Self-censorship for democrats
| Published date | 01 July 2018 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1474885115587480 |
| Author | Matthew Festenstein |
| Date | 01 July 2018 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
European Journal of Political Theory
2018, Vol. 17(3) 324–342
!The Author(s) 2015
Reprints and permissions:
sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/1474885115587480
journals.sagepub.com/home/ept
EJPT
Article
Self-censorship for
democrats
Matthew Festenstein
University of York, UK
Abstract
On the face of it, self-censorship is profoundly subversive of democracy, particularly in
its talk-centric forms, and undermines the culture of openness and publicity on which it
relies. This paper has two purposes. The first is to develop a conception of self-censor-
ship that allows us to capture what is distinctive about the concept from a political
perspective and which allows us to understand the democratic anxiety about self-
censorship: if it is not obvious that biting our tongues is always wrong, we need a
fuller account of the moral sensibility that finds it so troubling and this is elaborated
here. The second is to develop an argument to the effect that this sensibility should not
have the last, or only, word, but instead that self-censorship should be viewed as an
‘ordinary vice’ of democratic societies. The grounds for tolerating it rest on the demo-
cratic values that critics believe it threatens.
Keywords
Self-censorship, free speech, realism, democratic theory, power
I. Introduction
1
On the face of it, self-censorship is profoundly subversive of democracy. In current
political discourse, self-censorship is normally a source of anxiety and held up as a
symptom of a climate of fear, of the tyranny of the majority, stifling conformism,
groupthink, McCarthyism, political correctness or some other malign genie of
democratic politics (Robin, 2004). When self-censorship is invoked, it is almost
always to be condemned, along with the cowardice and dishonesty of the self-
censor, as part of an explanation of why some challenging opinion or inconvenient
truth is not more widely discussed.
So, for example, when the historian Tony Judt (cited in Pilkington, 2007)
described the ‘virtual silence’ of the news media in the United States on the
issues raised by John Mearsheimer’s and Steven Walt’s (2006) article on the
‘Israel lobby’, he reached for the language of self-censorship: ‘[w]e know from
Corresponding author:
Matthew Festenstein, Department of Politics, University of York, Heslington, York YO10 5DD, UK.
Email: Matthew.festenstein@york.ac.uk
De Tocqueville this country is driven by conformity. The law can’t make people
speak out – it can only prevent people from stopping free speech. What’s happened
is not censorship, but self-censorship’. As George Orwell acidly put it, ‘circus dogs
jump when the trainer cracks his whip but the really well-trained dog is the one that
turns his somersault when there is no whip’.
2
The uproar generated by the notori-
ous cartoons first published by the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten in 2006
sparked subsequent widespread fulminations over press self-censorship. It will be
recalled that these cartoons depicted Muhammad in bomb-shaped headgear, wield-
ing a cutlass, and saying that paradise was running short of virgins for suicide-
bombers. In their coverage of the controversy stirred up by these cartoons, many
newspapers decided that it would be irresponsible to reproduce them, and in due
course Yale University Press opted not to publish a book containing the pictures.
To free-speech campaigners, ‘all this was seen as further evidence of self-censorship
amid increasing fears of upsetting sensibilities of some Muslims’ (The Economist,
2009 and see Laegaard, 2007). When the ‘Charia Hebdo’ cartoons were published
by the provocative French periodical Charlie Hebdo, the French journalist Nicolas
Demorand (2012) warned that cartoonists shouldn’t be confused with foreign office
diplomats: ‘les exhorter a
`prendre en compte le contexte ge
´opolitique comme s’ils
e
´taient porte-parole du Quai d’Orsay, c’est mettre le doigt dans un engrenage dont
le premier cran est l’autocensure et le dernier la capitulation’. The murder of the
magazine’s staff in 2015 unleashed a torrent of understandable calls to resist the
temptation to self-censor, from a spectrum of sources, some vocally incensed by a
now notorious injunction on the part of the Financial Times for ‘common sense’
(Barber, 2015).
From this perspective, self-censorship undermines an important and vulnerable
condition of democratic societies: even in a democracy with well-developed liberal
protections from political domination, including freedoms of speech, ‘a central
precondition for avoiding such domination is the existence of the public sphere,
a space for the exercise of shared communicative freedoms’ (Bohman, 2010: 434).
Self-censorship seems to pollute this space, constraining citizens’ ability to speak to
each other, to speak truth to power and freely to express themselves. What gives
rise to it are unacceptable and degrading relationships of power or influence.
However, precisely what it is that is being condemned by the public rhetoric
against self-censorship is not obvious. Free speech includes the option not to speak,
if one wishes, and if the censorship really is censorship by and for oneself, more
needs to be said about why this constitutes a problem. Most social and political
discourse does not enjoy the license of automatic writing or the psychoanalyst’s
couch, and to lack the capacity to monitor and restrain the expression of beliefs
and expressive attitudes is unfortunate. And we do not always condemn the exer-
cise of this capacity: in social and political life, it is sensible to accommodate others,
as a matter of prudence or respect. We bite our tongues, we do not say what we
really mean or what we would say among friends; as the metaphor or analogy has
it, we censor ourselves. The discursive turn in democratic theory emphasises not
only the importance of self-expression but also the value of mutual respect and
mutual accommodation, which may require curtailing the expression of opinions.
Festenstein 325
To continue reading
Request your trial