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Free Speech, Rhetoric, and a Free Economy
Published by Routledge
Originally published in Making Economics Public
Free Speech Supports a Free Economy and Vice Versa
Adam Smith the ur-liberal declared in 1762–1763 in his Lectures on Jurisprudence,
The offering of a shilling, which to us appears to have so plain and simple a meaning, is in reality offering an argument to persuade someone to do so and so as it is for his interest. ... And in this manner everyone is practicing oratory on others through the whole of his life.
(Smith 1978, 1982 [1762–1763, 1766]. Report of 1762-3 vi. 56, p. 352)
Yes. The market is a form of persuasion, sweet talk. The practice of oratory, persuasion, and the changing of minds by speech accounts in a modern economy such as that of the U.S. for fully a quarter of labor income (Klamer and McCloskey 1995). The liberal theory of speech, therefore, strongly parallels the liberal theory of the market.
Rhetoric and liberty are doubly linked. For one thing, any defense of liberty will make use of rhetoric, “rhetoric” understood as “speaking with persuasive intent instead of using physical violence.” For another, the free market in ideas is a rhetorical idea at the heart of free societies. The evidence for the second proposition—that liberty is rhetorical, a matter of sweet talk, is not so persuasive as that defenses of liberty are themselves rhetorical. If true, however, the proposition that liberty is rhetorical is more important. The growth of knowledge may justify a constitution of liberty, as the economist and philosopher Friedrich Hayek believed, but rhetoric gives persuasive tongue to both liberty and knowledge. Free speech is more than merely parallel to free exchange. A liberal society is the one that gets its rhetoric straight
