Speech Beyond Toleration: On Carlyle and Moral Controversialism Now

This essay takes a historical approach to a current problem: how to read and respond to the argumentative practices of the moral and political controversialist in a context where it is vividly clear that some of the norms that frame and regulate “free speech” are contested by the controversialist. Thanks to Amanda Anderson and others, we have rich critical vocabularies for describing the complex ethos of modern liberalism and its norms of public argument as they developed across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Controversialism, I suggest, presents a difficult challenge to liberal expectations of free speech. The moral controversialist may be antinormative in the sense that s/he is consciously rule-breaking but not rule-denying; s/he may also be antinormative in a deeper sense, denying the value of norms others consider settled. The impulse in the more aggressively antinormative case is sometimes merely contrarian; it may reflect alternative values; in the most problematic cases it emanates from denial of the existence of norms. By way of probing the relationship between normative and antinormative thinking about free speech, this essay returns to one of the most notorious literary and political controversialists of the nineteenth century. I argue that Thomas Carlyle’s deliberate offences against progressive sentiment in his “Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question” (1849), and John Stuart Mill’s robust response, provide a helpful historical basis from which to consider similar challenges today to normative views of public argument and styles of expression.