Kant is a stern defender of freedom of speech. In fact, some see his defense of freedom speech as his sole objection to Hobbes’s absolutism. Moreover, given Kant’s strong defense of freedom of speech, it is natural to think that he defends the view that there are no rightful limits on what private individuals can say to others in public. Any such limitation, it seems, would be a limitation on freedom of speech. Finally, it is quite common to look to Rawls rather than Kant when trying to establish what counts as the proper reasoning of public officials and voters, and the justification of any redistribution of resources so as to enable such a flourishing public reason is typically seen as well beyond Kant’s reach. In this paper I present an alternative reading of Kant’s conception of freedom of speech. I argue that Kant’s defense of freedom of speech is only a smaller part of Kant’s fuller conception of free speech, understood as the kind of speech constitutive of what he calls right. I will argue that Kant’s position provides resources for dealing with many of the legal and political problems we currently struggle to analyze under this heading, such as the proper distinction between the sphere of justice and the sphere of ethics, the right to education, the reasoning of public officials, including legislators, with regard to issues like hate speech, freedom of speech, defamation, and the role of media and education in public discourse.
