Free speech is never free. It always comes at a cost, and someone always has to pay. In our late neoliberal era, that someone is usually us. In Free Speech and Neoliberalism: Art, Culture, Education, Asbjørn Skarsvåg Grønstad argues that because of 'the shrinking of the horizon of the sayable within neoliberal culture', there is a pressing need to reconceptualize our notion of freedom of speech. He is right. Against the censorial imagination, for Grønstad there is hope in art and culture, and especially hope in reviving and nurturing the practice of parrhesia (the license to offend as a courageous speaking truth to power) but even more so and necessarily in the principle of isegoria (the equal right to speak). To this end, Grønstad mobilizes Alphaville, Fahrenheit 45I, the performance art of Jingyi Wang, the TV series Severance, and the films of Yorgos Lanthimos as articulations of isegoria. For him, they offer profound ethical, epistemological, and political potentialities. More than this, isegoria offers an antidote to our waning faith of higher education's commitment to critical thinking, judiciousness, and education; and perhaps even to the demise of democracy itself! We can only hope…

Marquard Smith, Academic Director, AHRC's London Arts & Humanities Doctoral Training Partnership, UCL, London

Combining a historical and theoretical approach, this original study makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the linkage between free speech and neoliberalism. Asbjørn Grønstad argues convincingly that freedom of speech can no longer be considered merely as the license to offend but also needs to be understood as 'isegoria, the equal right to speak.' Analyzing important cinematic, literary, theatrical and televisional cases of isegoria, Grønstad shows how, employing a wide range of aesthetic means, these works negotiate and contest pressing issues of censorship and neoliberal politics. This timely and powerfully insightful book is a major work that is relevant across disciplines.

Jakob Lothe, Professor of English, University of Oslo, Norway, and Author of Memory and Narrative Ethics: Holocaust Testimony, Fiction, and Film (2025)