Free Speech and Neoliberalism

"Combining a historical and theoretical approach, this original study makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the linkage between free speech and neoliberalism. This timely and powerfully insightful book is a major work that is relevant across disciplines."



– Jakob Lothe, Professor of English, University of Oslo, Norway



"Free speech is never free. It always comes at a cost, and someone always has to pay. In our late neoliberal era, that someone is usually us. Against the censorial imagination, for Grønstad there is hope in art and culture. For him, they offer profound ethical, epistemological, and political potentialities. More than this, isegoria offers an antidote to our waning faith of higher education's commitment to critical thinking, judiciousness, and education; and perhaps even to the demise of democracy itself! We can only hope…"



– Marquard Smith, Academic Director, AHRC's London Arts & Humanities Doctoral Training Partnership, UCL, London, UK



In this book, Asbjørn Skarsvåg Grønstad challenges us to reconceptualize the notion of free speech. Focusing on the domains of cultural production, aesthetics, and education, Grønstad contends that neoliberalism currently poses the greatest threat to our freedom of expression.



Crucially, the book argues that freedom of speech should no longer be considered merely as parrhesia–understood as the license to offend–but also as isegoria, the equal right to speak. The latter denotes the original meaning of free speech, Grønstad posits, and should be restored as the conceptual ambit of the term, despite being largely overlooked after Greek Antiquity.



Grønstad examines a variety of texts across formats including Fahrenheit 451, Alphaville (1965), Severance, the performance art of Jingyi Wang, and the films of Yorgos Lanthimos to conduct a multi-faceted engagement with cultural works and discourses spanning both genre and historical period that grapple with issues of free speech, censorship, and neoliberal politics. Ultimately, these analyses highlight how art and aesthetics represent a particular case of isegoria, and more broadly, how neoliberal rationality operates to delimit the space of the sayable and the expressible.