A Critical Lineage of Intellectual Freedom
Intellectual Freedom, along with “neutrality”, is often presented as a timeless, unchanging value, springing fully-formed like Athena from the head of Zeus from one or another legal or intellectual foundation. In the Anglo-American world, the legal foundation is either the First Amendment of 1791 or the UN Declaration of Human Rights of 1948. Both of these, of course, derive from the legal-philosophical framework of the liberal-bourgeois revolutions of the US and France. In the US case, the intellectual forebears tend to be the formulations of liberal politics of Jefferson and Madison, while what we might call the “commonwealth” version eschews individual names in favour of the more “communitarian” achievement of the UN Declaration. Nonetheless, the names of John Locke and John Stuart Mill often supply the intellectual bonafides while Jurgen Habermas rounds out the intellectual lineage with a frisson of European leftism.
Despite the very concrete political and social events which gave rise to the First Amendment and the UN Declaration, and the very real political interventions Madison, Jefferson, Mill, and Habermas were engaged in, Intellectual Freedom and neutrality in libraries is most often presented as detached from real political movements. As a value, IF and neutrality are - like God - unchanging and immutable. We either uphold them as properly contributing members of an enlightened profession, or we challenge them through our own ignorance, misunderstanding, or anarchist disregard for the liberal order. I have argued in another blog post that we are in fact better off separating IF-as-value from IF-as-concept, because treating it as a concept allows us to engage with its history and its political usage.
Nevertheless, IF and neutrality do have a history. In Humanism and Democratic Criticism (2004), Edward Said argued that the role of humanism was to question and challenge precisely this idea of timelessness or intellectual purity when dealing with any cultural representations. This process of critique is what he did in Orientalism, challenging the idea that Western representations of the east were not pure analyses of the difference between east and west but were thoroughly structured by western rule and domination over colonial subjects. The insistence that particular representations are pure and immune from what he called “power, position, and interests” is an ideological one intended to maintain a particular status quo. To challenge that insistence is, in Said’s view, the essential role of the humanist; it is also an inherently destabilizing act, since it directly challenges the mechanism by which hegemony and social order are maintained.
Intellectual Freedom and neutrality, then, are two representations which are, to use Said’s description,
already and necessarily contaminated by [their] involvement with power, position, and interests, whether it was a victim of them or not. Worldliness - by which I mean at a more precise cultural level that all texts and all representations were in the world and subject to its numerous heterogeneous realities - assured contamination and involvement, since in all cases the history and presence of various other groups and individuals made it impossible for anyone to be free of the conditions of material existence.
In my dissertation looking at intellectual freedom and Canadian politics, I attempt a “worldly” genealogy of intellectual freedom. A blog post is not the right place to go into much detail about this, but in a nutshell I argue that the concept of Intellectual Freedom fluctuates according to the needs of particular periods in capitalism, transitioning especially in moments of crisis.
The concepts of Intellectual Freedom and neutrality does not really exist prior to the 1930s. The public library was invented in 1848-1850 by a Euro-American bourgeoisie victorious after their consolidation of power in the 1848 revolutions (which saw the bourgeoisie harness working-class discontent to their own political purposes; the Communist Manifesto [published 1848] is an expression of this discontent). This period is often eulogized as the height of liberal democratic freedoms, for example by library historian Jesse Shera, a period in which the state is managed by the checks and balances of John Locke’s theory of government, carving out a space of neutral debate, free speech, etc, between political life and private life (how one understands this depends on your interpretation of Habermas’ Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere). Libraries are, on the one hand, conceived as part of this civil society (for white male property owners) while nonetheless inculcating into the poor, the unwashed masses, the values and norms of bourgeois society (hence, for example, the reluctance to include anything but “useful reading” in the libraries of this period). Both the “enlightenment thesis” and the “social control thesis” of public libraries derive from this dualism.
This moment of unbridled democratic self-regard is also the period of the Fugitive Slave Act, which gives an indication of the limits of democratic participation envisaged by white bourgeois gentlemen.
While bourgeois intellectual freedom, free speech, and neutrality (i.e. the government’s orientation towards negative liberty and maximal individual freedom), were key elements in bourgeois civil society, they did not have to be defended, because they were never challenged, since participation in civil society was limited to men (and occasionally women) who believed implicitly in the same set of bourgeois values. It was not until the 1930s, the lead up to the Second World War and a resurgence of working-class militancy, that Intellectual Freedom and neutrality had to be explicitly formalized. The most famous case of this formalization came with the challenging of The Grapes of Wrath in 1939, leading to the creation of the first Library Bill of Rights and then its adoption by the ALA.
Neutrality was a different proposition, as the war - framed as a battle between fascism and the Enlightenment values represented by libraries - caused Librarian of Congress Archibald Macleish to call for a rejection of neutrality in the battle against darkness. Neutrality, therefore, does have its limits, and this speaks volumes about the survival of the concept in librarianship down to the present.
During the period from the 1930s to the 1960s, there was no explicit concept of “Social Responsibility”. Librarianship benefited from the rise of the military-industrial-complex after the war and the turn to positivism in the social sciences, giving the concept of neutrality more heft, and allowing Intellectual Freedom to be recontextualized in terms of objective, positivist, scientific truths rather than deriving from the bourgeois cultures of civil society. The postwar period was marked by a repression of individualism in the name of the solidarity of reconstruction (and exemplified by the “postwar settlement” between labour and capital that led to the long-boom of about 1950-1975). Intellectual activity was a “safe” outlet for individual feelings, and so libraries were called upon once more to underpin and maintain the social order and social peace.
By the mid-1960s, cracks in the postwar settlement had begun to appear (Stuart Hall dates the shift to 1964). Post-colonial movements (e.g. Algeria and Vietnam), the Civil Rights and gay rights movements, second wave feminism, even the hippie movement, rejected the postwar status quo and demanded more acknowledgement (paradoxically) of individualism (e.g. the hippie movement) and of collective rights (e.g. the Civil Rights Movement). This set of social movements provoked the development of the Social Responsibilities Round Table in 1968 (the Office of Intellectual Freedom was created in 1967 out of the same social ferment). The new concept was meant to be a complement to the fundamental social-contract individualism of Intellectual Freedom, a way of recognizing social responsibility without disrupting the comfortable certainty of IF.
The development of Social Responsibility marked a divergence between American and Canadian librarianship. Because of the fundamentalism of individual rights and the First Amendment, IF could not take social responsibility “on board” without being seriously disrupted. So a second - complementary or competing - concept was developed, and it was the tension between these two that marked librarianship in the transition to neoliberalism that was the response to the twin crises of the late 1960s.
In Canada, however, social responsibility is already baked in to the conception of rights (deriving not from the classical-liberal First Amendment, but from the post-war solidarity of the UN Declaration). This is why the Canadian charter has the “reasonable limits” clause, to ensure that a fundamentalism of individual rights is always balanced by collective goals. This is also why it’s so troubling to see American legal concepts (e.g. free speech rather than free expression) creep into Canadian discourses around rights.
The “reasonable limits” clause ought also to place limits on any notion of neutrality in Canadian libraries. To a certain extent, the reasonable limits clause marks a departure from the strict adherence to negative liberty in US constitutionalism, towards a sense of positive liberty (collective good) in Canada. However, the moderated versions of both IF and neutrality in Canada always threaten to be overwhelmed by American fundamentalism - this is, of course, the lot of Canadian cultural specificity more generally.
The discourses of Intellectual Freedom and neutrality support and maintain an individualist social and political ontology predicated on the superiority of white male property-owners. The social order is their social order, and the so-called “Enlightenment thesis” plays an ideological role and in the construction and reproduction of this social order. Taken at face value, the Enlightenment thesis sees IF and neutrality as fundamental enablers of sacrosanct individual rights and freedoms. The “social control” thesis on the other hand sees these same structures as shoring up the power and dominance of patriarchy, settler-colonialism, white-supremacy, and the ruling class. Critique of these things is necessary. As Said remarks, “humanism is a technique of trouble”, but trouble in the name of a more just, more emancipated social order than the one tacitly assumed by the hegemonic notions of Intellectual Freedom and neutrality.