Book Review: When the State Speaks, What Should It Say? How Democracies Can Protect Expression and Promote Equality, by Corey Brettschneider

• DOI: 10.1177/0090591714535032
• Published date: 01 August 2014
• Date: 01 August 2014
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

Political Theory

2014, Vol. 42(4) 498 –513

© 2014 SAGE Publications

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Book Reviews

Book Reviews

When the State Speaks, What Should It Say? How Democracies Can Protect Expression

and Promote Equality, by Corey Brettschneider. Princeton: Princeton University

Press, 2012

Reviewed by: Frederick Schauer, University of Virginia and Columbia University

DOI: 10.1177/0090591714535032

We do not live in a society of angels. There is ample evidence for this propo-

sition, and it includes the fact that the world is filled with people who will

advance ideas that are wrong, hurtful, and often dangerous. A persistent ques-

tion then arises as to how the state should deal with those ideas and their

expression. One view is that the expression of an idea is, at bottom, an act—a

speech act—and as such should be regulated (or not) according to the same

standards that would be used to determine whether any act should be regu-

lated or not. And another view, embodied in the longstanding freedom of

expression tradition, is that at least some acts of speech, communication,

publication, and the like should be regulated only if the empirical and norma-

tive arguments for their regulation meet a higher threshold of soundness and

support than is otherwise necessary for the regulation of other acts causing

the same or equivalent consequences.

At the same time that questions persist about the existence, scope, and

strength of a free speech principle, other questions loom with regard to the

role of the state, especially the liberal state, in taking positions on disputed

questions about, among other things, conceptions of the good. Should the

liberal state be neutral among competing conceptions of the good, or may it

embody an official conception of the good, one that may be at odds with the

conception held by some or many of its citizens?

These two issues are not unrelated. Under what circumstances may the

liberal state restrict those acts of communication that are inconsistent with the

state’s own conception of the good? And under what circumstances may the

liberal state articulate and embody its own conception of the good even as it

is allowing its citizens to embody and express different ones? And thus, to

bring this abstract discussion down to earth, there are questions about which

535032PTXXXX10.1177/0090591714535032Political TheoryBook Reviews

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