Refusing to Listen: Receptive Audiences and the Political Authority of Speech in Hobbes, Locke, and Mill

In the middle of the summer of 2020, a group of journalists, academics, and self-styled thought leaders signed the now-infamous free speech letter in Harper's Magazine. The letter proclaimed a new epidemic: "a new set of moral attitudes and political commitments that tend to weaken our norms of open date and toleration." Such forces of "illiberalism" were constraining the "free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society." To oppose this rising tide of so-called cancel culture, the signatories insisted that all ideas, including bad ideas, deserve "exposure, argument, and persuasion" rather than "trying to silence or wish them away."1 More recently, a number of universities faced condemnation for tolerating displays of antisemitism. Contrary to the earlier claims of Harper's that we need more free speech on campus, think pieces and media personalities condemned anti-genocide protests as the wrong kind of speech. Most people broadly accept that free speech is a democratic value and good for democracy. But those signatories of Harper's letter in the summer of 2020 and the more recent outcry against antisemitism both suggest that campus activists are practicing the value of free speech incorrectly. What is it about the liberal democratic notion of speech that seeks, on the one hand, to encourage a proliferation of some speech while, on the other hand, to limit other speech? What discursive legacy gives the current pejorative heirs of "political correctness"—"cancel culture," "woke," and "DEI"—their political salience in maintaining the boundaries of democratic speech? In looking at the demographics for whom these phrases are most valuable, we can glean an anti-egalitarian tendency in their invocations. To "cancel" does not mean "to silence." Neither recent anti-Trans legislation in the United States nor opposition to queer book displays in public libraries has meaningfully been perceived as attempts to "cancel." Relatedly, anti-Zionist Jews engaged in opposing the foreign policy situation in Gaza are also not legibly targets of "being canceled" when city councils and boards of trustees institutionally pressure them into silence. Instead, "canceling" seems only to occur when speech derived from traditional hierarchies and sources of authority is challenged. Refusing to host anti-abortion Christians is to "silence" them (Bruce 2021). To refuse an audience to trans-exclusionary feminists is to reject "civilized debate."2 It is rejecting both the free market of ideas and "standards of moral judgement" to not hear out "an argument" against "same-sex marriage or transgenderism" (Arkes 2018). Tradition is entitled to free speech; challengers are not. The liberal democratic imaginary of speech lends itself to the preservation of hierarchies even while it theoretically insists on the power of critique. Herein, I want to frame respect for traditional authority as constitutive of the liberal democratic imaginary of free speech. The authority owed to speech can be seen by the way certain thinkers in the liberal canon have theorized the role of the listening audience. In tracing the role of speech and listening through Hobbes and Locke, we glean that speech is the entitled prerogative of the sovereign or of citizens constituting the sovereign; listening is the obedience owed to such persons. Listening is a passive position that is not merely a choice but a necessary function without which the speaker cannot exist. Mill, perhaps the patriarch of free speech, pushes the burden of listening further: it is active listening that all speech, even bad speech, is entitled to. For all three thinkers, speech expressed from a position of power is owed a receptive audience. The refusal to listen is tantamount to a disregard for either the sovereign or society at large. In what follows, I contextualize the politics of free speech in the present moment. I juxtapose the progressive and rightwing rhetoric around free speech before clarifying the crux of the issue: that certain rightwing actors demand institutional respect and legitimization of inegalitarian speech, which requires the presence of an audience to hear it. Refusing to listen is thus an act of disrespect and delegitimization. Such a perception of delegitimization follows from the way Western political theory traditionally conceives of the listener: as passive or effete in contrast to the assertive and authoritative role of the speaker. Excavating the position of the listener in our political discourse is therefore key to understanding the demands behind free speech invocations. Having identified this need, I then reconstruct the relationship between speech and listening in Hobbes, Locke, and Mill. I select these three thinkers because of their prominence in Western political theory as well as for the influence they wield in liberal thinking. Of course, I do not mean to assert that liberalism begins or ends with them. I read each through the figure of the listener, asking how they might imagine that we listen, to whom that we listen, and what kind of political listening they presume broader society practices. I move historically, starting with Hobbes and ending with Mill. I conclude not only with a summary of my central claims but also with a brief constructive claim: that the refusal to listen is a just political strategy in a world where speech intersects with authority. Debates about the value of free speech have raged throughout the past decade. Rightwing actors insist that free speech in the Anglo-American world is under assault. They style themselves defenders of a "free marketplace" of speech against progressive "war" on speech; they insist that conservatism alone preserves something meaningful about speech politics in stark contrast to supposed liberal policies of indoctrination, censorship, and speech discrimination (Gonzalez 2024; Hunter 2024; National Review 2025). As one affiliate of the American Enterprise Institute, a rightwing thinktank, writes: "when the left demands free speech, it wants the government to teach children stuff that parents don't want to be taught to their children; when the right demands free speech, it is asking for the right to express opinions and relay facts that clash with elite thinking" (Carney 2022). Campus politics are a particularly strong focus of rightwing opposition. Nate Hochman (2021–22), writing in the Claremont Review of Books, describes student resistance to rightwing speech on campus as "hyper-moralistic totalitarianism of woke campus orthodoxy." A writer for the rightwing magazine The Federalist similarly describes the rightwing value of free speech as distinct from the "deplatforming, monopoly pressures, and heckler's vetoes" off progressive campus opposition (Sammin 2021). Beneath this hostile rhetoric rests an empirically observable phenomenon: liberal and progressive attitudes toward free speech have shifted since the 1960s. Where progressive egalitarian commitments previously favored minimal free speech restrictions, legal or normative, as a check on political authority, they now favor restrictions on inegalitarian speech (Chong and Levy 2018; Chong et al. 2024). Conservatives, who in the twentieth century favored moral appeals to the public good in order to limit speech, now find themselves embracing a more libertarian ethos—a shift reflected in the way the United States Supreme Court has handled free speech cases over the past few decades (Batchis 2016: 139 and 155; Paris 2025). Progressive actors contest this rightwing framing. They argue that the rightwing appeals to free speech are not meant to defend a market equality between ideas but are hypocritical appeals to institutionally legitimize unpopular conservative ideas. Adam Serwer (2024), writing for the Atlantic, explains that conservatives "believe that right-wing speech should be sacrosanct, and liberal speech officially disfavored." Similarly, Nathan Robinson (2022) writes in Current Affairs that rightwing "rhetoric about free speech" cannot "be taken seriously" because "they believe in rigging freedom so that they get to be free, but if others try to exert the same rights, they are deemed enemies of the state." Beneath this contestation rests a rather benign empirical fact: both progressive and rightwing actors appeal to the rhetoric of free speech to either support or suppress their own political biases. Diana Mutz (2023), criticizing Chong (2018), finds that "Republican and Democratic partisans espoused radically different patterns of tolerance" about speech politics, "with each side more intolerant of groups on the other side." But this mutual intolerance easily lends itself to a "both sides" narrative that obscures a more fundamental, democratic predicament. The out-groups against which both factions define themselves have radically different relationships to democratic equality and inclusiveness. Progressive actors, by and large, desire limits on inegalitarian speech and expression: speech targeted against vulnerable minorities. Rightwing actors find free speech useful at this moment because appealing to it functions as a vehicle to legitimize their inegalitarian speech. By positioning inegalitarian speech in the context of agreement/disagreement within a democratic debate a moral equivalence between a variety of opinions is being constructed, thereby completely disregarding the inherent ethical dimension of the fight against fascism, racism, sexism and other forms of discrimination and related hate speech. The topsy-turvy nature of this discourse is also demonstrated through the way in which 'disagreement' is only an entitlement and exclusive privilege of the dominant group, not of those that contest them. Moreover, such free speech appeals also work performatively to "paralyze" public discourse and "undermine the ability of some subjects to speak" (Rodriguez 2021: 453–453). Such performances are buttressed by rightwing motifs of victimization, whereby the "left" is "canceling" or suppressing their speech unfairly (Fahey et al. 2023: 69). What interests me here is to expand upon the politics constitutive of the claim to "cancel" someone. The verb "cancel" derives from Black twitter during the late Obama years, now "co-opted by conservative commentators" (Fahey et al. 2023: 69). It is part of a broader rhetorical assemblage the rightwing script draws from in its debates about free speech: "coddling, trigger warnings, safe spaces, mobs, cancel culture, illiberal liberalism, Marxism, ideological orthodoxy, and critical race theory" (Vivian 2022). We might add to this list "wokeness," itself another term originating in Black anti-racist activism (Cammaerts 2022: 734). Such terms exist to morally chastise all responses to rightwing speech that refuse to legitimize it. Obviously, a rather wide qualitative difference exists between aggressive counter-protests, college students mobilizing to cancel a talk, and refusing to listen as an audience member to inegalitarian speech. But in the rightwing imagination, this rhetorical assemblage persists to demonize this wide variance, despite its magnitude. Why does such an assemblage persist? And why does it function primarily from a rightwing point of origin? In the traditional liberal imaginary of free speech, to speak is associated with power. As will be shown in the case of Hobbes and Locke, speaking is explicitly correlated with sovereignty, either in the monarch or in full citizens of a political society. In the case of Mill, speaking is not associated with sovereignty, but it emerges from an ontological equality between persons who otherwise exist within existing historical inequalities, which, in practice, end up resembling in form the speech–power relationship with Hobbes and Locke. In all three theorists, listening is an obligation we owe to political authority (Hobbes and Locke) or for the sake of political society (Mill). Rightwing actors invoking "free speech" are not necessarily misinterpreting the value but rather emphasizing the genealogical heritage of speech's constitutive relationship with political authority. For this reason, any response to inegalitarian speech that in some way contests it, even in the simplest form of refusing to listen, is perceived as an assault on political authority. As one legal scholar notes, rightwing actors "mistake actions of freedom from speech with attacks on free speech" (Franks 2022: 868). In Western political theory, the position of the listener frequently correlates with a lack of political authority or with values that diminish its political standing. Listening is perceived as passive, subordinate, effete or feminine, weak, dependent, ignorant, or emphatic—and thus emotive or passionate (Altamirano 2022; Scudder 2020). Listening is therefore the obligation of "those who are ruled" (Altamirano 2022: 429). Conversely, not only is speech associated with expression and authority, but to "not listen to others" is itself a mark of power (Beausoleil 2020; Bickford 2018; Dobson 2014; Scudder 2020). Susan Bickford (2018: 156) notes that the "more powerful groups in society are often, deliberately or unintentionally, the ones who do not listen or who silence others." Readers should not find it surprising, then, that Locke and Hobbes associate political authority with speech and those without authority in political society with listening. But as I will show in Mill, his insistence on the equality between persons in society and their obligation to actively listen to one another for the sake of progress itself legitimizes inegalitarian speech as functionally equal to egalitarian speech. In Mill's scheme, the racist and anti-racist both bear the obligation to actively listen and empathize with one another, despite one position's traditional authority over the other. He thus provides a more robust theory of the listener that contrasts with how it is undervalued in Western political theory but one which nonetheless prohibits marginalized groups and their sympathizers in society from not listening. I am not alone in recognizing that liberal free speech politics are genealogically constituted by inequality. Historically, the freedom of speech emerges out of a "racial liberalism" that only granted such freedom to "elite white men" and not others with "perceived irrationality or sub-human status" (Dragos and Hughson 2024: 639). Darcy Leigh (2022) has expanded upon this claim with a critique of Locke and Mill. Locke's free speech politics are limited to those with God-given reason inside political society, and therefore, "indigenous and enslaved people in England's settler colonies," the "irrational," are excluded (Leigh 2022: 8). Mill's freedom of speech is limited to those in the "maturity of their faculties" and therefore, once again, indigenous people and those in "backward states of society" are excluded (Leigh 2022: 9). Leigh provides a solid foundation for reflecting on the ways racial inequalities constitute and limit the liberal value of free speech. But settler-colonial racial divisions are only one instantiation of political authority. By reconstructing the position of the listener, I show that traditional political hierarchies generally constitute the authority operative behind speech expression. Hobbes provides a theory of the listener that quite explicitly positions them as a passive audience necessary for sovereign speech. Hobbes's approach to language is materialist, having its source in the physical impressions left upon us by the world (Hobbes 1985: 85–87), and naturalistic, dismissive of any metaphysical authority grounding linguistic understanding. He identifies language first and foremost as an invention humankind uses to both signify our internal thoughts and to mark the external world. The "invention of words or speech" is our first fundamental shift away from animality (Hobbes 1985: 98–99; Hungerland and Vick 1973: 460–461). Furthermore, language has the additional benefit of enhancing our consciousness, enabling a kind of reason that allows us to reflect on our trains of thoughts and push the boundaries of the world beyond immediate sensory experiences (Hobbes 1985: 100–102). But herein arises a massive problem that is both epistemic and political: speech is imperfect and risks abuse, and conflict arises from our different understandings (or willful abuse) of words. A sovereign resolves this conflict politically by stabilizing the meaning of public speech that holds us together—the law. The role of the listener in politics, then, is to simply hear the commands of the sovereign. Hobbes identifies the "purpose" of speech as the medium through which humankind "transfers mental discourse" or "train of thoughts" into words by using "marks" or names for objects in the world or "signs" to "signify" what we conceive in our minds to others (Hobbes 1985: 100). Marks and signs together allow us the possibilities of arts and technical possibilities, teaching others, to "make our wills known" to others for "mutual help," and to "please and delight ourselves" with song and poetry (Hobbes 1985: 101–102). The uses of speech also inaugurate abuses of speech: We can register our thoughts incorrectly, use metaphors to deceive others, lie about our intent or will, and cause harm to others (Hobbes 1985: 102). But Hobbes's greatest anxiety about speech is the failure to signify. Speech is an imperfect invention, and people think from the environments in which they are located, which gives rise to the ever-present possibility that we misunderstand words or might use the wrong combination of words. Because no two people share the exact same context words always have subtly different meanings: "for the errours of definitions multiply themselves, according as the reckoning proceeds; and lead men into absurdities, which at last they see, but cannot avoid, without reckoning anew from the beginning; in which lyes the foundation of their errours" (Hobbes 1985: 105; Duncan 2019: 165–166). Not only is the problem of misunderstanding endemic to language, but Hobbes also recognizes that we might view the same object differently, further compounding the problems of language (Hobbes 1985: 109). Philosophers, orators, and rhetoricians are especially responsible for this kind of abuse, and Hobbes explicitly chastises them for introducing confusion into public discourse (Hobbes 1985: 100; Hobbes 1840: 73–74; Steinmetz 2021: 94–95). The social contract and the sovereign resolve this anxiety. Through an act of speech, we all mutually signify our wills to one another to submit to the sovereign and form the social contract. Every man says, "I authorize and give up my right of governing my self, to this man, or to this assembly of men … and authorize all his actions in like manner" (Hobbes 1985: 227). Rather than giving society over to the whims of philosophers, the sovereign has the primary right to teach citizens, and public ministers appointed by the sovereign have a secondary right. With regard to law, the sovereign is exempt from both the law and the author of the law (Hobbes 1985: 312–314). Citizens only have the right to obey. In both teaching and the law, Hobbes attempts to remove conflict from language by making speech a sovereign act that citizens simply hear and obey. Clarity in language thus emerges with stability in politics (Duncan 2019). Where is hearing (or listening) in Hobbes? To some extent, Hobbes treats communication as axiomatic: it is a presumption he does not need to make explicit because he assumes it to be part of the process of speech. Other people are simply always available to listen. Part of this assumption follows from the form of Hobbes's Leviathan: The call to "read thyself" is a call addressed to a would-be sovereign to understand the materiality of human nature so as to best rule over others, the would-be citizen-listeners (Hobbes 1985: 82–83; Parkin 2015). Given that the sovereign is the foundation of law and counsel for the public and that the sovereign emerges only after people collectively agree to submit to him or her, we can assume an audience of citizen-listeners exists. Critics have noted that the relationship between Hobbes's state of nature, his social contract, and communication is messy. It remains an open question how people communicate and listen given the epistemic uncertainty of language before the sovereign exists to provide stability (Dungrey 2008; Flathman 1993; Hampton 1986; Silver 2006: 339; Whelan 1981). Philip Pettit (2009) emphasizes personal rationality to clear away the epistemic uncertainty in this process: The foundation of a common language consists of the active powers of our reasoning process that allow us to sift through the subtle differences in evaluative language in order to arrive at common ideas, further grounded on the fact that we are all fundamentally alike despite diverse circumstances. The turn toward rationality is the best means to reconstruct a theory of listening in Hobbes, insofar as he assumes that we all have similar reasons and can therefore work backward from the speech act to make sense of how we hear. Sound is a physical impression left on the ears by the world, causing sense (Hobbes 1985: 88–89 and 107). In an earlier work, Hobbes (1840: 36) makes clear that he distinguishes between brute sounds (like noise or the voice) and higher sounds (like music or speech): The "delight of hearing" is the intentional use of sound to produce sensations on the body. Part of the effect of pleasure derives from affect or what Hobbes (1840: 36) identifies as "some passions which we otherwise take no notice of." But the rest of it derives from the fact that we have reason, which can raise this audible sense to the level of imagination and train of thoughts by marking them with words (Hobbes 1985: 93–95). We can thus recognize that speech is an intentional use of voice to make an impression upon others. The foundation of communication—leaving aside the problem of a common language—consists of finding the specific marks and grammatical connections that produce the desired effect in others. Hobbes's ontology of listening is thus a unidirectional relationship between speech and the hearer. Speaking is the active role of soliciting an effect in the hearer (Pettit 2009: 60 and 98); hearing is the passive role whereby we have impressions left upon us that cause sensations as well as ideas in our mind. This passivity, however, is what makes speech politically risky for Hobbes—and why we need a sovereign first and foremost dictating to us. Orators and philosophers—as well as democrats or unsavory political others—can use persuasive speech to impress our passions, risking political instability (Abbot 2014: 394; Silver 2006: 332 and 340; Steinmetz 2021: 94–95). A sovereign constrains public discourse precisely so that our passions cannot be manipulated against our political benefit (Corsa 2021: 206; Whelan 1981: 60–63). Ultimately, there are two political problems in Hobbes's ontology of listening. First, speech assumes that listeners are present and are responsive to what is said. Like the public listening to eloquent speeches or parliamentarians swayed by democrats, the figure of the listener is someone given over to the impressions that inflect their passions. Hobbes's solution here is to confine political speech to the sovereign, who alone has the active capacity to speak on contentious topics. The rest of us, as passive listeners, must merely obey: "the mode of political listening expected of the people is really one of fearfulness, based on the one-way path of accountability they owe to the sovereign" (Uhr 2004). A second, deeper problem is the fundamental issues with communication itself. Hobbes suggests, in recognizing that we all use evaluative language differently, that the sensations left by the impressions of sound are not fully within our ability to determine. Listening to someone else is therefore always a politically contentious act because misunderstanding risks the consequence of antagonistic reactions. The sovereign attempts to remedy misunderstanding by both defining terms through law but also by functioning as an ever-present shadow in conversation to constrain the worst outcomes of contentious dispute. What Hobbes leaves us with is the belief that authority and speech must work together to assure the best outcomes in communication, and the role of the listener is to be both present and passively receive speech. Responding to political speech any way other than by obeying is to act on passion rather than reason. Locke's philosophy of language is similar to Hobbes in that he considers speech to be a useful invention primarily intended to reflect private thoughts. Unlike Hobbes, he believes humans are fundamentally social, and thus a common language arises from our inclination to sociality (Locke 1996: 176–178). And yet, Locke still believes that listening is a source of political error. We always risk misunderstanding others because speech signifies interiority (Locke 1996: 178; Peters 1989: 389). We are never fully able to grasp the interiority of others, which means that our common understanding of words is naturally constrained (Guyer 2006). Such constraints make possible linguistic and communicative abuses. And abuses of language further risk enflaming our unreasonable qualities. Speakers are tasked with rationally striving toward clarity and consistency in speech; listeners are simply present, passively hearing or passionately responding. But this presence of listening is bifurcated by "reason." The fully reasonable man listens to and passionately responds to both other citizens and the government. The unreasonable, a much bigger category, exists in a subordinate position meant to constrain their listening to reasonable citizens so as to not be enticed by the "delights" of language. Locke considers the fact of communication axiomatic (Dawson 2003) in that, for him, the words we rely on eventually signify "common sensible ideas" (Locke 1996: 177). Speech is the process of "making known" one's "ideas to the hearer" (Locke 1996: 178). Much of this process relies on working assumptions. Locke recognizes that people use language in common to communicate, so he makes a pragmatic assumption that we exist in a common language. But this recognition betrays the fundamental assumption of his theory of language: that words are private constructions (Sheridan 2010). How then do we get from private language to social communication? We assume that, because men are fundamentally alike and share a cultural context, the words we use can have the same meaning for others, despite there never being a completely shared meaning, given that one's interiority is never perfectly like another's (Locke 1996: 176; Dawson 2003, 2007; Ruthrof 2013). This "risk" in communication becomes the grounds upon which Locke will argue that we all must strive for clarity in language (Losonsky 2007; Nauta 2021; Newton 2017; Soles 1988). Communication is a game of reason and honesty, and the only way to share meaning in a world of imperfect signs is to strive to use signs that affect in our hearers something approximate to what we claim. But such an approach to communication puts the active burden of clarity on the speaker: speaking is the rational activity that must strive toward clarity. Listening seems to be at the whim of the speaker. What then does it mean to listen or hear in a Lockean sense? The hearer "grasps some sort of mental object, distinct from the speaker's words, that the speaker's words express" (Gauker 1992). "Noise" is that which does not (or fails) to signify (Locke 1996: 179). Words are only given power to rise above "noise" if they "excite in the hearer, the same idea which it stands for in the mind of the speaker" (Locke 1996: 205). "Excite" here suggests a kind of invocation or stirring up that is not reducible to mere rational transference. We as speakers strive to produce certain mental effects in others; we invoke or conjure ideas in the hearer. The listener will have some effect regardless of what is meant. Accuracy, however, is dependent on conjuring the right or correct idea. Locke lists a number of reasons for the failure to "excite" an idea in the hearer. One is that the speaker and listener have two different ideas: that the same word in my mind signifies something else in my listener's. Others include the possibility that ideas themselves might be too complex to express; that they bear no resemblance to the world or a problem with the sign itself (Locke 1996: 205–206). What these failures reflect are the natural constraints upon language. As a listener, my context or the way I grew accustomed to language (and thinking) fails to lay the preconditions for the speaker to excite in me what they intend. Locke thus positions the hearer in a passive position because the burden for rational clarity is not the onus of the listener (Gauker 1992). For Locke, I, as a listener, can't strive to understand the interiority of the other because there is no possible access to it outside of what the speaker reveals. I can only receive effects of the sign, which my own rationality negotiates to approximate what the speaker intends or does not intend. The way we might abuse language further reflects Locke's anxiety about the power of the speaker and the passivity of the listener. He criticizes those who are dishonest, willfully manipulate language, or fail to abide by accepted linguistic norms (Locke 1996: 209). These are people who disregard Locke's mandate to strive for clarity. The other kinds of abuse reflect his anxiety about listening. He criticizes religious sectarians and philosophers for using unclear, abstract language meant to lead people astray or obscure their own claims (Locke 1996: 208). He worries about the ignorant o