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Free Speech and Neoliberalism

Art, Culture, Education

Free Speech and Neoliberalism cover

Free Speech and Neoliberalism

Art, Culture, Education

Quantity
Pre-order. Available 16 Apr 2026
$129.60 RRP $162.00 Website price saving $32.40 (20%)

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Description

In this book, Asbjørn Grønstad challenges us to reconceptualize the notion of free speech. Focusing on the domains of cultural production, aesthetics, and education, Grønstad argues that neoliberalism currently poses the greatest threat to our freedom of expression.

Crucially, the book argues that freedom of speech should no longer be considered merely as parrhesia - understood as the license to offend - but also as isegoria, the equal right to speak. The latter denotes the original meaning of free speech, Grønstad posits, and should be restored as the conceptual ambit of the term, despite being largely overlooked after Greek Antiquity.

Through a multi-faceted engagement with cultural works and discourses spanning both genre and historical period which grapple with issues of free speech, censorship, and neoliberal politics, this book highlights how art and aesthetics represent a particular case of isegoria, and more broadly, how neoliberal rationality operates to delimit the space of the sayable and the expressible.

Table of Contents

Preface
Acknowledgements

Introduction: From Parrhesia to Isegoria
1. Reclaiming Isegoria
2. The War on Imaginative Speech
3. Art and Justice in the Age of Neoliberalism
4. Neoliberal Epistemology, Censorial Imaginaries: Alphaville and Fahrenheit 451
5. The Dividual Self in Severance
6. Neoliberalism as Burlesque: The Cinema of Yorgos Lanthimos
7. “The Academy in Peril:” Free Speech and the Future of Critical Thinking
Postscript: Requiem for the Arts?

Bibliography
About the Author
Index

Product details

Bloomsbury Academic Test
Published 16 Apr 2026
Format Ebook (Epub & Mobi)
Edition 1st
Extent 256
ISBN 9798765167830
Imprint Bloomsbury Academic
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing

About the contributors

Author

Asbjørn Skarsvåg Grønstad

Asbjørn Skarsvåg Grønstad is Professor in the Depa…

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