Review
"This is a timely collection of excellent articles dealing with current threats to free speech. Ever since the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, the Ayn Rand Institute has been a morally and intellectually consistent defender of free speech. There is no 'free speech, but' exception in ARI's approach to this important right. Its position is based on a simple truth: the individual is the most important minority in any society. Thus, for a society to be decent and civilized it has, through the force of reason, to be serious about the protection and cultivation of individual liberty."
--FLEMMING ROSE, former editor of Jyllands-Posten and author of The Tyranny of Silence: How One Cartoon Ignited a Global Debate on the Future of Free Speech
"The Ayn Rand Institute's Director of Legal Studies, Steve Simpson, has put together a powerful set of short essays that, taken together, powerfully demonstrate the ways in which freedom of speech is essential to the survival of our Western civilization as we've come to know, but too often under-appreciate, it. For those who have been asleep or imprisoned in a mind-set of wishful thinking, this collection speaks with burning intensity and powerful logic to the urgent and solemn duty of those of us still awake to re-double our efforts to turn the tide before it is too late.
"Defending Free Speech . . . is short enough to make its dire point without hemming and hawing, but detailed enough to force the reader to take the endangered state of our culture of freedom deadly seriously. Anyone who reads this book and does not immediately devote himself to a renewed and reinvigorated defense of liberty has probably drunk too much post-modern Kool-Aid to deserve the freedoms that our predecessors fought and died for."
--HARVEY SILVERGLATE, civil liberties lawyer, co-author of The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America's Campuses (The Free Press, 1998), and co-founder of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (thefire.org)
"Freedom of speech, the last standing pillar of American freedom, is teetering. Islamic jihadists and American liberals have joined forces to assault this crucially important freedom. Thankfully, we have the Ayn Rand Institute to explain the deeper philosophic meaning of free speech and why it must be defended at all costs. I urge all Americans to read this important book. Your life depends upon it!"
--C. BRADLEY THOMPSON, Executive Director, Clemson Institute for the Study of Capitalism and author of John Adams and the Spirit of Liberty
"Over the last few decades, writers from the Ayn Rand Institute have consistently provided the most incisive analyses of free speech controversies that I have read. These scholars unfailingly cut to the heart of a dispute over offensive speech or campaign spending on political speech, for instance, by exposing contesting sides' deeper, operative premises about the basis of all speech and the conditions of freedom itself. For anyone seeking a grip on our ceaseless battles over free speech and the abiding principles at stake, this collection should be immensely illuminating."
--TARA SMITH, professor of philosophy, University of Texas, Austin and author of Judicial Review in an Objective Legal System
About the Author
Steve Simpson, a former constitutional litigator, is the director of legal studies at the Ayn Rand Institute.
