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THIS ARTICLE BRIEFLY DESCRIBES THE DOZEN TOP-SELLING CONSERVATIVE BOOKS IN THE PAST FIFTY YEARS. THESE INCLUDE: THE ROAD TO SERFDOM (1944) BY FRIEDRICH HAYEK GOD AND MAN AT YALE (1951) BY WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY, JR. WITNESS (1952) BY WHITTAKER CHAMBERS THE CONSERVATIVE MIND (1953) BY RUSSELL KIRK ATLAS SHRUGGED (1957) BY AYN RAND CONSCIENCE OF A CONSERVATIVE (1960) BY BARRY GOLDWATER A CHOICE, NOT AN ECHO (1964) BY PHYLLIS SCHLAFLY THE UNHEAVENLY CITY (1970) BY EDWARD C. BANFIELD A TIME FOR TRUTH (1978) BY WILLIAM E. SIMON FREE TO CHOOSE (1979) BY MILTON FRIEDMAN WEALTH AND POVERTY (1981) BY GEORGE GILDER A CHRISTIAN MANIFESTO (1981) BY FRANCIS AUGUST SCHAEFFER

It was just one line, nearly a throwaway; technically a subordinate clause. Yet that one clause from Oliver Wendell Holmes's Abrams dissent breathed life into a metaphor, the "marketplace of ideas," whose lasting power is undeniable. Nor is it difficult to understand why. Yes, it may be incomplete, inaccurate, and possibly cribbed from John Stuart Mill, but the metaphor matches something we all see. Ideas and ideological programs are out there looking for adherents or "buyers." In Holmes's time, progressives, socialists, and fascists courted supporters, just as similar groups do now. Specific ideas like the flat tax or the legalization of marijuana seek their own buyers and usually go nowhere but may suddenly catch on, just as in the world of real products. I leave it to others to criticize the metaphor. What I want to suggest here is that it isn't taken seriously enough. Despite all the talk, the First Amendment offers incomplete protection for the marketplace of ideas. If we were halfway serious about the premise that the marketplace of ideas needs protection by courts, we'd be interested in all the ways that government or private parties can distort or block competition. But the First Amendment has no interest in most such distortions – especially those created by disinformation campaigns, which have rapidly become the speech control technique of choice in the early 21st century.

In the Panel Discussion on The Marketplace Of Ideas In Cyberspace at the 1999-2000 Oliver Wendell Holmes Symposium And Lectureship At Mercer University, Professor Margaret Chon discusses censorship and hate speech on the internet. Professor Chon questions the exporting of our First Amendment jurisprudence in this particular area, since we are the only democratic country to speak of, that protects what we've been referring to as hate speech.

"The marketplace of ideas" is frequently invoked in debates concerning the merits of free, unrestricted speech; as social and information centres of their communities, libraries are often implicated in these debates. If we suppose that libraries are supporters of civic debate, what does it mean to take the "free market of ideas" as the principle by which the free speech debate is organized? This paper contextualizes the tendency to imagine the public sphere as a free market in ideas within jurisprudence and the neoliberal arts of government, consulting democratic theory to question which frameworks libraries might draw from to reimagine their contribution to the public sphere.

"The marketplace of ideas" is frequently invoked in debates concerning the merits of free, unrestricted speech; as social and information centres of their communities, libraries are often implicated in these debates. If we suppose that libraries are supporters of civic debate, what does it mean to take the "free market of ideas" as the principle by which the free speech debate is organized? This paper contextualizes the tendency to imagine the public sphere as a free market in ideas within jurisprudence and the neoliberal arts of government, consulting democratic theory to question which frameworks libraries might draw from to reimagine their contribution to the public sphere. Keywords: civic space; democracy; free speech; markets; neoliberalism

At least five basic values might be served by a robust free speech principle: (1) individual autonomy; (2) truth seeking; (3) self-government; (4) the checking of abuses of power; (5) the promotion of good character. Free speech might serve one or more of these values by functioning in at least three different ways: (1) as a privileged activity; (2) as a social mechanism; (3) as a cultural force. My contention is that the conventional understanding of the most familiar metaphor in the First Amendment lexicon, the "marketplace of ideas," has had the undesirable effect of focusing attention too much on the truth seeking and self-government values and on the function of free speech as a social mechanism. The detriment in this emphasis is threefold. First, the case for a high level of protection for free speech has been weakened by being made to depend too much on unconvincing claims regarding how the phenomenon of provocative speech followed by countervailing "more speech" produces a satisfactory process of collective deliberation. Second, the identification of the freedom of speech with the ideal of a well-functioning market in ideas has generated distracting and dangerous regulatory proposals that attempt to redistribute communicative power as a means of realizing that ideal. Third, as a result of viewing free speech primarily as a plebiscitary mechanism designed to produce collective understanding and political legitimacy, we have failed to appreciate how it serves as a cultural force that contributes to the control of abuses of power and the promotion of adaptive character traits.