Book: The Two Clashing Meanings of “Free Speech”


Reread the second paragraph of the article and summarize the author’s thesis.

Paragraph:

The reason that appeals to the First Amendment cannot decide these campus controversies is
because there is a more fundamental conflict between two, very different concepts of free
speech at stake. The conflict between what the ancient Greeks called isegoria, on the one hand,
and parrhesia, on the other, is as old as democracy itself. Today, both terms are often translated
as "freedom of speech," but their meanings were and are importantly distinct. In ancient Athens, isegoria described the equal right of citizens to participate in public debate in the democratic assemblyft parrhesia, the license to say what one pleased, how and when one
pleased, and to whom.