Courting the Abyss

Introduction: Hard-Hearted Liberalism
The Intellectual Options Today
Liberals, Civil Libertarians, and Liberalism
The Free Speech Story
Self-Abstraction and Stoicism
The Method of Perversity
Chapter 1. Saint Paul's Shudder
The Puzzle of Paul
The Case of Meat at Corinth
The Privilege of the Other
In Praise of Impersonality
Hosting Dangerous Discourse
Stoic, Rhetorician, Jew
Chapter 2. "Evil Be Thou My Good": Milton and Abyss-Redemption
Areopagitica, a Misplaced Classic
Provoking Objects
Scouting into the Regions of Sin
Dramatis Personae
The Morality of Transgression
Chapter 3. Publicity and Pain
The Public Realm as Sublimation
Locke's Project of Self-Discipline
Adam Smith and the Fortunate Impossibility of Sympathy
Mill and the Historical Recession of Pain
Stoic Ear, Romantic Voice
Publicity and Pain
Chapter 4. Homeopathic Machismo in Free Speech Theory
The Traumatophilic First Amendment
Holmes and Hardness
Brandeis and Noxious Doctrine
Skokie Subjectivity
Hardball Public Space and the Suspended Soul
Impersonality, or Openness to Strangeness
Chapter 5. Social Science as Public Communication
Positivism as Civic Discipline
The Arts of Chaste Discourse
Democracy and Numbers
Objectivity and Self-Mortification
Medical Composure
Ways to Rehearse Death
Chapter 6. "Watch, Therefore": Suffering and the Informed Citizen
Catharsis
Compassion
Courage
Pity and Its Critics
News and the Everlasting Now
Chapter 7. "Meekness as a Dangerous Activity": Witnessing as Participation
Witnessing with the Body
Witnessing from Captivity
Persons as Objects
Martin Luther King's Principled Passivity
Transcendental Buffoonery
Democracy and Imperfection
Conclusion: Responsibility to Things That Are Not
The Sustainability of Free Expression
The Wages of Stoicism
Afterword
Acknowledgments
Index