Pow

ersFreedom

of Speech

Bucknell University Presswww.bucknell.edu/universitypress

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The essays in this volume portray the debates concerning freedom of speech in eighteenth-century France and Britain as well as in Austria, Denmark, Russia, and Spain and its American territories. Representing the views of both moderate and radical eighteenth-century thinkers, these essays by eminent scholars discover that twenty-fi rst-century controversies regarding the extent of permissible speech have their origins in the eighteenth century. The economic integration of Europe and its offshoots over the past three centuries into a distinctive cultural product, “the West,” has given rise to a triumphant Enlightenment narrative of universalism and tolerance that masks these divisions and the disparate national contributions to freedom of speech and other liberal rights.

Contributors: Joris van Eijnatten, Javier Fernández Sebastián, Paula Sutter Fichtner, Jonathan I. Israel, John Christian Laursen, Lee Morrissey, Elizabeth Powers, Helena Rosenblatt, Douglas Smith.

Elizabeth Powers was chair of the Columbia University Seminar on Eighteenth-Century European Culture from 2003 to 2010. She is a scholar of German literature and is currently writing a study of Goethe’s concept of world literature.

Cover illustration: Franz Anton Maulbertsch, The Quack (before 1785). Oil on wood. Städtische Kunstsammlungen Museen Augsburg, Inv. Nr. 12083.

Freedom of Speech:The History of an Idea

Edited by Elizabeth Powers

Freedom of Speech

A P E R Ç U S

The History of an Idea