Speech Beyond Toleration: On Carlyle and Moral Controversialism Now

Abstract

Contemporary conflicts over the acceptable limits of free speech in our political and academic spheres heighten the need for a critical account of how norms of public debate should relate to the expressive styles and dispositions that give argument much of its edge and its point. The distinction between "ethos" and "character" that has been the focus of much recent work within critical theory is one helpful way of articulating these interrelated components of argumentative practice: "ethos", Amanda Anderson reminds us in The Way We Argue Now (2006) is largely a matter of "the ambient social conditions and norms that guide practice"; "character" has more to do with "the inculcation-and reflective cultivation-of values in the form of habits, dispositions, styles". 1 The task undertaken by Anderson, more than a decade ago now, was to persuade practitioners of literary criticism and of political theory that their fields of practice possess, and to a considerable extent share, "norms and values", and that their ability to defend their treatment of literature and politics as dimensions of "lived experience" involves lucid articulation of those norms. Not a few respondents to Anderson have worried that the regulative ideal she was looking to reaffirm and refit for purpose risked appearing, as Stefan Collini put it, "discursively thin": admirably attentive to the ethical and affective content of debate, but at the price of admitting sufficient variation and intensity in the critical "mode[s] of argument" recommended. 2 It is a measure of the influence of her work, but also of how far cultures of public argument in America and Britain have altered of late, that literary criticism and political thought today seem less in need of persuasion that they have normative ethical dimensions than of clear differentiation between norms that are indispensable, and may require shoring up in the face of opposition, and norms that are contingent or relatively loose (perhaps flexible) agreements.