SPEECH AS VIOLENCE: THE HISTORY, PSYCHOLOGY, AND POLITICS BEHIND A DANGEROUS IDEA

Abstract

Within the United States, the conviction that offensive speech constitutes a form of violence requiring suppression has reshaped university speech policies, social media content moderation, and cultural norms governing discourse. This thesis argues that this conviction is not a novel product of contemporary polarization, social media, or campus culture. Rather, the history, psychology, and political theory reveal, instead, that such a view is a recurring feature of American political life and human behavior, often activated in eras of ideological intensity by similar conditions, and sustained by psychological mechanisms that rational argument alone cannot correct. Understanding why the speech-as-violence dynamic persists requires an interdisciplinary analysis that no single account has yet provided. This thesis supplies that analysis by integrating history, psychology, and political theory, and derives from it a set of recommendations for universities, digital platforms, legal frameworks, and society. The historical analysis section demonstrates that the framing of speech as dangerous action requiring suppression recurs across American history—from the antebellum suppression of abolitionist expression to the wartime Espionage Act prosecutions to the Cold War persecution of political dissidents to modern day college campuses—exacerbated in every era by conditions of ideological intensity and moralized group identity. The psychological analysis section identifies the cognitive and social mechanisms, including cognitive dissonance, concept creep, dehumanization, political sectarianism, and digital amplification, that make suppressive behavior feel, internally, like principled protection rather than censorship. The theoretical analysis section establishes that the strongest philosophical justifications for robust expressive protection rest on structural democratic grounds, and that the dignitary harm argument, which challenges that position, fails in practice in the ways the historical and psychological analyses predict. The thesis concludes that the distinction between speech and violence is the foundational line on which democratic self-governance rests, and that effective resistance requires deliberate institutional design. Policy recommendations address university neutrality and speaker policies, digital platform architectural governance, legal framework conservation, and the cultivation of viewpoint diversity and civic epistemic culture.