Waldron, Machiavelli, and Hate Speech
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Description
I am not particularly knowledgeable about the subject of hate speech. I am not a philosopher at all. Yet Peter Molnar has pursued me persistently to contribute to this project. I could not understand why he kept calling me up and sending me emails telling me I should speak on a subject I know nothing about. I finally realized that the answer had to be that I once bumped into him at Washington Square Park and we had a conversation about hate speech. That conversation took us back to the mid-1990s, when I heard Ronald Dworkin lecture in Budapest. Dworkin was speaking, of course, a few hundred miles away from the Balkan tragedy, where hundreds of thousands of people were killed on the basis of violent hate ideologies, and on a continent in which a hundred million people were killed in that century on the basis of violent hate ideologies. My recollection is that he argued for total freedom to express hatred of other people, without considering this context. It does not take Sigmund Freud to understand that, if you have two continents, in one of which one hundred million people were killed on the basis of highly violent hate ideologies, accompanied and propelled by extreme hate speech, and in the other of which, at least by comparison, basically nothing happened, you will get different judicial traditions. This is not a legal point; it simply reflects the fact that what drives people most in their judgments is their own experience—or, to be precise, their remembered experience. When you forget about the Great Depression, then you say, “Well, government doesn’t need to regulate the banks anymore.” When you forget about the Vietnam War, you can say, “We should go over to Iraq.” So, what you remember—your experience—is far more consequential than norms or philosophies.
Source Publication
The Content and Context of Hate Speech: Rethinking Regulation and Responses
Source Editors/Authors
Michael Herz, Peter Molnar
Publication Date
2012
Recommended Citation
Holmes, Stephen, "Waldron, Machiavelli, and Hate Speech" (2012). Faculty Chapters. 795.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/795
