9781422282779

CHAPTER ONE: FREEDOM OF SPEECH

of the age to press for further reforms. This led to greater individual freedoms and more representative processes in governments. Prominent among such reform- minded thinkers were the Englishman John Locke (1632–1704) and the Frenchman François-Marie Arouet (1694–1778), more commonly known as Voltaire. Through works such as An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689), Locke stressed the need to make the British political system more democratic. Similarly, Voltaire advocated political reform in France and Western Europe, often through fictional works critical of existing societal norms, such as Plato’s Dream (1756) and Candide (1759). Locke, Voltaire, and others helped build the foundation for democracy in France and Great Britain. Their ideas also helped inspire Britain’s rebellious North American colonies, which fought a successful war for independence that resulted in the establishment of the United States. To understand the power and innate fairness of free speech, one need only consider the history of one of the contemporary world’s most prominent democracies—the United States. The American colonies that formed the basis for the United States used the power of expression to launch a bid for freedom from British rule by promulgating the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. After winning the American Revolutionary War in 1783, the leaders of the colonies engaged in open debate over the founding principles of the United States through the publication of a series of Federalist Papers and Anti-Federalist Papers. The debate focused on the appropriate levels of federal and state power specified in the Constitution. Those works were published between 1787 and 1788, and the Constitution of 1789 reflected a balance between the views of Federalists such as John Adams and Alexander Hamilton (1755–1804), on the one hand, and Anti-Federalists like Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, on the other. THE POWER OF EXPRESSION

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