Noncoercive Threats to Academic, Political, and Economic Freedom - by Akeel Bilgrami & Jonathan R Cole

About the Book

This book brings together a distinguished set of scholars to examine covert constraints on academic, political, and economic freedom from a variety of angles, developing surprising and timely new insights.

Book Synopsis

States and institutions in both conventionally authoritarian and formally democratic societies overtly circumscribe freedom in any number of ways. Yet there are also subtler forms by which authorities and cultural forces compromise the choices of individuals in ways that do not seem, at first glance, to be coercive. This book brings together a distinguished set of scholars to examine covert constraints on academic, political, and economic freedom from a variety of angles, developing surprising and timely new insights.

Ranging across philosophy, economics, law, health, science, art, and the media, luminaries from different fields expose threats to freedom within avowedly liberal and democratic institutions and cultures. Their incisive essays, both analytical and historical, emphasize how economic inequality, academic orthodoxy, media control, racism, and gender roles undermine the potential for human flourishing. By considering such multifarious noncoercive threats, they illuminate the vexed notion of freedom. Lively and learned, this book offers a provocative and urgent understanding of the often-unacknowledged forces that restrict our choices.

Contributors include David Bromwich, Eric Foner, Robert Gooding-Williams, Michael Ignatieff, Laura Kipnis, Anya Schiffrin, Joseph E. Stiglitz, and Geoffrey R. Stone. In an essay and an interview with the volume editors, Noam Chomsky addresses the neoliberal assault on academic freedom.

Review Quotes

It is easy to suppose that losses of freedom occur because of interference in the life of the loser. Akeel Bilgrami and Jonathan Cole have recognized that there are many more subtle (and perhaps equally dangerous) ways in which a person's freedom can be diminished. In a lucid introduction, they survey the problems. What then follows is a compendium of varied perspectives on diverse examples from many domains of human life, given by a stellar cast of writers from different fields. In an age when political life is often dominated by glib rhetoric about freedom, these discussions are urgently needed. This volume is a treasure-chest of illuminating surprises.--Philip Kitcher, John Dewey Professor of Philosophy, Emeritus, Columbia University

About the Author

Akeel Bilgrami is Sidney Morgenbesser Professor of Philosophy and a member of the Committee on Global Thought at Columbia University.

Jonathan R. Cole is John Mitchell Mason Professor of the University at Columbia University, where he was provost and dean of faculties from 1989 to 2003.

Bilgrami and Cole are the editors of Who's Afraid of Academic Freedom? (Columbia, 2015).