Luke Sheahan
Suppressing Dissent
Why Freedom of Association and Decentralization Matter for Liberty, Community, Innovation, and Human Flourishing
Alexis de Tocqueville wrote that the tyrant doesn't care if you love him, as long as you don't love one another.
In this episode I speak with Luke Sheahan about his book Why Associations Matter: The case for First Amendment Pluralism. Free associations are essential for political liberty, human flourishing, and for genuine community; but Sheahan argues that recent judicial decisions are increasingly subsuming freedom of association and assembly into speech rights.
Free speech is essential for political liberty, but it’s not sufficient—It works in tandem with the right of association and assembly to strengthen and create venues for free speech.
But the right of association goes beyond that
It derives from our social nature as persons. The right of association is essential for political liberty, because groups can dissent and resist state power more effectively than lone individuals, but it also has other political and social values.
Free association enables authentic community and friendship, which is essential first for human flourishing, and also necessary for innovative scientific discovery, culture, literary and artistic production, and more.
What we are seeing in these judicial rulings is the playing out of deep philosophical debates about the nature of the person, and the false dichotomy between the state and the individual as the only two parts of society.
Rousseau maintains that all individual attachments: family, religion, language, and regional attachments are obstacles to human freedom. But of course this leads to the lone individual, which becomes subsumed into the Leviathan state; and when the individual dissents he must be, as Rousseau put it, forced to be free.
Luke and I discuss a number of things including the philosophy of Pluralism, Tocqueville’s concern that individualism leads to centralization, Robert Nisbet’s work on community, decentralization and the need to revitalize associations, and some of the arguments for free association from Aristotle, Aquinas, Magna Carta, the American founders, and more. We also discuss some of the problems with bad communities, racism, and the limits of association.
Biography
Luke C. Sheahan is assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at Duquesne University and a non-resident scholar in the Program for Research on Religion and Urban Civil Society (PRRUCS) at the University of Pennsylvania.
Resources
Suppressing Dissent: don’t allow individuals to have independent sources of authority outside of official power Diminish friendships
Aristotle Friendship
The Supreme Court of the US subsumed association into speech
Freedom of Association in NCAAP vs. Alabama
John Inazu: Liberty’s Refuge
St. Thomas Aquinas Contra Impugnates (1226) makes an argument for the free right of association
Leo XIII discusses the right of association in Rerum Novarum and uses St. Thomas on the right of free association for his argument for the right of unions and business etc.
On Technology and Decentralization
See Balaji S. Srinivasan: Software is Reorganizing the World & Quantifying Decentralization
More resources and links coming soon.