What’s Wrong with the "Marketplace of Ideas"?Lisa Herzog

11 February 2021

Lisa Herzog (University of Groningen), 17:15 - 18:45 CET, presents her project in the Interdisciplinary Research Seminar of the GRK "Collective Decision-Making”.

This seminar will take place as a Zoom meeting. Please see (if you haven’t already) https://www.wiso.uni-hamburg.de/en/forschung/verbundprojekte/rtg-collective-decision-making/events/register-for-irs-talk.html if you want to register for the seminar. We invite everyone interested to attend!

Abstract

Metaphors from the past can have a long-lasting influence on current political thought and political practice. In this talk, I discuss the example of the “marketplace of ideas”, which has been very influential in US jurisprudences and continues to be evoked in current contexts, e.g., in debates about the regulation of the internet. But as a metaphor, it does not quite work – exchanges of ideas are different from exchanges of goods and services. And in fact, when Milton wrote that we should let “truth and falsehood grapple,” he had in mind more a battle than a marketplace. But a “battle of ideas” requires individuals, as the bearers of ideas, to behave in certain ways, making sports competitions a more appropriate metaphor. Instead of being captivated by any of these metaphors, we need to acknowledge that the fields in which ideas are exchanged differ, with regard to individuals’ motivation, the appropriateness of regulation, and the temporal dynamics. The debate about speech and its regulation needs to focus on clarifying the delineations between these fields, and the rules and norms that are appropriate within and between them.