The right to freedom of expression appears problematic through and through. Its potential scope is defined by principle (5), which focuses on whether govern­ment’s reasons for regulation include a concern with what messages audiences receive.

But that scope is either too broad, rendering almost all content-based governmental regulations - and perhaps all governmental speech and speech subsidies - violative of freedom of expression, or it is indeterminate and inca­pable of principled delineation.

In this chapter I shall attempt to diagnose the cause of the failure to find a cogent and defensible principle justifying and delimiting a right of freedom of expression. I believe that such failure is part and parcel of the failure of liber­alism to provide a justification for tolerating illiberal views - which toleration is for many definitive of liberalism. The great liberal freedoms - freedom of religion, association, and expression - are all deeply paradoxical because they rest on the notion of “epistemic abstinence”^[285] - the idea that liberal government cannot impose its views of the Good on dissenters; that qua liberal govern­ment, it cannot know the Good. But operationalizing the idea that liberalism cannot take its own side in an argument is an impossibility. Liberal govern­ment cannot help but be partisan, which means that liberalism as governmental nonpartisanship (neutrality) toward religions, associations, and expression is an impossibility.

Much has been written on the paradoxical nature of liberalism as it applies to freedom of religion.^[286] And there is a growing body of literature on the para­doxical relation between liberalism and illiberal associations and groups.^[287] But with the exception of Stanley Fish, no one seems to have noticed that the same paradox infects that third liberal bulwark, the right of freedom of expression.^[288]