Further Reading: Chapter 6

Essential Texts

Lippmann, Walter. Public Opinion. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1922. (Public domain; freely available online.) The founding text of the debate about democracy and information. Part I ("Introduction") and Part VIII ("Organized Intelligence") are most relevant to this chapter. Read before or alongside Dewey's response.

Dewey, John. The Public and Its Problems. New York: Henry Holt, 1927. (Public domain.) Dewey's direct response to Lippmann. Chapter 5 ("Search for the Great Community") contains his most affirmative statement of the democratic ideal and what conditions it requires.

Habermas, Jürgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Trans. Thomas Burger. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989. (Original German: 1962.) Dense but essential. Chapter 2 ("Social Structures of the Public Sphere") and Chapter 6 ("The Transformation of the Public Sphere's Political Function") are most relevant. Students who find the full text challenging may begin with the essay "Further Reflections on the Public Sphere," in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (MIT Press, 1992).

On Free Speech and Propaganda

Mill, John Stuart. On Liberty. London: John W. Parker and Son, 1859. (Public domain.) Chapter 2 ("Of the Liberty of Thought and Discussion") contains the classic "marketplace of ideas" argument.

Fish, Stanley. There's No Such Thing as Free Speech: And It's a Good Thing, Too. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. Fish's argument that free speech is always "speech plus" — regulated by context and institutional norms — is a useful challenge to absolutist free speech positions.

Sunstein, Cass R. #Republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017. Sunstein's argument that online "echo chambers" and "information cocoons" threaten democratic deliberation, and his prescription for what platform design could do to support more robust public discourse.

On Democratic Erosion

Levitsky, Steven, and Lucan Way. How Democracies Die. New York: Crown, 2018. Levitsky and Ziblatt (not Way in this volume) analyze patterns of democratic erosion, including media capture. Accessible and widely read.

Guriev, Sergei, and Daniel Treisman. "The New Autocrats." Foreign Affairs 98, no. 3 (2019): 112–123. Argues that contemporary authoritarian consolidation relies less on brute force than on information manipulation — a "spin dictatorship" model. Directly relevant to the propaganda-democracy relationship.

On Wartime Speech Restrictions

Stone, Geoffrey R. Perilous Times: Free Speech in Wartime from the Sedition Act of 1798 to the War on Terrorism. New York: Norton, 2004. The most comprehensive historical account of U.S. wartime speech restrictions and their civil liberties consequences.

Kennedy, David M. Over Here: The First World War and American Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980. The social history of the WWI home front, including the American Protective League, loyalty committees, and the suppression of German-American culture and dissent.

Contemporary Platform Governance

Zittrain, Jonathan. The Future of the Internet — And How to Stop It. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008. Prescient analysis of how the architecture of internet platforms enables and constrains speech. Still relevant for understanding the structural dimensions of the platform governance debate.

Klonick, Kate. "The New Governors: The People, Rules, and Processes Governing Online Speech." Harvard Law Review 131 (2018): 1598–1670. A detailed account of how social media companies actually make content moderation decisions — the people, processes, and institutional structures behind platform governance.