Well, this one is nothing if not straightforward. Indeed, it has the virtue of stating plainly that for at least some scholars, advocacy of free speech is really only desirable when the results of such advocacy align with their own deeper political and moral commitments. When they don’t, it’s time to jettison free speech. I’ve noted similar moves by various legal scholars in this piece. But it is salubrious to see the position marked out with such openness and clarity.

The book is Against Free Speech (Rowman & Littlefield) by Anthony Leaker.

This book examines the renewed and vociferous defence of free speech witnessed in relation to a number of recent events, including the Charlie Hebdo massacre, the Brexit and Trump campaigns, and recent campus politics. Anthony Leaker argues that the defence of free speech has played a pivotal role in a resurgent right-wing nationalism, that it is the rallying point for a wider set of reactionary political demands, a form of aggrieved liberalism at best and patriarchal white supremacy at worst, aided by a complicit liberal centre. By focusing on these events and situating them within the wider geopolitical context of a post-democratic, post-truth world of austerity, ongoing conflict in the Middle East, pasokification, and rising fascism, Leaker critiques the role that the defence of free speech has played in legitimising the scapegoating of oppressed minorities while deflecting attention from the egregious operations of power that have led to ever greater inequality, injustice and capitalist destruction. This powerful book shows that free speech is in fact a myth, an ideological tool employed by those in power to sustain existing power relations.

Here’s an interesting new work of sociology on religion and economics, trading on the metaphor of “believing and belonging” made famous by Grace Davie. The book is The Wealth of Religions: The Political Economy of Believing and Belonging (Princeton University Press) by Rachel M. McCleary and Robert J. Barro.

Which countries grow faster economically—those with strong beliefs in heaven and hell or those with weak beliefs in them? Does religious participation matter? Why do some countries experience secularization while others are religiously vibrant? In The Wealth of Religions, Rachel McCleary and Robert Barro draw on their long record of pioneering research to examine these and many other aspects of the economics of religion. Places with firm beliefs in heaven and hell measured relative to the time spent in religious activities tend to be more productive and experience faster growth. Going further, there are two directions of causation: religiosity influences economic performance and economic development affects religiosity. Dimensions of economic development—such as urbanization, education, health, and fertility—matter too, interacting differently with religiosity. State regulation and subsidization of religion also play a role.

The Wealth of Religions addresses the effects of religious beliefs on character traits such as work ethic, thrift, and honesty; the Protestant Reformation and its long-term effects on education and religious competition; Communism’s suppression of and competition with religion; the effects of Islamic laws and regulations on the functioning of markets and, hence, on the long-term development of Muslim countries; why some countries have state religions; analogies between religious groups and terrorist organizations; the violent origins of the Dalai Lama’s brand of Tibetan Buddhism; and the use by the Catholic Church of saint-making as a way to compete against the rise of Protestant Evangelicals.

Timely and incisive, The Wealth of Religions provides fresh insights into the vital interplay between religion, markets, and economic development.

One not infrequently hears talk today of the “weaponization” of rights–particularly the rights of religious freedom and free speech in the Constitution’s First Amendment. Indeed, as I discuss in this paper, that rhetoric has even made its way into some opinions in the Supreme Court’s most recent term. Whether the rhetoric of weaponry is just that, or represents something more, is a major question. Clifford Bob seems to argue in this new book for something like the latter view. The book is Rights as Weapons: Instruments of Conflict, Tools of Power (Princeton University Press).

Rights are usually viewed as defensive concepts representing mankind’s highest aspirations to protect the vulnerable and uplift the downtrodden. But since the Enlightenment, political combatants have also used rights belligerently, to batter despised communities, demolish existing institutions, and smash opposing ideas. Delving into a range of historical and contemporary conflicts from all areas of the globe, Rights as Weapons focuses on the underexamined ways in which the powerful wield rights as aggressive weapons against the weak.

Clifford Bob looks at how political forces use rights as rallying cries: naturalizing novel claims as rights inherent in humanity, absolutizing them as trumps over rival interests or community concerns, universalizing them as transcultural and transhistorical, and depoliticizing them as concepts beyond debate. He shows how powerful proponents employ rights as camouflage to cover ulterior motives, as crowbars to break rival coalitions, as blockades to suppress subordinate groups, as spears to puncture discrete policies, and as dynamite to explode whole societies. And he demonstrates how the targets of rights campaigns repulse such assaults, using their own rights-like weapons: denying the abuses they are accused of, constructing rival rights to protect themselves, portraying themselves as victims rather than violators, and repudiating authoritative decisions against them. This sophisticated framework is applied to a diverse range of examples, including nineteenth-century voting rights movements; the American civil rights movement; nationalist, populist, and religious movements in today’s Europe; and internationalized conflicts related to Palestinian self-determination, animal rights, gay rights, and transgender rights.

Comparing key episodes in the deployment of rights, Rights as Weapons opens new perspectives on an idea that is central to legal and political conflicts.

It is often said that two of the canonical purposes or justifications for a robust free speech legal regime are that free speech facilitates and promotes the search for truth (or Truth, in some formulations), and that free speech is a necessary support for democratic self-governance. Sometimes these justifications can run together in interesting ways–as in Justice Brandeis’s appropriation of Justice Holmes’s truth/marketplace-of-ideas justification to incorporate a civic-democratic function. At other times they are treated as distinct. But these two justifications have long been advanced as part of the standard genealogy of the American commitment to free speech (there is a third justification that concerns speech’s value for individual identity–a very powerful justification today, but that was far less prominent before the mid-twentieth century).

Here is what looks like an extremely interesting new book that argues for the deep and perhaps insoluble tension between these justifications: Democracy and Truth: A Short History (University of Pennsylvania Press) by Sophia Rosenfeld.

“Fake news,” wild conspiracy theories, misleading claims, doctored photos, lies peddled as facts, facts dismissed as lies—citizens of democracies increasingly inhabit a public sphere teeming with competing claims and counterclaims, with no institution or person possessing the authority to settle basic disputes in a definitive way.

The problem may be novel in some of its details—including the role of today’s political leaders, along with broadcast and digital media, in intensifying the epistemic anarchy—but the challenge of determining truth in a democratic world has a backstory. In this lively and illuminating book, historian Sophia Rosenfeld explores a longstanding and largely unspoken tension at the heart of democracy between the supposed wisdom of the crowd and the need for information to be vetted and evaluated by a learned elite made up of trusted experts. What we are witnessing now is the unraveling of the détente between these competing aspects of democratic culture.

In four bracing chapters, Rosenfeld substantiates her claim by tracing the history of the vexed relationship between democracy and truth. She begins with an examination of the period prior to the eighteenth-century Age of Revolutions, where she uncovers the political and epistemological foundations of our democratic world. Subsequent chapters move from the Enlightenment to the rise of both populist and technocratic notions of democracy between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to the troubling trends—including the collapse of social trust—that have led to the rise of our “post-truth” public life. Rosenfeld concludes by offering suggestions for how to defend the idea of truth against the forces that would undermine it.