The Aesthetics of Free Speech: Rethinking the Public Sphere is one of the first books to theoretically explore the relationship between free speech and the public sphere. By drawing upon Marxist theory the author, John Michael Roberts, demonstrates how liberal theorists frequently construct an abstract aesthetic of 'rational', 'cultivated' and 'competent' discussion which then serves as a norm through which certain utterances can be humiliated and excluded from participating fully within the public sphere. However, the author also shows how excluded utterances develop their own aesthetic of free speech and how this aesthetic then comes back to haunt the bourgeois public sphere.

JOHN MICHAEL ROBERTS is Lecturer in the Department of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Leeds. He is co-editor of Critical Realism and Marxism (2001), Realism, Discourse and Deconstruction (2003) and After Habermas: New Perspectives on the Public Sphere (forthcoming, 2004).

Acknowledgements Introduction: Digging and Levelling the Capitalist Public Sphere Abstracting Dialogue Consummating Aesthetics John Stuart Mill and the Search for a State of Cultivation Jürgen Habermas and the Search for a State of Competency The Capitalist Form of the Public Sphere The Intuitive Form of Free Speech in the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Spheres The State of Free Speech Notes References Index