Paper #1is to be an argumentative paper, based on readings for class, in which you defend a point of view regarding free speech that you either believe in or simply find intriguing.
- Pick a classic text that we’ve read or will soon read: Milton, Mill, or Meiklejohn on the value of free speech, Marcuse or even early modern French and Italian spokesmen on the necessity of certain forms of censorship or government regulation of speech.
- Write a paper in which you:
- Explain the nature of that argument in detail.
- Defend that argument against all the possible criticisms or objections that you can imagine, including those who would defend censorship and/or free speech on other grounds.
- Finally, consider if there are ways to strengthen the argument that you are defending beyond the terms laid out in the original text.
You may make reference throughout the paper to historical circumstances outside the text and/or to other texts as you see fit.The first paragraph must introduce your own main argument or point. All citations should be properly footnoted (parenthetical citations are, however, fully acceptable if you are using the same edition of the text that is listed on the syllabus). The paper should be well-organized, elegantly written, carefully proofread for errors of grammar, spelling, word choice, etc., and, above all, thoughtful. The desired length is approximately eight double-spaced pages.
A CRITIQUE OF PURE TOLERANCE ROBERT PAUL WOLFF 9 I• BARRINGTON MOORE, JR. HERBERT MARCUSE BEACON PRESS BOSTON REPRESSIVE TOLERANCE BY HERBERT MARCUSE THIS essay examines the idea of tolerance in our advanced industrial society. The conclu- sion reached is that the realization of the objec- tive of tolerance would call for intolerance toward prevailing policies, attitudes, opinions, and the extension of tolerance to policies, atti- tudes, and opinions which are outlawed or sup- pressed. In other words, today tolerance appears again as what it was in its origins, at the begin- ning of the modern period—a partisan goal, a sub- versive liberating notion and practice. Converse- ly, what is proclaimed and practiced as tolerance today, is in many of its most effective manifesta- tions serving the cause of oppression. The author is fully aware that, at present, no power, no authority, no government exists which would translate liberating tolerance into prac- tice, but he believes that it is the task and duty of the intellectual to recall and preserve historical possibilities which seem to have become utopian possibilities—that it is his task to break the con- creteness of oppression in order to open the men- This essay is dedicated to my students at Brandeis University. 82 Repressive Tolerance tal space in which this society can be recognized as what it is and does. Tolerance is an end in itself. The elimination of violence, and the reduction of suppression to the extent required for protecting man and ani- mals from cruelty and aggression are precondi- tions for the creation of a humane society. Such a society does not yet exist; progress toward it is perhaps more than before arrested by violence and suppression on a global scale. As deterrents against nuclear war, as police action against sub- version, as technical aid in the fight against im- perialism and communism, as methods of pacifi- cation in neo-colonial massacres, violence and suppression are promulgated, practiced, and de- fended by democratic and authoritarian govern- ments alike, and the people subjected to these governments are educated to sustain such prac- tices as necessary for the preservation of the status quo. Tolerance is extended to policies, conditions, and modes of behavior which should not be tolerated because they are impeding, if not destroying, the chances of creating an exist- ence without fear and misery. This sort of tolerance strengthens the tyranny of the majority against which authentic liberals protested. The political locus of tolerance has changed: while it is more or less quietly and con- stitutionally withdrawn from the opposition, it is made compulsory behavior with respect to established policies. Tolerance is turned from an active into a passive state, from practice to non- practice: laissez-faire the constituted authorities. Herbert Marcuse 83 It is the people who tolerate the government, which in turn tolerates opposition within the framework determined by the constituted au3horities. Tolerance toward that which is radically evil now appears as good because it serves the cohe- sion of the whole on the road to affluence or more affluence4The toleration of the systematic moronization of children and adults alike by publicity and propaganda, the release of destruc- tiveness in aggressive driving, the recruitment for and training of special forces, the impotent and benevolent tolerance toward outright decep- tion in merchandising, waste, and planned ob- solescence are not distortions and aberrations, they are the essence of a system which fosters tolerance as a means for perpetuating the strug- gle for existence and suppressing the alternatives. The authorities in education, morals, and psy- chology are vociferous against the increase in juvenile delinquency; they are less vociferous against, the proud presentation, in word and deed and pictures, of ever more powerful missiles, rockets, bombs--the mature delinquency of a whole civilization. According to a dialectical proposition it is the whole which determines the truth—not in the sense that the whole is prior or superior to its parts, but in the sense that its structure and function determine every particular con- dition and relation. Thus, within a repressive society, even progressive movements threaten to turn into their opposite to the degree to which they accept the rules of the game. To take 84 Repressive Tolerance a most controversial case: the exercise of politi- cal rights (such as voting, letter-writing to the press, to Senators, etc., protest-demonstrations with a priori renunciation of counterviolence) in a society of total administration serves to strengthen this administration by testifying to the existence of democratic liberties which, in reality, have changed their content and lost their effectiveness. In such a case, freedom (of opinion, of assembly, of speech) becomes an in- strument for absolving servitude. And yet (and only here the dialectical proposition shows its full intent) the existence and practice of these liberties remain a precondition for the restoration of their original oppositional function, provided that the effort to transcend their (often self-im- posed) limitations is intensified. Generally, the function and value of tolerance depend on the equality prevalent in the society in which toler- ance is practiced. Tolerance itself stands subject to overriding criteria: its range and its limits can- not be defined in terms of the respective society. In other words, tolerance is an end in itself only when it is truly universal, practiced by the rulers as well as by the ruled, by the lords as well as by the peasants, by the sheriffs as well as by their victims. And such universal tolerance is possible only when no real or alleged enemy requires in the national interest the education and training of people in military violence and destruction. As long as these conditions do not prevail, the con- ditions of tolerance are "loaded": they are deter- mined and defined by the institutionalized in- equality (which is certainly compatible with Herbert Marcuse 85 constitutional equality), i.e., by the class struc- ture of society. In such a society, tolerance is de facto limited on the dual ground of legalized violence or suppression (police, armed forces, guards of all sorts) and of the privileged position held by the predominant interests and their "con- nections." These background limitations of tolerance are normally prior to the explicit and judicial limi- tations as defined by the courts, custom, govern- ments, etc. (for example, "clear and present danger," threat to national security, heresy). Within the framework of such a social structure, tolerance can be safely practiced and proclaimed. It is of two kinds: (1) the passive toleration of entrenched and established attitudes and ideas even if their damaging effect on man and nature is evident; and (2) the active, official tolerance granted to the Right as well as to the Left, to movements of aggression as well as to movements of peace, to the party of hate as well as to that of humanity. I call this non-partisan tolerance "ab- stract" or "pure" inasmuch as it refrains from taking sides—but in doing so it actually protects the already established machinery of discrimina- tion. The tolerance which enlarged the range and content of freedom was always partisan—intol- erant toward the protagonists of the repressive status quo. The issue was only the degree and extent of intolerance. In the firmly established liberal society of England and the United States, freedom of speech and assembly was granted even to the radical enemies of society, provided 86 Repressive Tolerance they did not make the transition from word to deed, from speech to action. Relying on the effective background limita- tions imposed by its class structure, the society seemed to practice general tolerance. But liber- alist theory had already placed an important con- dition on tolerance: it was "to apply only to human beings in the maturity of their faculties." John Stuart Mill does not only speak of children and minors; he elaborates: "Liberty, as a princi- ple, has no application to any state of things anterior to the time when mankind have become capable of being improved by free and equal discussion." Anterior to that time, men may still be barbarians, and "despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provided the end be their improvement, and the means justified by actually effecting that end." Mill's often-quoted words have a less familiar implication on which their meaning depends: the internal connection between liberty and truth. There is a sense in which truth is the end of liberty, and liberty must be defined and con- fined by truth. Now in what sense can liberty be for the sake of truth? Liberty is self-deter- mination, autonomy—this is almost a tautology, but a tautology which results from a whole series of synthetic judgments. It stipulates the ability to determine one's own life: to be able to deter- mine what to do and what not to do, what to suffer and what not. But the subject of this au- tonomy is never the contingent, private individ- ual as that which he actually is or happens to be; Herbert Marcuse 87 it is rather the individual as a human being who is capable of being free with the others. And the problem of making possible such a harmony be- tween every individual liberty and the other is not that of finding a compromise between com- petitors, or between freedom and law, between general and individual interest, common and pri- vate welfare in an established society, but of creating the society in which man is no longer enslaved by institutions which vitiate self-deter- mination from the beginning. In other words, freedom is still to be created even for the freest of the existing societies. And the direction in which it must be sought, and the institutional and cultural changes which may help to attain the goal are, at least in developed civilization, comprehensible, that is to say, they can be iden- tified and projected, on the basis of experience, by human reason. In the interplay of theory and practice, true and false solutions become distinguishable— never with the evidence of necessity, never as