independence, in the sense that no one will interfere with him: he will be left alone, he can claim anything he likes as his “property,” and no one will imprison him. Nonetheless, these facts do not represent freedom, since there are no others with whom his agreements might be managed well or poorly. It may well be that, even when we live among others, we still wish, to some extent, to live as though (at least some of those) others were not present, and we can represent this as a desire for independence, as placing value on being left to our own devices. But it is only when our independence is the product of a shared agreement about how to live that it counts as a form of freedom.

Moreover, it is important to remember that the size and boundaries of this “tolerance zone” must themselves be politically adjudicated: some of the agreements that make up our shared political idea are agreements as to what we don’t need to agree about. Figuring out which topics are not a part of justice is an inquiry into justice. If we disagree about that question, those disagreements need to be managed freely. Something counts as my property if and only if there is a shared understanding, in my community, that I can dispose of it as I see fit; and communication is how we establish and maintain a shared understanding. Thus independence is, for those persons not located on desert islands, a communicative freedom. This is because freedom is a political idea, and political activity is communicative activity.

1. * If someone wishes to stipulate, as a linguistic matter, that “being refuted” is equivalent to “losing the argument”—and thus that those who are refuted lose—Socrates will not object to this, so long as the person allows that losing can sometimes be good for a person. Socrates will also allow you to stipulate, as a linguistic matter, that it is part of the meaning of “lose” that losing is (always) bad for the person who loses. What he won’t let you do is stipulate both that losing is bad, and that being refuted is losing, because at that point you’ve disguised a substantive claim as a semantic one.