What is Free Speech? The History of a Dangerous Idea

$29.95 at de Young Museum.

A leading intellectual historian shows how free speech, once viewed as both hazardous and unnatural, was reinvented as an unalloyed good, with enormous consequences for our society today. Rejecting platitudes about the First Amendment and its international equivalents and leaving no ideological position undisturbed, What Is Free Speech? is the unsettling history of an ideal as cherished as it is misunderstood. Hardcover, 480 pages.