Books like The Harm in Hate Speech — picked by fans

I am Nadine Strossen’s Number One fan. What an amazing career–daughter of a Holocaust survivor, directly targeted by Nazi hate speech, yet today Professor Strossen stands out as America’s most prominent advocate of free speech.

Having served as President of the American Civil Liberties Union for an impressive term of more than fifteen years, Strossen used this book to outline in a concise yet fact-filled way the reasons why hateful attitudes are damaging, yet legal punishments on individual speakers would be even more damaging. 

I will never forget Professor Kennedy’s welcome speech during my first week at Harvard Law School, trembling in my boots that admitting me must have been some sort of administrative error. Kennedy’s penetrating wit showed me what we need to know if we want to think effectively about complex social controversies.

That impression was powerfully confirmed when I read his outstanding book about racist speech. Tracing back through his own childhood steeped in racial discrimination, Kennedy explains the problems we cause when we allow people to voice racist ideas and the problems we cause when we try to censor them. 

I disagree with the authors’ conclusions, but I agree with their diagnosis. This book is aimed at students yet written in a style that anyone can grasp. The authors defy the old “Sticks and Stones” dictum, explaining how even seemingly mild racism feeds into deeper patterns that undermine our ability to relate to each other as citizens of a single democratic society.

Although I agree with stricter controls on internet platforms, I disagree with the authors’ proposals for punishing individual speakers. Whether you accept or reject their proposals, their account of how racist attitudes spread is passionate and compelling.

I found this book to be one of the best introductions to the endless dilemmas surrounding free speech. In the first half of the twentieth century, anxieties about free speech in the United States were triggered mostly on the left, with government attempts to stifle socialists and communists culminating in Senator Joseph McCarthy’s witch hunts, damaging and even destroying thousands of lives and careers.

Philippa Strum shows how, after the 1950s, this completely changed. The government’s increasing focus on far-right speech became an issue of burning importance when residents of a small Illinois town, home to Holocaust survivors, tried to block a Nazi march–and the courts said “No” in the name of free speech.

Freedom of speech means many things to many people, but often the advocates of free speech have not thought very clearly or deeply about the purposes for protecting speech and the reasons for the American free speech system.

Of all of the books on free speech theory that I have read, I appreciate Fred Schauer’s book the most. It is truly a classic about the philosophical foundations of freedom of speech. Do not be intimidated by the idea of free speech theory: Schauer’s book can be understood by any serious nonfiction reader, and I highly recommend it for its powerful reasoning and beautiful prose.  

This is the most obvious book on this list. If you do read one book about climate change, make it this one.

It’s mainly not about climate change at all, but about the difficult balance between protecting people and freedom of expression. If we want a society that makes life better for all, and I do want that, we need to get this balance right.

It’s hard, as Nelson shows, but also incredibly exciting to identify freedom, in art, in sex, in drugs and in climate. This list isn’t an accident. 

This book helped crystallize something I’ve long suspected: that democracy’s strength—its openness—is also its greatest vulnerability. Gershberg and Illing don’t just chart the rise of populist rhetoric or disinformation; they go deeper, showing how the evolution of media itself has upended the cultural foundations of democratic life.

Their argument that “media ecology is the master political science” felt especially resonant. It’s not just what we know—it’s how we come to know it, and how that process can be gamed. If you want to understand why democratic institutions feel so unstable today, this is one of the sharpest diagnoses I’ve read.

Unscrupulous leaders often stir up mob violence in service to their own ambitions, taking offense at slights that they could choose to shrug off. George charges such groups as the Bharatiya Janata Party in India, the Front Pembela Islam in Indonesia, and ACT! for America in the United States with pursuing power, money, and attention by shrieking that a blasphemous cartoon, a multicultural textbook, or a new house of worship threatens the dominant religion. “Explosions of righteous indignation and incitement are more than the hysteria of mad mullahs and enraged mobs,” argues George. He reminds us to look past the young men throwing rocks and find the movement leaders who stand to gain.

This is a classic. The book provides an early assessment of the impact of new communications tools on freedom of expression. Pool observed how electronic networks were emerging and transforming the nature of print, arguing that we need to learn how to live with technology and make the most of it. Electronic technologies, Pool envisaged, will become the dominant mode of communication. Pool further envisaged that electronic technology would allow a great degree of diversity, more knowledge, easier access, and freer speech. He provided a lucid and perceptive analysis of the relation of American law to technology and its regulation. Pool was concerned with the negative consequences of new technology and feared its excessive regulation. It is not computers but policy that threatens freedom, he warned. This seminal work encapsulates many of the questions we face today. The challenges Pool described came to life as the pressures on government to… show more.

Although Stanley Fish is recognized as a major scholar in English studies, I was intrigued by his controversial and searing criticism of the American culture at large. I loved his witty and easily understandable attacks on everything from multiculturalism, affirmative action, and hate speech to legal reform–and on all sides of these social and political debates.

It was fascinating to see Fish turn from his assault on conservative claims to traditional values to demolish the intellectual left’s commitments to equality and non-discrimination.